Spring Bee Hiving Moon
What happened here, this post-easter, post-christian rush of words
The heart does not know itself too well, at least not in words and ideas, especially ideas strung together with a rationale intruding its way among them. As the mind opens itself to the heart’s song, it speaks and in speaking, filters. The filters are syntax, available images, understood and misunderstood concepts, personal and collective history, not as it happened, but as it is remembered. This is the only way the heart can speak its intent, though of course hardly the only way it can show it.
So when the words splash down on paper, or the bits coalesce in the form of letters and words on a computer screen, they are messengers from a kingdom foreign to this culture. Which is not to say that this culture of words and thoughts will necessarily be untrue to the heart, only that this culture is in effect a translation from another form of communication.
It also means that the words and ideas struggle in the mind of the writer, trying on this outfit and then another, wanting to look right, give the true appearance, in clothes authentic to the moment. And, since this is translation, the heart’s voice can surprise the translator, in fact often surprises him. Did my heart really have this frank a brush off of the resurrection? Yes, as it turns out, it did. And had had it for awhile. Just waiting for the right season.
What I’m saying, what we’re saying here, my mind and heart working together, is that most often I have no idea what will be on the page when I begin. Why? Because what you see is an act of translation, of two intimate partners working hard to understand and inflect each other, then create a sentence, a paragraph that gives it all away to any who might happen on it. And I almost never know where that process will take me.
