Let me complain.
I take great delight in words and their ability to send messages between us. I equally resent them for their inherent caging of things. The moment I try to distill divinity into letters I feel like some mad scientist trying to bottle sunlight or immortality. Quit that! That doesn’t, fit there!
One can argue nothing belongs inside of letters, for the true essence of this place is ineffable. Art is. Love is. And ironically that’s all we want to write about. THATS ALL WE WANT TO BOTTLE. We have spent the past five thousand years rearranging letters to better articulate the essence of love, still to no avail. No one has really gotten it right because you can’t get it right. You can’t pin down a gust of wind. You can’t fit love inside of hieroglyphs. I feel the same with paint, thought I can’t seem to help trying. Trying to pin down love is what I am here for. That’s what an artist does. We try to pin down love with a typewriter, or ballet shoes, or strings. We try to catch it like a dragon, equally as elusive. When we feel we have its tail, we hold on for dear life and make the art. Once we think it’s finished, we stand back and love looks back at us, yet it still remains free from any cage. Immortal in the way mirrors are.
What we most want to frame disappears once framed. We take a Polaroid of the sky and it is merely a blue square. Could just as well be a color swatch at the paint store.
Hold on.
As I write this I am changing my mind…I was on the subject of poetry when my metaphors all crumbled and I stopped agreeing with myself. I think I am wrong.
Maybe letters aren’t cages. Maybe they aren’t frames either. Who said the edges of the letters are where it stops? The letters are not finite, they are anything but. I suppose, if anything, they are windows. Still a frame, yet one we lean our heads out of to see a whole new world.
It is easy to think things are caged, or finite. It is easy to see walls and rage against the ending of things. Yet it requires a bit of believing to see that things never really end. Art reminds us that despite the frame, despite the hard edge of letters, there is no end. It is a refusal of an ending, the impetus for more. A great window that, if we lean far enough out of, we may tumble out of and into what we are meant for.