Do we always write with some planned audience?

I went through a phase of being in love with girls in a search for a perfect spiritual connection between us. I believed it for a while. That wherever I was and they were this connection existed beyond time and space. I guess many people develop a similar relationship with God, maybe that is what I really needed! The problem with girls, which God is free from, is that sex is guarenteed to mess up the whole thing. But that is another entry ;-)

Into that private space I wrote poetry, letters and music and they were written for the moment. I wrote some of my best stuff into that space and there was only ever one copy and that was sent and I never know whether it was kept or destroyed.

It is a wonderful experience of pure reckless ecstacy (in the Greek sense of being outside oneself) to write one's heart into a temporary form. Writing I love you on the sand of the beach to have it washed just as quickly away. I would hate to think that published poets ever wanted their work published, it would turn the bright light moments they charm us with into the heavy engravings on tomb stones under ink stained skies. The illusion maybe in writing and film is to make the reader believe that what they experience is momentary when really it is often heavily edited and by definition fixed and copied. (Reminds me that the film The Ring was about that - another blog at some stage). Of course the true moment of a viewers experience is always momentary but then it is also empty of content, but we never notice that because we are too busy taking in what is happeneing!

I regret much of that recklessness now. Not that I will ever be published. But I gave one of my best pieces of music away and I will never remember the subtle twists in the main tune that I slaved over for half a week to get right. It was actually vaguely based upon one of my few musical innovations which I'll never forget - came to me on guitar - inspired by the new room I had moved into. One piece of poetry which was truly ment for the moment I oddly have remembered, it was a thank you for a couple of birthday presents in 1998. A bottle of Eternity fragrance and, I wanted to believe, a heart felt present of a clay ball she had made in her childhood and quickly scratched the world map into to avoid being accused of slacking in class.

In early June I took my place upon a chequed floor,
Black and white
Two world collide
In what I beheld before.

In a cafe beside a busy street
In a city that sings to a cosmopolitan beat
In a room illumined in panels of light
Time flowing on shadows in sundial flight.
Resting gentle on conversations eager swell:
I'll be back in a moment, so the waiter said
And she,
Daughter of the moon to me
Gave her world and Eternity.

I remember that had the feeling of quality when it came to me. I had struggled sitting on a log in Balham common to write that one lunchtime and had just notes to show for my work. But that evening when I picked out the piece of paper and puzzled over it, it suddenly all came together quite magically. That is the experience I always get. You puzzle over something for ages - be it music or poems or anything. Put it down and when you pick it up again, and your mind is in the right moment of energy, it all just falls together somewhere out of sight and the next thing it is there. A gift from above.

So that poem is no longer private in that moment, and it does seem to have lost something now. It has become that engraving on a tomb stone, a memory of a time that had been kept alive by its own bond of silence.

So the expensive experiment is complete! I have broken a very precious personal bond of silence for this blog but it does prove that silence is very valuable and not everything need be written and viewed for it to have meaning. There goes urgent plans for an autobiography!

A counter measure to the encroaching world of reality TV, surveillance cameras and the internet. However let me not get too carried away - who ever looks at CCTV footage or most of the web or most of the junk on TV.

In a moment i will return to that precious silence that I share with myself, which I am pleased ironically through this message to have reminded myself about.