Message in a bottle
Walking out of this morning’s oh so placid sea, I see a message-in-a-bottle on the shore.
This is only the second I’ve ever found - Not many after all my sea expeditions!
What’s happened? Has everyone been found? Have all stranded souls been rescued? Is no one lost anymore? Does no one allow themselves to get lost anymore?
The last one I found was on a shore of the River Dart (The river of my childhood. The river of my divorce and of my growing up). I wrote to the address and the people there kindly replied, but the young girl who sent it can’t have been there for what must be more than 50 years ago - which is when they had bought the property.
Mystery.
I bring today’s message-in-a-bottle home and place it on the garden table. After a shower, I get some breakfast and take my mug of coffee outside and sit looking at it… Obviously, I begin to wonder what might be written there on the crumpled wet sheets of lined paper with blue biro. Grains of sand sit on the bottom of the bottle in a pool of sea water. I can make out some words. I try and make it out… Does that say: “People”?… Some printed text with tick boxes…. It must be a re-purposed piece of paper…
… I decide not to open it just yet… realising I can stay for a while longer, as long as I want in fact, in the mystery. At this stage it could say anything - from a cry for help, to something mundane and disappointing, to something hopeful, expansive, insightful and meaningful.
It’s a good place to be sometimes, adrift on a sea of unknowing - lost you could say. It’s a risky place - yes, but it’s also a place full of potential. Of becoming.
I like the idea of potential, and poetic truths - truths that refuse to be entirely known. Not fixed, dry or rigid but like water - open and vasty. They move, shift, flow, morph from solid to liquid to vapour in a trice. Like us ourselves and like the words that spill out of our mouths and sometimes onto a page. Truths that do not impose on someone else’s truths. Truths that do not dictate. Truths that leave space - and maybe even create space - for dreaming and a dialogue with ourselves and this wondrous and curious world we find ourselves on each morning.
(Have you ever noticed that even if you do try to write a hard and fast truth, in a WhatsApp message say (the new bottle?), the words play with interpretation anyway? So much so that people often misunderstand each other - hence the need for emojis coming to the rescue! Mother tongue is open mouthed to slippage.
Elkins in his well thumbed book ‘What Painting Is’, talks about the materia prima - just as Zen talks about the Tao - as being unnameable. Insisting instead on being in potentia and open to possibilities. Form may suggested, but there is no spelling anything out.
Dear Reader, maybe it is best to leave things open for now, and let’s open the message in the bottle in the next letter to you - together. Let’s both remain a bit lost for now and let the imagination superyacht it around our placid sea of mind.
