Travel Shorts

I'm still thinking of silence. John Cage's Silence isn't really a new idea. Shackleton wrote about it in his diary and many writers before him used the connotations of silence within their work. What would radio be without silence? Silence plays an important part in art and poetry. I wrote a dissertation about snow and its connotations of silence. In my delirium of solitude I was associating his silence and all the snow in some sort of pathetic fallacy. Snow - a blank field - is both empty and full of promise. Silence carries the same duality. Perhaps his silence means he's trying to forgive me? Perhaps it means he wants to punish me? Maybe he hasn't given it a thought? How can people say silence is nothing, when its so full of options? I'm filling my time with music and making, reading and writing because it detracts from the over-possible-ness of silence. Similarly, Cage experimented with sounds - claiming that any sound constitutes music. Sometimes when there's too much sound I need to empty my head, and like Jenny Diski; seek refuge in ice and snow to escape from it all. It's interesting how, prior to this recent Arctic blast, we connote snow in such a way. People's attitudes towards silence and snow are changing out of some necessity for them to do so. We'll see if 'Cage against the machine' make it to christmas number one this week...

I had to break off a very new relationship recently. Considering what an abortion I have made of situations such as this in the past I approached the situation with logic. I did the honourable thing for one of the first times in my life; finished it early because it just wasn’t going to work. Watching the lines in his face crease up and hide his pain was hard, but won’t leave months of scarring and sleepless nights for me. He held his pain pretty well, and accepted my offer of dinner, which we ate in stilted silence. Why discuss feelings when they can be turned into facial topography? Who needs words when how we feel can be conveyed by passive aggressive slamming and avoidance of eye contact?

It occurred to me that at the end of a relationship the thing we mourn the most is the lost future; something which never really existed. It was constructed from words (those duplicitous bastards), hopes, and dreams. It was never tangible, and yet leaves a void that causes a physical pain. In short relationships these futures are almost exclusively made solely by the dumpee. The delusion of how well things are going informs their future.

In longer relationships the pain’s harder to bear as the lost future was shared in some way. The foundations were the shared hopes and dreams. The cement is the words spoken. Sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted, but always shared; even conflated. And the bricks were the shared experiences that began to mount up and make the future seem more real. For me, in the last year, the bricks have deconstructed the false future as they’ve fallen on my head; teaching me lessons as they tumble.
And some of the lessons I have learnt have been from mistakes I have made more than once. Hell, some of them I’ve made for 30 years, but finishing something that just wasn’t going to work in a mature way is the product of having learnt one of these lessons. The rest of my life is something of a derelict building site. There are days when excavations are revealing and days when the wind whistles through everything, whipping up a flurry of autumnal leaves which pirouette, curtsy and settle again around me; obscuring my way.

Sometimes we have to get lost to find ourselves.