On Holding

Language is a holder and art, a harness. I transmogrify the heaviness of my longing into the lightness of craft, suspending the essence of you here in my sentences. I enjoy you taking flight here in my words which grow wings enough to carry you. With my language I lead you by the hand to the quivering boundary between the metaphysical and the material for in the kiln of my pen I hold both together in a synthesis of flame. Dance in the heat with me, yes, smoulder in the embers of our creation, infernal and eternal, until we rise from ashes and take shape in ink. You see, ink is how I hold together, how I hold you. Ink is how I hold on. Ink is how I hold out against a desire to perish. The blank spaces of what is not said are how I hold in, keep secret, repress. I enjoy holding in until I can no longer withstand the sensation of choking on water. Things unsaid for too long turn to ice, clog the lungs, abrase the throat. I will make the ice into tumbling rivers so you may know me a little more and a little less, for you cannot capture me but bathe in me.

On holding: holding on, holding in, holding up, holding out, holding tight.

I am holding out to hold you tight. I holding on to you as I hold in what I feel. I am holding you up on a pedestal, but perhaps I am just holding onto a fiction. Maybe my fiction is me holding up a mask so I can hold in but pretend I’m not. Hm, it’s a curious line between fact and fiction, reality and make-believe. Nonetheless I am here holding out, holding in, holding on and yet spilling.

Humans too are greater holders. We hold with our hands, with our hearts, with our bodies. Holding and harbouring those around us until we stain them into permanence. Oh, how the body remembers, how I hold onto the memory of your body holding mine, and how I ache some days to forget you.

Isn’t it strange and magical how flexible the word ‘hold’ is, how it shifts in the shadows and refracts like sunlight on water. It should hold still but it resists being held – what a charming irony, what a minx! Each word is a steeped garden, palimpsestic, with roots that grow deep and reach back to distant lands and distant times. Yet fairies dance in the trees of words, creating a sorcery of double meaning, and subtle play. Slippery and yet still, moving and yet immoveable; the awful, brilliant paradox of words, which hold within them entire universes. As I tunnel and tumble through them in a cosmic free-fall, I am reminded of you. So, I grab onto them, hold them, as I would you. Yes, what a fool I am to hold the untenable in a language that never sits still. What a fool, what a fool, what a fool... but what a fool embroiled in beauty.

More on this...- think this can be developed - particularly around grief and harnessing the spiritual into something solid, something present, living etc.