In the space between words their intention

Seven words, two prepositions, one determiner, one pronoun, three nouns, each with their own dictionary entries and meaning.  Put them together and what do they mean?  That meaning is not the sum of the words used, but rather what is not said?  As a musician might have it, that the music is in the silence between the notes?  That words are what they are not?

Preposterous

no?

Laurie Lee writes, in ‘Cider with Rosie’, of how he came home from his first day at school in a foul mood.  ‘What’s the matter, Loll?’ ask his sister.  He explains that when he got to school he was asked ‘to sit there for the present’ and he sat there all day and there was no present.  ‘I ain’t going back there again!’ he cries and who could blame poor little old Loll.  He’d been done.  Tricked.  Passed over (though not in that way).  And not, as it turns out, and as he thought, by the teacher, but by language—

unreliable, slippery beast
ever changing its skin

which is a problem, because lord knows we need language.

Not having language can, as Primo Levi wrote when reflecting upon his experience as a prisoner in Auschwitz, be deadly.  To not know German in the concentration camps, to not ‘understand’ what was barked at you and to not respond accordingly, to not know through language that there were ways to secure clothes, shoes, a little extra ‘food’, led to a quicker murder, an earlier death.  In short, language saves.

And it does so by pointing to things. But when it points to things that do not exist in a concrete sense, to ideas, futures, histories, to the space between things, language greys.

As a poet, I play at the edge of words

In this print, I play with — what?

Words, broken, hard-set in monumental stone on a grey ground beneath the eye of a flaming sun.  To Barthes, and those of us who come after, the writer is dead.  It is the reader who speaks and makes meaning; the viewer who sees what they think is there.  And isn’t that the beauty of art: it has no meaning, only meanings.

A poem is not a room
it’s a door.