How does newness cover silted gold? I was in the gallery and the beautiful room took me to a time before when I had written a poem here, melding the rooms subject with a period in my life and the poem related to it, painfully and beautifully. The room is the stimulus and as each word flows from the pen I’ll never know how a piece of writing writes itself using such raw materials and making connections the conscious mind only thinks it can.
On Sunday this new exhibition, equally stimulating, started a new word recording. The heat, the meeting with a friend before for an hour left me tired and as I spoke with an assistant on leaving I learnt there was a film I hadn't seen so I'd be returning to effect completion or rather full appreciation. I finished the new poem on the way home, made in the experience of the room with another long ago personal experience.
I read much of the booklet in the room, they’d run out and I couldn't take one with me and the gallery guide was so rich I read a bit early morning each day the following week.
As I write this I read the poem afresh which speaks to me softly but I have to return to let emerge what was missing from the experience and to find where the power hidden in the writing may be located. In explaining something to myself, yourself, oneself, that which is hidden often remains hidden until the key that's missing is either located because it's searched for or just emerges into the light. The lack of satisfaction shows itself not with something missing in the so-called finished product but the feeling in the heart, a bubbling restlessness, a recognition, a desire for realisation that isn't there.
On the weekend I'll return, perhaps I’ll find it, perhaps the silted gold is in the material and not in me but in the newness of vision that may be revealed. A formula can be repeated but the results of each moment are always fresh, all experience is fresh.
Covid has left me disappointed because I go to to places with a memory of how things were. In the William Morris Gallery last Sunday there was no such feeling and it’s the same with writing. How can anything ever be as it was? How does newness cover silted gold?
Lynn-Marie Harper
