Life is an unwritten elegy. Life is filled with half-imagined eulogies for lost love, lost friends, lost keys. We allow ourselves to collect and save books, clothes, wine, art. We talk of English, French, German, Italian, and Scottish poets. We confuse the elegy and eulogy and have silly arguments with our friends and loved ones about silly things which we only half believe. We remember cousins and pets and tennis players. We have favorite movies, favorite months. People live, people die. Each day we live a little, each day we die a little. How often does diagnosis and sickness and recovery enter our conversation, goodness, kindness, and holiness are often retrospectively refracted or retracted while we are sometimes dazzled by chattering, laughing, polished teeth. We silently touch our private grief, remember the conspicuous bewilderment we tried to avoid – each one of has a badlands, a wastelands waiting to be displayed for the public, with all the sensibility of hiding each injury, each pain from the doctor until amputation is the only solution. The decision to live, to love, to hope requires patience, confidence, selflessness. The decision to live creates many conversations, many subjects. Life is lyrical, filled with repetition, filled with both conscious and unconscious echoes of other famous laments, of other famous litanies, and in particular seen and unseen moments of compassion, visible and invisible moments of mercy, and we allow ourselves to create private interior unwritten elegies and prayers. We allow ourselves to find time for contemplation and reflection of a noisy, crowded street, to compose our stories, to find the humorous and the haunting and the haughty in our lives.
Memory is the artist’s companion at first, and we linger there in our thoughts reliving some event again, on the crowded, jostling sidewalk, where a Scottish wind stirs and makes a sound like waking bagpipes. Memory is the companion of hope and love. Memory is the companion of prayer. In the realm of silence memory leads us to London, Paris, Berlin, Milan, and Glasgow. We are ducks by a fountain. We are in the realm of the seen and unseen, the heard and unheard. We are dreams, we are tears. We seek innovation, we seek examination. Each moment allows us to think of exclamations and proclamations.
Life is an unwritten elegy. Life is filled with half-imagined eulogies for lost love, lost friends, lost keys. We allow ourselves to collect and save books, clothes, wine, art. We talk of English, French, German, Italian, and Scottish poets.
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