Affinity

(1993)(ed2013)

*

No words; none. She was unaware before that her voice box is located somewhere in her gut, resting closely to her soul, listening for something, audible.

Where is that sound? When it arrives, will it explode like a silent experiment mixed somewhere else? If we wait, patiently for an echo to return and speak of a faraway scene, we may be here sometime.

They have said again and again that the eyes are the windows of the soul. Does this mean she dies each time she cannot face my gaze? I wait, patiently enough for her to really want to speed up – but even with me she’s no longer here anymore. We wait for a break in this inaudible noise, for some form or sign of life. If she could, would she say: BRING ME BACK!! If it were as easy as that, we know this quiet would be of a different kind.

Where is that sound?

*

She paints. I choose to sit behind her. There is doubt in the room, floating like the smoke rising. It is a sign – this focus may just be breaking, for this peripheral animal vision allows some sense of movement to flicker – encouraging her to quite simply look up. If it were as easy as that, she might keep smoke burning all the while.

*

I paint, sticking to something intricate. If I move from this spot I may explode or destroy everything made. Yet there is that smoke. It is tempting me now with how it leaps, rolls, sinks and falls like it were conducting Mozart or stroking a shape. I wait; without waiting, as this may go on forever - and then,

you choose to touch me.

If it were possible to flinch and sigh at the same time, I would – if it were conceivable to cry, I would have done so – you know that, don't you?

I stop. I want to look up but I am frozen now with words like: YOU KNOW I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH! The same words that are anti-freeze or antidote for this rare and ordinary disease. You leave and I look up to see the smoke still rising, see it as dry as ice moving now...Where did you go?

*
I write:

You called round to say your eyes were failing you – your aquamarine cataracts were bathing you in a cloud. Then you said it looked like the smoke I placed around myself. My eyes have always been good so I saw exactly what you were saying. You heard my look like you always could and departed again, leaving my ‘gifted’ eyes behind, selfishly taking your blindness away with you. I wonder at all the gifts we gave each other. You gave me each sense. I wonder at all the gifts we are returning; - I will explain.

I gave you my eyes many years ago. 'Look at that!' and now you are going blind. You gave me a voice and I have gone mute. I am mute, you are blind, and we are separately grieving for a lost sense. A sense of loss.

*

I write. This silence is a dead giveaway. All I wanted to see was a little more, or a little less. Things change.

There is a meditation that begins 'If my right thumb was cut off, who am I?' and it goes on and on. I want to see you whole. I wanted to see me empty almost, and after, to feel almost full. This is an exercise in wholeness.

*

I gave you silence when you had given me so many first sounds. You gave me blindness when I had given you my eyes. We were returning each other to each other.

And now I am alone, and miss your gift of hearing me so well. I curse you for leaving me with the ability to hear the searing grief so acutely, because you know I cannot play, weep, talk, roar or speak.

I paint.

*

When she is alone a woman appears. Sophia, an evasive Queen, but there nevertheless, dressed in black again and veiled in a powerhouse of dark. She's a Goddess bringing wisdom with her - Sophia in black again, born again and formed by the mixing of water and earth.

She speaks.

She says...feel green and inhale every field ever seen - smell every cut grass day again, drink a healing green and hear a soft mother breathing..baptizing... It is a green birth that springs from water and earth, hear a soft mother breathing...

*

I stop and raise my eyes to this witchcraft. My first taste of science came years before this! Must I now go back lifetimes? I lift my brush like an alchemist and mix a primal soup: Water, Earth; Magic: and bathe in a greenness the colour of forest moss.

A key turns from the outside. My Front Door is fifteen paces, and I first hear the intrusion over here, somewhere in my gut...I wait for an echo to return and speak of a faraway scene...and the Door slams shut.

I don't have long. It is time to come up for air but there is doubt in the room again, and I see the smoke rising. What is the colour of air? I'm mixing Blue smoke by the time you reach my side. You touch my shoulder, I touch your hand, and paint blue messages for you to hear. We smoke.

Blue is the colour of gas on fire, and the colour of words mixed with air. I'll not explode as I'm completely green. This naivety cannot last long so I paint a turquoise tourniquet around my neck and think of Indians this time, as the Goddess Sophia seems to have left us to it.

*

Navaho wear stones and coral to remind them of the Earth and Sea so every ancestor there ever was can speak through mountains and oceans never owned or spoiled, just borrowed a while from the past. Turquoise of the sky and throat is talking to a pink-red coral that once rested in the she-oceans far from here. He asks for clarity from the deep and in the blend a new shade of stone appears -

as all else fades, I look up to meet your amethyst eyes...Where did I go?

*

You take me to a warmer place upstairs and we colour each other in the darkest reds ever seen, we meet Sophia again and again, illusory and real, speaking of every dream and flavour that has ever been.

She says: I am the mediator of the elements, making one agree with the other; what is warm I make cold, and the reverse; that which is dry I make moist, and the reverse; that which is hard I soften, and the reverse...I am the end and my beloved is the beginning. I am the whole work and all science is hidden in me...

*

She speaks in Lilith's voice and is complete within herself. We hear her alchemical riddle bring water from the earth, to see dew, distilling as beads on each others brow.

Then the heat of Water to Air, we feel the energy of creation breathing from each of us here;

and in a human voice that sings from a resting place located somewhere red and old, nesting closely to my soul or hers, we speak the first real words of the day.