Mind The Gap

On The Goodness of Lack

Our eyes process life in under sixty frames per second. If existence does saturate the chronic body in its unguent sauce, we never glimpse but the intermittent slice.  Sixty little slices of each second - per second.  The rest of life’s visions escape us. Grab yourself a high definition monitor capable of two-hundred and forty frames per second—you’ll miss three-fourths of the action.  

Good.  I like the gaps. 

The wider the gap, the better, the larger the ingress, the more room from page to page, the larger the invitation. I like big invitations. I like swimming in the expanse.  I like maybe even thinking I may find no shore, no other side. That I may drown, to kick more monstrously against, or to seize in blissful submission to. I like being entrusted to my me-ness.   

The in-betweening of life is death, so they say.  But death gets a bad rap.  So I call the in-betweening lucidity.  Lucy for short (if I’m in the immortal mood).  Lucy tells the story, you see. 

It’s not the pictures that do the telling.  It’s not the words.  Neither, too, the sounds nor the smells nor tastes. Mere trifles of stimuli!  Mere diasporas of event!   It’s Lucy alone, in the soft shouldered hush, in the umbrae of invitation, between each frame, who makes the montage, who weaves us each our plot. It is within the liminal space that we meld the scattered moments, salve the tangled and shorn threads, that we may quilt meaning from what peaks of vision remain within our weathered bodies.  Only the interstitial, after all, are in position to stitch.

Be proud (if pride has yet any pride left). 

For I can tell you, from my vantage at least, you are brave. Most avoid invitations to the void.   ­It confronts one with one’s self-ness.  One’s me-ness.  Its not the me-ness of self-reflection (we are all enough burdened with mirrors), but the me-ness of instinct.  Most consumption, most art, attempts to exterminate it’s every pore by force of polish, to rebuff its bits into a sheen of contiguous constancy so tightly knit that any me-ness is put to sleep, vegetized in the supposed bliss of entertainment. (Most do desire the smooth pate of stupor.)  Lucy, guillotined in a pop-art fever, all her vantage and possessions of instinct extinguished so that we may avoid the frailty of our own participation. 

It is true, our poor robotics are daily bleached of intuition and raped of instinct, couched and hijacked by limb and limbic and committed to nada.  

And yet, even withstanding such chemical burn, you, dear reader, show now that absurd resiliency of courage, to heave yourself against the flush grain and into the wilderness. Good.  The great art neither holds your hand nor leaves your side, but provides you with a kit and compulsion to sew. 

You are great art. Your gaps, great and wide. Take the time of exploration. Visionless and hunching—your own meaning, your own story, your own life is contained therein.  

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(A version of this was the forward to the book of poems Coordinates, by Andrew Shaw, which you may find here).