simonhlilly

Working towards some text-art pieces for the “Great Night” project, I began playing around on the iPad ( the app was Zen Brush). Its a delightful tactile process and the text was not much consciously filtered in any usual way. Semi-automatic writing, I could say. Not quite as calligraphic as I would like, more spider scribble! Translations follow ( before I forget and can’t read my own scrawl)…

1
Within the darkness
Within the walls of night
Jailor stars, spyglass planets,
The wild things lap and strut
Lines of thought dissolving
In manic, fearful laughter.

2
The long trident of night
Tree-reached
Forward spontaneous deliver
No more the …..
No more the light.
A shimmer, a shade,
A will of the world,
A whiteness.

3
Some
Some
The weave says
The way, the deep says,
Yea or nay,
Gainsay it will not prosper
If it has
No inherent breath.

4
Away-
The slow soft
Words
These anchors
Of shrift –
A vocabulary
Of light
Awaits:
Reveal the
Door.

5
Dissolve you
Dark lines,
Darker lens.
O, obsidian eyes
Deep set,
Your own soul
Would hardly
Recognise you.

6
Lined,
Linked
Do not cackle
Lolly-tongued
Dishevelled one
Dark, bloody lips
Deepest urged
Destroyer,
Eater of night.

7
This slow
Drawn out means,
Lost in lines,
Time wept
Scribble sounds,
Not gathered
Nor pooled-
Hard to distinguish:
A drain descent
Of echoes,
A distance of deceived
Ghosts,
Night stippling.

What is lost when it is not hand-written? Even when hard to read, it conveys to some part of us more of the intent, the hunt for words, the fight upwards into air. Illuminated by illuminated manuscript, time and care laid down for all time, a voyager of parchment and mind-matter across ocean centuries. What could be more enchanted, the mind of one millenia dead, born egged safe in new skull, scratch of quill, cockcrow and vespers…..