Collage #.1-Lost Possibilities

These collages are exactly what they say they are: pieces of writing, ripped out of their original context; transformed from their solid, unforgiving state into an air where they can all inhabit the same singular space: they are drifting clouds.

In myths, I’ve heard of those 
Who burned into thought itself. 
Into thoughts that leave the limits of words, 
Inexpressible, out of the hold of tongues,
They rise, thoughts that change their form,
Rise like smoke from severed roots,
They merge and join within the clouds,
Meeting through windows with bored eyes.

Federico Garcia Lorca. Painting by Kate Boxer.

“I’m coming back
for my wings.
Oh let me come back!
I want to die where
it’s dawn!
I want to die where
it’s yesterday!

I’m coming back
for my wings.
I want to die where
it’s origin.
I want to die
out of sight
of the sea.”

-The Return, Garcia Lorca

LEEEEEAVES.

“The prisoners of infinite choice
Have built their house
In a field below the wood
And are at peace.

It is autumn, and dead leaves
On their way to the river
Scratch like birds at the windows
Or tick on the road.

Somewhere there is an afterlife
Of dead leaves,
A stadium filled with an infinite
Rustling and sighing.

Somewhere in the heaven
Of lost futures
The lives we might have lived
Have found their own fulfilment.”

-Leaves, Derek Mahon

To be imprisoned in infinite choice-I guess that’s not a bad way of describing youth. I keep waiting for the day when all is settled, and I’m still too young for regrets. Now, most choices are redeemable, most things can be changed, most mistakes aren’t too consequential-not in the immedieate anyway.

Still though, at a young age, you can recognise when the possible is lost and fades away. It’s as the winter comes to: the sun starts to set before you are ready, the clothes you wear don’t match the cold, the world’s possibilities all go and one of them alone is realised-the short day, long night, silent winter.

The despair doesn’t come from the fact that this particular possibility occurs, or even that the others don’t occur. The despair comes from the fact that you are left there, feeling without any further possibilities, looking back on what you once thought to be possible and seeing it for what, in that immedieate moment of realisation, you believe those thoughts to have been-stupid.

Possibilities, to quote Forough Farrokhzad, like leaves, “always plunge down from their naive height and die”. There they lie, at peace. 

“I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:
a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.”

-The Book of Hours, Rainer Maria Rilke

“What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                              But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
                        Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?”

-Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot

“Here I’ll mull over all
I once could have been.
God or beggar,
water or old marguerite.

My multiple paths
barely stained
now form this enormous rose
encircling my body.

Like an impossible map
the garden of the possible
every moment is
deepened, restored.

Was never born, never,
but could burst into life.”
-The Garden, Garcia Lorca