I was first awakened to language at the end of a game of Scrabble that I had gatecrashed. The actor, whose name now escapes me, but whose beautiful face, rests in partial lines in my memory, quoted a line from Hamlet, “and dawn her russet mantle spread”. I was 19, at drama school doing stage management and he must have been 60 and working as a director at college. What followed was a simple pressure for meaning, a few minutes of a standard exercise.
What colour is russet?
Red
What sort of red?
Dark red
What sort of dark red?
Red with some brown in it.
Where is it in the sky?
And so we continued for just a few minutes, and the pauses before the answers grew longer as that dawn spread before me. I can still see it now.
But the revelation lay not in the picture that was created, but in the process of creating it. Pressing through the surface tension on which my rational consciousness skated like a lightweight water boatman and claiming the seething depth that lies beneath. Out of which rises up all that I call myself, including the unfolding of language: words, the conduit of life.
Salatheel 