I have a memory—which is, after all, only imagination labelled real—of being less than six weeks old. It came to me many years ago in the cradling that is approaching sleep, when we let go the reins of the world and sink into the hidden spaces.
Awareness is a soft haze of colours. The darker blur in the centre gradually fills the space. An intensity of love swells, an answering joy radiates and melody suffuses it.
It was a world demarcated only by the the basic unconstrained senses; a world of undifferentiated awareness; a world that had no defined meaning, where my mother leaned towards me and with a few loving words, reached to pick me up.
In my mind, the key to the experience was its undefined quality. It came from a space before language had carved up my existence into discrete chunks. Before language had determined for me that I can experience love, or, bitterness, but not both together, because there is no word for that in English. If I do experience it, I find it confusing because it has no label. So I probably describe it to myself as something that it isn’t, in order to provide an explanation and get my rational side involved. Then off I will go down a logical path based on a false premise and I will end up… who knows where.
In subtle and not-so-subtle ways language coerces us into a view of the world, both as individuals and more broadly, as cultures. But we kid ourselves if we think that words are precise things that we can define. Actually their meaning is completely individual and is predicated on our experience and understanding. We have created our world from shimmering building blocks that wobble to suit the requirements of the moment, and we do our best to shore them up into something dependable and solid.
In creativity, I am trying to exploit that inaccuracy. I seek the unpredictable in art. I want to see something from a new perspective, or to see something fresh in a known perspective. What attracts me as a writer is to uncover the unrealised in a situation. Through the exploration of a character, to realise and perhaps apply a different interpretation of the world, where the logical chain based on the false premise, has ended up in a very different place to my own. And in many ways, to do this, I need to return to the undifferentiated, undefined world of the baby and redefine it for myself in new ways.
Photo courtesy of jjbyrne on pixabay
https://pixabay.com/en/baby-love-mother-newborn-baby-mom-1474439/
Salatheel 