A String of Red Beads
A
row of ancient books I saw upon a shelf. Of course, I had seen them there many
times before, but this time I ‘saw’ them: drawn to them. So I took a few and
stood them up on the bedside table, where the lamp was, and turned off the main
light. The lamp’s golden glow lit up the books and seemed to give them life,
shining on their gold leaf writing pressed hard into their poor spines; broken,
or about to break. I loved them. Not because I was interested in their stories;
I did not know what they were. They were too hard for me to understand; I had never
read them. I just wanted to absorb their flavour, and write like they did, but
without reading them. I think I had stepped outside all the boundaries that
imprison the child and make of it an adult; and escaped, I could do as I
pleased. So, very small, I slipped inside the books themselves; and with their
pages all round me, their pretty ways of stringing words together became an oil,
which poured itself into one of my many corners, and quickened me. Suddenly
that which was impossible I could do, for I was a child. And from then on I wrote
whatever popped into my head; and I was pleased. But it was not always easy.
One day with inkpot and loosed feather I
found it writing what seemed to me like a string of ripe-plucked cherries. The
hard things I knew were their red hearts, and the oil, fleshing out their inward
part in dreams and in visions the succulent part beneath their skins. Once ‘eaten’
there strung on a black ink thread of words was a string of ‘red beads.’ A
living story-bracelet left of life preserved by death!
*
An extract from the book THE LIGHT TREE
JOURNAL, Portrait of a Lost Star.
This
book is listed in the right hand column of this blog site . . .
