My loved one had been given a diagnosis. By the time we returned from the doctor visit, a specter had slipped into our house and settled itself into the spare bedroom. I didn’t realize it had come until I noticed tiny things missing: the brilliant colors of autumn, the bright burst of a ripe cherry tomato, a minute or two floating out of the picture window. Subtly, softly, I came to understand. We had a guest.
As a writer, it is expected that I would hie me off to a journal and pour out my thoughts. You would find me furiously scratching out my feelings in tiny strokes of black and white. Reputationally, I should claim that as my process, promise my insights, but…
I would be lying.
I may regret someday not keeping a journal of this journey with my loved one. I’m told it could be good for my psyche, and I can always use it—let’s be honest—in this day and age, for intimacy marketing, or a book, or panels, and the like. But, if you remember a poem I wrote a couple years back, “Where Choice Ends,” I talk about the place with no words. Yes, I actually wrote words about no words. I like that place. It gives me solace.
Every time we reach for a word, we flatten its truth somehow. The place where there are no words is honest, unqualified, unquantified. When we search for expression, we pass judgment on that amorphous things we’re trying to label, and hand down a ruling on our experience. We tell about it, but if you look in my eyes—really look at me—much, much more shows.
No, I won’t be condensing my feelings or collapsing my knowing to a single point, and in the process, destroying its uniqueness. I don’t think I’ll journal about this diagnosis. Communicating this roiling cloud of thoughts, fears, and feelings will serve only to exhaust me. I’m going to need all my strength.
Where Choice Ends: First Movement
For me there is a place where words cannot go.
A swirling mass bottled only by a willful field.
Contained within: all of that, which uptaken through the senses,
Resonates, not of this temporal world – but far below.
If I place a name on the mist as it lingers,
The cloud condenses to a single drop.
Too distilled to form a longer sentence
And too quick – it slips through my fingers.
I have tried to glimpse the sorting of the disjointed,
To take my bearings before the chaos is ordered.
Only to cause the elegantly spinning, balanced disk
To deconsolidate around the real, central point.
Or in attempt to affect the outcome, I insert myself,
Casting pools and eddies inside the rushing, rotating flow.
With froth and foam, the tenuous cohesion flies apart,
My servitude, reaffirmed, I am expelled.
Thus, I have learned: I cannot watch, and I dare not hinder.
Unlike my corporeal form in four, inexorable dimensions,
Where I might know either an object’s place or its path,
In the place where words cannot go, I am offered neither.
I may sense only by proximity to this realm, brushed by a passing spiral,
I glimpse a wisp of clarity upon which I might place words.
Revelation comes, spilling into dreams, or distracted, waking moments,
Lest I forget, I am not the visitor – but visited upon.
– written by A. Alanson Chiller, 01 22 2022
The photo is of a lily in our garden, missing nothing in its vibrancy. I’m pulling together the final bits of the 12th book in The Admiral Inn series and thoroughly enjoying the curtain calls and finale. Pick up the first book in the series on Amazon, A Devil in the Donations (ah, where it all begins), and catch up to me. I should be finished by then.
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