Elusive rhythms

Tomorrow, Saturday, people will be gathering to remember Kerol, five months after she died. There will be people from away, or ones that drifted, or maybe I drifted. So hard to say. But all of them people that were part of Kerol’s life. I will be speaking about Kerol at this event and I’m slowly looking at the multi-coloured threads of our entwining life and seeing how to make that into something. I’m always delightfully surprised at the range of peoples’ experiences of another on their own lives. It is such a fine line though, as I become irritated when the stories are far more about the teller than the person they are trying to honour. And yet, in this case, our case, hers and mine, it is so hard to separate the threads.

And so, as it happens, I was trying to write this dispatch but really I was writing what I’m going to say tomorrow. I thought they would be two different things but then, suddenly today I got the rhythm of what I wanted to say here and it was the rhythm that I wanted to speak. This is good news for me because it took me a long time to find it. But what it means is that I don’t have a dispatch for today. I will post what I wrote on Sunday.

Do you know what I mean when I say that I got the rhythm? It is something Ursula K. Le Guin talked about. She was quoting Virginia Woolf - here is the quote from a letter Woolf wrote:

Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year.

I admit that I don’t understand what she means, not logically, but I feel what she means which is entirely different. I know it with my body. Today I started working on what I want to say about Kerol and the rhythm came to me. I wasn’t looking for it, muttering under my breath where is the damned rhythm? Missing, elusive, like the Scarlet Pimpernel. No, it snuck in while I was writing, which is why it is better for me - I have no idea about you and wouldn’t presume to - not to structure things upfront but to just start hurling words down. That’s how I catch the slippery fish of rhythm. Accidentally. In this case it is like seeing lives flowing by on a river - it is an extended and very full almost baroque feeling. Okay. I didn’t mean to go on.

So you’ll get this in your box Friday morning and the other will come Sunday perhaps, or maybe Monday.