I have just had a very personal piece of memoir published over on Manitoba’s Public Parking magazine. The piece takes Zhuangzi’s reflections on language as a trap for meaning as a starting point:
Bamboo traps are used for catching fish. When you get the fish, you can forget the trap. Snares are used for catching hares. When you get the hare, you can forget the snare. Words are used for catching meanings. When you get the meaning, you can forget the words. How can I find someone to talk to who has forgotten the words? — Zhuangzi
With this as a starting point, in this piece I write about the final days of the life of my partner, Elee Kirk. It’s a piece about language and its failings, and how we try our best to communicate nevertheless, across the gaps and the shortfalls.
Here’s a short extract:
The words made no sense. They made perfect sense. Beyond traps and snares, I stood on the brink of something that was not quite meaning, nor was it meaning’s absence. The quiver and pulse of life and death, half in shadow and half in light, the shapes we cannot fully make out, the unrepeatable pattern of a moment, the bewildering, beautiful blur of things.
You can read the complete piece here: Purple Mangoes.
Cover Image : Purple Mangoes (A tree full of unripe Tommy Atkins mangoes in Ghosh Grove in Rockledge, Florida.), photo by Asit K. Ghosh. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported via Wikimedia commons
