Take me to a place you've never been...
...and make me homesick for it. Make me yearn for it and believe in it and love it and miss it as though it once belonged to me and I still carry it in my heart.
I've been thinking about this ever since I watched a particular Doctor Who episode. Gridlock, to be specific. I actually went looking for it on You Tube, just on the off chance, and lo, they had the very scene I wanted:
Listen, particularly, from the 1:55 minute mark to the end.
I've never been to Gallifrey. I can't have ever been there. It does not exist any longer - the Doctor said it's been destroyed - but the bigger picture is that it never REALLY existed at all, outside the story, outside the Doctor's own mind and heart and memory. And yet some part of me thrills to the "burnt orange sky", and the mountains that shine when the second sun rises
It's easy - well, easier, anyway - to write about a place one had personally known and loved. I have done it not too long ago, in this very journal, talking about the Danube and the way I feel about that river; I've done it about the places of my childhood, peppered as memories throughout this journal over the last couple of years.
But can I be homesick for a place I have never been, can never go? Is it possible for an Earthbound human to be homesick for a planet called Gallifrey, or a wood known as Lothlorien? Is it possible to be homesick for some patch of this our own world which one has never seen or visited?
For instance...
Oh, the moment in which the sun is not yet quite risen, not yet quite ready to pour itself around the shadowed crags in their veils of mist, but the day has started - and the light is pearly and nacred, shifting and shining, and the mists flow and coil around their great standing rocks and islands as though they are saying farewell to a lover. And the sky is lost in a brightening glow and the silhouettes of stones sharpen into individual sharp edges, and trees, and in between all there is the river, and the water is starting to change from darkness to a dull pewter glow which echoes the pre-dawn light to the glitter of sun on water as the first fingers of sunlight touch the ancient river and wake it into day once more, another day. And already there are boats moving, and men silhouetted against the sky, and the faint shimmery lines of nets being cast into the water where the fish are waking, too, and waiting to offer themselves in the daily act of love and sacrifice that feeds the people of these crags, of this river. And the shadows are black, and the crags are charcoal gray and deep deep green in the faint light, and the water is turning golden and the sky is turning a faint blue, like the delicate shell of a bird's egg, and soon the sun will come and the water will blaze with glory...
This is the place I am thinking of - the Li river, Guilin, China:
I've never been there. I've never seen this, outside of pictures.
And these particular pictures... I went looking for them AFTER I wrote that paragraph above. I went looking for images that matched the view from my mind's eye. I wasn't describing the pictures; the pictures were found later to match and illustrate what I had already described...
And yet it's there in my mind's eye. And I can make myself homesick for it by letting the image live in my mind.
Perhaps it is possible to take a soul to Gallifrey. And make that soul love a place never seen, impossible to reach, a place that may never have existed outside the mind and heart of a character in a story...
I've been thinking about this ever since I watched a particular Doctor Who episode. Gridlock, to be specific. I actually went looking for it on You Tube, just on the off chance, and lo, they had the very scene I wanted:
Click to viewListen, particularly, from the 1:55 minute mark to the end.
I've never been to Gallifrey. I can't have ever been there. It does not exist any longer - the Doctor said it's been destroyed - but the bigger picture is that it never REALLY existed at all, outside the story, outside the Doctor's own mind and heart and memory. And yet some part of me thrills to the "burnt orange sky", and the mountains that shine when the second sun rises
It's easy - well, easier, anyway - to write about a place one had personally known and loved. I have done it not too long ago, in this very journal, talking about the Danube and the way I feel about that river; I've done it about the places of my childhood, peppered as memories throughout this journal over the last couple of years.
But can I be homesick for a place I have never been, can never go? Is it possible for an Earthbound human to be homesick for a planet called Gallifrey, or a wood known as Lothlorien? Is it possible to be homesick for some patch of this our own world which one has never seen or visited?
For instance...
Oh, the moment in which the sun is not yet quite risen, not yet quite ready to pour itself around the shadowed crags in their veils of mist, but the day has started - and the light is pearly and nacred, shifting and shining, and the mists flow and coil around their great standing rocks and islands as though they are saying farewell to a lover. And the sky is lost in a brightening glow and the silhouettes of stones sharpen into individual sharp edges, and trees, and in between all there is the river, and the water is starting to change from darkness to a dull pewter glow which echoes the pre-dawn light to the glitter of sun on water as the first fingers of sunlight touch the ancient river and wake it into day once more, another day. And already there are boats moving, and men silhouetted against the sky, and the faint shimmery lines of nets being cast into the water where the fish are waking, too, and waiting to offer themselves in the daily act of love and sacrifice that feeds the people of these crags, of this river. And the shadows are black, and the crags are charcoal gray and deep deep green in the faint light, and the water is turning golden and the sky is turning a faint blue, like the delicate shell of a bird's egg, and soon the sun will come and the water will blaze with glory...
This is the place I am thinking of - the Li river, Guilin, China:
I've never been there. I've never seen this, outside of pictures.
And these particular pictures... I went looking for them AFTER I wrote that paragraph above. I went looking for images that matched the view from my mind's eye. I wasn't describing the pictures; the pictures were found later to match and illustrate what I had already described...
And yet it's there in my mind's eye. And I can make myself homesick for it by letting the image live in my mind.
Perhaps it is possible to take a soul to Gallifrey. And make that soul love a place never seen, impossible to reach, a place that may never have existed outside the mind and heart of a character in a story...