The Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
I grow old... I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
~ The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock / T.S. Eliot
Sometimes, when the lines such as these surface in epitaph to my narrative, the commentary track remarks with pointed alacrity, "Is that the only literature you know?" --- It isn't, of course, though some days, I'm unsure. She does make persuasive points. But it isn't the voices that need to be recorded, it is the Mermaids. The mermaids... I know why they do not sing to me.
Their sweet cloying crying voices, saccharine verses etched in tracks of blood and salt on the knife-edge of their glistening scales--
Sirene songs wavering between the truth of experience and the fiction of their telling, pearlescent baubles set adrift on the waves; these celebrity curiosities and their jumbled up lives of loves and lusts and causes and crusades, adventures on the high tides, ever giddy and addled by their soft, fragile, beautiful selves, the words, the worlds, the empty lyrics and tender guiles...... and I know why they call to me, but donotwillnotrefuseatall to sing to me.
And so it coalesces in the picture frame of the mind's eye: a lazy, hazy, sea fog rising, neither coming nor going on a faded stretch of waterline somewhere found once upon a dream with fine gold/grey sand; a stillness that is a perfect moment captured on the end of a pin, prevented from slipping (in a moment it shall start bleeding so we must, we must, be quick); and kicking off kitten heeled sandals to roam the knife-edge of that water-colour beach in rolled-up/cut-off khakis a score years out of fashion, frayed, faded white cotton flapping against the roughened, imperfect arms of a woman too old to have any business aligning herself as a "girl", coming into the old enough to forget to care: her hair wild, her laugh care-less, and free the way it can only be when there is no one there to hear it nor to see her dance, or bring to mind that this is a scene better served by fluttery sun dresses and playfully swept off hats (bleached straw, wide brimmed, set off with a splash of mint-green in a bow-sash)... and she slips, taking her leisured ghostly time, between the frame, up and down the sand leaving only the faintest of steps, forever a wisp of something just out of the moment, out of mind... ...
And there, in that forever-moment, time starts to move.
....tick
............
...................
........................
and I learn, once again, to breathe.
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
~ The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock / T.S. Eliot
Sometimes, when the lines such as these surface in epitaph to my narrative, the commentary track remarks with pointed alacrity, "Is that the only literature you know?" --- It isn't, of course, though some days, I'm unsure. She does make persuasive points. But it isn't the voices that need to be recorded, it is the Mermaids. The mermaids... I know why they do not sing to me.
Their sweet cloying crying voices, saccharine verses etched in tracks of blood and salt on the knife-edge of their glistening scales--
Sirene songs wavering between the truth of experience and the fiction of their telling, pearlescent baubles set adrift on the waves; these celebrity curiosities and their jumbled up lives of loves and lusts and causes and crusades, adventures on the high tides, ever giddy and addled by their soft, fragile, beautiful selves, the words, the worlds, the empty lyrics and tender guiles...... and I know why they call to me, but donotwillnotrefuseatall to sing to me.
And so it coalesces in the picture frame of the mind's eye: a lazy, hazy, sea fog rising, neither coming nor going on a faded stretch of waterline somewhere found once upon a dream with fine gold/grey sand; a stillness that is a perfect moment captured on the end of a pin, prevented from slipping (in a moment it shall start bleeding so we must, we must, be quick); and kicking off kitten heeled sandals to roam the knife-edge of that water-colour beach in rolled-up/cut-off khakis a score years out of fashion, frayed, faded white cotton flapping against the roughened, imperfect arms of a woman too old to have any business aligning herself as a "girl", coming into the old enough to forget to care: her hair wild, her laugh care-less, and free the way it can only be when there is no one there to hear it nor to see her dance, or bring to mind that this is a scene better served by fluttery sun dresses and playfully swept off hats (bleached straw, wide brimmed, set off with a splash of mint-green in a bow-sash)... and she slips, taking her leisured ghostly time, between the frame, up and down the sand leaving only the faintest of steps, forever a wisp of something just out of the moment, out of mind... ...
And there, in that forever-moment, time starts to move.
....tick
............
...................
........................
and I learn, once again, to breathe.