There was an old woman tossed up in a basket,
Seventeen times as high as the moon,
Where she was going I couldn’t but ask it,
For in her hand she carried a broom.

“Old woman, old woman, old woman,” quoth I,
“Where are you going to up so high?”
“To sweep the cobwebs from the sky.”
“May I come with you?”
“Aye, by and by.”

helen reynolds

From Sunday March 9th 2008

Okay, so why I’m here, why I’m back, is because I love words, and playing with words, and particularly the magical feeling of creating beautiful, funny and peculiar things with them - places and objects and people and ideas that don’t exist until I’ve described them. Surely words - and whatever ideas and images and feelings they transform into when we experience them - can be seen to be as full of life as you or I, or the closest tree to either of us, or any jellyfish in any sea. I am alive, as far as I’m concerned my imagination is alive, and a great deal of my imagination is made of words. They’re the protein. What’s of interest to many of us of course is what precedes the words in the process of creation. Whatever the indefinable soupy stuff is from which those words are born is a mysteriously beautiful collaboration between myself and the world I have lived in so far. One can detect something of the awe-some-ness of the soup in the marvelous experience of ‘having an idea’. One moment you’re not thinking it, and the next moment you are. And it happens fast, in a flash! If I try right now….

I see an orange fish hanging from a silhouetted, dark tree against a crimson sky, and the whole thing is on a card, like a tarot card.

It’s quite possible I have seen this particular card before somewhere, but if not, how did this image come to exist in my mind? Like I said - it’s partly me, and partly ‘other than me’. At this point I’m left feeling that the boundary implied really starts to break down - when something as fundamentally personal as an original thought, cooked up by my own little grey cells, is constructed from materials ‘beyond me’, haven’t those things become part of who I am?

It seems parallel with the vague thoughts I am able to muster (with little grasp of physics) regarding the fact that between me an the end of the sofa there is no empty space, it’s all full of oxygen; but that the atoms that make up the oxygen are made up of electrons and protons and maybe neutrons - none of which I faintly understand, but which I have been told exist in relation to one another in terms of size and distance like distant stars; so after all there is a lot of empty space between me and the other end of the sofa, not to mention all the empty space inside me; and to cap it all off, I have been reliably informed, lying on this end of the sofa as I am, my body doesn’t ’stop’ where the sofa ’starts’, right at the edge of each of us, our teeny-tiny components actually overlap a bit. Curr-azy stuff*.

To my fumbling mind, these points collect around a central idea of the connectedness of all things. I don’t begin and end… anywhere, exactly. My words spring forth from soup that doesn’t begin and end anywhere either. So that soup, just what is in there? Is it finite? These questions do not so much compel me to attempt to answer them, as to want to dip my spoon into the soup and see what those little pasta letters spell out!

Put another way, I feel as if there is an infinite playground inside my head, and I want very much to play in it. Left to my own devices I don’t play in it even a smidgeon as much as I’d like.

My goal is to use this space to write in, a little bit, and often.

*If my attempts to describe these facts are so bastardized as to render them uselessly unscientific and damaging to any of the points I was trying to illustrate with them, I hope you will forgive me.

helen@seventeentimes.com

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