Pause

 

Some silences spin worlds.

My husband and I agree it may have been the most communicative pause in a talk that we'd ever heard.  At the meeting a 30-something year old professional man, handsome--healthy-looking, dressed in a snappy shirt and tie--had recounted how, several years ago, he, after over a year of the surprising grace of sobriety, decided that drinking his In-law's vodka was a good idea. He then woke up the next morning (we can guess that morning's sensations from the look on his face) and took his daughter fishing.  He paused.  Looked down,; Looked inward. Paused...some...more...breathed.  Paused, again.

In that pause, we sat in a little boat with him and his daughter.  Our heads throbbed, our hearts twisted tight like old fishing line, it was hard to swallow. Dawn's damp hung in the air  along with the desultory chatter of a content girl.  A crow called out from shoreline brush, oars bumped wood in small lappings of water. The sight of bright bobbers upon dark water, the small fingers of a girl cradling a fat, red worm... reminded us of the tiny, ineffable delights of this world.  The knife edge of despair glints in our vision of this moment.  Pause....

pause.....








When he speaks we are not sure we are ready. We are afraid to lose sight of that knife edge and of the tiny delights.  We are grateful that he let us sit there, in that pause, in the boat.

Then he said, "And that probably saved my life."
Ah.
We knew that. 
 
I write poetry, not because I like to be obtuse, not because of some tradition of intellect, not because it's beautiful. It's because it's the only way for me to say certain things.  There are silences in poetry.  Spaces.  Pauses.  That's why it looks that way on a page (one of the many queries from the poetry-daunted, "Why does it look like that?").  My husband is in an even less enviable postion as an abtract painter: invariably several visitors to an opening will squint, turn to him and say "What does it mean?"

What did that silence mean in this man's story?  It means a fishing trip.  It means worms, water, hangover, prayer. It means despair. It means a child and her father.  It means the impossible.  It means rowing.

It is the silence the artist Galindo keeps as she trails bloody footprints from court to jailhouse, to police station to town square (see first post). It is the pause I feel each time I drive by the departed Rosie's forlorn gas pumps at the entrance of my street.  It is the pause of  Borges before he turns blindly towards us, to recite another verse. 

When I drop a pebble through a water's surface, there is a silence as it drifts down--visible and then not. The pause that emerges within me at that moment means everything. I cannot tell you what it means to you, though.

I do know that in that pause--not more than a couple of minutes--more than that one man's life was saved.

You can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.
 (Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, 2005)

Painting: Point of Departure--by Mark Beebe
Royal Art Lodge; Little Sweets Series
Photography: Mark Beebe