Naming the nameless

Poems, stories, songs. In each, we sometimes talk around things which are difficult to name because they are difficult to see. Strong but unclear ideas or feelings. A glimpse of something in a mist.

Once, I was astounded – by miles of greens and yellows, from the top of the Sidlaw hills. Vast shadows were skimming across fields and paths, as great clouds high above me moved over an infinite blue sky. A sky too bright to look at for long.

Perhaps a mile away, disappearing around the corner of a dazzling white farm house, tiny due to the distance, was a human figure. I thought – that’s someone I know! But how could that be? Wasn’t it much too far to tell who it is? And, it couldn’t have been him anyway. He died years ago.

So, I got back on my mountain-bike and freewheeled down the long, steep path. Soft breezes were cooling my face, and the sun was warm and bright, even when I closed my eyes for a moment. I felt that every sparkling second was trying to tell me something: something more than I will ever be able to say.

Words enable us to say a million things, but they cannot name a feeling which will not reveal itself clearly. Or, perhaps, it cannot appear until we name it.

T.S.Eliot came closest to naming a few of the nameless things which are forever disappearing around some corner of my own consciousness. Often, these glimpses have something to do with seeing a moment pass and, at the same time, feeling that somehow it will always be. So, when Eliot speaks of such a moment in the poem Burnt Norton, I instantly feel he has named something that was nameless.

The moment in the draughty church at smokefall

I read this and immediately thought: that’s exactly it. Yet, if I then ask: ‘Exactly what?’, it’s gone again. Like the tiny, impossible figure disappearing around the corner of the distant farm house. Or, like that moment on my bike, freewheeling down the long summer path and thinking that the day is trying to tell me something. And the words I use aren’t really helping me to get closer to what I mean. I’m relieved when I notice that Eliot too was aware of the difficulties of trying to say some things in words. Later, in the same poem, he wrote:

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision…

In Eliot’s sequence of poems: Four Quartets, the poem Burnt Norton is the first part. All are inspired by his search for meaning in the world, which he found in Christianity. It is entirely possible to respect the poet and his poetry without swallowing his beliefs. I feel able to do this because I recognise his honest search and struggle to name things which often seem beyond our reach. Poetry is one way of striving to reach the apparently unreachable. Other ways include – stories, music, and whenever an artist or sculptor tries to give form to indistinct apparitions.

It’s not easy to write clearly about a lot of things, but there are special difficulties when your subject keeps disappearing like a ghost. The only reason I don’t give up trying to name the nameless is – I sense a kind of treasure, just out of the reach of my words.

We live in stressful times. Our minds are battered every day with meteor showers of hard facts. Wars, starvation, rotting urban oceans of poverty.

Only in quiet moments between the meteor showers can we sense or think about inklings of nameless things. Like one time recently when I heard on a radio a few notes of Claire de Lune (French for ‘light of the moon’), a haunting piece of piano music composed by Claude Debussy. My mum used to play it when I was young. Each pure note and another and another sparks a different memory. The blur of her small hands gliding over the keyboard, sunlight coming in long shafts in the window and tiny dust stars, and remembering that it was summer outside and I wanted to go out on my bike and cycle along to the beach, but I also did not want to move and I just wanted to listen and drink in a taste of something I knew tasted wonderful but I had no words to name it.

I don’t believe in ghosts, or God, or magic. Well, maybe some magic – like the magic of old books. And although I do not believe in ghosts, I enjoy spooky films. And I’ve always had a fascination for kinds of creativity which could be described as – a person on a spiritual quest. Vincent Van Gogh. Charlie Brown. Yet, I expect that any naming of nameless things I try to do will be done without any mysticism, but as rationally as the way plants can be grown and nurtured in a garden. And it feels like a miracle.

Harvey Duke