On boundaries

A haunting

Boundaries exist as dividing lines – drawn to separate territories and concepts. 

Often invisible, sometimes mountainous; what makes boundaries interesting isn’t their shape-shifting power to keep things apart but their ephemerality.

They’re more glib than they first appear. The tiniest trick of light can shift them from border to intersection. 

In nature it's always been this way. Long before maps were drawn, change and movement was constant. Life exists within its own shifting boundaries – visible or otherwise.

The age-old Oak is set apart from the path by the gate – and yet underneath the roots connect, spreading freely, far and wide. To view things in isolation is to overlook what they are in entirety.

When boundaries blur and intersections reveal themselves like portals, there’s a brief strangeness akin to a quiet passing place.

Poetry and language sit across this divide. Give words a boundary – the structure of a sentence; the borders of the page or screen – and you’ve given them life. 

Mum told me she saw a ghost. 

We were having lunch at my sister's house earlier this year, talking about a certain type of ‘atmos’ – a sudden coolness, dissolving, roots momentarily rising from the ground like a high five from a Romero extra – and the story followed. 

She saw the thing on a day trip in an empty church – where else? Well, a cathedral in Beverley, Yorkshire to be exact. 

From a distance, the thing moved seamlessly, silently from one side of the altar to another. She stared from the aisle, aghast. It was tall, draped in a hooded cassock, its face obscured. 

As she recalled that moment, I could tell she knew it sounded farfetched. I leaned in for more. I didn’t ask if her blood sugar was low. Or maybe I did.

“There was definitely something there. I followed it with my eyes. And then it was gone,” she said gravely.

Dad enjoyed the anecdote, as did I – when someone tells you they’ve bared witness to a chance phantom in a medieval cassock, they’re putting their trust in you. 

I ran today and listened New Order’s Procession. Something in the lyrics brought the thing to mind:

There is no room to move
Or try to look away
Remember, life is strange
The life keeps getting stranger every day
I try so hard but this attitude's
A type that won't subside
No matter what they say
Remember your heart beats you day at night
Your heart beats you day at night

Poetry is haunting because it comes and goes and yet it says forever. Much of how we live can’t be held in your hand. The beauty in life is becoming conscious for long enough to see what’s there, even if others don’t. 

Poetry and language can take you across both sides of the boundary.

It can make real a passing place – from rising tree roots to the thing – and dissolve it all at once with a simple, “And then it was gone.”