A poem about Perspective by Rocco Jarman
THE KEEPER OF MEANING your life is a tapestry, so many threads, woven a tremendous going on, a relentless unfolding, of thatching and unravelling, a picking loose and a tying off, a coming together of chapters; of beginnings that are noticed only now, but which when traced back to stitches made sometimes so far back, we discover, began, actually very long ago. and a vividness and a contrast coloured at once in fine detail and sweeping fullness depending on how close we dare to stand or how far back we venture to take it all in. and of endings, whose thread was running out already somehow, whilst a new theme was just blooming onto the scene, announcing its future disappearance in plain sight in a way that can only be seen once it has taken up a different kind of room in your heart in the shape of your remorse. and then there are ways in which a pattern emerges. which betrays at once the repeated leaning of our choices and an invisible hand that seemed to always know exactly what it was doing even in those moments where we had been invited to steer the design. strangely, especially in those times and unsurprisingly, exactly when you thought yours was the only hand at the loom. and then of course as we arrive at the unfolding event horizon of what is emerging in often alarming confusion only now, that bright exciting edge where today is splicing into tomorrow, that moment of infinite potential we call Now being as it is, not yet hemmed in by the selvege of fate, and we arrive at the same time at a place of enough courage wound around the spindle of our hearts to allow the whole incredible picture, replete with its many flaws and knotted regrets that refuse to allow the eye to forget, if we can love that enough and choose the whole of it, with all its tragedy of promises that unravelled as the shuttles of requited and unrequited love struck their rhythms to the weave of your own heart that seeming failing of the world and of deeply significant others to give us the kind of love we thought we wanted rather so often instead the kind we needed. if we can remake the frame of our minds to regard all of it with the honour of acceptance, a beauty is revealed which takes us by surprise, whose other name is Meaning and we discover with profound humility we are both weaver and weft, and more that each of our wonderfully complex tapestries are both impossibly and inextricably Intertwined. and then, when we forget again, and drawn back in, as we undoubtedly will, to the narrow and engrossing task of living, the secret beauty of every snag, every rude break in our rhythm, and every frustration, is in its invitation to re-embrace the wider view to be reminded, again, it is always now. Rocco Jarman, October 2022