left unsaid
I’ve been writing a lot lately. Some days it seems to flow along, and others I struggle. But even when it’s going OK, I end up feeling that if I even manage to articulate 10% of what I set out to do, that’s about the best I ever manage. Writing – good writing – is in itself something that demands a bit of the philosophy of SLOW; you can dash off a bit of writing, of course, as anyone who lives under RAE pressure knows very well. But you can’t just dash off something really good.
Life itself is much the same. Sure, we all have things to celebrate, things to be thankful for, things to be proud of. But only in the privacy of your own soul do you know the huge discrepancy between what is and what might have been; the ragged remains and the false starts and the failures to complete and the unfulfilled hopes that, for the most part, no-one else is aware of. George Eliot once said, "It is never too late to become what you might have been." That’s hopeful, and offers the inspiration never to give up. But in a way, I think Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy got closer to the mark with this mixture of hope and resignation:
I cannot read the writing of the years,
My eyes are full of tears,
It gets all blurred and won’t make sense;
It’s full of contradictions
Like the scribblings of a child.
I can but hand it in, and hope
That Thy great mind, which reads
The writings of so many lives,
Will understand this scrawl
And what it strives to say – but leaves unsaid.
read the rest of the poem here
5 Responses to “left unsaid”
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
In an increasingly secularised society few people have a good working knowledge of the Bible. Yet a great deal of our culture is built on stories or ideas that come from the Bible. Literature, art, music, language and even the fabric of our society - such as our justice system - are built on Christian concepts and biblical references. The Writing on the Wall provides a fascinating introduction to the Bible's best-known, and most influential, stories. Each chapter gives some background to the text of the Bible, and shows how the stories have become enmeshed in Western culture. Adam and Eve, the ten plagues of Egypt, The Prodigal Son and Mary Magdalene all feature - along with how the Bible has influenced everyone from Shakespeare to Monty Python, and Caravaggio to Banksy. 
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maggi, just to encourage you with the writting thing – you may only get down 10% of what you want but with words like…
“only in the privacy of your own soul do you know the huge discrepancy between what is and what might have been”…
you have managed to articulate something I constsatly wrestle with but have never get on paper. You have even prompted me to my first post! That’s what I call writting.
peace.
thanks Mark! so glad you find some encouragement in there.
“… But you can’t just dash off something really good.” Unless, I suppose, you are Coleridge on two grains of opium?
But I take your point. Good writing often takes a lot of time and many versions.
“But only in the privacy of your own soul do you know the huge discrepancy between what is and what might have been; the ragged remains and the false starts and the failures to complete and the unfulfilled hopes that, for the most part, no-one else is aware of.”
Beautifully written Maggi – a thought for today… thank you
Neale, although Coleridge did “dash off” some things, a vast amount of his work was re-written, and full of crossings-out and second attempts. The opium thing is often overplayed in the way people talk about Coleridge’s work – despite his ongoing health issues, he wrote more during his lifetime than most writers even dream of.