writing our way whole: 45 clearing the desks/decks

Those of you who already know me personally will know that in my life I witness a constant tussle between opposing polarities and tendencies.

To be specific and on-topic (for a change) – I tend to agonise over where I am on the spectrum between fastidious tidiness and spontaneous chaos. Also between clinging and letting go, between laughter and tears.

(Tending towards the heaps and squalor these days, in my Hermitage that is about to have [in all good Highland Time, i.e. some time from here to eternity] some Major Works involving Room Clearance, if not House Clearance.)

And over six decades I have worried about how and what I am seen to be. Don’t we all?

And I’ve oscillated at dizzying speed between these apparently opposite states, so that from the outside I might seem to be poised and still, or at least hesitant and slow. And, sort of good enough at keeping my chaos “under control” …

Whereas anyone with the acuity of vision of a housefly (another quick-fire seer) might be aware that my stillness masks a constant blur of movement between psychic states.

And that’s where the exhaustion can set in.

In a poem written by one of my writing students, she refers accurately to a similar mental experience as “whirring”.

I’m reminded of the clangorous whirring wings of the horrible creatures that Lyra Belacqua Silvertongue has to have welded into a tin. In ‘Northern Lights ‘ by Philip Pulman, in his ‘Dark Materials’ trilogy, although my student has never got to that point in book 1 of the series.

(Whereas I read it – and read it aloud to my family – on more than one occasion, before it made it onto BBC Radio or, later, onto film and TV.)

To wind back and focus again (hard for a quicksilver, mercurial thinker, a will o’ the wisp) I am picking up – from you dear Readers – on “where is this leading? what is she trying to say here?” and so… back to the title … clearing the desks:

BrainDump

You may notice that there are several things that CLEARing ISN’t, but is a near neighbour of – a not-quite synonym.

Myself I am noticing, in that category: CLEANing, emptying, removing, agreeing, facilitating …

Add your own near-neighbours, to give more CLARITY what precisely CLEAR means.

I believe that CLEAR’s derivation as a word (“etymologically”) comes from the Latin clarus, via the French clair, so we have a sense of lightness both of luminosity and of weightiness. Today I am leaving the dictionary-hunting to YOU.

Let’s be clear about that.