“In brief: the secret of the dream, which he carried around with him now, was that certain words have an extra element to them. This extra element is, perversely, missing. Absent. … It is not written, and it is not sounded.”
‘Rockpools, Oaks’ is a shaggy dog story about language and indescribable things. Two friends, lovers, get drunk and share almost hallucinatory thoughts on the things they can barely describe at the edges of their perceptions. Yet in all of those abstract thoughts comes the real world too, the things they are describing formed of the shadows or imprints or absence of things. What’s so brilliant about this – story? recollection? – is it opening possibilities to the stuff we don’t see around us, a different landscape shifted in a scale we have yet to fathom.
First published on Horses Noise Substack, 2023
A Personal Anthology 