I spent the last two weeks of 2021 on the west coast of Ireland-a winter landscape defined by constantly shifting plays of light and dark: wind, rain, ocean, cloud, mist. Short days spent beside warm fires and walking empty, wild beaches.
It’s easy to get lost in the wind and spray and cloud; difficult to determine through squinted eyes exactly where the sky ends and the sea begins; exactly where the sea ends and the beach begins. Where the landscape ends and experience begins. Edges of everything dissolving from salt-gritted blue, watery-cold grey, into blasted whale bone. A sip from a flask of searing black tea. The skin of experience dissolving the skin of my hands peeling from the oily black decay of seal carcass, blue light falling through raw, red fingers.
Where do you locate yourself in that bare, extreme, landscape? In the extremity of poetic seeing-in the extremity of experience? Where do you find a distinct border between seeing and feeling; between you and the wind, the cloud, the decaying seal? Between this moment of seeing and this moment of writing, this moment of reading? This moment. Just. This. Moment.
That extreme Irish landscape impels inward and outward; that naked experience of wind and smell and touch and just thisblasting the worn skein of me all to hell. What’s left in that blasted space? Where are you in the immense silence of a howling wind?
Just breath. Bone. Flesh. Just wind. Just endless sky, vast ocean.