Winged Stones
I like driving and listening to the radio, so that I can be acoustically isolated from the rest of the world. But when I got home that day I realised I had driven in perfect silence without even noticing. David ans Linda’s story was simply amazing. And yet I could not deny that, even in the incredible circumstances under which their family had formed, it displayed very common dynamics.
Obviously things had been different for David and Linda. He had fallen in love as soon as he had seen her. Linda seemed to have mixed feelings for David. She knew he was younger but he had lied to her, so she thought he was 19 (even now, I thought, David looked a little older. I had thought he might be 36 whereas he was only 32). She was protective of him but also liked the fact that David was very protective of her, too. She seemed to be attracted as well as slightly scared of his mood swings, ranging from boredom and apathy to rage and hyper activism. She tried to understand him but it was not easy because David himself couldn’t.
Linda made David realise how messy his life was. His life and his art. He had convinced his mother to let him quit school. His life could have been complete anarchy. But Linda had helped him discipline himself and his work. She believed in technique as well as emotion. David was pure instinct, but had learned to appreciate formal control.
As it always happens, those differences which had ended up being fatal for their couple had showed up at the beginning of their relationship. The day he moved to start a new life in Portland David casted a last look on the house which had contained his hopes and dreams as well as his family, put a suitcase in the trunk of his car and wondered how it was possible that he had forgotten he had admired Linda for precisely the things he was separating from her.
He remember it was Linda who had first encouraged him to write poems. Through them he had finally been able to manage his anger and had discovered that there’s nothing as powerful and terrible as controlled rage. He had started writing tentatively, just to make Linda admire him, but had discovered that writing could be as absorbing, liberating and therapeutic as painting. Words were streets to him. And rails, hot rails in the sun taking him back to a familiar place as well as promising new destinations. He would taste them slowly, sucking them as liquorice sticks. He would throw them, not caring about where they would land twirling like ribbons. Sometimes they felt like light stones and it was not difficult to give them wings. Sometimes he had to struggle with the accents and metrics but then his words would seem to have been purified by his efforts and the formal framework he had inserted them into.
Being with Linda, understanding her, felt easy and difficult at the same time. She seemed to enjoy talking about artistic creation as well as he did. She liked giving David reading suggestions. One day she mentioned John Milton; David had never heard of him but he didn’t want Linda to know, so he went to the public library and borrowed The Paradise Lost.
He had no idea that this poem would change his life.
