Inarticulate

Many things are hard to articulate
Went to a friend's semi-retirement today
... at 75!
so many layers of history, life and feeling here ...
I can neither be extracted from these stairs
Nor they from me ...
I am acquainted with the personality of each step, each one different, the textures, the meeting points, the meeting of slate to wood, oak to panelling, the grain, the tricky dark corners, the indentations, the wear, their warmth, the depth of feeing imbued in each one, the changing moods, busy and quiet, winter, summer, darkness and light. I have fallen up and down them, tripped and laughed, sat and cried, cleaned up the wet, the sick, the blood, I can still hear the fall of others, the thuds, the many voices and echoes, love and sadness, the utter desolation, the worn burnt indentation of close disaster, the sound of clocks echoing through the void and arriving at each surface reflecting slight variations to make a tonality of matter talking to matter through space and time and creating an intimacy of each meeting the other, of connections and so much lost, but also strangely held, suspended in each moment ...
If ever there is a sense of extension of body into matter it is here
One day I would like to be able to articulate something of what they mean but it is beyond me just now ...

On a slightly lighter note, it reminds me of Flann O'Brien's 'The Third Policeman' which I read many years ago and which has always stuck with me .... perhaps waiting for this moment ...

“The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.”