Dissolution
“Knot in the Ribbon at the Edge of the Solar System ‘Unties’”
ScienceDaily (Oct. 1, 2010)
The threads of thought fall back; swooping, sliding through the slippery pockets of her mind,
And wisping out into emptiness, like late dreams at dozing dawn.
The Artist asks the Scientist, ‘What is this? Where is it going?’
But the Scientist is silent as a secret.
Deserted by intellect and structure, she is silent.
It will come right. She draws algorithms
With light.
The threads make pace, make mass; amass in their hundreds, thousands, billions. Then
Weave, coalesce, around the
Hundreds, thousands, billions of dreamers and thinkers,
Out of whose stolen finalities they are extruded.
The Scientist ponders extrusion, but the Artist is losing her
Self; becoming faint in her attrition, losing
Definition
Her soul loosens itself first from its lover’s barre; and their holding fades.
He fades, dissolving; his face
A glissade of chiffon, dissipating, leaving no trace.
And their loving – less than echoes as the mists of strange, deconstruct and softly escape.
Time thunders, while disintegration silks age-cold threads, and life gives up its drive to find
A heart’s warm ease in another’s mind.
The Scientist contemplates what is left of meaning, while
Coherence and logic detach themselves, and become
Insubstantial.
This orphaned notion – not quite thought, not quite nothing, is curiosity;
An attempt to understand.
But the question folds itself elegantly into the regressing threads’ anonymous, sinuous lure
And abandons her.
Soon after, the Artist feels the wrenching betrayal of unravelling mother love.
What was his name?
Nor can she recall or fully comprehend what he was; what child was.
But the ache of hollowed out nothingness, where he had
Curled and uncurled, pink and cuddle soft with promise, rails against its dissolution.
Then gives in and, insensate, drifts
Into the shrifting void.
From within and without, she observes its leaving. Can love exist without thought?
She imagines a thread the shape of love; holds it for a moment’s kiss, for aching millennia.
She binds to it all the loves she knows, to keep it safe. But,
As the singularity of one becomes the one of singularity,
She becomes the solar breeze
And sets it free.
Conboy-Hill, 2012. Coursework for MA Creative Writing
This piece has, like many adult offspring these days, come rolling back with its washing to live with its parents because otherwise it will probably remain forever homeless. Why? What did it do? Is it the literary equivalent of an indolent, work-shy waster? Not really (well I would say that!), it’s likely because the poetry market thinks it’s prose and the prose market believes it’s poetry.
Actually they are both right; ‘Dissolution’ started life as a poem for my OU course and, because I don’t really have a feel for poetry, I wrote a flash story first from which to fashion it. Not quite in the spirit? My tutor thought so and chuckled out a less than perfect grade! So when the time came to unleash it on a more public stage I tried the poetry market first [zilch – it’s prose], re-wrote it as a flash piece [nope – it’s poetry], then revised both for different markets because if you don’t keep knocking, no one will ever let you in, right? Today when it turned up again on the doorstep, I decided to let it back in permanently and give it its room back because it brought home some of the best comments ever for a rejection. So here it is, my hybrid chimaera of a tale that won’t roll on a catnip mouse or bury a bone.
Dr Suzanne Conboy-Hill 
Interesting but not easy to digest. I thought the scientist and the artist were the same person, as in real life.:) Definitely a prose/poetry hybrid.
Spot on – they are indeed the same person or representative. The trigger was a discussion of the Big Bang/rebound theory, now discredited. I wondered how that would be experienced by universal life to be drawn back to the beginning of things. Someone else who read it saw it as the last thoughts of an individual who is dying. I’m happy with that too – and its hybrid identity!
Actually I saw it as a life circle of the dualistic scientist /artist. There were a couple of places where I thought about encroaching dementia : “She can no longer remember or fully comprehend what he was, what child was, but the ache of hollowed out nothingness where he had been, coils and uncoils, rails against its dissolution, then gives in and drifts, insensate, into the collective void”.
Fascinating! I wonder if its undirected nature is what makes it difficult to tag – it means what it means to the person who reads it. Wish I could claim to have intended that!
You wrote it, so you can claim anything that goes with it.:) It is amazing how even seemingly straightforward writing is perceived differently by different readers. It provides a bottomless well for literary theory diggers to ponder over interpretation, author and reader relationship etc.:) Of course, we all project our experience and our subjective associations on the stories we read.
I think that’s true, although some stories wear their messages more prominently than others so there’s not so much room to dig. I think too, there can be a danger of over-interpreting and unconscious projection. Psychotherapy has suffered from that in the past (and maybe still), but the danger there is that the therapist is always right and the patient who disagrees is in denial. Nothing so alarming here!
I agree about the danger of over interpreting, especially when the analysis concentrates on the author’s subconscious motives and not on the story itself.
Just before I disappear off the bottom right – ooh …