The grief that does not speak

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak,
Whispers the o’er–fraught heart, and bids it break.”

Macbeth (Act IV, Scene III)

Shakespeare was right of course. The moment you verbalize your sorrow, a burden is lifted and your heart is relieved. I’m not quite sure why it works like that. I guess when sorrow dwells in your heart’s depths it exists in a liquid form. You try to grasp it, if only to understand it, and it slips away; just like a dream. Maybe that’s why it’s so overwhelming; because it’s untouchable. However, once you capture it into words, it becomes solid and specific. You can point at it, hold it and remove it from inside. Of course once you bring it into the light and make it so tangible, you cannot really escape from it. It becomes a reality and you are obliged to deal with it. When in your heart you could ignore it and simply wallow in it. Once outside, though, you have to stare it in the eyes and, well, that’s a different type of overwhelming. Truth - truth is always overwhelming.

What is missed by the eye is recalled by the guts

This is, according to my notes, what my film language teacher was telling us in relation to Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now”. But I guess by making this observation he was also encouraging us to make films like that – films so powerful and suggestive (rather than expressive, I might add) that the gut would recall them before the eye would even catch up…

And just last night I had this dream – a dream that like so many others before it is already fading from memory. Yet I still recall the intensity of that gut feeling – the same one that my teacher was talking about. A gut feeling that recalled something long forgotten before even my eyes could catch up with what was happening on my mind’s screen; my gut recalled what it feels like being in love.
What was happening on the screen was irrelevant. The man I was watching is not in fact the object of my adoration. Yet that man kissing me so passionately was triggering feelings I haven’t had for anyone in such a long time. And it was not that fleeting feeling you get when you simply have a crush on someone. Rather, it was that all consuming happy-sad feeling you get in your stomach when you love another and you know he loves you back and that to him you are important. And the thing is my dream scenario did not even have a happy ending. Yet, it was not the feeling of rejection that predominated when I woke up, but only that of being in love and feeling loved. So I kept rewinding and forwarding my dream in order to preserve the feeling. It did not last long, though. I can still remember some of the dream, but I cannot retrieve the feeling. I guess the gut is the first to recall and the first also to forget…