Chime

A white african girl sees a pregant woman brutally slaughtered. This incident, no doubt amongst others, strikes her consciousness which chimes into eternity. When a bell is struck it makes a loud and sudden noise and then continues to echo, and eventually seems to fade away. But physics tells us that the vibrations never completely die - they just become fainter and eventually imperceptable amongst the noise of other strikes and chimes.

When this girl came to London, I met her and the chime of this incident was clearly still ringing in her consciousness, above the noise even of the city - it spread out and coloured her whole personality with an intensity that drew me in like a fly to a burning light but then made me turn away from the heat of it. I never called.

This was years ago. Everyone seems to have their tragic stories. But I don't have any, as far as I'm aware. So I count myself as pretty lucky. But often I find myself drawn to people who have their own tragic stories.

***

I open the paper at random, as a distraction from the list-writing I'm trying to tackle in order to order my life, to control it nicely. A black african lady with a broad beaming smile looks like the picture of happiness. The article tells the story of some immigrants and it turns out this lady lost her family, all murdered.

"Her future is something we can't divorce ourselves from" says her English host. "Language began to take second place to a deeper strand of human communication" (Metro 24 July 2013)

These chimes reach me all the time, and often I try to block them out in order to create some peace and quiet, but of course the long-run effort in blocking them out always results in more noise than the amount which was blocked out. So what to do? Sing with the chimes maybe..