Wanderspace

I’m sometimes a careless reader; I’m so keen to get onto the next line, sentence, scene that I miss words, guess them, misread them. This can lead to confusion and a need to reread, but sometimes it opens up a whole new different train of thought and new ideas come springing.

I thought I saw the word ‘wanderspace’ and without actually looking at it or its context properly my mind leapt somewhere else. Wanderspace! it could be the name of an intergalactic craft which does literally wander space, or maybe it’s closer, and darker – maybe wanderspace is a new drug which takes your mind somewhere else into a different world which is in turn called Wanderspace.

Or maybe it’s something pleasant and harmless, the physical space and time-space to wander around – looking at things, drifting between trees, among dunes, by water, over hills, through towns and villages, along shores of lakes or seas… yes wanderspace, clear your head, open your lungs, stretch your legs…

Or maybe it’s what we writers do and where we go, wandering with our people (characters) through real imaginary places, taken to new worlds, new lives, through time – forward, backwards or sideways.

Yes I like wanderspace… I think I feel a poem coming on…

My poem hasn’t arrived, but here is the sonnet which triggered these thoughts…

This sonnet has such a modern feel; it has a sort of sci-fi-fantasy touch, the idea of the essence of a person shaking off their corporal self and wandering space…

It may be so with us, that in the dark,
When we have done with Time and wander Space,
Some meeting of the blind may strike a spark,
And to Death’s empty mansion give a grace.
It may be, that the loosened soul may find
Some new delight of living without limbs,
Bodiless joy of flesh-untrammelled mind,
Peace like a sky where starlike spirit swims.
It may be, that the million cells of sense,
Loosed from their seventy years’ adhesion, pass
Each to some joy of changed experience,
Weight in the earth or glory in the grass;
It may be that we cease; we cannot tell.
Even if we cease life is a miracle.

John Masefield 1878-1967