You, and I, and Rosabelle believe

Houdini, the scourge of the Spiritualists, disappointed by his own delvings into spirit communication, is resurrected and immersed into a darkened room in Kate Bush's Houdini (taken from her album The Dreaming). In this track Bush explores clandestine romantic secrets and declarations of devotion shared between the escapaologist and his lover; a hidden passing of the key that would ensure his escape from death through the hidden intimacy of a kiss. The context of this shared expression of love and hope is played out in parallel to a seance where the immaterial desires of love and hope seek reaffirming via the release of spirit from their non corporeal nothingness into physical phenomena and messages of love.

Edmond Jabes, who has entered my poetic thoughtscape recently via a reference in a Max Richter piece, has similarly suggested the need for the dead to be contextualised in language as a means to escape nothingness. He wrote that:

"It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak."

Justine Picardie, in her moving account of the aftermath of her sisters' death (recorded in the 2002 If The Spirit Moves You) noted the agony of silence, of forgetting what her sister sounded like. Such silence erodes memory, as though it wishes to deny a sensuous link to somewhere beyond the here, the now, the physical. I can empathise with similar pangs when unable to recall the voice of a friend of mine who died three years ago. Starting with catchphrases, I push at the walls of my memory and call to her, pressing against silence with balled up fists.

When the silence breaks and a voice speaks from beyond the veil, the dead roll out from the woodwork, surrounding the seance and its bereft participants, filling the aether with hope, with love, with their own campaign against the suffocation of memory.