I am the master miller
In come the sacks of wheat,
Each grain a sealed globe
Of locked up mystery,
A richness of nutrition
Sealed within its protective case –
It’s cover.
The seed tumbles through my machine
In unseemly haste,
In hundreds of thousands,
As I slowly grind.
Harnessing the energy of nature
To turn my sails,
Working with nature
In the natural way,
For that is the art of the miller.
I break the case asunder
To release the wondrous essence.
It is now free
To dance with new joy
And give life.
There is deftness in my art
As I deploy my tools,
For I must keep up
With the flow of seeds
And never fall behind.
I separate the chaff
From the vital essence
And am happy,
Lost,
Within my work.
The sacks of seeds arrive
In great number
And I transform them
From potential into realisation –
A stream of purity.
For months I toil
Lost in the beauty of the slow art,
As the seeds arrive,
The sails turn,
The cogs engage,
And I am one with the process;
Losing myself in fulfilment
That stems
From the moment it connects –
A timeless balance
All of its own –
That I am of.
I am the master miller.
Waking from the thrall
I look behind
At the sacks of raw flour
I have gleaned,
With a glow of satisfaction.
The fineness of the flour
Is the evidence of my craft –
I run the fine white powder through my fingers.
This is what my hands have made
When I merge myself as one
With the process,
In harmony with the wind,
The wood, the stone and seed.
I transform the rough grain
Into this delicate stream of wonder
And it fills me with fire.
Back home I take the pure potential
And adulterate it with water, sugar, oil and yeast.
I knead and leave to stand.
I place it in the oven
But it is burnt or full of holes.
For I am no master baker.
My fayre is passable at best.
All the beauty of my skill is spoiled
And returns to mock me.
Ideas arrive into my mind
As ephemeral bubbles
That I must catch between the millstones
Of my imagination
So that their essence is released
To trickle out in words.
Those words
Endlessly streaming through my fingers
Across the page
Now need the master baker’s hand
To enable them to rise,
And the heat to do its work;
To release the full flavour they contain
Lest they read as run of the mill.
Every master miller is in search of the master baker
In order to perfect their craft together.
Neither one can produce excellence alone.
Opher 23.10.2016
I am the master miller
A writer works alone but cannot complete their task alone. It requires community in order to perfect the work. Without the feedback of the audience or the honing of the editor the raw product is poor. For the skill set necessary to create a work of art is too onerous and multiple for any one person to possess in full. Few have that range of ability. I surely do not.
A writer sits in solitude catching the globes of ideas that pass through their mind and capturing them in symbols. These words pour out in endless stream across a clean white sheet and build up into page after page. It is a relentless task, to keep up with the flow and translate those ideas into their essence – to liberate the abstract into concrete form that communicates their spirit. I use the word liberate deliberately – for I see those ideas freed from an internal abstraction into a wider world – a world where others might interpret them and taste the abstraction themselves. So while the symbols are reductionary and restrictive, the liberation comes in explosions of realisation in the minds of others as the essence, packaged in the constrained symbols, is released in the consciousness of others. The ideas are liberated from the mind of one into the minds of many.
That is the creative task of a writer.
Yet should the writing process be strewn with spelling, grammatical or structural faults that intrude and prevent that process of communication, like boulders on the highway, then the art is lost.
The writer can rarely see the boulders they have created to block the progress of the reader. It is the task of the editor to identify the faults and smooth the path. That is a skill as adept as any creator.
Alone we are less. Together we are greater. Every master miller requires a master baker in order to create the perfect loaf.
As a writer I am constantly haunted by Paul Simon’s words –
‘And all my words come back to me
In shades of mediocrity;
Like emptiness in harmony.
I need someone to comfort me.’
That is always how I feel – bereft.