And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain
A love letter to the lyrics of Sweet Thing by Van Morrison
He’s singing to a woman, of course, but this is not important. Our concern is not with the author, but with the song.
Not with what it’s about, but with what it says.
How it speaks to us.
The song is from an album — Astral Weeks — whose first lines are
If I ventured in the slipstream, between the viaduct of your dreams
so let’s not presume we have any obligation to fact here. We leave the corporeal world the moment we set the needle down and the bass slithers its way under our skins and the guitar — is it folk, is it jazz, what is it? — carries us downstream, an invitation to join the reverie.
Will you find me, a voice asks, over and over, part hope part doubt part plea, a desire we all know, to be seen and heard and felt. To be understood and to be released. To be born again, as the voice says.
And so the ‘real’ world crumbles and we drift between whatever structures we thought we cared about, and we watch as they — the viaducts and facts and biographical details of songs— swirl together with our dreams.
And so we arrive at Sweet Thing.
And so the song starts with And.
And so does almost every line.
And I will stroll the merry way and jump the hedges first
And I will drink the clear clean water for to quench my thirst
And I shall watch the ferry-boats and they’ll get high
On a bluer ocean against tomorrow’s sky
It’s like we’ve entered the story in its middle.
And we stay there.
Suspended.
The singer occupies this limbo for the entire song. We exist with him in an endless future tense, a moment defined by its unseen end, a horizon near enough to believe in but far enough away to hurt. A moment defined by distance and separation, by anticipation, by yearning, by the swirl of the real world with the memories and future dreams that fill his mind, and ours.
The dreamed horizon in the author’s real world was to be reunited with his love. He was in America, she was in Ireland. But what matters to us now is the power of the reverie. To make the future more real he recalls what has been left behind. And so in his dreams he remembers as he looks forward.
Remembers nature: hedges and water, ocean and sky.
Looks forward, seeing everything brighter, more beautiful, just more: a bluer ocean and a higher tide, clear clean water and the merry way. There is no greater promise than the idea of tomorrow’s sky.
How does this speak to us? I think you have an idea.
And I will never grow so old again
And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain
And this is what separation, suspense, does to the singer. And does to us. We grow old. We grow wise but wither. Lose our vitality and something else too, our innocence perhaps. This limbo, this dream, is full of regret, fear, pain. We all carry these things, but mostly when our arms are empty of what we’d rather hold. It’s the weight of what’s absent. It makes us un-whole. The more we care about these things the less we are ourselves.
And so he dreams of being back there, of getting to the horizon.
Now all he wants to do is walk and talk in gardens wet with rain.
Now all he wants to do is everything.
And I shall drive my chariot down your streets and cry
‘Hey, it’s me, I’m dynamite’ and I don’t know why
And you shall take me strongly in your arms again
And I will not remember that I ever felt the pain
What a picture of abandon this is. Carefree, vivid, unself-conscious. Freed from the pain of separation, this moment he imagines in the future is so real, it’s surreal. Chariots and unburdened shouts to the world — ostentatious statements of love. An embrace so strong it banishes not just pain but the memory of pain. A reminder, should we really need it, that though love is spiritual we feel it in the body. And in the bodies of others.
We know that now, don’t we? Words and faces and voices — they offer succour, support, love. Yet all those things we feel most strongly in each others’ presence.
We feel the intensity of separation, now, this expectation of reunion. In a way we never thought we would, in a way we couldn’t have imagined. And now we too look forward to tomorrow’s sky. We feel the ache and the dream and the escalating promise in the words, in that pledge extended and reinforced and repeated over and over and
We shall walk and talk in gardens all misty wet, misty and wet with rain
And I will never, never, never grow so old again
Never.
Never.
And so this is what we’ll do.
And I will raise my hand up into the night time sky
And count the stars that’s shining in your eye
Just to dig it all and not to wonder — that’s just fine
And I’ll be satisfied not to read in between the lines
And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain
And I will never, ever, ever, ever grow so old again
We will live.
We will walk and talk and sing and dance.
We will point at the stars so far away and sit so close to someone we can see the night reflected in their eye.
We will light fires and huddle under umbrellas and pose for photos and cook for each other and take long drives to the coast and splash each other in the sea.
We will jump hedges and hug strangers and wear what we want and drive chariots and shout I love you to the world and fuck ridicule.
We will love and laugh and touch and flirt and play and hear the wind in the trees and walk and talk in gardens misty wet, misty wet with rain and never ever ever ever grow so old again and hug someone we love because the sight and the sound of the world as it really is connects to something, something that makes us feel good, something that makes us feel whole again, something that makes us feel like us.
We won’t understand much of it but oh, sweet thing, it will be under today’s sky not tomorrow’s and we will feel it all.
We will drink it in.
We will be reunited. We will be found.
We will be born again.
Thank you for reading. If you liked this love letter, you may like another.
