I am currently reading "Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair" by Christian Wiman. It is part poetry, part lyric essay, and part commonplace book. In the third entry he quotes
Imre Kertész, "under certain circumstances... words lose their substance... they simply deliquesce..." Kertész is, I think, referring to grief, but I was struck by the Dali-esque image of melting words that
deliquesce implies. It is originally a term from chemistry, referring to the process by which a salt absorbs water from the atmosphere and turns into a solution. Looking for all the world like it is melting away, but of course it has not. All the ions that were in the salt are still present, simply now unseen in the water, and the water that swirled around the salt unseen is now made manifest.
Ten entries later deliquesce appears again, this time in a long ouroboric discourse on snakes. I look deliquesce up, wondering what the non-chemists make of it. Metaphorically, suggests Merriam-Webster, it means to soften, perhaps with age. Am I deliquescing as I write? (Certainly as I age.) Pulling something unseen from the air, making it manifest, while I myself vanish? Still there, tucked unseen between those water molecules...those words.
It makes me think of efflorescence, where water flows through a salt, dissolving it, carrying it to the surface where it then turns back into a solid. But instead of the tidy crystalline packing, now it looks like flowers have erupted on the surface. Perhaps that's another metaphor for my writing, looking for what's in the depths to carry it up to the surface where it can flower. (Or lose its intended structure -- not an image I'd chose.)
All things visible and invisible. All things exchanging and interchanging.
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Sodium hydroxide is what I think of as the iconic ionic substance that deliquesces.
