Time & Perspective Quote by Storm Jameson

Impossible is a mood until someone forces it into syntax. Storm Jameson’s line turns language into a lever: the minute you “lay words” onto the supposedly unthinkable, it stops being a vague wall and becomes a shape with edges you can test. The phrasing matters. “Talked of” suggests hearsay and dread, the kind of impossibility that thrives in silence and rumor. “Laid to it” is tactile, almost workmanlike; words aren’t decorative here, they’re applied like tools or mortar.

Jameson was a novelist, critic, and public intellectual writing through a century that specialized in mass catastrophe and abrupt political redesign. In that context, “the impossible” isn’t only personal ambition; it’s women’s autonomy, collective resistance, the idea that institutions can be remade rather than merely endured. Her claim carries a writer’s bias, but it’s not naïve about poetry’s power. It’s about the mechanics of articulation: naming creates a target, and a target invites strategy, coalition, and iteration.

The subtext is quietly anti-mystical. Problems feel impossible partly because they’re kept in the realm of sensation: fear, shame, fatalism. Words translate that fog into propositions, and propositions can be argued with. Even if the plan fails, the act of saying it out loud reduces the monopoly of inevitability. Jameson’s intent is to defend speech as a first act of agency: not because language magically fixes reality, but because it’s how reality becomes negotiable.