Patterns

"I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors hare something monstrous about them." - Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius


Realms

Light lingers long by the door. A crack in the paintwork of the windowframe that I cannot see because it is too small threads a persistant eddy of cool air into my forearm, brushing a crease in the small blonde hairs on my medial muscles and running parellel down the wave-streak of my slightly twisted lateral muscle, as if the wind was surfing on my still skin down its length. There is the faintest of whistlings. The wind from a wasps wing stirs spirals of dust on my hornbeam chest of draws, and then the wasp is gone out of the door into the hall. Patterns in the white emulsion paint of my ceiling flit from fingerprints, to nazca lines, to the expanding concentric circles of a dropped pebble in the changing light, then stop. Flecks of sunlight diffuse off my gold hairs and shear off into the air, though I can't see them because of the fading sun.

I have watched a gull turn in a halo of sky for the last 1 + 1/2hrs. I don't understand why birds fly, anymore than I understand why the wind thrums my washing line or why my eyes are blue or why the sun didn't go out yesterday, or tomorrow, or a millenium ago. Oh, I understand the scientific, the academic, the realist theory why, but I don't understand the why why. Sometimes I can only find 'because'. I measure myself by what I don't really understand. I'm not very good with things I am supposed to understand. We step gingerly onto a line that is as wide as the most slender strand of hair, and broken and lonely winds push us from all angles without knowing why, but soon we forget about falling from all that staring at the sky. The land below becomes as intangible and intransient as a star, and about as distant. Soon, we don't remember falling at all, then we forget the memory of the memory of falling, and then nothing. Now, for the first time in all our lives, we are walking. And you cannot run until you've learnt to walk.


Walls.

There are four walls.

The unbreakable fourth, the inexorable third, the shifting second, the collapsing first, with the outer seal of the fourth hemmed in by the heavy third, and the siblilant second binding the folding first.

Between each wall is a rift of size.

The first and second walls contain emotion and colour and distance, which warp and elongate and snap from chemical to chemical and reaction to reaction. The reactivity of the first to second is sequential, numinous, lawful and chaotic in equal measure.

The third contains precepts of memory and foci of habit, half-formed phantasms, doldrumic and windless, which are subject to change as often and varied as cats paws in a trackless sea.

The fourth contains composure and resource, lodestones of self and selfhood, one fractured totality.

The distance between each layer is as thin as the wind through the slivered grass. Or as thick as the distance between the mirror and the reflection. The impact of one wall on another wall is so appalling as to be cataclysmic, yet so subtle as to be as discernable as the single reflection of a single sunbeam on a single grain of sand.


I Don’t Remember.

Influence begets influence, thought chases thought, step treads footprint, footprint crushes grass, grass presses mud, mud pushes stone. Stone cracks stone. Each thought, memory, and habit is spherical yet boundless – its circumference hypothetically measurable, its radius functionally infinite.

The space between each sphere is filled with archons of light.

The radiance is blindingly invisible. The colours are like the washes in a mandala. Seraphic synpases flit in torn bursts of pale flame. The wind that shakes the barley also propels the rain, murders the sky, sings the evening, twists the fabric, snaps the fingers, expands the pupil, waters cupidity, drowns courage, heals endurance and corrodes doubt. Memory falls like fog on a field. Shreds of vapour have more in common with remembrance than element. The bars of pink behind a shut eyelid, the diffusion of light through a glass of water, the sebum of smears on that glass. The slow fall of protective mucus like raining atoms on a woken eyeball. I don’t remember any more than I remember why I sleep, or why my heart beats. Or why my mouth swallows air. I don’t remember anymore.


"I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?" - W.G. Sebald, The Rings Of Saturn.


But There Are Other Skies.

I am followed by my own shadows and led by my own lights. On some days, I cast beams onto pavements and I am lit by the glare of silhouettes, although only when I shut my eyes. When I open my eyes again it is seven hours later.

Or eight.

I waltz from reflection to glaze to sheen before sleeping in matt colours. Everything in my dusks and dawns is in secondary colours. There are other colours there that I don’t have names for and I suppose never will.

I wake up in half-light and falter through currents of spontaneity and rivulets of impulse until the day ends and the sun goes down. Then I go to sleep when the light goes from black to black-black to grey-black to grey-blue-black to yellow-grey-blue to copper-azure to bronze-scarlet-sapphire. Then finally blue, blue stretching from golden horizon to golden horizon and from drowsing ground to waking zenith, until I am cupped in the palm of the sky and my breath flickers happily in my chest and the freshening wind rises with the morning.

Then I get up and do it again.


Strange Weather

I am blood-caught in the skies, as far in altitude in my head as my feet are chained to the earth. I lay on my back on cropped laser-green grass and feel my skin groove and spike with the blades and turn pink and mottled under the pressing ground. I watch clouds scud and trip over the sky until my vision spins.

I tilt my head back and watch the arc of the sky fall into the inverted earth until the blood pulses in my brain, and I watch as trees plant their leafy roots in the blue shimmering ground and their towering trunks reach the roof of the green sky. I have a tame Poplar that picks up the slightest breath and shivers silver leaves.

In a strong wind, it looks like it is on fire. Silver flames, edged with emerald.

Huge winds growl around the meadow and buffet the grass like an inland sea, tides of air.

And the barn owl rides the wind-spins like a storm petrel.