And this is strange. A broken document. An ellipse of configuration while looking at the past, rereading what was written fifteen or sixteen years ago. The seams become crooked, pulled out of line by the constant adjustment of the body and the weather. A wool sweater to cover the skin, allow sun to be absorbed without thinking of any particular gesture towards the spaces beyond this simple contagious daily arena where speech and silence, the matted fury of anticipation and disappointment flow across an undisclosed rectangle or sphere. The exact contours are always unknown. So, the reading of past pages about pre-dawn thunderstorms, periods of withdrawal and sudden illumination, the mythological elements still embedded in the consciousness, Golden Boughs, magical swords, rivers whose waters impede passage or defy entrance, sudden appearances of stags in a late winter woods, brings about this curious uncertainty, the misplacement of fingers on a keyboard stimulates the transposition of certain letters, thus rendering the text comical instead of significant.
Today is more somber than expected. The clouds look pasted onto a slightly curved surface. Somewhere far to the east in the Atlantic ocean, a hurricane is rolling over cold waters, losing its amber-edged rains, its tremendous documentation of devastation. No one records the minutiae of loss, the silken wavering of fall grasses, the strands of someone’s hair kept for decades, the softness of air on a warm night. What is ephemeral does not lose its identity, it disappears. What was constant is now in transition, in an unrecognizable state of flux, witness to its own demise. People perceive the constants of home and place within the context of growing mortality. Human, animal, and plant loss bisect the day; each zone becomes fused with the next logical configuration. A broken roof and a dead bird; a suffering child and the splintered boards of a sailboat. The allowance of arms and hands provides some measure of safety, of comfort. Building becomes all, clearing, cleaning, building. There is no particular solace in information, no real need to understand what meteorological elements produced the cataclysm. Predictability is no longer useful.
In a way, the reading of pages written fifteen or sixteen years ago provides an impetus to turn away from the past. The present is all-absorbing, they say. The blue throbbing along the body is messenger of winter, the vast snowing along the spine of the mind, turning leaves into soil, rocks into sentinels unable to recreate the enclosure. A garden of possibilities is revealed. No paper is really acid free. The air is always present, even between the pages of a closed book. What acts on the paper, however, is the mind, the capricious and all-devouring fire of the mind. It is ice-blue and saturated green, wobbling brown and voluptuous black. The lines running between the letters have another source, perhaps somewhere in the mythological lands cited in innocence, in ignorance of the true force of the allusions. The Golden Bough, the great polished apple, the pitted sword of the lake remain with us even if we no longer seek, see, or comprehend what appears.
My skin is blue now, and not with cold or mortal illness. It is sky blue on a clear day, morning glory blue, sapphire blue. It is sometimes leaf-gold, rising on sudden currents, moving into the sun at some unforgettable speed, the consequence of which is an array of dazzling images, a quickening of the pulse, a reluctance to speak until the soft night returns. No one notices such a phenomenon. No one conceives of such a peculiar turning away from the human. Sapphire blue on a blue day with blue flowering blooming. This is the under-story of imagination, the infinitely thin layer of light under perception. My hair is white-gold, woven into a silken trance, a nesting place for shadows, the presumed source of early snow or the wavering light behind the eyes when sleep impossible disturbs the capacity to dream.
However, these are speculations not unrelated to the first marring of the pages, the unique substitution of q for a, which created an unreadable text, a text so close to the threshold of the absurd as to create panic, withdrawal, the need to erase and discard. Every time letters move about, the mind wonders if it should follow or dismiss these antics as illusion and caprice, the ardent disillusion of overly sensitive minds. So, the pages from April 7, 1999 and April 7, 2000 have created their own sort of dissonance. Pre-dawn thunderstorms bringing in sleet, episodes of wariness and caution, the occlusion of time, a lingering tendency to cast the world in mythological terms, perhaps more easily identifiable, perhaps the most common of displacements. In any event, the magic river remains, the shimmering ripples in the lake have not disappeared, the road to the underworld is still perilous, although they are manifest in other forms. Anyone desiring to watch a solar eclipse does so at his or her own risk. The sun shows no pity and allows no time for reflection. Even the smoked filmstrip cannot remove the intensity of the image projected in calm water. There is no image apart from the body itself, and it burns so far inside time, that one cannot perceive the subtle changes it generates. The life force provides its own double, creates and absorbs its own enemy, and we stand under the green-leaves canopy of eternal illusion.
Andrea Moorhead
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