Second Space

The first time is always too reticent, too opaque. We stumble and stutter, unfolding, stretching our wings, into wider expanses, open fields, second spaces. The point becomes a circle, the line a square.

At some point in the journey I woke up. Disoriented, I look out of the window, searching for something I could know in the pitch dark (hasn't that always been the case: we search for a familiar face). These are the unholy hours, when the world escapes to dreamlands but the solemn earth, remaining rooted by gravity and inertia, is black and unredeemed.

A thought tugs at me. I have left all that is valubale back there and there is no going back now.
A book on Robin Hood (another exile) and my own notebook on dinosaurs in which I had naively attempted to name and describe all members of the species. As if by picturing them alone one could learn their innermost secrets. Instead, I knew nothing of their slow, ponderous minds or, indeed, if they had second thoughts. Perhaps their one and only thought, "the one thing needful" , was that we too must die.

We arrive in a new town in the small, the smallest, hours of the day, unnoticed by anyone..except, perhaps, a stray dog. An inauspicious beginning! Our first steps are tired-it has been a long journey-weighed down by second thoughts. Not remorse or regret, but an uneasiness that maybe we shouldn't have moved in the first place, from the first place. A lament for the life that we never had, for the futures that are dead branches of the past. The morning is bitterly cold.

We live through a series of real and imaginary lives, some parallel, some tangential. I sometimes catch myself thinking this way: life is a progression of exiles, escapes, expulsions. We fall, we fall, into this second space.

Perhaps I should say second-hand thoughts, since I'm not sure what is mine and what has been borrowed from others any more. "Theft is property...". Anyway, a second child can never be original and a second thought is but a thought about thought. So, one day, someone had decided and we packed our bags, got up and headed south. "Never look back" our friends warned us or else you will be turned to stone , like us.

Nothing really happened up north. One day was as good as the other. That was the problem. We looked for a second chance. What was wrong when chance was dealt the first time round? No time for that. Now

But what was that first thought again? Maybe it wasn't a thought at all, just a vague intuition, a looking out of a glass darkly, and second thought is a learn-ed naming, forgetting, of those feelings, an after-word. What (where) was that primal, silent language that we once knew, that absence or clearing in which we now lovingly place so many objects. I have become a question to myself, caught in two minds.

Even if the first thought was mine-and not God's- why do I need a second, a second opinion to validate my own? After 'A' , what need is there for anything else , said the poet.

There is no going back, no stepping into the same stream twice; neither the well of mimir nor ourselves are the same. And yet, in the still moments of the day, we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror. "That isn't me" . And we see who we once were, what we might have been.

Childhood has passed now. Let us not give a second thought to it. The autumn breeze rustles through the burnt-out leaves. Goodness has exhausted itself. And we cannot stay here any more. Already, there is a premonition of spring. Glaciers and hearts will melt. But this second thought fills me with dread. For it was on a day like this that Ymir was slain.