The man with a clay mouth was losing his hearing; day by day words became softer, fuzzier around the edges, the points of abrupt change in tone petering out, all the varied accents that human history has produced up until now blur into indistinction. Some slowing of the mind the way time works itself into wood, some bridges not crossed in his mind, or maybe just the relentless pressure of the sun's expansive light filling out all empty spaces. Each word spoken became like every other word, dreaming itself into the other, and each speaker the same too. He thought he could imagine a word that would reverse the trend, the decline, an invariant word that would all of a sudden emerge like an unexpected holiday, as fresh and uncluttered as if it had been spoken by God himself...
The man with a clay mouth was losing his sight, his ability to recognize faces and put a name to them. More so his own. A failure of memory, the frailty of his inheritance, the blindness that was passed down unforgivingly in his genes. What can one say? We are what we were. He looked at old pictures which he kept safe in a dark cupboard so as to remind himself of his former self, the fading yellow images from the 1970's when everyone had thick wavy hair and wore flowery shirts, the days when days were not counted and time was still time...
The clay man did not read and did not have anything in particular to say. He felt less and less uneasy about the suffering in the world, had fewer opinions on anything at all.
The long silences of the heart, the sea at 3 o'clock that even God only views from the corner of his eye. He dreamed of a wooden key, whose rightward turning was a splendour to behold, the sound of freedom itself. The slow creaking clank, like rope being twisted, that relaxed itself into a light, springing click.
He walked alone with the Roding by his side, the grass knee-high, sticklers on the back of his leg. Ancient pollen, eternal stream. He thought how quiet the world was and how he was somehow a part of it. The grey sky would become denser, light thicken, and the first thin wire of ice would form in the water. The winter in the heart. The congealing, the gathering, the preserving, the resistance to all that flows. This, too, he could understand. There was a reason that the man had a mouth of clay, but it was something he could not speak of.
The man with a clay mouth was losing his sight, his ability to recognize faces and put a name to them. More so his own. A failure of memory, the frailty of his inheritance, the blindness that was passed down unforgivingly in his genes. What can one say? We are what we were. He looked at old pictures which he kept safe in a dark cupboard so as to remind himself of his former self, the fading yellow images from the 1970's when everyone had thick wavy hair and wore flowery shirts, the days when days were not counted and time was still time...
The clay man did not read and did not have anything in particular to say. He felt less and less uneasy about the suffering in the world, had fewer opinions on anything at all.
The long silences of the heart, the sea at 3 o'clock that even God only views from the corner of his eye. He dreamed of a wooden key, whose rightward turning was a splendour to behold, the sound of freedom itself. The slow creaking clank, like rope being twisted, that relaxed itself into a light, springing click.
He walked alone with the Roding by his side, the grass knee-high, sticklers on the back of his leg. Ancient pollen, eternal stream. He thought how quiet the world was and how he was somehow a part of it. The grey sky would become denser, light thicken, and the first thin wire of ice would form in the water. The winter in the heart. The congealing, the gathering, the preserving, the resistance to all that flows. This, too, he could understand. There was a reason that the man had a mouth of clay, but it was something he could not speak of.
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