Sit in the corner, looking out of high windows on a Saturday afternoon, looking at both sides of the world. Waiting for it to grow dark, and the old house leaning in the light, like a shipwreck, keeps a hold on us no matter what. Before that..what is the time before the beginning? In death we think of life, or was it..
Cut it out!
Death lines every moment of ordinary time.
Tell it slant.
That's the problem with distances, with always being too late on the stage. By then it's gone. We stumble across..a photograph, say, what? I must have known another language at one point in time. Was everything already there in the picture, on that bright afternoon? Was the face knowable right from the beginning? "See, I told you, I told you you'd fall," a voice says from deep within the kitchen. The paint on the white door is peeling but it is flung open for security, so an eye can be kept on us, and the shadows and voices are thick like a blanket, heavy with the sense of foreignness.
Here has to be laughter, you idiot.
How did it turn out then, what little mystery do we take with us? What place is this that you know so well and have forgotten? The heart, older now, sighs when it thinks of all the time that has been crossed out or lost, or of how an image grows darkly, without any more moments of being.
3 comments:
A delicate and moving meditation on time's passing and the way our experiencing of this fractures, over time, into all these different angles of viewing. The added distance of cultures shifting adds depth to the view, if not perhaps the alleged enchantment. Feelings in this area cannot honestly be made to seem or sound simple, for they are never simple. The honesty of the approach is bracing, the admission that all views are necessarily partial, limited, and subject to alteration from moment to moment.
Those of course would be moments of time. Moments of being maybe the flecks of gold that appear within the unsorted mass thus dredged up.
By this figure, those moments would be gold only to someone sensitive enough to know the world is anyway an insubstantial dream, the "sands of time" forever slipping through the glass, occasionally clogged by the moments of being -- an impediment maybe to the quantitative practical mind, which would want simply to get on with it, keep the sands flowing... To that sort of mind, the felt or retrieved moments of being might well seem not gold but dross.
It is a lonely thing to meditate upon. Also perhaps the one thing actually worth the candlewax.
oh no, you? an old photograph of you? when you were 5?
you being the sweet chubby boy on the left, looking across the image? :-)
Tom, yes, though I haven't read Woolf's book yet I think the moments of being, the real moments, are precisely those 'flecks of gold' (to use your lovely phrase). I think I saw them once, outside William Morris's house..
@ Roxana, get out of here! Sweet..er..chubby: yes!(and this is *before* the cinnamon rolls kicked in!).
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