A white square floating weightlessly in a white field.
I imagine a white room, stark, bare, utterly simple, hidden from the world. At eleven o'clock people in the city are busy, making phone calls, preparing, getting and spending...blind to it, unaware of it's hushed silence. It is like an attic flooded with light or a white boat on the white sea. It doesn't exist. Or perhaps it does.
What we see are reflections of it: light glinting off windscreens, dreamy summery lemony afternoons in Seville, a room overlooking San Marco where light and words float and intermingle effortlessly, reliving ancient affinities. What will convey to us that which death cannot take away?
Here, this second space, polar space, north of the future, is blank, empty, full of ways. Here, there is no talk of doors or keys, of what binds us and what keeps us free; of what is "mine" and what is "thine", nor any mention of "inner" or "outer", motion or stillness. The room opens up to a hundred others, like a dream within a dream. Restrained glances and the chase. The thief hides, laughing to herself, breathing heavily,wanting and not wanting to be found...
Here lovers hold hands freely and stroke one another's hair with tenderness and gentleness, robes fall away, introductions are made, swans glide on silvery still ponds, hearts melt but the blue-shadowed snow abides. The face of lost things, the face of last things. Lace curtains flapping, then curving softly outwards towards her, and then breathing in. Patterns of light and shade dance on the floor. Enigmatic, cryptic. In tapestries, in dreams, they gathered, as it was enacted, the return, the re-entry of transcendence into the sublunary world. The soft milky dew of her eyes, untouched by sorrow. The un-created world, the pre-world, a white paradise of all possibilities, where sleep is the beautiful dream of a dying man.
A single tear dissolves the circle. Tears, the traces of memory. Clouds and wind melting into all directions and into none. A bird flying by a cloud, merging, surrendering to it. But who is to say who is who? Mountains and white skies remember the secret and open up to one another. The vertical and the horizontal. Here, no image or form takes shape, no thoughts and no words divide; only the silent whispering of children into eachother' s ears up close, only a breath, a smile, a sigh...and then she is gone.
A singer once sang:
He who is close to your heart
How happy must be his fate.
Those people close to you
How blessed they are.
When the heart takes a liking to someone,
so that her nature becomes like yours
Then the days of death are near
And yet,
He who is close to you
How charmed is his fate
Those who suffer, whose hearts long for her
and yet still do not complain,
How strange their hearts must be!
~~~~
Your face is the white picture of your right hand;
your hair the one that writes the black book for my left hand
There was a dark storm all around us, or was it your tresses? There was gentle rain all around us. Or was it the sorrow in your eyes? The kajal around your eyes smudged, mine burning for yours. Black ravens flew in all directions. But here there was calm and stillness, like nothing else on earth.
She fell into his arms and time and the world stood still. And for a moment he was in her and she was in him. She said: And now, now and now! But if he held here then he knew he could never let her go. If I were blue for you...but I am black, black.
You had a mirror. I had a piece of paper. Did they help? You wrote your name for me thinking, like a child, I would forget, and it filled up the empty page. The jealous stars had broken the mirror. But then, you smiled and caressed my hair. God relented-"Okay, just once, for you, because you hurt so much"- and I saw something astoundingly beautiful in my heart. And it was a picture of you.
