Restless gestures, patterns unfolding, spikes and holes in patches and rows, a scaled terracced surface that sends you into convulsions of compulsive repulsion.
It is one of the gaps, and you are on the edge, and the wild wind blows hard at your back, and your feet unsteady with toes hanging over that distant ugly bottom, and you should not be here.
But that is how you recover, you must stand and wait till it passes. It will blow over and you will forget.
Social contortion. Words rattling like a bag of bones between your eyes and ears. You are awake, and you are up, but only because your bed offers little repose or calm. Here, you exclaim, is a comedown, some negative space. Here, a tangled mess of wires and string, wound in and out like a kaleidoscope of Celtic runes. And of course the inside of your skull is likewise runed, engraved with the scratching of many infernal processes, bubbling away from hour to hour, overloading their buffers and spewing mental ash like a field of pus volcanoes. But this is how you recover.
Far from the weightless glimpses of purity, days can drag and moan and howl like a stubborn wind pulling at the landscape. These are places you have to pass through to find your way, and best not to pause for too long in their barren and eaten gorges. For the mind will not sit still, will feed of its surroundings, and will grow thin and starved from consecutive courses of stony views and torturous ideas. Come, move on!
Upwards, you lift that sagging weight, and strain to take its load, Sisyphus merged with Atlas, straining to move an inch. But you know the weight is a dream, and like all dreams gone sour will consume every idea of recognition and multiply the fears that go with it. So this is where you are at- amplifying negative vibes and retreating from corner to corner pulling a legion of burdens, belligerent invented burdens. But this, of course, is how you recover.
Slowly the day will lift. Slowly, the eyelids raise and an odd spark of light seeps in. Somewhere a radio finds enough time between ads to send out a tinny trebly song on its little speakers. Somewhere you pass a busy crowd and forget where you were headed, scanning the faces and the fashions and the poses and the cuts of their jibs, set straight against the wind and tied fast, moored to the wind and marooned by spiralling seas.
And eventually, your consciousness shifts gears and ascends momentarily above the dirt and grit and bedevilled detail, and the compulsive clattering of paranoid patterns becomes a background hum, white noise hissing like the beginning of the universe on your tv, an ignorable profundity of your basic physics. Now you are fully booted, and your processor is buzzing with some latent vigour and your laces are tied and your jacket is high-collared and zipped up. Your afterburners are ready to engage and your foot rests easy on the throttle, the traffic in front finally starting to clear and the ringing of phones dissipating.
Music, easing in to your ken, taking hold, stemming the swell of edges, rising from a soft murmur to a persistent grip, taking hold and pushing forward, animating the shapes and boundaries that it finds.
And you, thinking you had finished, restless runaway. Recover! You focus your mind on itself, arch it back in an awkward loop, bend it down and aim it inwards, immerse your feeble logic in the flow of guts and intentions. Body and will, on its way. In these roofless rooms there is plenty of space to wander. But nothing here is solid. Everything is process, every idea subject to the idea of ideas and on and on, every thought a possible subject for the next. And how then to find a passage under the eyes upon you, that has soma manner of meaning and some trace of intention?
The lake it froze, but it will melt. What was liquid is solid, but not for long. Now you can step off the shore and turn on it, what was once a boundary is now just another place to stand. There will not be many chances to be there, standing on the 4 inches of ice surveying the piers and shore and frosted trees, and you strain to tune into a sense of significance, strain to apply some gauze of purpose and consolidation to the moment and the paths that lead to it and from it, past and future mingling, and you carrying the heaviest stones you can find and hurling them onto the cold lake’s winter skin, just to see how thick, how deep, how satisfying the sound.
