Anaglyph 2
The ground beneath my feet was moving ; at least, for a moment, I thought it was. I stopped by a tree and closed my eyes, quite easily imagining someone trying to design an accurate map of this large park. He would have to walk round it many times making notes. But even then there might be gaps in his understanding. It's too easy to make mistakes and impossible to take in everything. One day you step through the cracks and there's no one there to catch you. Painting a picture of it might be easier, emphasising just the landscape's salient parts. Leaning against an oak trunk, I tried to compose it. But when, eyes closed, I almost had it, just when I was putting in that figure in red leaning against a tree near the stream and the large egg-shaped monument over by the wall, these suddenly melted into an enormous unfolded newspaper page with a bold headline I could only half make out: "Gold takes a tumble on...." But that was yesterday. Even a walk by the side of the water is encompassed with the need for decisions I can't make. And the real theatre is not out here on this grass listening to the birds and hearing distant voices, but living a life of its own in the head. That is where we really are. The lake is empty and even that wooden sphynx has gone into a different world. Forget the conversations over breakfast. Impossible to map the present. The figure in red has moved on. Out on the edge of darkness you begin to dream of what might have been. But memory is a city of dead voices stretching backwards for ever. How was it in those times? Was there happiness, was there even love? Did I imagine that paper falling from the window? Those unarticulated passages of time don't deliver fast effective relief. Take a few more steps, even though the womens' voices have faded now. There is nowhere else like this, yet hope always lies convincingly and there aren't any convenient memory retrieval systems. Yesterday the present rehearsed itself and it's doing so again right now as the golden sun starts to sink down behind the oaks that line the stream. Rain clouds are massing in the east. All you can do is step through the cracks and hope you land somewhere that is safe.
Page(s) 23
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