51: Time – Breaking

There is a part of me, a fundamental, essential part, who does not live in time. He has no aware­ness of things coming and going, of their not being here and then of their being here. For him, my dear J has always been here. She was here already, when I rode my tricycle for the first time, not so much waiting for fate to unfold its complex map of indecipherable interconnections, but just here, like the sky, like dreams, like waking every morning, like hard words. And now…

And now he does not know that she has gone, that my dear J has gone ahead for a while. And so he brings me dreams, every night he brings me dreams, and there she is … sitting, walking now (as in adult life she could not), reading a book to me, telling me how affairs must be ordered. And I am always at least a bit puzzled … ‘But I thought you had died … how odd…’ And sometimes I even start to tell the sorry tale of breathlessness, of the paramedic, of the flashing blue light that on this night had come for her, of the hospital. She pays me no attention when I talk like that.

But my non-temporal self seems so puzzled by it all. No tricycle, no orchard, no grandparents, no wife, and an aging face in the mirror that looks so forlorn and lost, as if pleading for a ticket that will affect the transition out of the prison camp to somewhere a bit nicer than that. And he says, in such bewildered tones, ‘But they are right here. I have just been up and down the pavement outside, and the bearings are easing. I have my married life ahead of me, don’t I? Will anything be achieved? Will my grandmother stop snarling at my inability to make money? Did I not, then, ever master any­thing of value? I will learn to play the guitar and the lyre, won’t I? Though those tunes I wrote seem ready to pop into my mind, new and as yet unfin­ished, at any moment…’

Has time itself broken? Or has it always been like this?

45: Orchard – Drowning

A storm has come today, that throws itself up­on my dark and dismal shore, whilst I cower, huddled in my ramshackle hut at the back of the beach, whilst a wild wind rips through the heaving palms behind, whilst the sea rages and seethes and crashes upon the fluid shingle so that you cannot tell where sea ends and land begins. The whole sea is monstrous breakers breaking, breaking, furious­ly breaking, whilst the wild wind whips foam and spray right up into the atmosphere, so that you cannot tell where sea ends and sky begins.

I am cold and miserable, but I can still remem­ber the sun that I have not seen for such a long time, and I would like it to come back, to light this sorry place once more, as it did before, when there was not sea, but a garden, and I ran, and rode, up and down, up and down the path, from house up here to orchard down there. But that has all been washed away by this furious sea. The orchard lies somewhere under the waves, and I do not know why this has happened, and I do not know how to undo it. I would like to undo it, if only I could.

12: Insect Wings – Humming

The rains this January, in southern England, fall incessantly from a grey sky that reflects my sense of despair. I am like a man trapped between two huge, facing mirrors. On the one side I see my inner being, whose unfathomable nature generates such a sense of hopelessness, and on the other side I see the sky, grey and cold and wet and unloving and unloved. The sky mirror will become trans­parent when summer comes, when all is light and bright, with far-reaching cerulean heights speckled by dis­tant birds, and close at hand, the air will hum with insect wings. And those yet to be sum­mer days will rea­waken memories of childhood spent in my great-grand­parents’ long garden with its little orchard right at the bottom, where in later years, though whilst I am still living here, my grandfather would re-erect his old shed, bringing it from his garden for us, because now he has a new concrete garage for his new car instead. My great-grandfather had died the year I was born, so for me he survived only in the design of the gar­den and, indoors, in the choice of wallpaper and the creaking of the ward­robe door whose hinge he never got around to oiling. For some reason I never felt his absence, and my great-grandmother, though always remi­niscing and reminiscing, never spoke of him, as if perhaps there were some shame barring her way to her memories of him. Had he been cruel, had he been unfaithful? There were no pictures of him out on display, and none in the al­bums I was permitted to wander through. His name was Wilfred, I am almost certain.