World, self and change
THE
NATURE OF CHANGE is elusive in the heightening of perspective
with age. He looks at himself in his surroundings as he sees
other days. Self and place undergo, silencing denial, but he
cannot say ‘the change is here’ and point with any
truthfulness. He wants to deny to see his denial silenced. Always
something has ended and something is about to begin. A change
in the sight, a change in perception, a change in the perceiving
eye: all at the edge of an altera’s being: the flickering
life of which he is partly aware, in the dead of night, the small
hour when sleep is personal, the perception of a turning, of
time, of a face, of a mind’s volition. Change, beyond the
skyline: sense alters: the small and felt in the hand, owned,
perhaps, close in the night, the senses stilled, in the stillness
of the room, for a little while: the look from the window, and
what was small in the hand is clear on the horizon, under the
first beginnings of dayspring. Change upon the orders of change:
I think a line and, beyond, I am no more myself. The falling
of evening not the fall of another day’s evening. Only one
evening, remembered, perhaps, to nature. She feels by memory
below the level of the senses: no-one sees more than the smallest
part of what she does. The nightly eclipse. The yearly turn.
The changing seasons of a life, under a sky of tides, in the
undergoing, inexactly known.
A hospital
in a mill-town on the side of the moors. It was a long walk from
the station, up hill all the way, guided by the lit windows of
the mills, a dim expanse of diffuse light in the November fog.
The laboratory was in one of the original workhouse buildings;
it had been known as the insane wing; it was built round a courtyard;
a dark red-black brick place with sandstone cornerblocks and
window embrasures. Each floor was laid out along a high corridor,
from which small rooms gave off by small arched doorways, prison-like,
the atmosphere unaccountable and lost. The room he was given
was a cold cube twelve feet in each dimension, with a low arched
window, once barred inside the glass.
The
laboratory was empty in the evening. He returned with a borrowed
key at about nine o’clock to continue writing. He climbed
the stair and walked the long first-floor corridor, paused outside
the room, found the key heavy on the unfamiliar ring, paused,
in the feeling of the place, blind, mute, wordless, no sound,
the perspective of the corridor empty, sightless, the void of
the stair-well, from the plain newel dropping to the floor below,
so sudden the loss of the boundaries of oneself, the person one
is no longer a centre or the point of a perspective, no fear
to this, it is what will happen at death, the apprehension of
mortality: there is no sense of loss. The moon to the touch of
the child’s hand. How might the thick mortared wall hold
the feeling of a time which had dropped away as though it had
no meaning? With ease. The edge no more than a self’s pace
distant: less: meaning never to be grasped. The moon to the touch
of the child’s hand. The senses move differently, bring
to no lone sequestered mind their apprehensions, distinct, a
fleeting pause, something standing beneath the division of the
senses, of nothing familiar to him, no name to it, a coruscation
of the moonlight at the passage’s distant end, on the membrane
of the ear. The moon to the touch of the child’s hand. The
violin keeps its tuning, tense the feel of the belly and the
back, resonant from the velvet as a vast hall, brush of deep
gold pile on varnish, the bow to string, in the ill and many-reflected
light, notes not heard before, a folk-song, say, oh, you wouldn’t
know its provenance, no-one would know that, said to be, someone
in the past there would have been, to name it, remote in time,
someone once alive who might know its origin, the ear that listens
remote, some distant part, of this one same mind, who would know
the provenance that pacified the air, amongst the presences,
which filled the space, in the space in which it was being played,
the sense that all the past was in the present once concealed
and now overt to every sense, the person and the place are one.
 |
David Wheldon, Oldham, November 1994