BROWSE Columns
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What do I owe? The question takes the opposite shape of the most significant parts of our lives, a blank country marked up with tentative pencil lines that presses in around local areas we have already fleshed out with elaborate detail. But to work out exactly what we owe – and to whom, and what – to make it up with none left over, would be to cease to exist at all, and so we cannot walk out into it for long. You will continue to fill the space you have allotted yourself like a figure on a tarot card, a relic that stands in for a life well-lived, to slip yourself into the hands and pockets of the people moving before you and ahead of you, an event in the landscape that can be approached and then walked on from, making progress, but only for a time. The idea of progression in music – to hold the landscape as a length of fabric and drape it reverently over the objects you are fixated upon. Parts that have never been visited, perhaps because they have been forgotten, perhaps because they are yet to be sketched in – they flatten into a plane, a long stave with a single note on it. It is here, in what we do not know, that space is best utilised, for we fill the space we do know with too much efficiency – space is eliminated, replete with commas, adverbs and provisional titles. To speak as I hear, for I cannot judge or describe what I hear as I hear it, let alone recognise it, and know what I say only because you say you heard it somewhere before, and liked it – or not – and we are indebted to each other, and we do not acknowledge it, and the question opens up to consider the space before and after the event, as well as the event itself, and we meet as two regions meet at opposing riverbanks. We butter both sides of the bread.
Our plans were too circumspect, but we knew this from the beginning. The entering and exiting through so many little doors in the month like pockets turned inside out, with nothing left to take. Our plans were more significant for the theory they put into practice – that one year may transition into the next at any point in time or space. Someone has been here before, and left, and yet I feel them walk beside me. The well is totally dry, and yet the bucket comes up brimming. A street-scene so well-drawn, that concealed in its angles, in its reflections in glass, around the edges of each sound, is a perfect model of its own inverse – it points the way out of the predicament it sets in motion, and you will wake up into it until you wake up out of it again, it is what you prepare for in this dream, the dream a windowless antechamber that is the same thing as life, the space between two or more living things that coexist at the same time, like the cracks in a vase, and the unity they engender, for the pieces grasp their situation and know how they must sit in order to stay together, it is the bardo that spreads out and back around to itself between these cracks, and you walk towards yourself, yourself in me, as one walks towards a concave mirror and their image is flipped upside-down. An outline along a wall, the trace of a bed that used to stand against it – the final bed we will sleep in, perhaps.
Somewhere along the way I was writing this note. I’m singing it now down the wiry latitude lines to wherever and however you’ve been – you will know it by the way the envelope leaps from your hand when the sun comes out. The map shows how first the town was built along parallel lines, then many years later along circular lines, and many years after that along radial lines. The heart is a sphere, it eats the sheltering sky that stoops to arc over it. And this persimmon, pin it to the sky so that it may look down at us with warmth, with a gaze that bakes bricks, archer. But evening is drawing in, and you are hungrily ripping open of a series of envelopes, pieces dropping to the ground – these islands in the river, they all fall under a single name, though each one will look up to see a different sunset. Each year has a particular tint that can never be repeated. The following slide shows a courtyard with piles of envelopes stacked up against the walls. Next to them stands a figure looking up at a square of sky. These islands of sky, they all arc over a single name, though each one will look about and see a different sunset. Small arrows are drawn on the map to show that the building has fallen to the ground, and the sun has disappeared. Perhaps, sometime, you will meet me again by this cardboard cutout of a doorway – but you will not recognise me, not in this light.
Alex Priestley is a writer from Leeds, and currently lives in York where he recently completed an MA in Poetry and Poetics. Some of his other work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spectra Poets and Poetry Online.
