I have just returned.
Sometimes it seems as if only part of me is still here. A feeling
of dispersal. Glimpses from other angles. Other locations. The
city is always shifting, realigning itself. It is memory.
I constantly feel a distant kind of longing. The longest song,
the song of longing. I walk the same streets like a fading ghost.
Flickering grey suit. The same avenues, squares, parks, collonades,
like a ghost. Over the years I find places I can go through,
some process of recognition. Remnants of other almost forgotten
places. Always returning.
I can detect tiny edges of time leaking through. I feel nothing
is completely separate. At some point everything leaks into everything
else. The trick is in finding the places. They are slowly moving.
Drifting. You can only do this accidentally. If you set out to
do it deliberately you will always fail.
It is only when you remember, only then will you realise that
you caught a glimpse. While you were talking to someone, or thinking
of something else. When your attention was diverted. Just a hint,
a glimmer, a shade.
Much later, you will remember. Without really knowing why. Vague
peripheral sensations gather. Some fraction of a long rhythm
is beginning to be recognised. The hidden frequencies and tides
of the city. Geometry of coincidence. You will certainly find
yourself passing that way again. Perhaps not for a long, long
time. Over the years you gradually become aware of some slight
differences in the light, the temperature, the way things feel,
like a subtle change in the texture of a film... faintly aware
that time moves in a slightly different way there.
The city is a place of tides. Tides move down every street. Time
does not not move at a uniform rate here. The relative speeds
of various time pockets throughout the city, all moving and forming
subtle currents around each other, resembling an ocean, which
looks uniform but is really composed of great currents, contraflows,
minor eddies, undercurrents, warm and cool streams of different
densities and temperatures, swirling slowly or quickly, affecting
each other at every boundary.
The shifting city, the drifting city... You will be changed by
walking down this street... The angle of coincidence, of memory
will alter other memories, make other connections... This street
will become other streets in time. It will lead to other streets
in time. Some streets lead to other times... You almost expect
to see your father and mother aged 21 walking arm in arm towards
you. Some are streets from your own life which you have not walked
yet.
They will seem different when the time comes you will not remember.
Endless. Revolving... You can not return. You will never walk
down that street again. Another time is another place. Turn and
wave. Someone almost there. Walking away now.
The streets lead into other streets where a glimpse of someone
who is young will remind you that they must be many years older
now... How did you miss them... How did you pass them by for
so long... Where did all the time go...
Some places seem still, quiet. Islands. A few leaves fallen on
the stone pavement. A trace of sunlit moss in a stone corner,
an eroded line of memory, a bench, evergreen leaves.
You can place your hand on the stone wall softly, feel the humming
beneath. This is simply the surface of things, it is shifting
slowly all the time, its molecules are moving, it is a liquid.
You can push your hand through the surface, you can flow into
it dispersing out, you can breathe the ocean. It is composed
of music, echoes that take many years to return, to reflect,
to reverberate. They never disappear. They fade, mingle, make
a finer and finer web of refractions. The movement gently, imperceptibly
spins your skin away like candyfloss, spinning skeins of you
combine with the ocean over years, over miles, over tides and
times. Until you become part of the hidden frequency of the rooms,
the streets.
It is a long slow waltz we are dancing down the cathedral. Turning
into reverberation and roses and shimmering light. Just wait
here for a little while. I will be back soon. Soft winds across
the lake, rain falling on leaves a thousand miles away, years
and years away, slow cascade of those empty places. The lakes
move in time to the sea.
Spirals of dust on the street corner, glittering in the afternoon
sun.
The cathedral nave leads off into streets, canals, restaurants,
corridors, avenues, parks and arcades.
A part of it is underwater now, a city beneath the ocean. He
was looking at a picture in a travel guide from 1954. The picture
had the quality of an old technicolour film still.
As he examined it, the picture began to change. Its surface slowly
fragmented, dissolved until he could see through it...
Swift transition of time and place...
My hands are open... I am only eyes travelling over the overgrown
streets... through the buildings... down stairways, arcades,
squares, alleys, waterways... foggy, sunlit...
Rainy stars reflected in the speckled mirrors down the hallways,
under the ivy leaves. The taste of rust and rain and there is
a cinema I can always step inside and see you moving, turning
slowly in old sunlight and I can melt through on the Saturday
morning tides of light and I know that time is a great, shambling,
many roomed, ramshackle structure. Tall, flaking, endlessly fragmenting.
Myriad avenues. Waterways deeper than I can swim. Warm, revolving
and lost.
The stairway leads on to bridges soaring across the river. Smoke
on the horizon, blue and gold among the fog of trees.
Everything is quiet and the dust on the streets and the stars
are slowly flowing through each other. |
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