Ceiling Without Shadows
This ice holds yesterday calm against the tongue. A great deal of time and thought are missing, but there is no mystery. Memory presses against the face like a fogged glass. Only the impossible is solid and enduring. We are confident that the future lasts forever.
Does the world expand? Buildings are buried so that architects might build a different world on top of us. What we imagine we know is absorbed by an alien race of conquerors. Half-covered in rubbish, the names of our children become faint and all their belongings are stuffed in jars, vases and burlap pillow cases. Even the bones of thieves, daughters of thieves, archaeologists of thieves, and readers of thieves are strewn on the cellar floor. (Here they spent their lives as doubles, preparing to dig their own tombs).
Nevertheless, history has told us very little. Fragments of our story have been carved on water plants. But is it the story or the meaning of the story that is interred with the most valuable treasures? Which will keep our civilization from perishing into a hidden valley of red rocks, golden sand and clear, burning sunlight?
It's a job to keep awake without a puzzle because a mind is always at its time, almost to the minute. Imagine layers of silt brought to the surface by shadows. There will be no peace until silence tells the story, not so much from pain as uselessness. It takes so long to exhaust this stiff breath that the only chance of keeping still in is keeping among, that is, to escape longing.
You will see before you a great rock wall. It will take years to uncover a group of crude huts erected over a pile of flint boulders. They all look more or less alike covered with three feet of soil. And beneath the dust, the unflowered earth begins with the usual clatter and scrape and clang. What is preserved has been removed.
In a passage three feet wide by six feet high you will break your nose on a solid door sealed with erased letters and faded telegrams. The plaster tells us nothing. But that nothing could expose everything; there is only one way to find out.
After standing guard for 5,000 years, the two weeks are put back in place. It will be impossible for a visitor to arrive in the morning and smooth himself into a man's body within a hundred years. By evening it is too much to think about, like a facedown pack of cards, like a stairway leading to a stairway, like the same name for many places. Dark has grown.
At night: the same wind, good moonlight, open water. Every touch leaves a white mark, impatient to be dark, immediately, again. This is the period when a thought walks abroad, its shadows suffocated easily in an endless sky, the form of an hour like a future sleep. The season passed, but will begin again. All possible has come to stay. A fearful amount of digging remains to be done. It is trying, trying, but we can live, which is something.
The following day is taken by the magnificent things that it contains, none of which can be touched or moved. Instead the world must be photographed, numbered and listed in order to be certain that what is missing is only the shadow of doubt.
You are here by invitation. But the great moment doesn't descend, it preserves its delicate crumbs in every ounce of dust while the ruins are filled with chairs. Stone after stone is removed, passed hand-to-hand like beads of a necklace dropped while some robbers hurried away. Within the first set of doors is another, then another, and so on, each bolted, but not sealed. As each passage opens you exchange glances with yourself. Here at last is certainty.
What comes next, no one has seen and words are meaningless. Underground rivers tremble and echo. Soft beasts glow in alabaster light. Sentinels open their heads, throwing distorted shadows on the uncertain wall. Two life-size people stand side by side, breathless, speechless, motionless. Their portraits flicker and sputter in hot, stale air. The threshold dawns, strangely silent and subdued. A chaos, no doubt, too perfect.
In the first place, you can only find what you are looking for. However, some telltale possibilities still remain. Articles in boxes and fragments dumped on the floor require possession for safekeeping. They reign over puzzling and disappearing facts. When a blocked door has been cleared away, it's possible to burrow over the debris just under the ceiling until the next afternoon. What, then, can be expected? It's hard to believe, after so many unobstructed seconds, that each basketful of material carries conditional clauses and opaque consequences. Expressions don't change. Suppose that, after all, you could reach into that darkness. As if there were any choice but to keep waking up.
Glorious sunset, brilliant clouds, aurora in two waving spirals. These days are very drawn, half-filled with a restlessness and discontent, elastic with a dense hunger. The edge of one splits as it rises and slides over the other. It becomes shorter by a half-hour, an hour, and colder. You pause to listen to a serpentine thought, quivering and elusive, subtly closer to pleasure, and ascending the impossible.
In places where dying is being born, a blue sun is as good as twilight, turning on its axis towards the mixed remnants. The journey is the future, the silent darkness is the past. Who are you trying to rescue?
If the body, like a grave, is full, no one can get at it. Still the mourners retain their color and a little of their scent. There are three of them, nested within each other, wrapped in wood, gold and glass. They are at the end of the search, still linked to their names by the same ties that bind snakes to birds, rain to fear, floors to daily life.
There is no way out, or further in, for that matter. This is simply another night in the desert when a small group of strangers appear at your campfire. So you welcome them, reaching for their hands which are still warm and salty, until you walk away.
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