December

Its December, that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. In the freezing of the night and in the cowering of the grey day I could have settled for less. I could have explored less; I could have expressed myself less colourfully. I was not perfect and in this case and in my case less was much less than more. So much less than more so as to be almost insignificant. I thought of how the pantomime season always brought with it bad weather, horrible atrocious days that forced us to wrap up and move slowly in some winterly discontent and discomfort. In this land great crowds would gather in lukewarm theatres where they paid good money to be entertained. I just thought that there was something wrong with them all. They were like a plague and not a good plague either just in case my meaning is unclear. I summed it all up in long paragraphs that droned on; cheap tricks and diversions. 

The government were no help either; mostly bone idle well educated types who were short on real life experience. They tried to compensate by staring into screens were short films and skits gave representative performances of how life could or should be. Often they would scratch their heads in disbelief or on account of some infection or hideous skin disease. You could never tell. It was about this time that I began to fall in and out of tense, some past, some present, some indistinct to the point of being disturbing. When I say disturbing I mean not only for my self but for others in the vicinity. I tried to bottle it up but where does that ever get you? Being true to yourself, whilst remaining self indulgent and aloof does at least have the hallmark of honesty somewhere in it but your head still is like a kind of museum tableau displaying distorted and confused scenes from  your life. Unvisited.

Eventually all those things, the artefacts, will come to life, will populate, will talk back. At that point a little lapse of reason and a good dose of forgetfulness might prove useful. A strategy to escape the drivel. The people who talk in riddles are doing exactly that, that’s why you can’t trust them unless you happy to be good at solving riddles or role playing. I stand some distance from that type of behaviour for the sake of safety. I’d often say to myself, “this is no place for the likes of you” and be quite right. I just had an uneasy feeling inside that grew into something unintended like a bad lyric. I faced the fact that I wasn’t very good at things and that problem was compounded by the fact that I wasn’t sure what it was that I wasn’t sure I was good at. I began to compile a list.

My appetites turned, this way and that, fingers could never be successfully placed on feelings. I might have to get some supplies. Outside trumpets blared and seasonal songs were playing on some kind of perpetual loop and the excessive consumption of dairy produce and guinea fowl was promoted. We were at a loss of what to do next. Sometimes, sick of heart I’d just take all the text and convert it into Windings. Then using a magnifying glass and a set of tweezers I’d look at the patterns forming in the spaces. I’d look for repeats and clues, for messages and instructions. Occasionally I’d come across some useful string that would lead me on, tantalising and interesting for a few moments. Then it would all stop as suddenly as a bus full of wood shavings had collided with a wall built from feathers. When it became too much I retreated back into the familiar territory of my shell and my spelling mistakes. It was as if it wrote itself but I still had to use force just to cover the great white wilderness of paper and light that assaulted my field of vision. I tried to make lists, tried to fathom it. What was it that made life so dreadful, so complex and hard to avoid? The truth and that truth is out there someplace but nobody is looking.

I’d been away far too long, the place was no longer my home anymore. I was a stranger but the liquid familiarity that seeped from every image was comforting. Slowly the light grew, pale at first, indistinct across the woodland. A slow glow that was emerging from behind the grey shapes, touching them and changing them. The shapes and patterns emerged as the light, like some floating, shining treacle twisted and formed around them. Hard lines were drawn by invisible fingers, distinction has spread across the world like deep charcoal and white chalk, blurred and smeared in places and the sharp and crackling like spiky toffee and incredible spirograph and spiders web pieces of detail. The light drew across the dark and made sense and gave meaning as we looked on, jaws dropping and eyes widening. This was the place to be, here on the threshold to a new world only minutes old and still growing as we stared into it’s emerging and vital new complexity.