Thursday morning, twenty to four….
Now, all that the mind’s eye has not obliterated is a track back into memory. New light is thrown on things usually taken for granted. The paint drips around the window frame and on the window pane retell messages from that distant someone who had once carelessly passed an overloaded brush around and across these surfaces, delineating the outside world. Some simple message from a long forgotten, long gone Chapter, to Chapter Ten thousand, here and now, where peeling paint screams off the wood and fine black hairline cracks grow invisibly, radiating back out into some obscure timelessness out there, fine black hairline cracks radiate out from the carpenter’s joints, to also reveal the story of that which had once been precisely measured, sawn, chiselled and glued.
There happens to be a convolution, and the centre of attention is on the screen, on her world, the words. With these keys she conjures up, in solitude, her conversation. There is never any going back, never!
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, moves on; nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”
“Who said that? Who wrote those words?”* These two questions played a moment through Alba’s thoughts.
The word writes, wriggles and insinuates itself into her images. The words tell her that if only she were a bird she would be able to fly way away, far away from here, way out there. But what they didn’t write for her was that a bird is prisoner to the sky as words are prisoners to the programme in which they are written, to the skull in which they were hatched.
A scalpel blade cuts from the outside edge of her thoughts, from the pathetic screen, to the inside, deep inside.
Convolution, and there is nothing online, no connections out there, no screen, no monitor except the dirty sash-cord window, the blue paper. The surgical steel draws her mind back in, through the surface, through all the ruptures, to the secret place deep inside, the Secret Meeting Place, The Deep Blue Head, into crystalline worlds where silver nerves spark messages inside and out and around and about, as out spin ideas, beautiful images, and words with new meanings, onto her sheets of blue writing paper.
She thinks the early morning birds are singing and, in only an instant and only for an instant, Alba’s thoughts are back to sounds, sounds of feet, of feet walking towards the houses, towards her room, somewhere out there on the streets.
*RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYÁM
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