Mud on his boots, over the setting
autumn horizon, deep into winter, aches on his way to an as yet empty tomb, the
foolish old sage. His wines are spilt, his garments stained in homage to
imaginings lived fervently. The chorus line, they doff their satin top hats
from a rusted stage. Rare synaptic activity agitates a brief recollection of an
epoch in which the rover still had use of his capacity to caress an image, to
focus and compose and create some ghost of splendour to regale Pandora herself
with. Pandora! Her bed is empty, way back there, not even a mouldy mattress
upon the rusting iron bedstead.
Photographs, paintings writings, art,
art floats about in a crowded memory, it was not sent to him; he simply came
upon it. Images, perhaps they came to him; memory is such a fickle beast on the
prowl for renaissance in the titanic lapses between artistic intention and its
expression and the comprehension of the scale of an obsession. The artist’s
stool sits abandoned, and sat upon it, Pandora’s amphora. Her bed is empty, way
back there, not even a mouldy mattress rests upon the rusting iron bedstead. It
is not the worldly Pandora that withers this man, but man who withers this
world, man is broken in the absolute tinnitus of eternity, bobbing in and out
of focus rather like origami sailing boats scattered on an ocean of cardboard
waves.
In the absolute tinnitus of eternity,
within yet another pool of stagnant moments, a dragonfly beats its wings
stealthily. Insects, it is said, are drawn to the light, man, to the night, for
the space we are most taught to fear is the space that forever fascinates. His
wrinkled hand clutches at his sagging stomach, his arthritic hand clutches at a
waning reminiscence, but the sage is an artist and finds fond reconciliation in
obsession. He is familiar with The Dragonfly Effect. In slow motion beat her
wings and the sweet beats fuel a magnificent dread of the titanic scale of an
obsession. This, this is oblivion. Then she is gone. Art is gone. Oblivion,
lesser mortals, tottering on this cusped, all obligation to the puny self they
have harboured delegated, might well plead for their souls (as if souls were
anything other than just another obsession) to be saved but have no souls to be
saved since long lost are they for fear of this scale of an obsession.
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Morse code pinches a coda in a flurry of futile activity as the sinking rust bucket is swallowed up by the icy Atlantic Ocean, SOS, SOS, SOS….Oblivion in the absolute tinnitus of eternity. Pandora, contrary to classical belief, never unstopped her amphora that second time, SOS, SOS….Black cats on the satin greaseway grin down on them from on high. The chorus line, they doff their satin top hats from a rusted stage. The bats, receiving no echoes, fall, as thick black rainstorms from midnight skies, SOS, SOS…. This dragonfly lives to flutter briefly again, for she has learnt, with surreptitious help, to be stealthy. A flash of metallic midnight blue and green blazes into the sun and death is revealed, sagely, to the living sage, to the bluebottle fly, to be merely the end of an obsession bobbing in and out of focus rather like a lone origami sailing boat on a sea of cardboard waves.
I gaze, I take notes, I doodle. She did
write, often, in this very place, in this very place did drop her pencil,
doodles still, someplace else. A pencil rolls off the edge of a Formica topped
table and tumbles to the floor, but not a sound does it make, not a single tick
tack pick tick sound as of a pencil coming to rest on a hard tiled surface.
Pandora’s fingerprints did never grace this pencil’s shiny surface, only mine,
for she is gone, long gone and memory has forgotten the sound of that fall,
pick, tick tack, in the absolute tinnitus of eternity. Yet again I pick up my
pencil and my pencil again writes the same old thing again and again and again….
It has all gone, but art, life, is saved
by the scale of an obsession and it is recreated, even in the ultimate moment,
in the present, in fastidious memorial, some episodes missing, some obsessed
out of all recognition, bobbing in and out of focus rather like origami sailing
boats on an ocean of cardboard waves.
Detail of the
painting illustrating this piece, “THE SCALE OF AN OBSESSION” © David F.
Brandon 2013
