on a green bench in the royal gardens in potsdam, the remnant of a shadow, watches pleased, very pleased indeed, two fools talking the day away, urgently weaving their voices together, staring distractedly into the glimmering brook, laughing, disagreeing, reconciliation following suite like the sun breaking through clouds, ignoring the ticking of the small silver watch, but the remnant fingers his watch with a grin, time has no meaning and no hold for 11973 seconds and then, on fast forward, returns with a deafening rush.
It can’t be helped, I guess, but once in the twelve nights Yggdrasil is bound to show up. I do not observe Ragnarök, I do not live by the old Norse Tales nor by their subscription into a modern version of a quasi religious substitute – and yet, how would one meditate on the twelve nights and not be prone to illustrate the one tree, that tree of the beginning of the world. That time might be like a tree, unfolding in a strictly, beautifully logical pattern, giving form to light, seems like a fitting observation of the old and well worth remembering. Incorporated in this drawing are the elements of an architecture unfolding by a beautiful, strictly logical pattern, giving form to an idea about time.
In the meantime I discovered the places “where the seams come undone”, as my mother called it. Every classroom in my school had a clock on the wall right over the door, and all the clocks had identical clock faces, and every one of them showed a slightly different time.
I don’t know whether clocks in classrooms today are all connected to one central, totalitarian time piece as I suspect might be the case, though I hope it is not so. I always loved the way time oscillated between classes, obstinately refusing to be tamed. Officially, students had three minutes to walk to the next classroom after a period ended. But for the way from science to math, for example, you’d better made do with 1 minute and 29 seconds – the clock in Ms. Kirsch’s class was as fast as our teacher’s ability to conjure numbers out of the back entrance to Hilbert’s Hotel and as inexorable as her refusal to admit to time measured outside her class room.
On the other hand, you could afford to leisurely stroll to French after that, using not only the 1 minute and 31 leftover seconds from math but also the 40 seconds the French clock was late, giving you an ample 5 minutes and 11 seconds (not counted the additional minute or two Mme. Petite rustled with her papers, ignoring her students’ ongoing conversation). The clock in language arts had the peculiar and infamous habit of stopping at exactly 12.01 pm every couple of weeks and could only be persuaded back into service by Superintendent Segrob who, for that very reason, was particularly fond of it, and year after year insisted on repairing rather than replacing it.
Every day for a few moments just before noon instruction in language arts paused and everyone’s eyes followed the unhurried second hand making its way from 11.59.59 am to just after 12.01.02 pm. It was almost like a pagan ritual, these approximately sixty-three seconds of silence, as if we were paying our respects to the spirit of the clock, Time. Time, sputtering, fleeing, stopping, resuming its course, divided itself up over the 79 clocks in our school according to its own preference. With other words, it seemed to be on our side and refused to be institutionalized.
I know that the language art clock did not stop on that day. I don’t think it would have been possible for it to stop while I was willing it on. Apart from Time herself though nobody noticed that I counted every second of the school day, 24,000 seconds in all, stops, gains and losses, until, at last, the 2.47 pm bell wrapped it all up hurriedly and dropped the leftovers for the time dogs.
i have committed to the practice of exchanging, if only for 3.141592653 minutes a day, now for then, up for down and today for yesterday
so when, during those 3.141592653 minutes, i see my hand guiding a pen over the paper, rather than to follow the steady progress of a new drawing, i see it erased line by line, and am rewarded by the promises of a work just envisioned, not yet constraint by its execution,
when i scan the sky for vaporous messages of ominous prophecies instead of wilting under the weight of a heaven i care not to imagine i look down into the vast expanses of the deep oceanic universe consisting of the probabilities of its continuable or discreet measurable properties, energy, position, momentum, angular momentum, and i escape, if only for a moment, the inescapable urge of the common mind to inject the holy into the profane as described so aptly by eliade
and, at last, when i walk the well-known streets that carry the contagion of my own history continuously infecting my present with meaning like an obsession i backtrace and erase the past step by step to acquire a new sense of what this place could be if it was not what it is already.
there was a gate and there was none. to step forward required no courage just a lion’s heart. beyond it was the mirror land. hares parading on their hind legs, walking canes in their pretentious front paws as was to be expected. what else? i could not see enough from where i stood. i stepped through.
once through, the scene changed just as i had suspected it might do (but had hoped against my better judgment it would not). no green bucolic scenes, no childhood dreams. there was another gate and not a gate, a foot of grey no-mans land between realities, not more. i stepped through the second gate, as if one step mandated two, oh, what a fool i was!
beyond the gate there was bright blindness, no object, no surface, no orientation, no gravity – not dream, not reality, a blindness that did not originate in the eye’s inability to see what was there, there was nothing. there was no gate, there was no path, but in the brightness, invisible, the pretentious hare, checked his silver time piece smugly, and i did not know how i knew he did.
then i heard it fall, the silver time piece, fall with a dampened thud that sent shivers down my spine. i felt the rabbit searching for it like a blind man, paws frightfully extended, and suddenly i understood why i could see the hare with unseeing eyes. when i had stepped through the second gate i had turned inside out, and the rabbit was trapped within.
On my way to the library, still focusing on holding things in place, the trees drew script against the sky that was already starting to darken as if someone was pouring ink onto a glass pane. Everywhere now reality started to flatten as if I was crossing pages in a book, not even a stage. I felt frightened. Frightened because I had started the day with great determination and had forced myself to observe and hold all the details in focus but my perception of the environment seemed to be strangely overregulated as if I had exercised too much control, had added too much contrast, too much definition and too much saturation. It almost seemed that my wish to control the situation had actually contributed to the situation spinning ever so slowly out of control.
on a green bench in the royal gardens in potsdam, the remnant of a shadow, watches pleased, very pleased indeed, two fools talking the day away, urgently weaving their voices together, staring distractedly into the glimmering brook, laughing, disagreeing, reconciliation following suite like the sun breaking through clouds, ignoring the ticking of the small silver watch, but the remnant fingers his watch with a grin, time has no meaning and no hold for 11973 seconds and then, on fast forward, returns with a deafening rush.
Art & Writing 