Thomas Lowe Taylor -- ICONS OF DISORDER

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The other hermitage, his passion's patriotic film was elasticized beyond extension, made impermanent by the times and by their own significations to these others, others in their selves who mark them one by one into some forgetting who you are in yourself; here it is a marker left untended that tends to go astray, into forgetting itself in the times of what they are today and no other intends it to be that way; and here you are against the tides unmoving sink of light to contain these arrows of passion beyond the realm itself.

But here the days are still one by one the same unfolding of light which becalms the senses into belief; and here still the arrows of morning have yet collided into themselves without pity or designation. Today's light moves the air around you with an interesting silence which accuses time itself of lying in wait. You would sentence yourself to light, but there are no allowances for what you read aloud the other day on the way into the morning, there are no longer any disturbances left unnoticed by those who commit them with their own airs of superiority. It is not so much a becalming of light that fills the times, but rather an absence of distinguishable priorities toward which the spirit inclines always in the history of what has lain at rest too long; there are some pulsations of thought riveting the hour as close at hand, there is that perception around us.

Remnants in collision, of history and of intention to do the right thing. You are in the car and not moving nor is it moving toward you any longer, yet there is the indication that motion is taking place, like being told that the earth is moving through space at an incredibly high rate of speed, in comparison to what, you ask, and if I am standing here in the closet at the end of time, how fast can it really be moving, you must be joking. Something past the hour must be a reminiscence of desire, really, and if you look too closely, you do miss the point and go on by too quickly to notice anything at all. But what is there to notice, here at the end of time, about differences in the quality of the light, not as you might imagine as caused by the pollution, but by the light, yes, by the light itself wrinkling around the smoother objects in definition of their planes of distinction. And they are still held afar from the recall with which you pitch them into the blackness of your own imaginings, confusing light with light, you might say, and leaving the rest to scatter around as adjectives or parts of the intellectual baggage with which you, uh, immerse yourself would the rest come to bear on time itself, whose meditations are unkempt at best and removed from view at worst. In the parting gloom, you find joy at the fingertips radiating outwards, like the beacons of the comic-strip imagination with which we perceive the archetypes. No, the present is not without its indications, only without repose.

But skip the preamble, you say, get to it, man, and let me off the hook another time, so that I can go back to whatever it was that I was doing, painting, for instance, with the white spots still on my hand, my glasses spattered with the stuff, it is here and no other that consciousness remembers to remember, and beyond language, you turn around to see what slipped in under the image, was it a rhythm or possibly a hint of things to come?

You'd call it here and there to be something again, this time after time in which there is neither silence nor even time, the time to remember and see that there is light radiating from your fingertips whenever you point them in a certain direction, and there is a kind of leaping of light from your eyeballs whenever you focus on the darker corners of the room at night, and that there is a random glow to your body after a shower, when you towel off and leave the bathroom with its fluorescent ring hovering overhead and step into the darkened hallway you can see just where the doorway up the stairs is, there are these indications that something has happened inside your being that is an emanation and reflection at the same time, it is a pulsation that goes both ways into and out the self and makes the world different whenever you let it happen, it is a kind of seeing that removes you from the moment of perceiving it even as it happens it is going into the flow of what you are.

And so the architecture is there in its own sounding of protection and design. The monuments are not in themselves things to wonder over, it is the intelligence or whatever that makes them appear different from trees and rocks, like the faces carved onto the mountain make you more aware than ever of the mountain from which they emerge, and the faces themselves are perceived only as good likenesses and very large. A buddha carved out of a mountain is still a buddha. And that's what makes it an icon.

Being left alone in time does not make it any easier, for when the pattern of the sticks on the ground seem to "make sense" like an ideogram from the world of the random occurrence from which they are, uh, made, then you are more than ever convinced that you are mad, and to the extent that you feel that way, it is so. Running along through the woods, the sticks seem to say, "That way", and you turn and take the fork to the left, loping slow bent over and breathing the in and out of systole diastole the mind gleaming into its own forgetfulness that has time as its end and beginning, like, when can I stop and rest? A day would go on without pity or color, being the day that it is, and make you say something over and over, like a mantra, the wordless chant of the lost soul, I am, and then moving on up into the brush to the left, the dogs pushing ahead of you through the branches and beadings of light on their backs in motion and life with their mute intelligence looking back at you, waving tails and feet padding up ahead of you into the silence at the top of the ridge, up where there is nothing at all to forgive you and even less to indicate where you might be going, it is a slowness that awaits only the darkness at the end of the day at the end of the trail to lead you into the final perception that more than likely the sun will come up tomorrow and that you'd better get some rest.

And so you move into forgetfulness as a kind of defense, leaving the mutable silence to itself, as if what the truer indications are would be too much to handle, and that considering beyond the extensions of definition would somehow countermand the silence itself into light, ah, then, silence into light, that's the transmogrification you were thinking of, making the icon become light and energy, time removed from its prisons and habitations in revolutions it seems to concur.

You'd release the hour into its proper dimensions, letting something pass by that has no name upon your lips a darkness in the middle of the night, the clock's hands lying at the bottom of the dial, behind the clear plastic, glow-in-the-dark hands lying there telling you nothing. And still the eyes light holds you in these hours like someone you once met who was yourself. Today is the day you started out again. Today is the rumor you thought was just around the corner. Today is the motive for the future.

This would call out for something new to happen, and since there is only this unimaginable silence to the world's dialogue, you wonder where it might finally rupture to let this particular light escape into the atmosphere that surrounds you once again, and, leaving the moon to its own business, you might still bend around her in the early hours before day and whisper something unforgotten into her ear in the middle of sleep and dreams, you might call for help, you might say the stations of the heart are signing into you without despair, you might say that love's anchors have thrown you into the air.

Hours after, markers falling, hooded patterns remove you from doubt. Specific reminders are left around the room. Your calendar is not quite right, but there is no indication why. And between rage and wonder, you sometimes call out for help; between self-pity and the quiet release into movement, you sometimes wonder about direction. This might, you think, lead to a station beyond description requiring the full attention of my own qualities, without reference to anything else, I might have to make a decision. The heart beats wildly. But with the salty taste in your mouth which you imagine you might taste before death, you decide to act. It is at first a passionate affair, and you are left exhausted by the mere thought of it. But you are safe because it is an invisible process, and nobody knows that you are hung on the disasters of decision.

There are releases to allow. The day opens up into its own space and decides to let you in on the big secret. Sentences are still piled by the door waiting to be used, but it is no mistake that the man in the stall next to is not choking there with his pants around his ankles, scuffed brown shoes and torn brown pants all that is visible from where you sit, no he is not strangling on the throes of some sort of seizure, he is snoring, he has fallen asleep "in the position", you might say, or is homeless and finds any place that is warm to catch a few. He'll wake up with a collar around his ring. I mean, she noticed the last of the series and only after three or four tries would the allowances be made for something new. You might give up after the first few tries, but that's too easy, and to be accepted without understanding only means that you find yourself in the right place at no time at all, in the here and now of muteness.

On the mountain, the stones are piled like a fortress, but it is a celestial clock laid out wrong, plaques commemorating the dead from a long ago war, one of three or four you specifically remember, and that is too many for the here and now, too many excuses for light left untended to go astray and ask yourself why like somebody who doesn't really want to hear the answer at all in the first place so why go on, it is as if asking why is also a defensive wringing of the hands which leaves you without pity or rage for the person before you and it is not so much callousness as the obviousness of the answer which defends you from your own answer, it is the calm refusal to answer that is your only defense. You could go on.

In the morning, there are some details to go over which are less unsaid than obvious, and the quick dismissal of someone brings out laughter rather than a sympathetic response, and it is because the dismissal is too easy and too right to be the least bit nasty. It is the day itself which brings you around to a time when you last looked, not a fictive removal of culture to its obsolescence but rather a movie in which the left foot never reaches the ground, and the guardian of the mausoleum rubs his hands together with a kind of glee. I've got one, he stammers, and focuses the lens a little more closely on the headless figure that has advanced from behind the podium and is waving his arms, a headless image on the monitor, words of love spilling off the screen into the nothingness of a time-warped flatness of photographic images bounding from the earth.

There is a slow mood prevailing in the afternoon, and you wait for it.