Cloudy Trophies

Can anyone understand these things? It seems so farcical – that man can be so inventive, so creative, and yet a slave to the physical self! Is it perhaps because my mind so often conjures up mighty vistas of the imagination, never needing banal sight, that my eyes have wasted so? The sheer power of inherent wonderment is often enough; why then am I still so reliant on these weak orbs? Can human craft beget nothing more profound than flimsy plastic plates and tender wires to keep me truly in this world?

When, yesterday, my glasses, so long the frame of my existence, fell apart in my hands, my world vanished. Can you possibly understand it? How the world is transformed? How mind and reality blend into disharmony? We exist only outside ourselves by our senses, and when those are weakened, our self intrudes upon the world as we perceive it.

Observe! As I walk through the woods, on this most beautiful of days, such a change is wrought! The sunlight dappling through the leaves is still wondrous, but now it is tinged with uncertain danger – the blurred colours dance enigmatically, beyond comprehension, observed and yet unseen. I cannot match their subtle movements; they have escaped me. But my mind goes forth, surpassing the faulty apparatus of my sight, and the fluttering light seems to make the world whirl. Can you believe me when I say that it is intoxicating? Every spluttering shadow can hide a danger, and yet as I wander the luminescent bowers I am more alive than I have ever been. So alive that it hurts – I am losing myself, dissolving into the landscape, becoming simultaneously one and nothing!

To my left, through the dryadic trees, there is the gash of the river. My God, what words could describe it? The water is water no more; a breathless, dazzling evanescence that is both all colours and no colour. What is this world without certainties? This world where all things, external and internal, blur so easily? How can we exist as such?

The throbbing, insistent pain between my temples is all that safeguards reality. My desperate body clings to a whirling soul that every ambiguous, entrancing movement nearly draws out. Without sight, that which is ‘I’ wanders through worlds unrealised, never certain, never knowing if they be inward or outward. Pain, pain alone is within, the anchor of myself, the soul point of humanity in my light befuddled forest.

Would that you could ‘see’ my world? Ours is a precarious existence, subject to the transience of our senses. It is with conviction, and with utmost truth, that I impart this to you: these eyes of ours are doorways, going both in and out, and the inner lock is weak indeed!