Around the town

 

 

 

HEADING WEST

The road will not be at all like we imagined it at the house. And yet we had read the book that talked about it so many times. We knew it by heart. We could close it, stick a pin right through it just anywhere, and know the tiniest word it had gone through.
But the road will seem so flat to us that we will wonder whether we ourselves are lacking in depth. We will wonder what we are doing there. We will want to find out if we know ourselves as well as our book. So we will plant a needle in our arm. We will prick ourselves as only those left by the wayside can.

HEADING NORTH

If, on our way, we want to spend the night in an abandoned house, we should be wary! Because even in our sleep, we will be forced out of curiosity to visit it, and then chances are we will come across a man in black lurking in the attic. Let us be wary, for most of the abandoned houses we find on the wayside are actually going to be family homes that we have tried to forget. The man in black will always contrive to take us to a small bedroom and play to us the part of some ancestor standing there dead with his eyes wide open. We should watch out, for if ever we go up to him to embrace him, we will wake up with a start, with our lips on the bedroom mirror. It will be so cold that our lips will be glued to the mirror; we shall have just enough freedom of movement to raise our eyes slightly to see the reflection of the road stretching into the distance behind our back.

HEADING SOUTH

If, on our way, we come to a valley, let us take care to stop there. The wind is always lighter there and the grass greener. It will certainly be very tempting to want to end our journey here and build our house. But let's not forget that most valleys are still liable to flooding because of dams being built.
During the years spent in our house, we will be set in our little earthling landowner mentality and unable just to stand watching as public water engulfs our personal property. Before this lake of desolation, we will dive right down into the cellar of what used to be our house to tamper with the water meter. This way we can deceive the water board by proving that the water in fact came from a leaky tap. This would cost us our savings, but at least the lake of desolation would be ours and so we could continue on our way with the feeling of having settled all our accounts..

HEADING EAST

As we approach the lakes, our body will be completely shrouded in a cloud of gnats. As our mood changes, they will all move aside in a block, but will continue to follow us, staying slightly behind and keeping the form of our body. Each time our mood changes, we will be haloed in a fresh cloud of gnats. The earlier clouds will follow us like an army of shadows. In the course of the journey, having a shorter life span than ours, the gnats will be replaced by others. But some genetic memory will keep them in the same place as part of our form.
If ever our mood makes us try to get back inside one of these forms, the gnats will disappear into thin air and immediately re-form behind our back. The best thing to do is just pretend they do not exist.

 

If we stop before a landscape, it is to let our eyes wander over it without constraint. The points upon which we rest our gaze are merely pauses in our progress.
To take in a landscape properly, it is essential to shut our eyes long enough for the images we have glanced upon to become imprinted on the retina. If we pay close attention, we will notice that these images detach themselves from their point of origin and shift about within us. They move in order to merge with other images from our memory or our imagination.
Nothing within us is ever fixed: throughout our lifetime, the cells of our eyes are constantly regenerated; and each new image penetrates us with the sole aim of feeding upon some earlier image. But let us not dwell too long on images: the only thing that matters in our observation of the world, is that we sense our eyes moving in our face. Without this movement, we would still be in the image – trait for trait, generation after generation – of the first human to scan the horizon.