In a Mind’s Eye

The drained hue of the far distance, pale and indistinct, erasing the seamless, uncoloured horizon, was composed of a sublimation of dust into a blue, crystalline air. Brushed by vivid proximity, ruffled by the nearness of a movement of leaves around a lifting branch, it faded into transparency. Between these two pulls and indentations on his senses, the world of his knowledge.

Into that world, he had poured many thousands of glances, thousands of stares, some conscious, others not, and many hundreds of long studies. In return, that world had trickled, sometimes seeped, sometimes poured, through his eyes and on down into his heart.

Because just looking, hardly thinking, is a slow, tender benevolence. And, in that benevolence, the world fully occupies the eye and is a balm for the heart’s muscles.

Now he stopped again and surrendered himself to his eyesight. Which in turn gave in to a profundity of recognition.

His fingers were like tree roots that have grown above ground: between the ligneous curl of his thumb and amongst the gnarls of his finger joints, he held a knife. Gently. An inoffensive blade. Remembering the touch of this implement, he reached out and pulled some of last years growth toward his chest and severed its tautness. Then he discarded that handful. He reached forward again.

The shy was blue and the sun’s light warmed a channel through the thin, chill air. The air was clearer and more translucent than usual, as if it contained less air, and had the special clarity of coldness. The sun heated the surface of his skin but did not seem to heat the air. As if the elements were separate.

In the valley beyond and below him, a filament of river, like metal inlaid into the landscape, cut its narrow glittering vein. On either side the hillsides rose up: nature’s arms spread apart in suppliant demonstration of herself, showing her wares. Within that expansive gesture, the world was mostly silent apart from the occasional hollow clatterings of a woodpecker at work. In the far distance some miles away, it was just possible to discern the tiniest trickle of smoke that rose, presumably from a bonfire, and whose wavering thread, at a certain height, diffused into a grey-blue haze that dirtied the vividly clear air.

He continued working and the repetitive to and fro of his work did not demand that his mind be present. His eyes surrendered their occupancy and his thoughts mulled over their own private business within the cosy confines of a sightless interiority.

Because of the time of year, because the sky was too thin and not thick enough to support it, the sun, that had flown low all day, sank early into the darkness of its own disappearance.

Deprived of his world, he retreated inside and sat in a turbulent darkness enjoying the company of the hearth whilst watching the terrified flames try to escape up the chimney.

Later he ate a supper with a warm thick taste, spoon ringing against china, dull and tinkling.

Later still, his feet – his legs having pushed up and erect bones and muscles that groaned in an aching confluence – led his body toward his bed; a body that followed its feet more from habit than anything else.

In his dream he sat at a table with two, three, sometimes four people who were not individually recognisable to him but who were an amalgam of people he knew and had known, who in some mysterious process were simultaneously severally themselves yet merged in each separate person, two or three apiece. They played cards – piquet, he thought, with at least two games being played diagonally across each other – and the cards they played with were wooden and too large: like small shutters, cabinet doors, chest lids, and the like.

Without any obvious causal sequence, as if the dream had become bored of itself and decided, indifferently, to become something else, he was alone, walking alongside a wall of north African appearance, at one point with a huge bell in an arched recess, at another point opening on to a large garden contained by many walls. There was a desert nearby although his dream provided no evidence for this fact.

Just as in most dreams, he had no obvious power to direct the course of events, seemingly he hadn’t any particular control even over himself or what he did. It was as if he wasn’t fully present in his own awareness. There were happenings whose purposes entirely superseded his own – as if he were the least relevant element in his own head: just an unimportant observer and sometime extra.

He saw a girl he’d known at school and not seen in the decades since, the sight of whom brought back to him, suddenly and strongly, a feeling: a sense of his relative standing with her dating from that time in which she had been his superior in a shallow, transient friendship.

In amongst everything that transpired in the dream, as a theme, he seemed to be traveling in a variety of ways but, with a complete absence of melodrama, he was never in time to get anywhere he was trying to get to.

The silence woke him. He was used to an almost absolute quiet from the world of man: whose shouts and the groans of their machines rarely grew loud enough to intrude into his own world. But now the sounds of the natural world were also hushed into a silence which barely stirred. And the light was unfamiliar. He had woken ten thousand times and more into this same room behind the same shutters and some part of his mind, probably hardly ever attended too, knew the various shades of light that squeezed in between wall and wood and told him that this was not one of those shades: it did not correspond and was therefore, logically speaking, wrong. This was like the light of an eclipse and the silence was similar to that also. But there was no eclipse.

When he went outside everything was coated with dew, saturated: the grass, the branches of the trees, the gorse bushes, the fences. He had never seen so much dew and it was so thickly strewn that he imagined it might detach itself and rain slowly upward.

He saw a bird sitting far out on the end of a long branch of one of the nearby trees. It did not move except for one small sideways twitch of its head. It made no sound and, or so it seemed to him, it did not appear to want to make any sound.

He walked around the side of his house to where the ground dipped and to where a couple of shallow terraces tried to arrest the slope. An apple tree and two small cherry trees interfered somewhat with his line of sight so that for a moment he was uncertain as to what he was or was not seeing. But then, acting entirely on its own, his body leached something sickly into his heart and its chambers began to fluctuate and thump a febrile beat. At the same time his head felt spongy and a little dizzy.

He could see, a little further down the slope, a fence of thin, weathered chestnut staves held at various angles of fatigue by two long rusty wires, beneath which thickly bunched tufts of grass grew…beyond which was emptiness. Not so much as that. A non-appearance.

He could not even see nothingness: his eyes did not bring him as little as that to feed on. His eyes were left hollow and hungry by his sight.

He looked away in order to fill his eyes with something. He looked upwards. The sky was there above him but he could not see where his absent world became full of sky, or the sky became empty of itself; like yesterday’s horizon there was no visible line of blending. He turned around and saw the hillside rise slowly in the other direction above which he could see more sky. However, at the upper fringe of the trees, he could not tell what he looked at: either his mind did not care to disclose to him the evidence of some of its senses or his mind could not fathom the intrusion.

He returned to his front door and went back inside his house. Once inside he sat down in order to think. However, he could not call to mind anything that he could possibly think of. His mind in preparing to contemplate the blankness of the world outside drew something of a blank in so far as the world inside was concerned. He sat and mulled his unresponsive thoughts and, after a while, it was perhaps the action of this gentle stewing that inspired him to put the kettle on to make himself a drink. Furthermore, it may have been this process of making and consuming a hot drink that encouraged him to go even further and cook himself some breakfast. Possibly, some part of him reasoned (though it was probably not reason itself) that if his mind was empty and his world was, in large part, a void, his stomach may as well be full, that he might be all the better for it: perhaps some of his intestinal satiety would rise and fill the undernourishment of his senses and psyche.

Such a miraculous internal intersubstantiation did not occur but his morale improved and he began to think a handful of thoughts which, even if they provided him with no clear answers, at least they conspired to occupy his mind. He briefly considered the possibility that he had not – at least when he had ventured outside – quite finished sleeping and that his dreams had had a little unfinished business. However, as soon as he had this thought, he dismissed it. The mind may not know what is what when it is asleep but when it is conscious, it cannot be fooled so easily: it is alive, so to speak, to its wakefulness.

He had a few more inconsequential thoughts as he chewed and swallowed his food. In the end, having finished eating he decided to leave the house again in order to look after his few animals and to attend to the tasks required of him in his garden.

Whilst he fed his subdued animals, they looked to him for some explanation of what was happening, at least to their particular circumstances. Their eyes reproached him for not providing them with the comfort of understanding. Naturally, he was unable to help. The world was gone. What could be said about that? What could be done about it?

As he worked in the garden, spreading and digging in manure around some of his future vegetable crops, as well as clipping and taking out some of the old supporting wires and threading new ones where needed, the sounds of his implements and the sounds of his own movements, instead of standing out more audibly in the silence clunked dully and their little waves of sound spread only sluggishly and not far.

But then and in contrast, he thought he heard a dog barking even though there was nowhere for the dog to be. The hoarse, hollow sounding barks seemed to exist only in the air. He wondered if it was an echo of his own mind’s expectations. He was used to hearing the barking of his neighbour’s dog that was often, borne on the soft shoulders of an obliging breeze, carried up to him from the valley below. Perhaps this was phantom barking. It reminded him of his old uncle who had lost his leg and whom, he remembered, had had sensations from the missing limb, sensations that had outlived their source, living independently like sparks from a bonfire.

In a way that was similar and yet not the same, he was able to stand up straight, arch his back against its stiffness and then, looking and not looking at the world that was not there, he could place remembered sights into their proper places. He had looked at the same view for so long that it was more than a remembrance, it was a knowledge of the things he now saw. It was as if the sights of his world had travelled so often through the canals of his senses, so many times a day, across so many seasons, that they now had a fixed and stable resting place in his mind. And it was as if those sights, lodged in his mind after all those years, were just as well endowed and empowered to conjure up their own image for his enjoyment as if they had been the river, the little chapel on the hillside, the sheaf of trees slipping down past the village of C…., or the far, far distant castle ruins themselves.

At first he saw these things like torn, misty pieces of a jigsaw, catching glances of them as if from habit, but later he called them forth at will and was able to enlarge those fragmentary pieces and elide one in with another, sometimes putting a cluster of them together. There were times that day when he wondered if he needed the sight of things in order to see. He even wondered, a little sacrilegiously, if his own sight by remembrance might not be slightly better than the incontrovertible evidence of his eyesight. He saw, by and large, what he wanted to see: usually the electric pylon did not any more form part of the landscape, nor the steel sided barn that had been recently erected on the hill to his far right (that was, admittedly, at least two miles away but whose presence in his world he had not invited or enjoyed).

In the afternoon he had explored a little and, as far as he could establish, his own land had remained intact and it was only beyond his borders that the world seemed to be no more. He found this very reassuring and any unease he had felt early that morning was now largely subdued

In his dreams that following night, the sun was seen to bathe in the sea, like a plate being washed, dipped in hot, soapy water. There was a reason for this that was known to him but he found himself unable to discover the location of this knowledge in his mind and was therefore unable to benefit from it. This was a cause of sadness to him – to the extent that a person can be sad in their own dream.

Walking down a long street that he recognised, each time his feet hit the concrete of the pavement a tracery of cracks struck out from the impact. These resembled the convoluted, searching, attenuated refinements of a root system; and, indeed, without turning round, he was aware of saplings sprouting from his footprints.

The light in his dreams was normally rather gloomy as on a very overcast day, plenty of oscuro without much chiaro, like a television he had once seen on which the brightness had been turned down much to far. However, that night, there seemed to be more clarity: what caught his attention seemed to stand out sharply and even things in the background were relatively clear. He could also, as a result, better locate himself, so to speak, within his surroundings.

At one point he sat down in a café and ordered a drink of some sort which was immediately brought to him by a waiter. He almost marvelled at this extraordinary delivery (by cause in the service of effect) since it was so unlike the lack of mentally requested causation that usually mired his dreams. It was almost like having choice.

As the days passed, he not only got used to this new absence of his surroundings, he settled down into these circumstances so completely that he ceased being constantly aware of them and only occasionally became conscious of his missing world. His animals too seemed, after a while, to be entirely untroubled by the loss of that which, after all, had been of little practical use to them. Furthermore, neither his vegetables, salads, nor his fruits seemed to be suffering any ill effects.

He had had some initial concern on this score because growing plants are easily thrown out of their rhythms and are sensitive to a great many types of change, both grandiose and subtle. However, the rain had continued to fall almost normally except in that it was not wind driven – there was no strong wind just a movement of air from which the energy had been filtered out. The sun shone normally for most of the day (but there was no sunset or sunrise as such) and where the world was no longer to be seen there was neither light nor darkness but something for which none of the words he had gathered up and stored over a lifetime could be made to fit. All in all though, the climatic conditions were not profoundly altered and his crops seemed to grow much as they had before.

After a week or two had passed, his facility for conjuring up the various images missing from his world had developed to such an extent that it was as if their presence and their absence were two overlain veils neither one more evident than the other. But as a little more time passed, these images, now more or less composed into an entire landscape, became the more dominant, the more prevailing vision.

There came a morning when the light was ambiguous in the lenses of his eyes and he could not tell whether the world had been restored to him or he had restored the world to himself. However, he no longer registered the absent world: what had gone was now gone itself.

Whether or not it was inevitable, with the passage of yet more time, – days rather than weeks – he began to introduce new elements into what he saw. It was as if he no longer simply reconstituted the parts of his former world (no longer, so to speak, painting by numbers) but allowed his imagination a little freedom on an empty canvas. And the change happened as surely as when the clouds clamber up the hillsides in poor weather.

At first the world softened. What had been a countryside largely covered, where it had not been cultivated, with a coarse, arid undergrowth, was now smoothed into much gentler contours of an almost velvet baize of a fern green. This was a countryside whose distant grassed fields one would long to stroke and which would satisfy the tenderest palate of the most immature lamb. This world, as a result of its more temperate feel, also felt more inhabited by peacefulness.

The river grew larger and more slow moving. It acquired a new bridge, rather exaggeratedly humpbacked for its span, supported by a series of arches. Now and again he would see a carriage winding down the white road that led to it and, slowly mounting the bridge on one side, descend even more carefully down the other. It was obvious from the appointments of the carriage and from the apparel of the palfreys that pulled it along, that the ornate vehicle carried a princess. On one occasion, even from so far off, he felt sure he caught a glimpse of some golden hair so flaxen that it could only have grown out of royal blood.

Later, in the very far distance, a bay developed: full of the tiniest choppy waves any ocean could furnish and adorned with the most delicate lacery of spume. Balanced on top of these, he once thought he could see a fat bellied galleon, its many sails stretched tight into pretty crescents.

The equally far distant castle was no longer ruined and appeared to be in rude health. He had no reason to suppose so but for some reason he just knew that within its banqueting hall the boisterous baron and his friends raised goblets as they watched the leopards paw the air.