Parable Of The Blinds

In late spring or early summer, in late evening, the angle of the sun hits the blinds in our bedroom in such a way that the light coming through gives a dappled effect, blobs of light that seem to pulse, dilate and shrink, complementing the narrow, rectangular blades of the blinds with the amorphous splendor of light, fusing high definition to the hazier corridors of inference and correlation. It seems natural to think of a universal consciousness imbuing everything with numinosity, with the magnificence of a disembodied, oceanic intelligence, part and parcel with the fermentation of daylight into the wine of night. Or maybe it’s all just a brilliant accident, light and shadow in various patterns that tease interpretations out of the mind with a seeming legibility that’s just arbitrariness in the end, doesn’t matter, but that’s not the feeling, which is also something generated, something shared by oysters and horses, elephants and eels and monkeys and human beings, an intimation, a monumental understanding no one understands. The message isn’t clear. Is it even a message? Something seems to be trying to communicate. Or is that just imagination? Where does imagination end and the world begin? Earlier today, on our way home from a run, R noticed the moon was out. It’s always a bit strange to see the moon during the day. It’s more dreamlike. The divide between reality and imagination is a little more vague. They don’t divide. They blend. The border is non-existent. They define one another. They overlap and the overlap isn’t even an overlap it’s more like a sfumato effect in Italian painting. That is to say, a mist, a blur, the way the air gets around a city by the sea, everything so steeped in vagueness it has an emboldening effect on you, makes you feel silly, giddy, daffy as a dog, why take anything seriously when everything is so partial, so temporary, so ephemeral? We’re all ghosts. We haunt ourselves looking for selves we used to be, selves we could’ve been, selves we carry with us into our new existence, our latest manifestation, which isn’t entirely here yet, and never will be. Invention never stops. There’s the material and there’s the immaterial. The material is immaterial as the immaterial is ethereal. You can exempt yourself from anything, really. Just watch the current. The current is tricky. And the rocks are slippery.