Every time I open my eyes, the world becomes narrower, and wider.
What I see tells me that certain things are impossible; what I see tells me that so many things are possible.
Every time I move my elbow and touch the world, the world becomes narrower, and wider.
What I touch, what I feel, tell me that certain things are impossible; what I touch, what I feel, tells me that so many, so very many, things are possible.
When I floated unseeing, unfeeling, in an endless void, everything was possible.
And nothing was possible.
Here is an image of trees set among oddly pointed hills. On the ground, in the image, white trails snake everywhere.
The white trails might be ancient lava flows, might be modern water runnels, might be plants of different colors growing in stripes because of the underlying chemical differences caused by ancient lava. Or modern water.
Trees are shelter from the rain, trees are habitats, are not-yet-decayed masses of food for saprophytes, are just one of the things that happen when you get an area very very hot, and then let it cool very very slowly.
We circle the tree, each of us thinking our own thoughts, each of our thoughts reflecting everyone’s thoughts. The trees are prisms for our thoughts, taking them in as white beams and redistributing them as rainbow tracks; rainbow tracks for the trains of ages, rainbow tracks for the steam-engines of understanding.
Here is another image, of trees set among oddly pointed hills. On the ground, in the image, white trails snake everywhere.
Are these photographs, and has the photographer only turned from east to west, or north to south, between one and the other?
Are these impressionist, semi-abstract, paintings from life, and has the artist turned the easel in one direction on one day, and the other direction on another day?
The artist sits on a hillside, under the outermost reaching branches of a dense dark tree with deep green foliage, and as the artist slowly paints, small animals and large insects rustle in the tree, and in the crevices of the ground cover.
If these are paintings from life, what does the artist smell, moving the brush slowly over the canvas, there under the edge of the tree’s shadow, where stripes run over the ground, or where the ground inspires the artist to paint stripes where, in plain reality, there may be none?
Every time the artist breathes, and scents the air, the world becomes narrower, and wider.
What the artist smells, scents, breathes, makes olfactory note of, tells the artist that certain things are possible. What the artist smells, makes olfactory note of, tells the artist that many things are possible.
The brush of the artist spells out on the canvas what is possible, what is impossible.
With every touch of the brush, the universe becomes narrower, and wider.
When the canvas was blank, everything was possible.
And nothing was possible.
Time passes, for us circling the trees, for the artist painting, for the trees refracting all our thoughts. For the photographer on the hilltop and for the writer in the old overstuffed armchair.
As time passes, as we see and hear and feel and smell (and taste), the world becomes narrower, and wider.
With every tick of the universal clock, what we experience tells us that certain things are impossible.
With every tick of the universal clock, what we experience tells us that so many things are possible.
Circle the tree with me, with love; give the trees the white beams of your thoughts, and accept from the trees the rainbow diffractions of mine. Love is the result of all of it, and love is the cause of all of it. Love and light are the same, trees and stripes on the ground are the same. Darkness and stillness are the same.
Here is a mystery. Here is a question. What will the next moment declare impossible? What will the moment after reveal as possible?
Here is another image, of a river of stripes flowing between thick dark trees, among oddly pointed hills. Under one tree, a feline form melds with the shadows, resting or waiting, relaxed or alert, its ears a pair of points in the dimness, listening, its whiskers quivering in the air.
Every sound the cat hears tells it that certain things are impossible. Every sound the cat hears, tells it that so many things are possible. The sound of prey in the brush, the sound of splashes in the river, the sound of another cat, distant among the trees, raising a brief and plaintive call toward the sun, the moon, the spirits of prey in the trees. The cat’s body is full of potential, full of watching and patience and the thought of sudden fatal motion.
Did the artist see the cat waiting in that shadow, and capture a hint with that moving brush? Or is the cat the diffraction of a thought of the artist, from patterns in the artist’s mind, from memories of the artist’s past? Is the artist also a traveler, a reader, a composer of fiction or symphonies?
Music makes no claims, cannot be judged or faulted for adding imaginary cats to real tree-shadows. Can I lie with music? Can I lie with a photograph, with a painting, with a loaf of bread?
If these images on the table before us came with no words, no labels or cover-letter, nothing claiming anything with words, then perhaps they cannot lie to us, either; they can only be what they are, and we are free to take them (the rainbows from the trees) and use them in any way at all. They tell us that some things are impossible (now that the envelope has proven to contain only these two images, we are not in a universe where it contains something else, as well or instead), and that many things are possible: the images as photographs, as paintings, as narrative, as hallucination, as music; the sending as a gift, a threat, as braggadocio or the fulfillment of a contract.
Hold them near your face and breathe. What is possible?
ceoln 