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Summer 2006 Fiona Sampson at the window holding your reflection, the desk-lamp inverting a bowl of warmth on the table. When you look up, you see the shape your face makes — pale, shield-like, taking on a form that remains untied at the edges, moving out from nose, cheekbones, forehead through streamers of hair, black among the streaming black twigs of the dark — its pressure of something-else against your scalp like a halo; or like the blue line which oscillates, sometimes, around a silhouetted face — a reverse-halo of presence, some trace of the leverage self exerts on its surroundings, a message needing the apparatus of superstition, the oscillograph with its fluttering wing, though you feel the disturbance as something presses in, a table-leg digs the shin or the voice of someone joining you under the parasol of light breaks the skim on concentration that's both here and absent-minded. The room smells of coffee and aired linen, a blur of pleasure reassuring as the skirred light caught in those spirit photographs where young widows of the Great War saw themselves accompanied, through the dusty dark, beside the studio aspidistra, into whatever was to come: you lean forward, wanting to stretch this moment, to feel pleasure warming in you like the last time you were held face-to-face by someone, their blurred eyes in the half-dark and the way you felt yourself both in yourself and in them — seeing, taking on form — Or does this in fact have to do with language, the way it hooks and draws in, every name a displacement of the actual? The nib in your hand's a crochet hook, pulling things tight across, making starry combinations, and, if not you yourself, the other generations are moving your hand — like the woman knitting on the Tube, her hands' flicker and caress already known so that you had to look away from what you remember; you had to leave her loose as the swollen faces in the ads sliding behind her. Knowledge speaks you, it sometimes seems: a mute spatial awareness, of how things are, unlearnt, unedited; the deep generative grammar of something understood before you stepped into the lights and the strange seeping-away clatter of the Underground: Edgeware Road, Regent's Park, Marylebone — wayside shrines of your journey in the dark. The diagonal mineral grains vested in glass are marks of grace — though you look through it, see something flawless, thickening to white only at the rim. Leaning against a wall at the foot of the stairs, a sheet of glass absorbs shadow bottomlessly, its edge a pool of darkened colour shifting deeper than image, floated on polished struts and limbs of crystal: light faces itsel f in that thickened inner surface. In the dark beyond the window March is stirring: a first scatter of earth-smells, spores of late snowdrops among thin tree-shadows; a stirring of the retina or of the chemical membrane remembering, turning outwards: self a blurred, necessary frame opening again — its strange mimicry of the window's raking arm going out into the dark a thickness, like glass, where light could slip nebulous nothing more than a glimpse: like the rumoured big cat running the high maes of Cwm Elan, absolute black burning the uncertain colour of those loosed grasslands — now you remember their attenuated glow against a dusk sky, and how you watched, some evenings, where the echo-lines of further ridges, wave after wave, lifted each minute, holding it to the lingering light. |
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