37.

I was far from the house, wandering around in a rather thick morning mist. Apart from a few spikes of rush & some softly jiggling spiderwebs strung with dew everything was distant. You couldn’t see me, my body wasn’t apparent, but what was clearer even than usual was the distance between things. Distances, you should say: the mist makes clearer all the different distances. But you are haunted now, by that singular distance. You are seeing a beautiful spider’s web, like a hammock strung between spikes of rush, & it is jiggling a little bit in a wind you cannot feel, a breeze that seems little more than an echo of some still sleepy person getting out of bed. You are haunting this spider’s web. What do you want? You don’t want to see the spider, what if that’s you? How soon would you get over the horror? How quickly could you come to complete awareness as a spider? What are the speed of its breaths? What are the capabilities of its limbs? Is it like being a human ear turned inside out, covered in little hairs through which you feel you hear? Do you feel hollow, a black ghost haunting a world of dark tunnels?

You don’t want to worship the spider as a god, but you will if you have to. You want to admire its handiwork. Dismiss this vague sense of narcissism, it is but a shadow of the sun of knowledge that will in the end obliterate it: inside the mist every dewdrop seems to have had all the cloud burnt out of it. How strange it is to imagine you could assemble drops of such perfect clarity as these & come up with something apparently cloudy! The problem is something you can barely admit to yourself because it seems even more ridiculous. You don’t want to admit it. If you admit it you will have to admit all its friends as well. Is there often something lonely about the ghost? Even always? Something lonely about you. About you. Cloaked in the company of something so beautifully repellent I can’t see what it is, like the skin of rain.

I am reduced to measuring things, counting the drops I’ve already counted just to make sure nothing’s changed, but throughout this there’s an awareness I maintain that it may just be a method of passing time. I don’t want to say there is something insane about it. Do you? Do you want to insist there is a madness in time? I want to count the drops again, to be sure there is only one. I want to measure the distances between them to confirm they are in fact the same. I can see it is not the case, in what seems like an unbroken moment: the drops are many & the distances are obviously different. I can see it. But you can’t see me.

It is you. It is you & I can see myself in you
& all the different yous in each of you
all the same

I blink like not being awake at night & open my eye inside every drop in this little old limited field & I see you walking across it going back inside the house but I can’t touch the walls of your head without breaking down.

Is that what I want? Not to break down when I touch what isn’t there?

To haunt a work of art
not only the artist
must die

A world without ghosts is already a ruin

I don't know
but that beauty
seems a haunting

& that every ghost must have something to do with love

& that the idea is that this should still scare us, very much.