IMAGINATION ISN'T FEIGNING

Imagination isn’t feigning if I imagine I’m awake. No more than a mystery is the mask of something waiting to be exposed. If life is the medium of a dream then the dream must be reality without a second thought, no proliferation of witnesses; the leaves on the tree not testimony, no shadow at noon. The well thirsts for itself, and the fire is martyred in its own burning. The stars are blinded by the blaze. And the emptiness is always full like a woman in love. Which side of the window is clear; and which is sky? And if you consider the eye made both, arrayed both for the sake of the view, and you are the view, then where’s the distinction that would make one a fraud, and the other, the high fields of God, never broken by a plough, where under every seed the wind sows like stars, there’s the root of a demon and the flower of an angel weaving crude haloes out of compassionate herbs and scars? And when you read this; who’s inside out? When you want to know where someone you cherished and lost went; it’s easy. When the moon is on the water there’s water on the moon. If the cup were only there to contain itself, where could the wine find room? Intoxications of the morning, flower-fire, and I’ve barely woken up, and I’m already drunk. No left-handed bells, please; no lead-footed cornerstones. Let the mist pick itself up and don’t ask what lake last night left its lingerie all over the trees; it’s too early to be arraigned by the day’s convictions. Is the blood of the rose wounded by a thorn? The moon gored on its own horn? Love’s the waterlily in a swamp of porn. And look. Almost a hit. And I haven’t signed anything yet. Get it. The dawn is not an inflammation, and the imagination, the permanent side-effect of a spiritual antibiotic. Because if it is, the disease is doctor to the herb, and ministrant to the cure. Sweet fever that dances like a pulse when a woman lifts up her eyelids like a bra.

PATRICK WHITE