STATES OF MIND

States of mind that are the uninhabitable moons of methane giants, brown dwarfs with great red eyes that didn’t quite make the cut into shining, the spinster star, the last apple no one wants in the gravity bowl, an unmarried radio that tunes the listener out. More mud than star, I look for new roots, new lightning to show me something in the flash of its brilliant flower but it’s impossible to turn around quickly enough, to spin like a Sufi or a planet, to catch your mind at something that might explain everything. What happens when the snake eats its tail up to its head? Does its head eat its head, and if I struck one off, would it turn into a hydra and grow another and another and another, a cult of moons around me, each unsheathing their fangs like crescents, prophetic skulls in a roulette wheel? Which one, which one, which one is mine under the pods of my eyelids? Is it necessary to know? Should I hold a mirror up to space and exclaim, yes, yes, that’s it, that’s my face, or break the mirror and meet myself on the other side? This morning it seems I’m a labyrinth trying to find itself, an abyss with a name that’s looking for the door. Okay. Right now, I’m here and now. I’m glad we’ve got that settled. A continuity without a continuum, if space and time are one, and everybody says so. Which is to say, I might be a mere coincidence in the vast scheme of things, my being here, an unexpected guest at the elemental table, one of the softer swords of the alloys of chance, but if it comes down to surrendering it to a god or an atom, the wind rises up from its desert dream like a mahdi and stirs the blades of the armies of the grass into a holy war against the heresy of myself, and something stubborn within me ties me to the minute hand of the clock like a stake, like a planet on a wayward axis, as the numbers gather around me like wood, and the hours wait for me to recant, and arsonist to my own surprise, I start the fire, and burn like a lyric in my own immolation. Just to feel alive and free again, if only briefly. But later in the ashes, when the stars appear like martyrs to show me their wounds, and beatify my extinction with the halo of a black hole, I can’t tell if the voice they heard cry out to them was mine, or if I’m just hard on my own echoes.

PATRICK WHITE