SAY WHAT YOU WILL

Say what you will, when I look at the stars there’s a knife in the light that cuts, a distant bell that sadly remembers, a sea in a shell that makes me long for home again, as if somehow I were the furthest emanation of them, the secret issue of their shining, growing dim in the lantern that bears me around like the nabob of nothing to see what I’ve become. Is there an ocean in the heart of a star that turns into eyes, blood, mind, the more suffusive lucidities of the spirit; are there starwells I’ve ascended like a genome of the features that have been poured into a mould of space to cast my moon upon the waters like a face? Am I the light looking back upon itself wave after wave, or an island in the tide? Has the mindstream been unravelled from that radiance like a discontinued thread, or is the vision in the furnace of that burning, like the moon on the water, one inseparable continuum? Not fireflies, not lighthouses, not the mannequins of myth, not tuning forks, or compasses, but events of life ingathering their own chrysales out of nothing, to conceal and reveal themselves in me, utterly transformed into the reciprocal of an unknown visionary, the rootless fruit of a tree with eyes. So it should come as no surprise that I feel the stars are alive in the way they have empowered me to see one star shining in everything, inter-reflectively. One day, moving from medium to medium, ever more rarefied, one inconceivability to the next, apprenticed to these endless transformations, my vital organs might evolve into such subtleties of attenuated urgency, that the food and the breath of my elemental being are the stars and the seeing of a night without death. And isn’t it already true that every moment of light entertains its own afterlife like the host of what’s to come, as the mind does, that thrives on stars that have marrowed the scintillance of every passing thought such that I’m always beyond myself in some availability of the future that can only be embodied in the wake of my seeing, as if life and death, light and thought, were the two brides of the one breath I carry across the homeless thresholds of my ancestral lucidity, everywhere elated with stars, with eyes, with seeing, with the radiant levity of my illuminated being.

PATRICK WHITE