[Edited Feb. 15, 2018]
No Claude-Lorrain sky lights my path, save in the low rent rooms of my huddled and slowly-recovering memory, but that is plenty. A life is compressed there, flickering amid the unknowable gap of an endless field. From one session to the next, the memories change—their shape, their order, their feeling—but there is one that surfaces, like oil on water, to borrow a line from Cervantes, and it is changeless.
This room buzzes, brisk, with dappled halos of rose-petal fuzz, like the background of an old movie-star glamor shot. I am lying down and through dandelion seeds of light I see them: a pair of green-gray pearls that should belong only to dreams and the youthful distortions of love’s true nature. There is a voice, too—I know there is—but it is confused and fleeting, so that when I turn to identify the speaker, there is no one, only the numinous outline of a someone, and thoughts; they are hazy and inexplicably musical. A piece by Henry Purcell, I think…
…Z. 379 ‘If music be the food of love, sing on’.
And I half-expect the notes to materialize, but they don’t, and they don’t need to. I close my eyes. Closing is like opening them. The rosy room is gone. I have replaced it, maybe—or something has—with the field: a vast, grayish patch strewn with miles of bog cotton that’s been set alight.
