A pencil, lying on its side, it can’t stand up all by itself.
A piece of paper underneath, so blank until the light comes up and brushes light up curtain sides, makes beams and pools where there were none.
We open up our eyes each day, and lift the pencil that we left, when our eyes had closed themselves without our knowledge or consent, we start to draw where we left off.
The hours roll out before the textures strewn around the bed. The fragile thing that we hold now, pencilled in and formed anew.
Then looking up and making rooms, the ceiling, walls and door, and then we wander out in confidence that the stair we drew last night will still be there, except reversed.
We’ll scribble down into the hall. Our coffee cups, familiar forms, we draw some chairs up, me and you, and talking, sketch the world anew.
Our grasp is thin to say the least, we cannot hold the epic tale, we skirt around the outer edge, picking out the odd detail.
We find that it’s beyond our powers to show the scene toute entiére, and so we cheat and texture in, the blocks of life to hold their place upon the page.
Perhaps we shouldn’t draw so clear, so bold and black, each line so sure. Perhaps we should allow the time to find a path we haven’t drawn, and wander off into the woods, hatching shade and plans of trees, seeing fresh the shape exact, of these new things that cross our path and blend them in upon the scene.
Soon we’ll find main event, the constant theme, the undertow, I’m sure you’ve heard it all before, but here its sharp or flat upon the page, here it sings, takes centre stage.
But now the pencil has come dull, and the outlines become blurred. The air itself a smudge of dark, the flowers tumbling into grass, until an edge, like night, might lift us up and make the pencil sharp again.
The latest drawing in the book, flicking through them one by one, it seems I didn’t do it by the book, I found it by coincidence, my hand just flew across the scene.
All those pictures of our days, none half done, none rubbed away. Some, so focused just to show the mappings that I could discern, the visions that revealed the fall. But we must hold and draw the line, a perspective born anew, that was hidden underneath, the paper.
The way was short in endless time beyond the edges not drawn here, not numbered in our page system, nor filed away, nor kept on file. The simple and the complex charts, that describe with perfect lines, shapings curved and angular, the brighter colours and the grey, which always comes to cool our days.
I’ll lay the pencil down again, the page is resting underneath.
The Guardians of the Cave 