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Still Lifes of Finis Terrae is a novel in which the narrator, perennially engulfed in a dreamlike dialogue with his surroundings, travels the world in search of what he feels he lost, when the love of his life, a woman named Flora, set out on her own search for exotic encounters with the world.

5. Metaphysics

Flora favored certain colors. Colors that behaved like a feeling about fortune. She inverted almost everything with effortless tricks of the mind. Harbored an inclination to move northward, to recollect cold spaces and relate them to feelings most people associated with the tropics, or at least with heat.

I was captivated by that tendency, to reach for the golden bough, to know how to wait alongside one’s kindred, to wait with humanity, to hope for the unattainable, specifically because such activity (its selfsame irony actually lifting it above futility) keeps us on track.

There was a metaphysics between us. It seemed to have arisen at a certain altitude, which we never managed to measure, but whose pressure against our skin was always unforgettable.

Objectivity is implied by the behavior specific to pressure. There is subjectivity in what can only be immeasurable. There are metaphysics implied by almost any object's naturally epicurean relation to what defies measure.

A metaphysics implied by almost.

By objects. As relations. Interpretations.

For her it was fruit, and luminosity, that led her to metaphysical considerations.

For example:

Bananas are yellow.

Well, this banana, now at my mercy, this one is yellow, and I seem to recall having many times seen yellow ones in the past, in some acceptable corner of my perceptible past.

So, by inference...

One makes the assumption, hoping that the leap is educated enough...

That all bananas are yellow, if they live the full trajectory of their maturation process...

At one point...

They will be, they will enter into, or describe, yellow...

So, back to the original words, the frail but arguable metaphysical assertion:

Bananas are yellow.

A real statement of fact, if you believe in the language.

This particular fruit is right for conversation thousands of feet in the air. One can look out at the seething bulk of a cloud, imagine the interior meat of a banana, cleaned of its earth...

Abstracted, angelic...

We can dream about tropical skies, softly the color of its hide.

But we will not discuss the intimacy, the impressive sadness of the fruit when partly or mostly peeled, its longing to blossom, its nevermore.

We talk not of their timidity, nor of their sometimes brazen surrender.

It is the texture of their joy, as filter for intense heat or toxins, the possibility of escape into beauty, all these unscrupulous secrets kept beneath a tropic veil, this sort of mystique which captivates us, keeps us ready to unfold the bridges and pleateaux of a new perception.

Composite.

Blended with an avionic curve.

It seems an overarching surreality has come to roost when you notice that midway through a thirteen-hour jet flight, you have become completely accustomed to the incessant scream of the giant engines only several meters from where you sit...

The noise has come to seem so much a part of your natural habitat that it registers, on its own, as silence...

It takes a few moments of reflection to recover the basic structure of your universe... this is not a natural habitat, not any habitat whatsoever; it is an abstract face which encounters each human being, each human eye or foot, as a phenomenon wholly ex-nihilo and also as the grandiose and long-awaited raison d’être.

In this abstract space, time ceases to move with its usual measured gait; you can feel yourself being extrapolated.

From your world.

By your senses.

It becomes necessary to work out a new meridian interpretation of your one life in adjoining space-times.

Sleep, tempered with good food, is the most effective tool.

Unavailable at high altitude, except by way of memory.

11. Stasis on Request

People once close to me have become like porcelain dummies... dolls... fakes... so many quiet untruths, starched into rigidity by some vain pretense to usefulness... murmurs lost then later in a porcelain sea.

You might start thinking to shatter the world.

Planning.

But the world is not a porcelain sea.

The world is viable.

Navigable even.

Your porcelain sea is not.

No, I cannot find my way.

A storm is hurrying on across the skirts, across the edges of your...

Fragility.

A storm of world, or a storm of porcelain?

What would that be, a storm of porcelain? A resonance? The squeal of one lone thresh? A sort of delicate thunder?

The taste of a final straw, the last morsel of a given community’s sustenance barking its ultimacy at your inner ear? A guilt pang?

A rush of tiny fragments? Shrapnel of a luxury gone awry?

And luxury a porcelain vase, a container into which we throw all the matter of a selfhood we have determined to gamble against our hopes for an unending tour of possible pleasures.

And pleasures worlds, all possible worlds, we hope.

So every world is in the luxury, every possible world, with every bit of possible matter of a selfhood up for grabs, is thrown into the vase.

And the vase is crashed against some barrier of mortal or personal limitation.

An ending, I venture, an ending like all the endings to which we are so constantly irreparably drawn.

A border crossed? Could the coming of a porcelain storm in your inner reaches be the crossing of a border?

Everything is the crossing of borders. There is no other activity.

A milky indissoluble rain, then, could it be, a liquid extract from the further porcelain sea?

A hailstorm!

In the midst of these deliberations.

This is a first... it has never hailed here before... just as nothing here is now sacred.

Take it.

Take it all, why don’t you!

No, there is nothing left but a collection of porcelain fancies, mummified aspirations, careful little visions of perfection.

They laughed at ‘perfection’.

They most certainly did.

You’ve never heard such obscene certainty... you might guess there was a criminal intent.

Good people...

Have nothing like that, do they?

No.

Nothing so dry, so uncivil.

So totally ferocious.

Ferrous.

As still as a white lie in a minor key.

A porcelain sea, the stasis we’ve put on request, a white lie.

You might have forgotten; I did not.

I really can’t say where this will lead, this walk, this spongey waltz among so many porcelain dummies.

Can we touch them, scratch or break them?

No! They may be all we have.

Just.

Like oxygen.

Distribution of power.

One might detest need, for its persistence.

19. Still-life of Impetus, with Door

I dreamt there was a door at the foot of the driveway of my childhood home.

A broad, beautiful, even Byzantine, door of oak.

Ornate. Capable of speech, I was certain. Silent.

The light around it was a rarified gold, or the wood itself was becoming light, behaving in a golden way.

As if to say there was mystery contained in some other universe that waited behind it.

Beyond the limits of our childhood.

The mystery was everything that had not yet been a part of life.

It was a simple dream.

A dream that put the dreamer on a narrow thread of consciousness, strung between two diverging cosmic equations.

One helplessly broader.

One more devoted to soothing.

What became clear as I stood tediously on that thread was that time can break into multiple currents, that in those moments my time was wheeling around in some lower, less tentative part of my being, that on either side of my pause, two distinct currents were milling their way along over the smooth or jagged broken-stone realities that lay in their paths.

I dreamt it was my own inborn mission to find my place in that muddle of branchtimes.

To fit cleanly here or there, above or below, a piece of the current or a broken stone engaged in a lifetime of complex entreaties.

I didn’t like the idea of having to ask, politely, forever for everything.

I opened the glorious oak-gold door.

Saw colors I had never encountered before me.

Another Parisian daydream?

In the flesh.

Beneath my feet.

I took the first step.

The second.

Life was beginning.

To be something radically new.

I awoke.

Now, of course, in the steady spiral of a dream-addled day, it is left for me to interpret the tangle of the episode dreamt into the mesh of my remembered life.

A piece of myself has asked to be consciously assimilated.

Into the biography.

So to speak.

I will oblige.

I view the dream as a less-than-enigmatical, if vaguely mystical, commentary on the present evolution of my life.

The emotions do not need to be transferred.

No translation required.

I do not like the idea of having to ask, politely, forever for everything.

I do not fully comprehend the rigidity of the circumstances which keep me captive in this elaborate waiting game.

I will open the possibly Byzantine, possibly gold-soap-encrusted door which presently conceals my own active self.

I will venture out.

I will locate the place reserved for me in the muddle.

I have known the offices of the First Position.

The placement, the posture, the fortuitous encounter that precedes, that infinitely precedes, the starting-line moment.

A childhood.

Time for imagining.

Where humanity is at rest and beginning.

I have tasted the noxious air of the launching place.

Offal from the struggle against inertia.

Gravity.

Indecision.

Where humanity aims to be other.

Altern.

Metamorph.

I have already begun to walk.

Perhaps I will walk the whole way. Perhaps my journey will take me just down the road. Perhaps inertia is my mentor, my clue about immortality. Perhaps I will journey so far there will be land- bridges where now there churn, tempt, trudge, seas, straits, and glaciers. Perhaps I will cross into another current in time, organized by primordial ooze.

It may be a long way.

But I must commit.

To motion.

On foot.

Overland.

Over flustering footbridge.

On Philippine banca.

On Boeing.

I must commit.

To the specious project of my search.

The meaning of life, after all, is life.

For us humans: the search for the meaning of life.

Life: this vortex of secretions, not consumption.

This logic of the helix.

Plunging into itself to reach fulfillment.

Extension.

Life: it will be lived by this venturing-out.

Gain through release.

Stellar homeostasis.

A balance between inward and outward pressures.

Drinking in the refuse of comets.

Releasing a new formula for warmth.

Each step a pixel for tracing the architecture of a new Nirvana.

An invented.

A discovered place.

Pax ex-machina.

Idea Machina. A hybrid.

Suffice it to say, I have ventured out, and Flora’s trail is still within reach.

I’m on the trail of her trail.

So to speak.

It is more the bittersweet, tenuously homeostatic nostalgia in which the Us might be found that spurs me on, rather than any real intention of locating the She, or addressing her, or speaking foolishly of what we could have said or done.

It was the substance becoming light, behaving in a golden way, I wanted to retrieve, rather than the woman of flesh and bone. She needed her sovereign composition, her definition of self as free and choosing self. As I did my journey.

[ © 2000 Joseph Robertson ]

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