Caroline Caddy

It’s something they carry with them – explorers  night shifts  seamen – like a good pair of binoculars or a camera case perfectly and deeply compartmented. It has a quiet patina that both absorbs and reflects like a valuable instrument you have to sign for – contract with alone – and at the end of the voyage you get to keep. Sometimes it’s very far away. Sometimes so close at first you think the person next to you is picking up  putting down a personal cup a book in another language before you realise what – when talk has moved off leaning its arms on someone else’s table – is being handed to you.

Like buying a ticket inland to barely understandable provinces with no language at all I bargain and pay for this warm planet tipping the scales of wrist and elbow spreading my fingers with its weight to read my life-line my heart-line my seams and mounds of fortune. I stare into the sun on smoggy evenings the throat of an old street oven that seems to expand as I anticipate its glow engulfing my solar system. I open my mouth and China fills it sliding into tartness forcing my lips to begin its name over and over then finger-painting my chin with the gel of ripeness. I swallow the pabulum of infancy the sweet mucilage of age. It makes me eat like a person alone who hasn’t loved for years. There seems to be no core the few black seeds hardly noticed in its one undifferentiated cell other tongue that makes mine lazy    the flavour . . . the flavour is . . . my hand moves like an incantation through an alley of blunt flames that can be eaten with a spoon. I gorge on a people’s staple fat Buddha   squat Amida repeat three times persimmon persimmon persimmon and go to heaven.

Someone said that working through difficult equations was like walking in a pure and beautiful landscape – the numbers glowing like works of art. And in the same crowded room a woman I thought I didn’t like was singing to herself – talking and listening but singing to herself too and instantly with the logic of numbers I liked her as if she had balanced something I couldn’t. The corridors are long and pristine but I’m not lost – just working towards some minute or overwhelming equipoise.

Be precise authority is magic. When you think you've got it straight wax wane declination feel the movement under your hand one summer morning as you observe it set then rise that night. Always use a well-sharpened pencil followed by a good eraser. Watch the white emerge.