The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

surfaces

"surfaces" 

The essence and truth of everything are usually under the surface, and all the secrets we seek to reveal will always be safe, unless someone owns the task of digging or diving.

The top of the water mocks and snickers, boldly tittering in the early autumn breeze, knowing that soon the ice will keep the secrets safer, below a crust of cold indifference. Somewhere beyond the liquid sunlight, beyond the searching human eye, are the fishes and the dead. There are crates of Prohibition era liquor, and wood from trees that died before the last century began. There are bones picked clean, by currents or living teeth, and there is history in every wave which comes up from under, lifted from the patina of the treasures of the deep. Somewhere, out there, is Amelia Earhart and Electra, the wreckage of Spitfires, Messerschmitts and Mosquitoes, with only the deflated and deteriorated uniforms of their crews in filmy tatters, the life in them sunk into the sea bottom and their blood part of a fluid undulation which will roll with the moon forever.

Somewhere in the desert, are the bones of those who never made it out, who forgot to pack their water, who were fooled by the sameness of this sabulous world and all of its misleading directions. Surely, there are riches from a time when the world was smaller, with gold and religious relics beneath the tons of rippled grains as well as the anguish of exile and banishment of those who were sent there for misdeed or opinion.

Under the rich, chocolate dirt of the forest, are the remains of those who took the answers with them. The who and the why, the how and the what. Lost daughters and sons who were too trusting, too naïve, returning to the earth as part of some depraved ceremony. The animals smell the secrets, and they dig, and they claw, emptying the earth of sleeping evidence and the answers that the living seek to find.

The beach across the way, with its sunny seashore and happy froth, is a veneer which covers the horror of a bloody time. It has soaked the life which swirled in its waters, and pooled on its sand, its belly is full of twisted metal and bullets, of flesh and sorrow. To look at it in the daylight, at the gleam of butter sun licking the waves, it would be difficult to think of what lies underneath; a story without a happy ending.

We spy the surfaces of these things, and see God in them. We see the beauty and the art, the gloss and the glamour, and we lose the truth, somehow. Oh sure, there is beauty, that’s certain, but the reality of nature, both human and environmental, has a way of quieting the aesthetic. The marrow and the meat of it are what holds it up, gives it weight. If there is God or spirit, it most certainly lies beneath the sheen, at the heart of it all, beating slow, beating quick, with all of the mystery around it.

The earth is the surface of our life and death. It owns the bodies of those who we come from, our roots twisting together with those of the maples and the weeping willows. We feed the insects that dwell there, and they in turn become a little bit like us, having consumed those who have made us who we are. It is a cycle of sorts, layer upon layer of the living and the dead, a perpetual strata of the ages with everything that breathed, hated or loved becoming part of something bigger in death than they ever were in life.

And then, there is the top of crème brûlée, with its hard amber, burnt sugar crust, sparkling like a gem in the firelight. To crack it and destroy the exquisiteness of it seems ruinous and vulgar, until a spoonful of what was under the crust is put on the tongue; it is something of a religious revelation, making the sacrifice in the destruction seem honourable and important.

In a mirror is an image, with its perfections and flaws, but none of it is real, all of it breaking down, cell by cell, day by day. A semi-stalled destruction, a slow-motion disappearing act. What is under it, or within it, is the truth, the essence of being and it is always gaining strength, slowly coming to power and evolving with experience and time. It feeds on what is, it becomes what it always was and it is what is left over when the armour falls down and away.

The surface is always incidental; a veil, a grinning distraction.