On the Subject of Islands

Now, to properly paint this picture, I will, at first, require heavy use of the colour blue: the deep, dark blue of the abyssal ocean where dwells that which no human has ever known, shall drown the canvas to create a first layer; the lighter hues of the glittering surface, where the sun’s rays dance in and on the rippling waves, with its many histories as a symbol of romance -although, what isn’t?- toy and farm, to safely hide all beneath; and the carpet of blank, featureless cerulean of a noonday sky, applied just so that the sun itself is swept away under its rug. And then I shall cover my eyes and throw a splotch of yellow, a bright hot beach of a desert island, and perhaps a sole coconut-bearing palm tree, to give shade and drink and company to a man sitting at its foot.

I think this man is twiddling idle hands, arms clutching knees to chest, and eyes looking back into blue that may be looking back at him, but there is no good way of telling at what a sky or an ocean peaks or pries, save to say that it certainly does.

How long he might have been there is, of course, entirely up for debate. But his fiddling and fidgeting is not that of a nervous man, or an impatient man, but a thoughtless, indolent, rhythmic tapping of digits, to some well worn, but not tired, tune. His expression bears the same weight as a carefree fly and surely he could not have a single trouble to whatever his name is.

Except that, maybe when the lapping of the eroding waves fades under the smothering darkness of night and the man looks up to a moon too distant to shine on the shore, with a set of stars barely bright enough to twinkle, he might feel a slight longing, just a little tug, for a dream he probably does not quite know -or remember?- and then, while his sandy island is picked apart by an incessant ocean, more and more it may be all he can recall.

But! While he mayn’t know his dream, we clever painters definitely do. So, if we bring the focus across some ways, through all the dimensions of space and time, we would find a larger island. More than any simple yellow splotch, the oceans cannot touch this one. Indeed, this island keeps its own small, domesticated ocean on a whim. It is so large that it may necessitate a new name: continent.

And this continent is blanketed with greens and reds and oranges and mixtures thereof across its entirety, and in the very centre lie not one man, but as many as can ever be counted. There, where they sing tunes of their own ecstatic excitement for the future, in memory of carefree happiness.

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I like to think that it is on that continent that any future can be made, such complex futures that no single person can imagine them and no single or multitude of single persons will. I like to fear that this continent has not, does not, will not or can not exist. I like to hope that we may have our own, sometime.

But then, somewhere off the coast of the continent lies an island chain, or even an archipelago, and then what or who is to say it is worse?