Wednesday, May 29, 2013

A Curious Confluence: Chapter Nine–Thoughts of the Seine

I recently awoke near dawn and saw the Seine with its mirror surface broken only by the passage of an upriver bound barge. The glittering ripples thrown by the wake were slashed and splashed with gold and coral. I took a picture of it.

This picture has haunted me since that early morning.

The intense beauty of the scene captured by my camera is not the haunting component.

That is merely an aesthetic component.

The haunt is the feeling that wells in me from a place that I never knew was there until I saw this scene. And the feeling is one with which I have no experience. I am therefore unable to identify it, to categorize it, to give it a name, or to place it in some sort of time and space scheme.

The best I can do is to say that what I feel every time I look at that picture is what I felt on that dawn when I first saw it: I am somehow deeply involved with this view of the river. The beauty of the scene is only the attractive present day wrapping of something that is below and within. It is something that has been – although a thing that I sense to be unseen in this age - in existence and underway for a long, long time.

And it is something of vast importance to me, if only I could delve to where it is.

When I have these thoughts my sleep written document continually thrusts the term “curious confluence” into my mind. Curious indeed.

No comments:

Post a Comment