The Ecstatic Silence: 4
There can be no doubt that the architecture of these relationships – the watering hole, the walled garden, mid-afternoon pre-prandial artifact encounters, the undisputed priority of time to space – caught the zeitgeist in a butterfly net.
‘The house, the family, when it cracks up, all I’ll have left is this beehive and my bald children,’ the mother sobbed. Her heartfelt despair was unreasonable resin. It would work itself out. Their hubris was a shared monument where matter is subsumed by the composite of bronze and persecution mania. Here, as was common in nostalgia back then, walls, flower-beds, paths and lean-to sheds had fixed all the questions. Everything was matter free. Everything was repressed form. An addiction to suffocation after long bouts of napkin exhalation.
Reegan drove as if he nurtured a nascent material science. He took comfort from the falling leaves in the air, and the winding roads disguised as an unreasonable urgency to carve. Sundays were sacks of dental material. There was the suspicion that his face was nothing less than a complex orbit of conflicted gravities. Standing in the long greenhouse between the grape vine tendrils, tomato mixing buckets, jasmine, bougainvilleas and strict cacti he saw his shadow as an open Atlantic horizon, the bottom of a slope from his toes to where the wheelbarrow tested the mind with one-liners. He had a past and had a future, but then, so does a broken life-raft. Inside his heart fern-fossils dangled threats of nuclear waiting. Lurking in the interiors was where he lay down his life, a peerless structure of emotion and scheme. A simple man, if there are such things, dangling threats of strategically located flaws, irregularities in his engineered neutrality of organization. A simple tap would put the cat amongst the hounds. In Aristotle – these Aristotelian times were ending but remained a bruise in the atmosphere’s feathered slate nevertheless – error was a reliable symptom of matter’s elusive presence. Reegan drew on his pipe and inhaled the tobacco’s privation and mist.
