Stillness in motion, motion in stillness. Lao loved such paradoxes.
The train driver crouched in the doorway of his beloved train. He was genial and a bit hot. Crouching made him seem very tall. Sam loved the awkwardness of the angle, loved the idea of the train driver high up on the steps, crouching, and of Lao, low down on solid ground, talking up.
The conversation was difficult because the driver spoke in French, Lao in English. But the spirit was somehow right. Lao noticed the driver’s eagerness, his willingness to comply, and his nervousness in front of the camera. It was endearing.
A paradox emerged and Jim, strangely animated by a new sense of mission, latched on to it, and wanted it amplified. Mistletoe stood away from it all, in an enchanted zone, drawing, sketching, seeing nothing but colours and emblems.
The driver’s name was Luke. In his diffidence he revealed something interesting. It struck Lao that being a train driver was one of Luke’s fantasies. But he learned that his greatest love was gardening. One was the perfect antidote to the other. The perfect complement. And so their conversation revolved round this circulum – the love of speed, the cultivation of a garden, of stillness.
Lao was struck by the facts: four times a week Luke spent most of his working hours with trees, roads, houses, and sometimes rain hurtling towards him at nearly two hundred miles an hour. While the train, from a distance, seemed to be an enchanted thing, weaving a graceful curve through languid countryside, in the driver’s compartment, however, it seemed as if the whole world was throwing itself at him, tearing towards him, then vanishing past him, like a life lived at high speed.
Contemplated metaphorically, Lao couldn’t help wondering if it didn’t make of his life something of an hallucination: with the train as the mind dying in a dying body, reviewing in swiftness all the events of a life in time’s duration. How swift is the passing of terrestrial things. How brief is a moment of time lived. How tenuous can memory be when things pass so swiftly. How illusory time must be when maintained at a principle of speed. How passing over the same landscape hundreds of times does not make it many landscapes, but the same terrestrial dream, incapable of expansion, or of minutiae. How a brief life, crowded with significant activity, becomes a long one. How speed makes of nature a painting, a stillness, thus contradicting the laws of visual motion. How a new life paradigm can be sketched from the rapid progression through a life that is swept along by the marriage of fate and will. How reality curves. How speed distorts time. How time distorts vision. How memory is a blur, but becomes a briefer blur when speed enters into the picture. How with such quickness it is impossible to linger, in memory, on a single witnessed incident – an adulterous kiss snatched in an orchard, a beautiful girl’s skirt blown high by the wind and revealing curvaceousness in a flash too quick to translate into desire, a moment caught in a field of wheat, a man striking down another with a shining sickle, seen too fast to ascertain whether it was merely a farmer at work, a moment registered in wrong perspective, or a legitimately witnessed murder. Things that tantalise and infuriate the mind, and which also blot out of perception things subsequently seen. Because for something to be seen requires consciousness, and if the mind is dwelling on a previous detail it sees nothing afterwards but its own thoughts and reactions. And so much remains always unseen where there is much that fascinates the mind and eye.
To Lao it seemed a whole philosophy lay in the paradox, a life lived at speed, with many gaps in perceived reality, many things and events not looked at properly or deeply, which would later haunt one as fragments of dreams. A life viewed all mixed up, with dreams unclear. Life tending towards dream. Like the swift mysterious life of Alexander the Great. A life which because of so many mental puzzles, so many incidents to report, to perplex, leads the mind towards a preference for stillness. Preference for a life where things are given time to unfold, to reveal their hidden wonders or terrors. Preference for a life where seeing is just as difficult because it requires such stillness of heart, such patience, such concentration, such quietness of mind, such motionlessness of spirit.