They went from little Arcadias to large ones; from a train-driver’s humble garden to the vast cultivated acres of a king.
But before that they had a day off. They were entering the spirit of the journey. Away from their homes, from their moorings, from the familiar, they were becoming more alive, more vulnerable, and in some ways more open.
They had slept and dreamed, each in their different ways. And each had woken to a day peculiar to them. Lao and Mistletoe had woken early and wandered the streets of Paris at dawn. The smell of the city at that hour was so new to them. They watched the road sweeps at work. They watched the waiters bringing chairs out to pavements and smelled the fresh coffee rising from the cafés. They watched the early risers and the dawn workers, people of all races, as they hurried on to their workplaces. They seemed so different from the early risers back home, and even the sight of them here held a certain charm.
The city was waking slowly. The armed gendarmes outside the Élysée palace paced up and down, fully armed, and stared at them with mild suspicion as they went past twice, looking for a good café where they could have a nice breakfast. They found one, and Mistletoe chatted to the tall waiter, asking about news of the city. They were the first customers of the day. All about them chairs were still upside down on the tables.
Lao sat passively, staring into the pages of Virgil’s Eclogues. He was staring beyond the words, beyond the abstract marks on the old cream pages, into something beyond the words, the reality that lurked behind them, but not in them. He was thinking what a magic operation writing is, what a symbolic, a signic activity it is, how it is so secretly based on the interpretation of signs, the translation of signs into a mental reality, an inner reality, an inner world. He was thinking how much the words create the worlds within, and the worlds within enrich the world without. Reading too is a magic operation, a translation, an act of mental creation, or miscreation. An interpretation. A connection. All reading, he felt as he stared into the labyrinth of the pages, is the challenge of magnifying what is silent in the text. It is reading with an inner magnifying glass. Reading what is there and not there. Reading the margins, the gaps, the spaces between the lines and between the words. Reading the punctuation, the ellipses. The invisible words too. Or else, reading is passive. And so reading is a hymn to the challenge of the imagination and the intelligence, humanity, and sensitivity of the one who reads. They make the world within the words greater or smaller. But the artist shapes and compresses and hides the signs that spring from their coiled places, and makes them capable of such magnification when the reading mind is open to them and meets them with commensurate creativity. Reading well is as creative and as rare and as rewarding as writing well. And Lao felt that the world was much like that too. Life, the world, society, reality, history is a sprung text that we endlessly learn how to read better. Experience is a living text written in our immortal memories that we endlessly learn how to read better. Some signs are harder to read, and we need to learn more to be able to understand them. Some texts dwell in disguise, and we misread them, or don’t see them at all. And others live in quiet hiding, among the simplest things, and yet they are connected to the most profound things of all. How alive and how free and how enlightened one must be to be able to read the texts of living and the text of books, Lao was thinking, ruefully, as he stared into the pages.
Mistletoe drank her coffee, thinking much the same things, but in relation to art, to painting. She was thinking how reality is one vast complex painting, a living painting, full of riddles and meaning, of enigmas and hinted fates. She was thinking that there was as much chiaroscuro in life as in painting, and as much depth, concealed interiors, as much sfumato, as much smokiness around key significations that don’t necessarily announce themselves as such. There was as much mystery hidden right on the surface of things, difficult to see like all deep things that dwell transparently on the outside, extending their realms of meaning and ambiguity in the deepest places of the person who looks. And there was as much simplicity in the depth of things, the utter simplicity of an absolute truth, dwelling in the greatest depths. So that to one who knows how to make and how to see, the truth of things is both right there in front of you on the surface, transparent and clear, as well as deep down where only the bravest and the wisest can go. All true seeing is a testament to the person who sees. You see what you are. You create what you are. You read into a painting, into the world, what you are.
These two creatures ate their breakfasts, and drank their tea and coffee, in absolute silence, staring at the world, at passers-by, at the café owner, at the prints on the walls, at the chairs and tables, at the people hurrying past outside the large glass windows of the café as if they were in a different reality, a separate space.
These two creatures stared at the things going on outside as if they were flowing inscriptions, living hieroglyphics, motions in a vast living painting, pregnant with mystery.
They stared at everything like children. In that Parisian dawn all the world seemed an infinite text which the spirit reads, but the brain doesn’t.
One can be ignorant while still inwardly growing.
They stared silently as they woke with the waking of the city.