I was off school again with the asthma we’d hatched to warrant her fretful attention.
When I was her only kid, it had worked for us both, but now it was wearing thin.
Sensing, correctly, that my boredom would do for me, she said Son, we live when we live.
There are only three channels on TV and one is just showing the test card till noon.
Right now, there’s little alternative to using your imagination. It was a word I only knew
through the phrase ‘you and your imagination’, so was at first perplexed by her encouragement.
Listen. None of the magical things in Bazooka Joe adverts that you wrote off to America for –
the wristwatch TV, the sea-monkeys and the X-ray specs – will ever arrive in Dundee.
But I’ll show you something far more extraordinary: just stare at that picture for long enough, and it’ll come alive.
And, after a while, it would move: the blue yacht was now – look – pulsing through the sea,
small waves glittering at her hull, the foam rolling from her stern; the white cat on the brick wall would slink out of view
then slink back again, while the clock tower in the blue distance put on a minute, then another;
the freckled red-haired girl would blink, blink again, then wrinkle her nose at me, the way real girls never did,
and the clouds slowly move off like a white caravan, swaying over the hills. And it’s a talent I’ve never lost,
nor could if I tried. After ten minutes every art show is a bank of televisions, so I avoid them.
I stare my own lunatic romance into every fixed thing. (I wouldn’t sit too still if I were you.)
One day – I was maybe ten or eleven – I found there was nothing I could do to make them fast again.
Worse, every scene had been pursuing its own life in the meantime. I think it was the white cat first,
the morning I saw him licking the blood on his paw, and behind him, the clock tower’s frantic semaphore.
And now when I visit my mother’s house, the boat heaves in a silent storm, its sails billowing and snapping,
the train of clouds wheels above the darkening hills, and the young girl has turned her face
towards an unseen window, her eyes glossy, her smile forced, and a name forming and forming at her lips.
But around forty years later I found an odd compensation. While I couldn’t stop the film of the world
I could cut its frame-rate to a stutter. With practice and meditation, I got it down
to one exposure every clock-tick, then every exhalation; I thought that this must be the way
trees know the world, humans blinking in and out of the frame like ghosts, if they see us at all.
Empty rooms would fill with bodies, suddenly conjured to their place; skies would darken or explode in light;
I learned to turn a snowstorm to a miniature galaxy, a boring party to a marionette store, a waterfall to a glacier.
Eventually I took to going to the hill, where I would slow my breath and wait
for that moment the sun touches the earth and all the shadows get to their feet,
that time of rose and amber and violet, when the still water returns the light a hundredfold.
I’d stop it there, and sit for an hour; then when I felt the chill, I’d blink, and it was dark. I love it, this freedom
to choose one’s instant and hold it fast. I assume you can see where I’m going with all this.