The White Room
The room is not mine.
One window frames an ash tree. One window lenses the world.
From the wide lens of your window I can see an album of ordinary life. There’s a woman unfolding a music stand with metallic determination. She picks up a flute, begins to play, and soap bubbles of notes break against your glass. The music is floating but the woman is standing very still. The strange thing about her is that she is naked. Yes, quite naked, her spine as long and straight as her flute, her vertebrae like the keys of the flute.
I pushed up the window to let in the music. We were floating Mozart. Why is it that the real things are fragile and tough, destroyed so easily, but never damaged? Lost to us endlessly - stupidly, unknowingly - but in themselves always found again, when time opens like a door.
I walked into you.
Where is the green door in the green hill? Summer and winter I marked paths that led me nowhere, blind trails that tunnel ground the way moles do, sniffing it, scenting it, digging it sideways with both hands, reading the ground like the palm of my hand.
Upturned, I have tried to follow the heart line, but the way has been closed. Wait patiently, without hope, for the miracle that cannot be coaxed.
All the stories advise me that one day the hill will open, in the shining hour, when time and space and desire hinge the solid world into a door.
The white room is a chapel
Like all sacred spaces, it does and does not exist. It has joists and floorboards and damp and doorjambs. It can be bought and sold. At the same time, what is valuable here cannot be traded in the market place. What is valuable here is a quality of light. Light that changes as we do. Light as subtle and uncatchable as human beings
We are fallen angels netted in light.
The white room is a hospital.
It happens on the borders between healing and pain. The light is as surgical as a laser. The light finds me out. My soft tissue is exposed. Parts of me have been cut away.
I had a wound that would not heal. You rummaged your hands through it and it bled again. It bled clean this time, and the poison left me. That wound has been infected for years. It will never heal but it is not infected anymore.
My body is clean.
The white room is a rendezvous.
Past and future meet here, if not as friends, that at least not those old enemies, the hostile brothers, warring over the same girl.
I am jealous of the present. The present is a lover always slipping away. The present comes chaperoned by memory, and lottery to desire. The present is a bartered bride.
How to love what is now? How to make love to time?
Time is what stops everything from happening at once
It’s a good explanation but not enough. My life is simultaneous - whatever the artificiality of time. I experience life as calendar, as diary, as anniversary, as event, but when I remember it, - the walls between are as thin as stud partitions.
The house and its staircase and its rooms have been divided to provide a number of apartments. Here I am in the basement. Here I am on the top floor. Here my lives are living quietly apart, but always in earshot. Here I am subdivided into tenancies that call themselves separate but remain one house. One staircase is all I have - forget the dividing doors. One staircase, and these locks and keys.
Past, present and future are separate apartments in the same house.
The white room is a mystery.
The owner is often away. Time sleeps here - among the sixteenth century furniture and the twenty first century life. Some people buy antiques because they are old - other people buy them because they are still alive.
Time can be caught in objects.
When I touch this table where a woman counted out her past like money, I too start to bargain with life - what will this cost me? What can I expect in return?
She tells me the old story, her fingers stroking her memories. Time is tarnished, but not where she touches it - where she touches it, time is worn thin from being turned over Time thin enough to lose between floorboards. Time worn bright with love.
Love is the story. This story. This time.
The white room is where we nade love.
What is desire?
Desire is a restaurant. Desire is watching you eat. Desire is pouring wine for you. Desire is looking at the menu and wondering what it would be like to kiss you. Desire is the surprise of your skin.
Look - in between us now are the props of ordinary life - glasses, knives, cloths, Time has been here before. History has had you - and me too. My hand has brushed against yours for centuries. The props change, but not this. Not this single naked wanting you.
Sacrifice time to desire.
This current of desire was underground and cold.
Love has sun-warmed me.
I had been subterranean for too long. I didn’t know it, but the river was moving towards the surface. There was a space, an opening, and you were there. The river burst out of its secret waterway, and you were there.
My body is a river - swim in me. My body is deep enough for diving.
She’s beautiful - oh yes. Golden and dappled and played over with light. Touch her, and together we unclothe time. Kiss her, and time yields.
Put out my hand, and time is bone - life’s frame, but not its flesh. The flesh is here - on her body - this living moment - and ours because we claim it.
Inside her, and time is gone. She is open and empty and free.
Inside her, and time liquidises into love.
Make love to me.
We lie together, skin close enough for grafting. When I kiss you, I give you all the words that room in the roof of my mouth. When you kiss me, you give me the shape of silence.
The theatre is empty. Everyone has gone home. Shall we go home now, to the place where no one is watching? To the place where time stops?
I love you
Combing the hill, I loved you.
Parting grass like an equation, I loved you. I wanted the symmetry and the balance not obvious to counting. I had to work you out, work you until I knew you. I had to solve the problem before I knew what it was.
What was it?
This. Listen carefully.
Enchantment is subject to no release but the breaking of a spell.
The enchanted can cook bacon and eggs like anybody else. The enchanted can fill in their tax forms and bet on a winner at the races. The enchanted bear children - who sing in choirs. The enchanted are just the same as the rest of us, unless you catch them by chance - staring into the water as if it were a crystal ball.
You called me and I came. You unstoppered the bottle and I flew out. I was imprisoned in a tree. I was lost on an island. I had only the memory of desire to guide me. I could not free myself.
I was walking round and round in circles. The circles of enchantment that are magic and cliché. They are so known, so predictable, even the language we use to describe them is worn.
Round and round in circles. And then I found the place I had lost. The place where the enchantment started. The place where I sacrificed desire.
The place where I sacrificed desire to time.
I thought it would come right. I thought the clock would bring it -as if time ever carries anything in its hands except itself. I thought the seasons might unfold it, but spring can only prompt what is already sown. Summer can only flower what is grown. No tree, no harvest. No stirrings of desire when there is no desire.
I do not believe that desire is better that love. Desire is not life either. But when desire is so mixed with love and life, that to sever one is to injure all, the wound is too deep.
I should have kept the pain I had, - pain of loss, pain of memory.
I know I loved and lost. Then I made the mistake of not loving enough, and won.
How shall I conjure with this? What shall I make of these fragments - each one sharp enough to cut me again?
When I met you I was moving like a blind arrow shot in time of need. I was flint-sharp, flint-primitive. I was aim, arrow, and target. I wanted to be wounded again. I did not want to seal myself against life. I would rather be cut than dry.
Is everything in this life about love or its lack?
I want to touch you. I want the sweat of skin. Salt and blood are better remedies than talk. No talk found me the spell. The need of you and the touch of you found me the spell.
Time passed. It always does. In the white room there are no clocks. The white room is a lover’s room, and we keep time on the run.
How long have I got? I don’t know. The beating heart of our love may stop at any time. How can we hold what cannot be held? How can we measure what cannot be known?
How long is a spell?
But though you enchant me, I am not enchanted. I am free.
The white room is a place of freedom.
No longer love’s exile, I claim a closed land. The door is open - pass freely. I never thought to be inside love again. I never thought to kiss the homeland of your body. I know this place so well - I used to live here. My house fell down and I was captured. Where have I been in these heavy clothes that exiles wear? I am naked now, in the sun of my own land.
My own land. Not you, love, who none but love can own; but love itself, and you its emblem. Let me wear you on my shield.
Love has rescued me. Love has carried me home. There is music in the room. You are in the room. Lie down with me under this skin-white love. This love is ours…
