Borges on a train entering a tunnel and losing his eyesight while reading at dusk…

The nightmare arrives without formal warning. Our worst fears dressed for the occasion and summoned upon the main stage, leading us around with spotlights and antics as if this audience were ensnared in a web of marionette strings. 

Like children, we gasp and flinch at the mute clown whose loudest gestures we recognize as jesters of our own expressions clamoring for attentive eyes and diamond focus but with chins chained to chest, we gift our gaze on the narrow gravel road reciting, Left, Right, Left Right.

The shine comes in on the sides.

The tunnel approaches. It to we-not we to it. Willingly we accept this sinking into darkness, feeling the bends on our bodies and resisting the urge to vocalize the high screech of metal upon metal, friction made to mimic terror or prayer. 

The corners fill with as much darkness as they can manage to save for sacred things and on-lookers limited by right angles.

The movement came before we lost our balance.

A fine tune for depth perception like middle C, all was lost when he came out the other side. And although he managed to feel his way on rails, inside the steel lines, the white noise made the colorful words sing with sharper clarity amid the fog that marries the man, floats its burden or necessity for water, never lifting the veil or the pall that bears the name Borges. 

Fingers down spines one feels gilt different from the rest. Dimes in the mines, dust did not mask the irony. The writer, the reader, the dance, the proper forms.

The dusk haze came with the warning, “Do Not Read in dim light”, the dream played live, the reeling words and fading vision, the black hole in the mountain that approaches its target, the train pushes on a winter’s night for willing travelers, shearing snow with pointed blades to suspend belief like vision and baggage, and an able composer setting the tempo as all rush and silence, a sensation of propulsion faster than the speed of life can make out in numbers. Wind rattles the windows.

The final destination felt like Home in bed.

Image credit By Julie Méndez Ezcurra (Escaneo Negativo Original) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Around the Bend: Trains (1)

There’s something about train stations and Mars-the canals (perhaps Percival planted that seed), No-the subversion, Martian-ness of this group travel, the train itself evocative of not just red and coal, gases and defiance, power, toxicity, it’s the Industry of it. And there is where one will certainly find the great hidden labyrinths below ground like in Paris. The romantic always interjects, yes, that is the fascination, the obsession, the fear, the fix of revolt and intrigue, our responsive, elemental self, raw and open to receiving. I see the train and I think I’ve seen it before. Not this one, not the ones in my town, in my lifetime.  The station itself, a hub I never frequented but feel at home. It is because it is so familiar, the sounds of multiple people bubbles jumping around one central location barely aware of one another, the sounds of such business on high and then a momentary hush, a warm wind and everyone suddenly remembers they are in the same place as others, going somewhere that is not here-together-today-anyway.

My grandfather was in the song “Morning Train” by Sheena Easton-not really, but it is certainly about him taking the morning train into the city-my grandmother would pick him up at the station in the evening with “the car” and notoriously kick up her left foot when they kissed before making the 40 minute drive home into the suburbs. That is true. I think he’s waiting for me at the train station, anytime he may be on one of the trains I impatiently anticipate that infallibly has nobody on it that I know, but I smile at them anyway since everyone likes to be welcomed home-even by a stranger at the train station thinking about the tunnels on Mars. 

Image By War Office official photographer, Horton (Cpt) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. W. Churchill waiting @ train station.