As waves roll through
As waves roll through, the character is tossed to the crest and hangs conspicuously pulled away from back-up of any solid walls. The undulations of the curtain sometimes take on dramatic swings that hang at their apex with aqueous antigravity. The passage I float upon is erected falsely in a vast cavern, far from any backing walls. A disintegrated palette of powdery wavelets rolls out again from the depths of each pleat in either direction with direction with incremental gradients each aligned with the vertical chute of its pleat. The movements taking place in the opposite direction of my progression I cannot confirm. They may be wavering in stillness as I rustle past. The colour maintains a translucency over the mist that appears to swirl up from the floor. With a watery bearing itself, the low-borne cloud transports a colourful light: a distant brassy blonde. The lower zones of the curtain are creamy, in shadow, stained in scallops to a filthy water aged brown. The colour of the curtain, which continues to roil, is more discretely arrayed than that of the cloud, in which the entire palette of the chamber is dissolved.
The value of the beige array increases as it skirts gently up the pleats. I run my gaze over the folds of champagne fabric. At their incurving edges I engage the disappearance of the thickened picture plane with a the opaline dusk I evade.
The extent of each pleat is of a purely muted colour that when passed by the mottled vapor of this breath I ride evokes, in an figurality uncharacteristic of a linear repeat, the ghostly profile of a stackable chair, the slender view of an ankle from behind, or a tumbledown tower of folded linens. Each dewy pastel appears to vaguely blend into characterless beige as it floats beyond the warp back into the convex depth of the pleat, which itself fades again, from beige to grey, immaterial. An incremental dissolution of pure taupe is at once, without a perceptible transition, the dissolution of pure cornflower is the dissulotion of pure sand where the continuous surface, a furrowing fabric cavern, translucently laps back upon itself at the cusp of convex and concave pleats. Some pleated depths were colourless or pale when a far cloud is drawn up by the movement of a distant kick, or the physical trace of my gaze.
Each colour body drifts through the air movements of a fabric lined cavern passage. The shadows of continuous vertical pleats maintain a contoured relationship with an impending catalogue of local objects. I sense chair-backs, stacked table cloths. These are after-images to a future me that I float toward, a context to snap myself into.
The billows in this fabric are unreliable transport due to their cadence. The billows come in sporadic pulses of varying durations, at variable intervals, and with a variety of intensities throughout each puff. The entire corridor gasps inward and curls about my gaze so that I can no longer see the icy light in the distance. The puffs come from varying sources lying close within the volume of the hall containing me. After an unquantifiable sequence of movements it is remarkable that the puffs repeast in sequences of five stations each with its own character of effects on the colours it passes over. Each station in the pulmonary cascade provides a new dance of effluvia to choreograph the curtain and its response. My view sweeps across the entire bank of colours, or the stacatto movement of the curtain flutters just three colours in a ruffled strobe, or a flat rolling settles on single colours for large portions of the station and covers many of the visible pleats with identical hues. The stations quickly decay and sweep into each other.
Upright yet, Lax, interlocking my movement with the writhing skin around yet distinct from me, I focus out into the drisk. The pall, receiving colourful light like a projection, drops away and has gathered across the floor. I am still. I accompany the frozen wrinkles and drapery. The perimeter hangings billow wavelike in the insistent exsufflation of an air conditioning register. Bands and wispy weavings of a taupe ground isolated from the mist step out into the billowing twilight. I visually skirt close to one side of the corridor. Diaphanous stage blacks comment upon the drama of my movement against the long wall of a theatrical gallery.
Proceeding with the presence of a cool breath, and exponentially tussling through the curtain-lined corridor, the character appears along the gallery wall. The pleats nod invalidly in intersecting wave patterns that send taupe to the recessed pleat bordered then by foregrounded steamy bands of mauve. Then, in the same location, or the next station I engage in the hall, the mauve pleat recesses to draw the taupe woofs to the fore. At the spine of each pleat, a character, a pure dry colour, gestates.
The pure yet vapid hue of the dawning light and its uniform intensity propose anomolies against the soft edge of the curtain. In a drisky blending transference the seemingly solid soaked bearer, wavering its pleated arrangements out across the airy corridor, completes the tripartite movement from the breath-rustled curtain edge brushing aside a cloud, the cloud settling in light amongst chair-legs and fingers, the chair-legs misshapen bronze glimmers rising out of the pleats and faults as the breath of my movement draws them in waves of visual peristalsis.
Splashes of gaseous colour slither amongst an obscure passage toward the hall. Rising away from the curtain on either side and impinging upon the route, my observations are drawn into the folds of material.
Within the cyclical shadows and invaginated folds of the pleats the material of the curtain is complete and continuous. The oceanic billows rolling over the fabric cause certain pleats in the sequence to lap up and outside the continuity of the curtain as it is transferred on to the next stretch of fabric. As the vertical selvedge of the curtain rises away from the system, a ghosted colonade of pleats is revealed. The layers of subterranean twilight are laminated indefinitely. Drawn into circuitous and ever more slender byways and corridors, my movements twirl in and around peeled away selvedges and dive within the shadowy greyness of deep pleats. The joints, locked within unknowable pleats, fall open before my movement, starting from the weighted base and rolling upward toward my horizon. In a catenary billow the rest of the joint falls upon me, starting from the weighted base. Sealing slowly, the closure brings on a dimness, then a cloudlet, passing, through my discontinuous body.
There is, in these dawn physics, the calculated possibility of the remoteness of all these phenomena. Character, defined by colour and moisture in this venue, is transmitted and recomposed through stations of reflections, breezes, appliques, and misperceived patterns. Colours against the lolling curtain, though recognizable, are so fleeting, diaphanous, Lax, I corroborate the stations with my out repetitive progress, and fix upon the fluidity only stable in certain instances of twilight that I chase behind curtain edges. Even in these instances, which, in the collusive essence light, vista, atmosphere, and diligence, harken a cyclicality of movement, it is not possible to forecast any impending openings at the seams of the curtain. The openings do not coincide with colour configurations. I turn upon myself over and again to slip between layer on layer of thick fabric. The cave walls and surfaces herein wrap back from a wan plane of light and limply settle away to run with the sheen of fresh refrigerant dew, visible only in the context of the dawn I move towards.
Still drawn in the character of the mercurial pleats, potentially familiar objects in the ornamental field that rise out of the dim are left obscure. Liquid traces describe profiles and edges with glimmering accents. The gradients that the edges of the pleats roll against diverge to form figures as a breath is coo’d upon the fabric. These hollow outlines are strewn across the curtain in interlocking repeat patterns that grow more dense as I leech deeper through the strata of limp curtains. The topographic contours drawn visually along the curtain make tangible the nebulously assembled catalogue of profiles that can be used to populate the cavern: nested furniture, columns of sheer linen, pale blue fingers, slender square edged stalactites, a highbacked chair draped with tafetta, a fanfolded linen, a precarious column of damp bone hued mugs, arrays of scaleless crenelated ellipses, honed metal tubes, pale blue clothing tied in knots, pillowy pads that sag with moisture, isolated constellations of rivets and screwheads. My gaze races across these phantasms, barely etched in their essence, collecting in the pleats and drenched with shadowy chaff.
I see figures erect, not moving toward me as I to them. I could see sleep, a greyness beyond this opaline dusk, that in a tesselated reserve, clasps fragments of a flesh body within the furrows of each curtain. The fragments are animated by the movement of the curtain. I peer behind the selvedge rising up from a mauve pleat. The seams and puckers of the rind in their soft undulations camouflage the sequential decay of the body into ever-flattened fragments. Once sedate, with the curtain visually stabilized, I stir back the tornadean chaos of the figures into uniform vibration. They return to discrete packets: fingers, thighs, apples, rendered in the colours of dawn and spongy blood.
The physicality of a tableau composed of these formations is tethered to my nerves through the layered, looping atmospherics of this gallery. Even as I progress blindly, the space of voyage seems to pass and transmit sensory characteristics. My gaze is fluid, yet wavering. Oft communicated sensory configurations are inconsistent with those accruing the pleats of the curtain. I gage my own reliablity with the thickening concreteness of an environment being coalesced from vapor.
The narrowing confines of subsequently deeper layers of the curtain give way to more persistent, yet tepid, luminance at each selvedge. It is an obscure interior moonglow possessing a soft hue that is given depth and presence only through the promise of its source. With gathering light, such profiles and characters that accrued against the curtain, now forming a complete dense patternwork across the scalloped pleats, begin to disintegrate. The figures are redefined by infinitesimal increments. A tablecloth develops into a loosely lashed bow. The movements within the pattern accompany my own in cadence. The clarity of the catalogue of elements grows with each layer of curtain I transcend.
The curtain, perhaps the last, is pulled back into place. The taut blacks once again shield the foamy light from a slender upright stria. I gaze upon a great dim hall. The extents of the space are hidden in shade.
Dissolving, the bandage before my gaze is undressed. I turn upon myself and the trailing clouds to apprehend the slotted face before a curtain-lined corridor. The stretch of wall to the left of the scene is papered with a repeating mountain landscape. The scallops tracing down the slope of the mountain are washed with mauve, sand, and cornflower.
A full night of breath can swell a foreign cave with moisture. The pulmonary haze slowly accruing from the tussling democratic lungs of the machine leeches through all baffles of papers, plastics, coats of plaster, and polycotton pleats hanging sheerly weighted and shifting against yarning breath. These fair gasps were visible in the upcurrents thrown from the empurpled landscape, and red lung tissue aerated to gauzy buoyancy that catches silvery luminance, is borne fluttering through a full basin of clouds toward fair frail palaces. High canals of mauve fog are turned liquid en masse in temperate morning exhalation.
