Stateless...

The sky is in soft focus this morning, prarieland that sweeps away to the horizon. Mauves, purples, lilacs bend with the subtle kiss of white marking boundaries for the herds. I have not yet woken up, so my mind moves seamlessly from the beauty of morning light to half finished thoughts and imaginary happenings; the rhythm of the train escorting me from state to state as the stations arrive and depart. It is a morning of cotton wool and icy breeze.

Caught between states is a curious place - not able to act on the pressings of my mind, yet able to travel on a whim between times and places, memories and suppositions, and create a geography that is released from Newton's (or God's) tyranny of bobbing apples. Here everything is familiar, but everything is strange - a world I create but don't control. There is a sense of the unreal - akin to orientating yourself in a new place that you know well, a feeling of being a tourist - or an immigrant. Here the familiar human is juxtaposed with the difference of culture and landscape. 

A hillock passes, trees crown it, knotted into patterns that are gnarled and regal. The image is bathed in witchlight still, the twists and turns becoming crevices and gaps in the fabric of the universe. My surroundings break out of expectation in my mind. 

This post has been germinating for days, tapping into fragments of thought and idea that have been buzzing at the back of my mind. The buzzing became a swarm as I made the trip over to the Lake District and down the north west coast - observing mountains that flocked towards the valley floor and beaches that mirrored the sea and sky becoming a landscape of glass - giving me images that made sense of each fragment and gave pictures a sense of sequence and the rudiments of plot. 

This was strange for me. After all I love words, I love to write and create imagery and paradox and juxtaposition and all that. But I hate plot. I never see it in advance, or if I do I recognise it from the works of others - not a crime I know, but it makes me feel... uncomfortable. But now a plot begins to form, and one that lets the elements begin to breathe, where before I had to fight - pounding the chests to get some sense of a choke or cough, before acknowledging my wasted effort.  

Now my random pictures start to flow into the flickbook they are, and I begin to see where they are going.