I see a different world out of the corner of my eyes. All the time, it encroaches on me but not enough that I can properly grasp it. I'm nearsighted. So I wear glasses for almost everything except reading. But, even accounting for the shift between that which I see through my glasses and that which is seen past that rim of corrected vision, the world is different. Things are shifted. Or in different positions from where they are when seen straight on. Out of the corner of my eye the world is a very different place.
This morning I'm driving down the road. And on the passenger seat next to me sits my purse and my backpack of things I take to the temp job. As I drive, looking forward, to my side I see my purse. But it's clearly sideways; it's fallen over and the side is now upward rather then the top. I turn and reach over to correct it - thinking it tilted during a turn perhaps - but when my eyes hit it dead-on, it's fine. Straight and level as it should be. It's not even unsettled and is resting normally on the seat. That's not what I just saw. Clearly from the side it had fallen over.
The world from the fringe is always slightly unseated the way my purse was. Things have moved; shifted; or different things are there all together. I find it happening with greater and greater frequency. There are even times - many of them, which frighten me into trying to not see these changes - people next to me. In that space between my site and my side, there's a world of possibility. And it's always showing something different from what else is around me. Always I turn my head, having half-seen something, only to turn and look and find there's no such thing.
Is this some trick of the eye? Product of some unintentioned imagination? Am I seeing potential - what could be, or perhaps in some other dimension, what is? Or does the world just shift and move in ways we don't understand. Is all of life changed by the sheer act of watching it? Does it remain in a flux until we spy upon it? The scientist with the sealed box...never knowing what lay inside for the process of gazing within it alters whatever it was unseen.
I don't know. But I find the clarity with which I note these changes improves. Does this bring me closer or further away from myself and reality? Is this normal or abnormal. Are we supposed to know this potential or are we not? And to what end can these half-seen differences bring me...?
Oddities. Oddities that need to be spoken to take the queerness from them. Though the questions remain. Just like the realms on the fringe.
~ flowers bloom near Memory and Dream
at 5/27/2004 07:44:15 PM ~
~
