The Maze: Convalescence

...and other mazes.

A blackbird overreacts and a red brown wren of microscopic proportion and astronomical fury breaks screaming towards the forestry which swallows it in a gulp and continues to observe me with the indifference of a two-by-four. I surmise the forest is practicing for its final examination. I am alone. I was alone before and now I am alone again. Also I am beyont. I should explain. Beyont is that place where nothing is done which cannot be done one-handed and thinking of something else. It is the place for writing and painting and on a good day the spot where in secret and shady nooks poetry might unexpectedly be found, as are found, in the real world, wild and edible mushrooms. Some say it is a good place to convalesce and for that I am here.

Beyont and the everyday world do not mix. The everyday world requires for the safety and success of its operation enormous amounts of thought logical. As you might imagine thought logical hurts, and particularly hurts the head, for it drags this poor organ by main force from its rooted and natural habitat, which is the state of beyont, and into the bland world of practicality. I have today risen from my fever bed. My head wishes not to be hurt for a while.

On either side of me the dead grass like golden telegraph poles has fallen under the rain, and wild angelica rises through it umbelliferous and strung with coins. Umbels of buachalán too provide a proscenium for butterflies and bees and today strange wanna-bees in wasp disguise have come to suck and strut their stuff. A white butterfly trimmed with black fur is sipping nectar from a knapweed crown, so got up you’d think she had dropped into the wrong neighbourhood. Like a stray thought, blown far from point of origin, she drinks one-handed.

At this moment I am in a maze, mindless and mapless, and have no need whatsoever to think of anything, let alone the sharp possibilities offered by the needles of compass points or directions or the meaning of life. I do not even have to follow the sun, if there were ever one here.

For now there are three mazes that chart and preserve my present daily movements. These three allow me to commute mindlessly and unthinking from one place to another and back again every day which is a considerable and cumulative saving in energy.

Firstly there is the night maze, the carpet path that winds about among cottage obstacles during the hours of darkness and creeps through unseen doors opening them easily under my somnambulatory fingering at 2am and at 4 am and at 6am. This path with the utter certainty of a 500 year old Tudor maze leads me from my bed to the bathroom and back again without the need to absent myself from the sweet beyont of dreamland or to grope for an empty bottle.

Secondly there is my self-constructed concrete path decorated with intaglio impressions of blossoms in season to prevent slipper slippage which leads me every morning before breakfast as securely as the hand of the Creator out from my back door through the visible universe of flower and vegetable beds and improbable encounters with other strayed sheep to its distant termination at the compost heap. Then having allowed me to meditate on the inevitable future of all those born of woman it guides me back with value-added gloom and despair to where I came from in the first place and the rich consolation of a mess of pottage.

And then thirdly there is the afternoon maze, the bóithrín. Which is where I am now and to which I shall return anon.