Collections of this Kind

The spaces between

I was 15 when the nature of reality changed. We imagine such metaphysical changes to always be marked by the dramatic, but, as many actually are, this was initiated with the everyday. Walking to the bus stop after school one afternoon, my attention was drawn to the disused post at the entrance to the grounds. I can't imagine why I noticed it this first time, other than being generally observant about the world1, for it was a simple metal pole, obviously at some point carrying a parking notice or other small road sign, but now just a lightly rusting post at a slight angle, alone in a plane of pavement tarmac. Perhaps it was the ridiculousness of its continued existence, or perhaps its lonely incongruity against the aesthetics of the surroundings, but at that moment it seemed to me inherently out of place. And, indeed, the more I stared at it, the more out of place it became – or rather, the more the place disappeared, and the more the world was just the pole, the tarmac expanding to concentrate the praeternatural geometry of it: lone, leaning, in an infinite and otherwise flat space. After some minutes of this strange effect, it snapped back into the world, but was left sharpened in focus, with a numinosity which then spread at pace to everywhere I looked – from the pole to the nearby road and houses, the local canal basin, the pub across the water, to the trees and hills beyond, such that what became real, geometric, and solid, was not the pole and the surrounding objects themselves, but the negative space between these objects, and its resultant geometry.

This unearthly shift in perception progressed with me for days. I no longer understood the world as objects-in-space, but as space-between-objects, the objects themselves, cars, trees, houses, people, became nothing but complex and dynamic geological infill within perceived surfaces2. I, myself, transmuted into this self-same chemical morass, and then finally disappeared, becoming nothing but an observer – the universe observing its own becoming.

Somehow, I managed to maintain the impression nothing had changed, following the forms of polite, and impolite, society3. Nevertheless, I look back now with astonishment and some optimism at the way in which I handled this transition. It caused a radical change in my relationship with the world, perhaps distancing me from it, though perhaps bringing with it a compassion for the pathways taken by humanity4.

This strange, and perhaps schizophrenic, shift in perception lasted three years, during which I kept up the pretence of a normal life. Finally, as a first year university student I happened to read Robert Aitken's "Taking the Path of Zen". Recognising something of my experience, within a moment it stopped5. To this day, I don't know whether this was a positive change or not. Perhaps it was simply a change, unlaiden with values, like the difference between life with and without children; the change between two perfectly reasonable states of being. And now, while I can still bring back this shift in perception at will, I rarely do, for it brings a strangeness to negative space that is hard to apply usefully to life6. Nevertheless, I am grateful that it remains part of me, and has opened me to a richness in my understanding of the world, and within that, the place of humanity.

07 May 1986

Six months on, an addendum: I find I am going blind, quite fast, with cataracts, and it is only now I realise the singular usefulness of this shift in perception, for it allows one to lessen the importance of the increasingly fuzzy surface of things, concentrating instead on navigating the space between them. I find myself pushing into this state again with increasing frequency.

8th Sept 2024