Then the dot starts unfolding from a singular point of contrast into a dry leaf into a stem into nerves and gray texture until it replaces the white completely. And leaves me in a field with an eye which is a balloon which is an eye.
The eye blinks magnanimously and just hovers there, looking upward, some distance from the ground. From its base hangs a basket and in the basket is a man that presently starts looking at me. An uneasiness comes over me when I realise my odd position, alone in this field surrounded by rows of vines and a distant, murky horizon.
I'm in the basket.
"I'm in the basket?"
"Yes."
I didn't realise I had spoken out loud so the response startled me.
"You should know that I had a man in here once. Fancied himself an amateur thinker, he presumed to explain to me that it seemed obvious to him that the eye with its constant upward gaze symbolised curiosity or even a perverse voyeuristic impulse that has enough momentum to lift a man from the ground but not enough to ever surpass this feat. And so this, he went on to confide in me, this is the reason why I am suspended here, some distance from the ground, not going anywhere. I was apalled and I promptly pushed him out of the basket."
I'm falling.
I'm falling.
f
f
f
f
f
f
f
f
flutter
What astonishes me is how the acute wave of panic brought on by my sudden plummeting to the ground is superseded by an even stranger emotion. I'm changing. My breathing is different, I am no longer cold, my arms feel odd, I can no longer see in front of me. A melancholical desire for perching on a tree-stump comes over me.
I'm a bird.
A raven.
Thoughts are now clipped. Short wantings. Need to feel. Craggy. A craggy scent? All of this smothered in a warm desire to go up and see.
I am now above the eye and through this renewed perspective it is the black pupil that intruiges me the most, I can see myself reflected there but different. I can see myself going in there and coming out some other place. I must dive into it.
And I do.