Mark Manders, Short Sad Thoughts, 1990
Short. A length. It gets longer. Pressure makes heaviness felt. Its all just a drag. Dont pull me down with you. The short, sad truth is that its double. The short, sad, unbearable truth is that its double. This chain keeps getting longer, keeps getting weaker, the further. From the shore the chains anchor is stuck in the bedrock. During a deep blue squall, a golden line resting on the horizon. Resting, on the wave double peaked, would be luxurious, a breath, hard won. The effect of the pull is the splitsecond recognition of our lack of possession. Everything hangs on this, you might say, diverting me from the gravity of the situation. Short sad thoughts are the punctuation of days that get heavier, increasingly gilded in triviality, diversion. And what are these points but holes in which what has been contained is allowed to escape. With, each, drip, a, small, truth, each, drip, allowing, more, breath, each, drip, that, makes, it, easier, to. Think of those two moles, caramel, one under each eye, perfectly aligned, equidistant from the bridge of your nose. From left to right, reading the line, going up and then down again, I am attempting to meet your eye. Then left to writing down the story of a deflected gaze, a downturned arc that can only return itself to me.
Before this gets over sentimental, and before I become too lachrymose, its time a make a break, draw a large breath in. So, two lines, each bent with equal force in dull brass, to create a mirror
when placed side by side to the other. This is what it is, a material fact, so Ill take this forward as something to hold onto in this act of over interpretation. Am I reading too much into it, seeing a ship rolling under waves in terminal submersion, only to rewrite itself, with an alien, supernatural buoyancy. Is it over the top, seeing two tears, distended and endlessly flowing, or more like two links of that chain, unbound, waiting still to be assembled. Like some kind of apparatus for recollection, hung up and perhaps abandoned, these two tuning forks are conductors for our absent minded neural firings, now softly tarnishing. The thought is conducted, convulsed, charged upwards with enough current to reach its apogee, an oblique curve back downwards resting on a nail, towards what is a realisation. This moment, given a duly unwieldy form, a synchronous return back downwards of something newly understood, it is an image of two thoughts that were always at a distance. And finishing with another thought, now running the end of its course, that may swim back into all that white space below it in an instant, some jolting déjà vu. A previous memory of some idle discussion, of how to write about something that dismisses all words, or indeed has never known of them, by stacking them up in growing piles.