moving space
After 36 years of lifting, sciatic pain, almost ruptured muscles, and more bruises than he cared to admit, it all started with a simple question: What if he could move space, instead of the objects?
~
Ironic, that he-who-hated-to-move-addresses would do just that so many times in his adult life - and it never seemed to get easier. He tried every option he could think of, including hiring professionals, but everything fell short. So, he stopped trying.
This didn't mean he stopped moving, he just stopped trying to come up with a solution. He parked the problem in his psychological side-view mirror, knowing from experience that sometimes the mind would come up with answers best when you left it alone. Like putting a pan of water three quarters off a burner; you knew it would boil, just not too fast, and definitely not while you were looking at it.
And so it came to him, as he was working with negative space in his art work: If he could make objects appear in a drawing by defining what they were *not* ("negative space"), then maybe he could move *just* the space in a room, and the objects would follow?
~
Space, of course, was not always an endless tabula rasa; an infinity of nothingness. It changed and delineated depending on context.
And it could be mapped.
A little metaphysical red dye injected into the space in his kitchen did the trick. He watched it flow and drift around his table and over the fridge and into the sink and beneath the toaster - a grand, many pieced Tetris puzzle that gave definition to everything the space *wasn't*.
Dye-ing space, of course, was not trivial, nor was the subsequent labelling or moving, but he kept at it with a mystic's stubbornness until he had a repeatable (if not straightforward) process: See, map, label, move.
With a little creativity and something his memoirs obliquely referred to as his "spiritual Dremel", he learned how to not just move the spaces, but copy them into the great outdoors.
What started as an exercise in physical logistics turned into empire building of the grandest designs - forest glens with living rooms and kitchens, mountaintops with La-z-y boys and end tables, and, occasionally, rooms stacked on rooms stacked on rooms; Babel-ish towers that nonsensed *things* instead of languages.
~
"So within, so without", he opined one afternoon, having created a nest of rooms that somehow stole each other's space and left him with exactly enough room for a wardrobe mirror, and a mystery:
Where the mirror wasn't: space. Where the space wasn't: mirror. And in the mirror: nothing.
Literally - no thing. It wasn't empty exactly - it was *full* of emptiness. Pregnant with possibilities; an intersection of opposites - or better yet - a place where opposites were born as unitive whole things.
~
There the Reverie was born and remained to the end of his days. Mystics and poets and musicians dropped in and through, asked him for directions to the other places he had created out of space, took what they needed on their Ways, and moved on.
~
After 36 years of lifting, sciatic pain, almost ruptured muscles, and more bruises than he cared to admit, it all started with a simple question: What if he could move space, instead of the objects?
And after the next 36 years- moving space instead of objects - he beheld the Beholder in the mirror's emptiness, became the space that had defined him, and breathed his last.
