Flights of Fancy

As they walked the golden, dusk-lit path in the hinterlands, they felt the winds of Time trace the distance coolly between them. On that wind there flew angels in the form of small, delicately-indestructible ephemeral spheres that flitted this way and that on the squalls. Reaching out his hand he let one accept itself into his palm. Then, stopping, he turned to her and spoke; “Hold out your hand”, he said.

Trustingly, she did so, and in it he placed the messenger of God. “Do you know what this is?” She shook her head and he continued, “It’s thistledown. They say that if you catch one, you can make a wish. Then once you let it go it will either fly upwards granting it or downwards denying it”. She nodded in understanding and closed her eyes tight as she made ready her thoughts.

He knew then that within her mind’s eye she was experiencing perfection, in the darkness a world without boundaries where anything was possible. A world created by one’s self in a heartbeat that could be just as easily destroyed, and created again a thousand ways different in the next. Only in the dark do you have such dominion, only in the black can you be the Alpha and the Omega, and only in your head does the world exist at all. For it is this individual perception that gives character to the physical and the metaphysical, and he remembered reading a journal.

In this journal it stated that each human brain has approximately one hundred billion neurones - that is, the cells that through a spark of electricity transfer information. And each neurone then has between one thousand and ten thousand points of contact with other like cells. As such, it said, there are more manifest permutations of brain state than there are elementary particles in the universe.

And yet, he mused, our perceptions are so outweighed by what can be perceived that we can only come to one conclusion; that the world is more than the sum of its parts and that humans could never hope to have the capacity to appreciate it in all its unfathomable wonder when our eyes are open, when we are driven to distraction by the parts of the sum and the logic we dictate to it. Only with our eyes closed are we fully open to the experience of existence.

Then, acknowledging that such convictions themselves were subjective perceptions of a material world in which he had the capacity to see, he looked at the person standing in blindness before him. She bit the inside of her lip, an imperceptible movement noticeable only to a partner. And a grin escaped the corner of his mouth as he recalled that at the very moment her body experienced the overwhelming and natural call to the earth, as she came to sexual climax, she could not help but close her eyes in this exact same way.

Suddenly she opened her eyes wide and trusted the angel to the winds that bore it. With the intense vigour of the newly freed it climbed straight into the air, and in a single breath their eyes followed it upwards and their bodies again felt the wind as though they too floated upon it, until it was unremarkable against the clouds moving ponderously above them. It was then that they together felt the unbearable heaviness of their bodies still connected to the ground.

Her face betrayed no emotion as she turned to walk onwards along the path that was scattered with thistledown wishes denied. After a moment he followed, and whilst the wind tugged impatiently at their clothes and hair, he wished that he knew what his love, in her most intimate of dark moments, desired.

Author's Note

I’m wary of putting this up. It’s a good few years old now and it’s been edited and re-edited so many times that I might have lost all objective sense of quality. Still, I enjoyed writing it and I continue to enjoy reading it. And even though I don’t agree with all of what I had written, I’m surprised by the sophistication of the ideas – particularly the bit about ‘logic’, which I recognise as the germ of my current discomfort with analytic philosophy. So anyway, there it is.