HILARY WHITE
Strings 2
‘about lighthouses not having to move to save a ship’
September 2024
Following the sweep
Following the sweep, maze-like, bone-like, venal in parts, branches overlapping but not knotted, each has its outlet, curves under, over, tapers towards the end, sometimes in the frame, sometimes out of, she loses the sequence, can’t be methodical, has to restart often, no way of knowing if she’s seen the whole thing, every detail, every bronchus (black, taupe, bone and blood), keeps coming back to the trunk. The trunk ends. Three trunks visible. Some branches sprout others, smaller, the illusion of growing in their smallness, the illusion of surely they must be going somewhere, she comes back and back to nodules at the bottom of each branch, bulb forms lightly shaded, thinly outlined, she follows the reach now, the interlocking reach, the integration of forms, the way trees sometimes knit together, but thinly, and here the knitting is thick, and flat, a hash a braid of curved forms, hard looking, the bone colour making her think this, the opacity, except for the blood at the centre which is fibrous, fuzzy edged, there is less of, it is central. The background (grey) has been noted but it is not to be caught up in like the four forms. Though it says there are three which can mean only that blood and bone are one, that given the language we go back inwards, in search of stillness, a steady vision, seeing as four what we know to be three, or seeing as three what we suspect to be four, the divisions unimportant, not to be fixated upon, but the wrongness is the interest, the seeing of one thing and thinking of another, whatever the details, is an interesting state, one to be followed, back and forth and in and out, if we still believe such divisions are possible, and whether we believe wrongness to be relevant, the lack of agreement, it is something, it goes somewhere, sometimes ending, oftener not.
A form
A form which is difficult to enter, yet compelling, its difficulty inviting more than anything, its lines swoop inwards – tilting – the illusion of intersecting planes. She has the sense a path was followed, the marks appear guided, in grooves, tilting you too inwards, but not to rest, for at the centre a curve ensures movement, ensures rocking, the movement gentle, perhaps unending. Now there is space between forms, emerging gently, forms which themselves appear soft in the sense that they are ambiguous, suggestion of visual sense which cannot be grasped, forms familiar and blank, potentially human, perhaps architectural, it is not in fact possible to know — this is soft comfort in motifs unknown. Her gaze ricochets off planar illusion, off flatness which is not fact, but not in fact its opposite, while in the background a baby cries, so she cannot be sure how fatigue has altered this split experience, though alter it has, and she wonders if maybe it helps prevent knowing, or trying to know, halts the reading before it goes too deep, then her impulse is to move on, rather than persevere (the lines won’t let you know what to do with them). On several occasions she forces a return, to look longer, not necessarily deeper, but to sit with looking blankly for as long as that feels useful, which is forever, for in the unseeing there is stillness, for moving on would take more effort, not necessarily result in anything either, for any result is not to be aimed for, and there is reason for sticking with forms, without even reason, or result, for like the lines this could go on forever, arcing back on itself again and again, and that would also be architectural, curved and segmented, even pleasing to the eye.
Red
Red, like you wouldn’t expect. Then, appearance of many-textured surfaces, edges, distinct edges. A swoop in from the top, lines vertical then curved, from right to left, they meet an oblong, pointed edges along the back like a child’s dinosaur: they leave the page. Swooped lines evoke eyeless smiles, there are curves and there are edges, and they are meeting everywhere, two faces peering in sideways from the left, refusing to meet the eye, rendering them harmless, charming, cheerfully rounded and distance-gazing. Sun shapes become visible, not that there is a prescribed order, just that attention heads one place and then another, catches a sun-like face encircled, empillared, capillaried via web-like lines to the nearby shapes. The angles provoke wheeling, so she wheels around the edges, distinct though not hard, curved edges, fur-like lines, sun-like patterns, more faces, upside down and gaping, but friendlily. The curves become mountains now, all the bigger to wheel around. Space is asserted. She has been avoiding the middle, though it is not empty. Textured, lightly, the residue of process, the middle recedes, not joylessly, but there is opacity around the edges. Structures assert themselves, reach upwards into the centre, each edge’s upward in a different direction, eyes first, then teeth, seen clumped in the corner, she had not noticed before, she wonders why, presumably evading the gaze, seeing only the averted eyes, not noticing those staring abundantly and facelessly outward.
HILARY WHITE is a writer and researcher. She is the author of Holes, a novella published by Ma Bibliothèque in 2024. She is currently at Maynooth University in Ireland, working on a postdoctoral project called Forms of Sleep: Literary Experiments in Somnolence. Her writing appears in The Yellow Paper, Tripwire, Corridor8, MAP, Banshee, The Stinging Fly and others.
