Day 1: Movement of a fly

Saturday • June 27, 2009 • by JPOpperman

Day 1: Move­ment of a fly

Yes­ter­day I was slowly drown­ing in the time that passed by over my shoul­der with­out being able to notice any of the silly thoughts that went from one part of my mind to the other. It’s kind of strange how lit­tle I notice when it’s late and I’m relax­ing on my back while I’m enjoy­ing a book, a diary of yes­ter­day that wasn’t born to take with me tomor­row. The soft buzzing of a fly made me look up and turn my neck away from the page while it nearly faded away. I got dis­turbed and while my neck and body was wig­gling like the sea to view this fly I came to won­der to myself how this hyp­no­tiz­ing act of a fly could inter­fere with my own behavior.

The buzzing sound and the rapid move­ment of this fly while I was sure to be able to see this fly hang­ing in the air as if it felt quiet en calm. Surely the fly felt calm in the grow­ing grass and I looked at myself as if I was in a bor­der­less field of green grass and this flies where buzzing every­where. Truly every­where I felt this strange buzz com­ing up to me, their sound waved as a bird, like a plane, like an orches­tra of untouch­able direc­tions that was quiet as earth by night but as busy as if all its direc­tions where reveal­ing them­selves. Their eyes where pop­ping out their bod­ies as if all senses came to life and it wasn’t before that, that I real­ized that flies nearly only are built up from eyes. While they buzz and while they move as fast as light through my room the view upon the car­pet, the walls, the hang­ing lights and even the fruits upon the table changed, the space grows but the space becomes smaller as soon as there are more and more eyes, every spot of this grow­ing place is touched by this fly her eyes and it calms down the green grass and the bor­der­less space.

This fly is what a thought is made off, this fly we can never touch since it’s to fast and it has too many eyes to look at you. The inter­pre­ta­tions of the fly must run slow and deep, or its pro­cess­ing speed might be turned up rapidly when it moves across the room, no doubt when I walked and sited down on my chair I must have felt the strange com­fort­able feel­ing of this fly touch­ing my space with its eyes while I remarked doubt­fully that time in a flies life must be very dif­fer­ent. I would never under­stand the fly; she went fast while I went slowly. It stopped while I went on to my kitchen, tasted the smell of food and she came to me, I went away and didn’t dis­cover the act of fol­low­ing. There is a strange magic clock in our world, what goes fast fol­lows what goes slow and when we stop, time stops while we are never on the same level. Night turned black and the fly slipped away from my atten­tion while I’m sure the fly looks at me as if it’s a new full day. Strange dual­i­ties we share.

Jean-Paul Opper­man (19–06-2009)