Reveries or on designing with words

March 2017

To dream a world of words
and words that are worlds.
To play with memory and feelings,
the mind’s hand searching,
feeling, grasping; scraping.

To weave like a spider with threads
of thoughts and colours
spanning textures over scales,
things and thoughts.
To daydream is to feel
on the skin of the mind.

To design is to inhabit a world
before its existence.
Dreaming is thinking,
reflection is a walk
along corridors in open fields.
Real and unreal;
a reverie of a memory
from a future time.

I step into this world
eyes open and hands forward,
the skin prickles with the gust
of a restless thought.

I breathe the atmosphere
of a universe of neurons
lungs, skin, hands, eyes.
I return with a stone in my pocket
dripping memories
and moods.

I feel around with many hands,
mouths, noses, ears,
it’s all the mind’s skin
no distinction, no lip or lobe
in a world of points.

Darkness smells, of musty rock
the sound of light entering windows
drips down the walls.
Walls made of memories and taste
like beach cabins I never visited
or flags I never saw.

Like a bird in its nest
my skin is the world,
and as I move it moves
and change
and I move.

One has to squint, to breathe
the thick air blown
by flickering images.
A sound moves in the air,
shapes the confines of my room,
the words of my speech.

Homeliness is but a flickering moment
between frustration
and exaltation.
Thus I move, looking for the balance
for a place that has to be
and is not yet.

It coagulates and explodes
again, like a storm of birds.
When the air vibrates and the skin
of the mind’s body prickles
with the whole world,
the atoms are tuned
the crystal glass sings
a reverberation,
the song of the mind,
that is body.

I bring my body
with me in the pocket,
a compass to navigate
the density of perception.

"I think with my eyes and ears
and with my hands and feet
and with my nose and mouth.
To think a flower is to see and smell it,
to eat a fruit is to taste its meaning." *

I keep my memories
close at hand
to filter the
blinding light of the world
I create, at each blink
of my own many eyes.

To design, to dream, to live, to feel,
to sense your body
under the light of the world
in the cave of your brain.

 

 

Davide Perrottoni

 

*Fernando Pessoa / Alberto Caeiro, from  The Keeper of Sheep

 

Davide Perottoni