“The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events… even the things that are most ‘thing-like’ are nothing more than long events.”
— Carlo Rovelli (b. 1956)
The past is not erased but enfolded into the present; objects, heirlooms, names on weathered graves — all are what Rovelli calls events and through imagination, these events, the times and people within, can be known to us — empathetically — through the mirror of our own lived experience.
In nature, where our lived experience best aligns with people centuries past, walking becomes an act of unfolding: each step a way of bringing the past back to life. How we experience the natural world — the trees, the sky, the wind and rain — can connect us to those who lived long ago. Despite the dissonance between our worlds, they would have known these phenomena in much the same way. In these things our worlds start to rhyme.
“Thursday, April 15 1802. The wind was furious … The wind seized our breath. The lake was rough. …When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. … I never saw daffodils so beautiful … the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake.”
— Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855)
“Shortly after dusk, the lightning appeared in the south and western horizon, and soon became most vivid, blue sheets of lightning following each other in rapid succession, but unaccompanied by thunder.”
— Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 1842
In The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Christopher Tilley writes:
“If writing solidifies or objectifies speech into a material medium, a text which can be read and interpreted, an analogy can be drawn between a pedestrian speech act and its inscription or writing on the ground in the form of the path or track.”
When we walk, we enfold ourselves into the past. Each footprint left in our wake becomes a word, and, as Tilley writes, the path a kind of text; one that is ‘read’ with our feet and interpreted through our senses. Imagination is our sixth sense.
Similarly, words written on a page are gestures through which, for a moment, the whole of their making, as well as their meaning, unfolds: the writer, the room, the world outside the window. When I or anyone writes or paints, the whole of the present is, likewise, enfolded — rolled and bound like a scroll.
Such is why I’m drawn to the gestures of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. The characters impart not only meaning — trees 木, sky 空, sun 太陽, wind 風 — but in their strokes the whole of the time in which they were made is contained — the writer, the room, the world outside the window…
In my own work, I paint shadows directly in the woods with ink and calligraphy brushes. Each mark holds the instant of its making. The shadow becomes text, and the text enfolds the present into the past.
The painted shadow becomes like a language made, written, and read in the moment — then lost as soon as the moment has gone.
The videos I make of the shadows likewise become a poem spoken in this lost and silent tongue. We cannot hear it. We cannot speak it. All we can ‘see’ are the trees now gone; the moment that has passed.
To climb the peaks of our imagination and see a time long before we were born is, at the same time, to descend into the depths of our own non-existence, wherein which dark expanse, our imagination lights the dark as it does the paths that lead away from our deaths. Imagination and memory come together to blur the boundaries of our beginnings and ends, as if, like a book, the unseen words that might have been written before and after are suddenly revealed in all their infinite number.
— Author’s note, 2019
“No longer to be as we have always been, in those endlessly anxious hands – to leave even our name behind us as a child leaves off playing with a broken toy.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)
Fragments, Patterns, and Memory
“The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm of the intellect, in some material object.”
— Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The light of the moon covers the earth, yet it can be contained in a single bowl of water.”
— Dōgen Zenji (1200–1253)
“It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned.”
— Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“For the things of this world are their stories, identified not by fixed attributes but by their paths of movement in an unfolding field of relations. Each is the focus of ongoing activity. Thus in the storied world… things do not exist, they occur.”
— Tim Ingold
“In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency… you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.”
“In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another… something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draws arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment.”
“Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.”
“The city does not consist of this but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past… The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.”
— Italo Calvino (1923-1985)
“The inhabitant is rather one who participates from within in the very process of the world’s continual coming into being and who, in laying a trail of life, contributes to its weave and texture.”
— Tim Ingold
“We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or ‘highlights’.”
— Bill Viola (1951–2024)
The past exists in fragments. Each trace — a word, an object, a ruin, a name — is both presence and absence: a time returned to view, diminished like the point of a star set against the vast mass of its origin.
Our present day comprises fragments of the past; a night sky strewn with stars appearing as if now, each belying their own unfathomable age.
Geographer Doreen Massey describes space as “the dimension of multiple trajectories, a simultaneity of stories-so-far.” That is how I perceive the present.
Each fragment is a story-so-far: an entropic event, a life wound down to a name; ancient footsteps left in tesserae, ploughed up blinking in the earth. Fragments like the tokens left by mothers with their children at the Foundling Hospital, London — small pieces of fabric cut from larger garments, each carrying the memory of touch, the trace of identity, the hope of return.
The present then is our simultaneous perception of these stories-so-far; interconnected threads, with depth as well as surface. As Carlo Rovelli writes in Helgoland:
“The central thesis of Nāgārjuna’s book is simply that there is nothing that exists in itself, independently from something else. … ‘I’ is nothing other than the vast and interconnected set of phenomena that constitute it, each one dependent on something else.”
It’s by extending a fragment out into an imagined wider world then that we can begin to feel our way towards an empathetic response to the past. This can also be achieved however by breaking down an object or an image into its constituent parts, whether the brush stroke of an artist or calligrapher, or the details of a nineteenth-century photograph which I discuss later.
The following quotes allude to this sense of interconnection. First Barry Lopez:
“One must wait for the moment when the thing… ceases to be a thing and becomes something that knows we are there.”
And Christopher Tilley, in The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology:
“The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible — his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… The trees and mirror function as Other.”
Taking Carlo Rovelli’s quote, everything becomes ‘other’. It’s everything that makes us visible and vice-versa. When we work with the past, we work with fragments. When we look at the mothers’ tokens we see the fabric from which they were cut, the dress from which the fabric was made, the woman who wore it, the places where she walked. Every attempt to extend or unfold a pattern is to weave with a thread of light. It is an act of empathy, a reaching-out across the gap between what endures and what has vanished, just as a star endures in sight, untold years after it has gone.
In his book White Holes, Rovelli writes : “the black hole does not end in a singularity, but tunnels into a white hole — a small, stable remnant, perhaps as tiny as a grain of dust, from which what fell in may one day emerge.”
I love this image. From the outside, the white hole is almost pointlike — nearly invisible. From the inside, it can stretch across a vast duration and distance — like a long, thin bridge through spacetime. In my mind’s eye, I conflate the mote and the thread, and see these holes as filaments, fine hair-like threads, connecting what was with what is. They are the voids left in the wake of a death, grief spun with the years to forgotten, holes from which, through empathy, what was, might yet return. They are the stories-so-far; fragments containing the whole; threads with which the present is made.
Nature, the Medieval, and the Child’s Imagination
“There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light.”
— William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“Woods are poised between reality and imagination… they span many lifetimes.”
— Richard Hayman
“But who knows the temporal dimensions of the forest? History is not enough.”
— Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962)
“But forests reign in the past. I know, for instance, that my grandfather got lost in a certain wood. I was told this, and I have not forgotten it. It happened in a past before I was born. My oldest memories, therefore, are a hundred years old, or perhaps a bit more.”
— Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962)
In my childhood imagination, the medieval world lived on in the woods: knights passing through shafts of light, the sound of distant bells, the air heavy with myth.
The Middle Ages represented, for me, an ideal landscape — a childish vision of beauty, myth, and legend, enriched not by the possibility of, but by the reality of magic.
The young boy, beholden to wonder and enchantment, still exists; yet in adulthood that vision of beauty and magic has deepened, transformed. Enchantment has become something else. Imagination has become embodied, empathetic.
In The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker observes that, from the perspective of the nineteenth century:
“The Middle Ages constituted an era that appeared to provide historical confirmation for the naturalness and rightness of the doctrine of separate spheres for the sexes.”
My work with pattern is not a commentary on these prejudices, but what compels me in Parker’s words is the boundary it describes — and how, in my work, that boundary begins to blur.
The woods of my childhood offered a freedom beyond such divisions: a space where identities could shift and merge, where magic fused with reality, where one could become a knight, moving between selves as if through shade and sunlight.
That sense of openness has become central to how I now explore the past — not as fixed, but as fluid, interwoven, and alive.
“And yet they, who passed away long ago, Still dwell in our blood, whispering.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)
“The leaf has a song in it… and the leaf is singing still.”
— Mary Oliver (1935–2019)
“Is not all writing, all art, a response to a loss of some kind, an imaginative way of dealing with lack?”
— Carl Lavery
Grief, like remnants of the past, is both presence and absence. What is lost continues to exist — not as it was, but as an echo or memory; a vibration through time; a white hole where the raw and gaping void of loss is slowly spun to the shape of a mote, floating in some far-off year, within a shaft of sunlight.
When I was a child my mum would go out to sing. Before a concert, she and her friends — the women transformed in beautiful dresses, the men in tuxedos — would come to the house to rehearse. She would close the dining-room doors, their frosted glass patterned with leaves through which I could see their shapes as I listened to their voices.
Since her death, that memory has become an image of grief. When I listen to recordings of her singing, it’s like those rehearsals: I can hear her, transformed, but not reach her. The frosted pattern of leaves in the glass remains — doors closed between two worlds. They are a screen through which I can see her singing, but like summer recalled to winter trees, although I might remember her warmth, I cannot feel it anymore.
Another way I have examined grief is through a series of works which take as their source studio portraits of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I’m particularly interested in the backdrops, in front of which the ‘sitters’ are placed to have their picture taken.
Often these feature scenes of nature – trees, bucolic landscapes, gardens – or images of idealised interiors. With these portraits, I remove the figures, and, using AI capabilities in Photoshop, extend the backdrops to become full landscapes or interiors. The results are often strange, unsettling images of absence and remind me of the backdrops one might find in a theatre when the actors have all left the stage. The fact my mum performed so much, in front of such backdrops, makes this sense of absence even more compelling.
There is a link here too with my childhood imaginings of medieval forests – that sense of an untouched, unspoiled landscape of the past. Wordsworth wrote in his Guide to the District of the Lakes, that we can only imagine, “the primeval woods shedding and renewing their leaves with no human eye to notice or human heart to regret or welcome the change.”
“To live is to crochet according to a pattern we were given.”
— Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935)
“We are, none of us, our own ideas of ourselves.”
— Adrienne Rich (1929–2012)
“And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us,” writes Rilke, “as natural disposition, as burden on our destiny, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up out of the depths of time.”
Rilke’s words capture what I feel most deeply about inheritance: that the past is not something behind us, but within us — alive in gesture, enfolded in thought, in the smallest movements of the body. We are made of continuities — a simultaneity of “stories-so-far.”
David Whyte, in Consolations, writes:
“Each one of us has a unique signature, inherited from our ancestors, our landscape, our language, and alongside it a half-hidden geology of our life as it has been lived… what blows through us is made up not only of the gifts and heartbreaks of our own growing but also of our ancestors and the stories consciously and unconsciously passed to us about their lives.”
I imagine this signature as a patchwork of patterns, each corresponding to an approximate ratio of DNA passed down my family tree through female lines.
Each pattern is distinct, yet shares a common thread with those around it. When combined, they form a landscape — my landscape, my interior: a wood, a room in a Victorian house with William Morris walls, the fabric of an eighteenth-century dress.
“The photograph of the missing being will touch me like the delayed rays of a star… a sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze.”
— Susan Sontag (1933–2004)
Every act of creation begins at a boundary — a meeting point between worlds. In my work, that boundary might be between past and present, interior and exterior, masculine and feminine, imagination and reality. It might simply be the formal separation of colours on a canvas.
To cross a threshold is to enter another way of seeing while remaining oneself. Each movement between media, identities, or times becomes a kind of passage. Boundaries are not walls but invitations — places of interconnection, where the known world gives way to the unknown, where dissonance meets with rhyme.
I’m reminded here, however, of Carlo Rovelli: “‘I’ is nothing other than the vast and interconnected set of phenomena that constitute it, each one dependent on something else.” In a sense there is no boundary at all — only interconnections.
And we are always in the process of crossing whilst ourselves being made of these ambiguous thresholds.
Borrowing from the world of physics (and again the writing of Carlo Rovelli) and what I’ve gleaned about entropy, I can look at a past moment as something which has a very low entropy. The past is like the sandcastle as opposed to the pile of sand (but with far fewer possible configurations of state than the castle).
This is because the past moment has happened and therefore its form is fixed; there are no different configurations by which it can enter the next moment as the next moment has also already happened. If we think of the moment we are living now, then we can think of it as having very high entropy as there are countless possible configurations by which we, as people living in this particular moment, can enter the next and so on. We are like the pile of sand as opposed to the castle.
If we are going to try and recreate a past moment, we have to try and rethink that moment as it happens, not as it was. So, when I look at the image below, a photograph of a street full of people taken in 1897, I try to imagine the scene just before the image was taken and for a short while after.
To do that, I might zoom in on a detail – one of the people – and imagine them moving. I imagine the noise of the scene, the sounds they might have heard and think about what they might have been saying.
One thing I find with photographs like this, is that it’s often those people who are in the background and who are completely oblivious to the picture being taken that allow me to animate the scene, to reintroduce a sense of entropy. People or details, such as open windows, are a particularly vivid way of achieving this.
In the picture above, the horses and carts locate the photograph in the early 1900s but it’s the windows – the open windows – which help me locate myself in the time. Why? Because the rooms behind the windows are spaces outside the photograph; spaces oblivious to the photograph being taken. It’s as if they have escaped the moment frozen by the camera.
The open windows also speak of a time before the photograph was taken and therefore give the photograph a sense of duration which, like the rooms behind them, also extend the boundaries of the image. When the photographer took the photo, the windows had been open a while beforehand; people had opened them and I can begin to imagine those moments. I can imagine being in one of those rooms (I think of the wallpaper, the patterns, the dresses), looking out through the open window and seeing the horses down on the street and hearing the sounds of the city. These open windows therefore can help us see the past moment as it happens rather than as it was. They ascribe the picture a duration and give it flow.
In his book, The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli writes: “The growth of entropy itself happens to open new doors through which entropy can increase further.” In the case of this image, Rovelli’s doors are our windows but the effect is the same. We begin to disorder time and locate among these details, pockets of potential. Instead of everything being fixed, there is room for manoeuvre, for change; entropy increases instead of everything being fixed, there is room for manoeuvre, for change; entropy increases.
“Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history.”
— Cy Twombly (1928–2011)
“Rinsho is not imitation but conversation.”
— Tanimura Kishō (1922–2008)
When we attempt to engage with the past, often what is left — whether a name, a ruin, an object or story — is like those scraps of fabric. In our mind’s eye, we can take the scrap and attempt to extend its pattern to form a view of the world long gone: the dress from which it was cut, the woman who wore it, the streets down which she walked. Whether a name, a ruin, an object or story, the process is the same; we take a fragment and, in our imaginations, extend it.
But in this endeavour we are always like a parent, claiming a child with a mismatched pattern, pointing out the parts that rhyme, aware of those which don’t.
And it’s in the dissonance and rhyme that much of my work is located. Rinsho is the art of studying and copying the works of great calligraphers as a means of internalising their brush techniques, rhythm, and spirit.
By copying my own shadow texts, for example, I seek a way back to the moment of their making — to unfold what was, at the time of their making, enfolded. In some respects all my work is like the art of rinsho; not a copying of, but a rhyming with, the past.
As part of my practice I sometimes walk, and whilst walking, I write down lists of things that I observe. For example, on a walk on 26 February 2024 I wrote:
The sun comes out and warms my face Bright on the lake The ground rises Moss-covered stump Old leaves crunch beneath my feet
When I read them back, days, weeks, months or years later, I pick up the thread and find myself back in those moments, tracing my path, just as I might copy the shadows painted in the woods. Reading the lists becomes a kind of rinsho.
And it’s in those walks that I take inspiration for the patterns I design, each different but each with a common thread that links them together. In some works I juxtapose two contrasting patterns, each with a shared motif — a branch perhaps running seamlessly between. One pattern is small, the other many times larger. One is our contemporary world, one the world of the past. There is dissonance and rhyme, just as when, through our own experience, we imagine the lives of those who lived long ago. Our worlds are vastly different, they dissonate, but our experience — in natural phenomena — rhymes.
Once, at the Tower of London, I stood before a wall on which, in 1541, a prisoner, William Tyrell, had carved the following:
“Since Fortune has chosen that my hope should go to the wind to complain, I wish the time were destroyed; my planet being ever sad and ungracious.”
It’s one thing to read this and sympathise with William’s plight. It’s another to kneel down where he must have knelt to carve it; to glance through the window at the sky. Our worlds may be entirely different, but the sky is just the same and our knees can feel the same stone floor of the cell. It’s a small thing, but we can, kinaesthetically, empathise in some small way with William.
“Rinsho is the practice of matching one’s breath and step to that of the ancients.”
— Teshima Yūkei (1901–1987)
Is that not what we’re doing when we empathise? Matching our breath and step, if not with the ancients, then with those who went before us.
I have, in the past, made a lot of work on landscapes that have witnessed trauma, whether battlefield sites of World War One or sites of the Holocaust such as Auschwitz. I was struck when reading ‘Underland’ by Robert Macfarlane by this particular passage:
“Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past. But to read such a place only for its dark histories is to disallow its possibilities for future life, to deny reparation or hope – and this is another kind of oppression. If there is a way of seeing such landscapes, it might be thought of as occulting’: the nautical term for a light that flashes on and off, and in which the periods of illumination are longer than the periods of darkness.”
The landscapes I produce therefore also hark back to the work I have made in the past about these sites of violence. There is the rhyming of the natural world and the dissonance of experience.
I like too, the term ‘occulting light’ to describe that sense of thinking about the past, of reaching into the dark as a means of empathising with people in the past. The light of our present day experience shines, seeking out those parts, in the darkness of the past, where the pattern might rhyme with ours. But it’s only when the light is off, in the afterimage glowing in our eyes — and our imaginations — that we see where those connections lie.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
— Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“The body is our general medium for having a world.”
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961)
Empathy is not only an act of imagination but, as described above, an act of embodied imagination — a means of perceiving and understanding phenomena through the whole of one’s being. It is akin to the mode of seeing described by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Goethean observation is a participatory method that moves from detached perception toward intimate understanding. Beginning with exact sense perception, the observer attends to a phenomenon’s visible details without judgement, letting the facts speak for themselves. Through exact sensorial fantasy, imagination is used to perceive the phenomenon in time — to sense its life, change, and movement. In seeing in beholding, the observer quiets their own activity so that the phenomenon may reveal its inner gesture or character. Finally, in being one with the object, perception and thought merge in an intuitive grasp of the phenomenon’s essence.
This process transforms observation from analysis into relationship: knowledge arises not by dissecting the world, but by entering into a living dialogue with it.
This method, which I often use, shares much with my wider practice. Goethean observation calls for the softening of boundaries between the observer and the observed — a reciprocal awareness, almost the moment Barry Lopez describes when “the thing ceases to be a thing and becomes something that knows we are there”.
“To cross a threshold is to enter another way of seeing while remaining oneself. Each movement between media, identities, or times becomes a kind of passage. Boundaries are not walls but invitations — places of interconnection, where the known world gives way to the unknown, where dissonance meets with rhyme.”
This is at the heart of Goethean observation. Through it we come to see the object as a story-so-far rather than a fixed or isolated thing. It becomes other. To borrow from Christopher Tilley, the object — whatever is being observed — “sees” the observer in a manner comparable to the way a mirror sees: it defines a point of view that renders us visible in return. We recognise that “nothing exists in itself, independently from something else.” We see it in the object, and we recognise it in ourselves.
And perhaps this is what enchantment truly is: the moment when the distance between things dissolves — when the world, for an instant, reveals itself as one continuous gesture.
In ‘Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description‘, Tim Ingold recalls the Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand’s idea that everything there is, launched in the current of time, follows a trajectory of becoming. Each thing is not a static entity moving through time but a line of continual motion — one thread among countless others in a woven texture of existence.
Another geographer, Doreen Massey, described space as “the simultaneity of stories-so-far” — not a surface on which events unfold, but the living intersection of these trajectories, each continuing, each still in motion. If Hägerstrand offers the vertical threads of duration (warp), Massey gives us the horizontal weave (weft) — the plane of encounter where stories coexist and entwine.
When I first wrote about durations, I imagined these lines of duration not as horizontal layers stacked like geological strata but as vertical, warp threads: each object, building, or landscape feature a line of uninterrupted existence, extending through the centuries.
When we empathise with people in the past, when we trace a thread back in time to one of those many entanglements, that is how we empathise with those who came before us. But what are these threads, and what is the pattern they make?
As I’ve already said, it is in nature where our lived experience best aligns with people centuries past. How we experience the natural world — the trees, the sky, the wind and rain — can connect us to those who lived long ago. Despite the dissonance between our worlds, they would have known these phenomena in much the same way. In these things our worlds start to rhyme.
That, therefore, is the fabric’s pattern: nature — the thing which binds us all together.
As I’ve also mentioned before, Richard Hayman writes how “woods are poised between reality and imagination… they span many lifetimes.” They are a threshold between now and then, being as they are neither fully present nor past. As Gaston Bachelard wrote: “…who knows the temporal dimensions of the forest?”
The forest too imitates the pattern of weft and warp. It is itself a tangle of trunks and branches, where, on occasion, those branches fuse together — inosculate — their forms interwoven yet distinct. The word, inosculate, comes from the Latin osculare: to kiss. Likewise, those encounters I described above, the momentary entanglements of stories-so-far, are like inosculations. And when we trace a thread back to one of a myriad number of knots, where we seek to empathise with a long-lost, nameless being, those entanglements become a kind of kiss — a tender embrace, where for a moment our forms, those of the absent being and ourselves, intertwine. Through an act of self-dissipation, we both become — like the forest — neither of past nor present. That is the essence of empathy.
This lends another layer of meaning to the video work I’ve made of shadows in the woods.
What of the threads themselves? How do I see those?
In part they are the filaments I described earlier, based on Carlo Rovelli’s white holes. As I wrote:
In my mind’s eye, I conflate the mote and the thread, and see these holes as filaments, fine hair-like threads, connecting what was with what is. They are the voids left in the wake of a death, grief spun with the years to forgotten, holes from which, through empathy, what was might yet return. They are the stories-so-far: fragments containing the whole, threads with which the present is made.
The present is our simultaneous perception of all these threads. Objects, when they are made, are like black holes in our fabric — spaces into which all that happens around them falls: a glance, a touch, a word. And as these holes extend through the passing of time, they stretch, connecting what was with what is. They become, as Rovelli wrote, “a small, stable remnant, perhaps as tiny as a grain of dust, from which what fell in may one day emerge.”
I have talked about fragments – a word, an object, a ruin, a name – and how we can build from these the worlds to which they have belonged, and in Rovelli’s description of white holes, we see that: from these remnants, what fell in — a glance, a touch, a memory — can, through empathy, emerge.
In any weave there are gaps — holes. They are as much a part of the fabric as the threads. Should I therefore be thinking of objects, places, and people as the gaps between threads rather than threads themselves? Or are they like black holes and white holes — a combination of the two?
Perhaps every object is an occulting form — a small black hole in the weave of being, drawing light and time into itself, holding the gestures of all that have passed before and around it. What we call empathy might then be the act of standing at the object’s ‘horizon’: the point where concealment and revelation meet, where what has fallen in begins, through observation with an embodied imagination, to emerge.
