Black Dwarf

There is a game we used to play. You ask a friend, if they were obliged to stop being human and had to be an animal, what would you be? Immediately they answer, you say, there are no vacancies for that particular animal. What is your second choice. The first choice (often a lion, a wolf, a leopard) is what we think we are; the second is what we really are (a poodle, a fox, a snake). I can’t remember my first choice, but my second was a giraffe – aloof, an observer, partial to the sweetest leaves.

I always grow afraid when happiness comes near. I grill myself with the same dreary questions. Who am I? Where am I going? What makes me me? What do I want? What do I really want? I look into the mirror and it seems sometimes as if the person in the reflection is wearing a mask, that there is someone quite different looking out through my eyes, the hunched, haunted figure I call Black Dwarf, my avatar, the portrait of Dorian Grey that hides in the cupboard. I have always surrendered to Oscar Wilde’s counsel: The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

The cold mirror reveals each day someone different. Time is remorseless. It moves, bends, spirals. Our cells die and new cells come to life. Time never sleeps. We grow tired repeating ourselves. Something had been shifting inside me, slow and delicate, like a lizard stalking a fly. An ennui had slipped like a sour smell into my daily routines; perhaps that’s why I  moved along the river from west to east?- Inspired by Vincent Moore and Anthony Polson.

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