Landscape of Impossibilities

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Apr 08

2013

by Thilina Heenatigala

by Jasper Coppes

Published: Monday, April 08 2013 19:17

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I remember how in my trousers’ pockets small sedimentary deposits had accumulated. At a given moment I could recognize some breadcrumbs. At another moment I discovered minute smithereens of green glass, as if they were washed ashore on a coastal strip, or were remnants of an explosion. Often other specimen would surface, like shipwrecks, when I fished up a piece of paper to make some notes about something that seemed worthwhile. It would happen that the notes I had intended to make were replaced by a detailed description of the find that I had just made; the piece of matter that rather unexpectedly had extricated itself from the dark caverns of my inner pocket.

What a delight it was to move one’s hands among the sediments of a world that seemed to me for the better part inaccessible! I could, for instance, make the porous piece of asphalt I had found on a remote little road in the north of France softly ricochet against a splinter of the moon. The most I enjoyed a special activity that I had come to master over time. The activity existed in making the entire visual spectrum as it unfolded to me during the day fuse together with the hidden game that was going on in the pocket of my trousers. A blissful ardour set my cells aglow when on a sunny afternoon my gaze swung between the neighbour across the street and the broadcast from the Middle East she was watching. A few kilometres farther, so I knew, a celestial body had once crashed into the desert. The piece of cool extraterrestrial metal, purchased on the deep black market, let itself slowly warm up in the palm of my hand, making contact with just about everything of which the world at that moment consisted.