Autumnal Time

I'd like to find a period of autumnal coolness, a room in an old house I have not previously known - except perhaps in dreams or half dreams or day dreams. I can almost see the house - two or three storeys - a large building; sloping roofs, missing tiles, tall narrow windows. Empires of chimneys and the ground floor windows hidden by clusters of ivy and the shadows of trees that grow too close to the building. Though the house is large, there is no sense of grandeur about it - or rather, ostentiousness - the house is far too anonymous for that. It is a hidden place, slipping sideways into those places between the everydays we live through. The house is set alone in a wood, surrounded by tall, spindly trees. The ground of the wood is covered with leaves; orange, red, gold, and all the tones of the autumnal fevers. Is the house abandoned? Is the house deserted? I don't know - there is certainly the sense of the house slumbering - or dreaming - or falling. The state of the house is uncertain, a Schrodinger's Cat house. A place both steeped in the essence of autumn (warm and balmy September gold, laced with something cool, lake-blue October, fragments of a bleached bone moon) and in the essence of something outside of time - oir at least the passing of time.

I don't know how I will - or would - come to be here, though I imagine it may be in connection to some kind of work connected with the house. The work of an antiquarian (though I am not an antiquarian) or maybe some uncomplicated gardening task (sweeping leaves or apple picking perhaps, - though I am no gardener either). I would be given access to the house - perhaps even a set of keys - but my tenancy there would be transient. I may occupy some kind of temporary caretaking position, but my duties would be light and would not be taxing.

In the house there would be a room - or series of rooms, possibly on the ground floor - and part of my duties would allow me access to these rooms - perhaps as part of the antiquarian project I may be involved with (sorting through old papers from a vanished tenant) or as some kind of storeroom (boxes of old newspapers, broken gardening trowels, melancholy dusty watering cans).

Despite the fact that my residency there would be transient there would be little rush to define this transiency. This would be some paradoxical effect of the house, and its equally undefined surrounding regions, of being both steeped in autumnal time and free from the effects of the flow of time. Time would pool and swell here, become deep like the back water of some forgotten river running through the unmapped geographies of the edges of sleep. Half remembered childhood woods, half glimpsed shadows in the garden on an October day.

In these ground floor rooms, it would mostly be late afternoon. Warm sunlight would fall through dusty windows, broken by branches and leaves moving in a pre-twilight breeze whose strength would vary from a morning-whisper to a small-hours roar. There would be a chair here - perhaps by a fire that would not have been used for years - decades - even never - for in this house it is always autumn, and fires are only ever lit in winter - here anyway - and it will never be any other season here but autumn. The sunlight over the floor - the dash and flicker of shadows - the night-flutter, would have all the uncertainty and fascination of light reflected from water, an old-harbour dance, an interior dockland.
Then there would be the weight the house around me, all those empty rooms, and unknown hallways, rumours of lost stairways. Attic-echoes- cellar songs.
Despite the emptiness, the J.Alfred Prufrock completion of desertion (or abandonment), there would be nothing sinister about it, but more a deep and resonant mystery. I don't really need to accentuate that, point do I? Everything at Bridge 39 depends on mystery, about that knowledge in the not knowing, about the qustion mark behind a door only a few inches ajar, showing a glimpse, a beguiling fragment of the corridor beyond.

This is what I crave fot anywhere, here at the beginning of summer, with the seagull song, and the wood-pigeon nostalgia calls, and the long evenings stretching impossibly late in this midsummer week.