Mouroir

The Redemption of the Image

Once is perversion, twice philosophy.

It rains as if a gigantic watch, a fat onion, had long been clogged, at last burst open, and now may release all its ticks abundantly. Shall we go further? If we have waterboots and raincapes yes. My grandfather carries an onion-shaped watch on a chain in his waistcoat pocket. The watch, just like an onion, has many shells, peels. With his knotted old man’s hands dated with brown liver-spots he opens the lids, one after another unto the last one of glass. The glass you mustn’t open up otherwise time will run delirious. Quicksilver. Under the glass the flywheels pivot, the cogs circle, the hands comb, the mechanism quirks with the movement of water. My grandfather’s watch must be leaking. He doesn’t even notice it. His pocket is growing heavier causing his back to bend. “I do wonder what time it is,” he says, fumbling his ancient fingers all down the chain. But the hands have become too slippery. When the load becomes unbearable he snaps and he is dead. Tch-tch-tch go the tongues of the family. Some say he died from water on the heart. Others maintain he must have had a poisoned onion. Or simply that his time had come. It is the breaking of the water. His time was done. It became too much. He passed away like showering rain and now there are no more clouds. I peer through the glass caps of his eyes. The frequencies are fixed, the indication of time-passage isolated and breathlessly caught on the bridge between one second and the next. Already gone from the one but never arrived at the non-one. We enclose him in a box, the one lid on the other. Hammer in the nails rhythmically. Fill the box with ticks. We shake the coffin but the guts refuse to get going again. We carry him to earth. Shall we go further? If we have raincapes and waterboots indeed. It is the planting season. There are tears in the eyes of the family as if they’d been peeling onions. Above the huge dark clouds, each with an internal movement, an accumulation — like watches without circumference. I look for an heirloom. What became of the old pocket watch? I return to the hole in the earth, put in the spade: the trough is filled with water. Time has devoured the very mechanism. Wheels and shafts lie under the water like disbanded bones. There must have been cellular decadence, the blueprint is destroyed and now there is licentious procreation, a frenetic vanishing. Dissipation. Onions will do well along here, the earth is nice and sandy. A pity it is so wet. I go looking for an onion. Tie it on a string to my waistcoat pocket because I have no confidence in links. When I hold it to the ear I can hear the ticks. The raven will build a nest of sticks. It is darkly working up for rain. Shall we go further? On the roof the rain comes down tic-tac-toc. Fat, onion-coloured little watches are shattered. Time flows away in water. It’s raining like homeless precise delimitations searching for the secure restraint of a timepiece, a grave.