mille-feuille
by Jeremy Fernando
A thousand leaves.
Though in that sun — even as one is, we were, standing out of it, perhaps even outside of it, not as if anyone can ever quite leave it — it felt a little more like a hundred.
Perhaps then, only a sense of a cent.
One might even say — a roll of steel breeze.
Brought together, quite perfectly even, by a cloud. One could have called it cream, but that might well have been letting facts gets in the way of truth. Then again, it might be quite apt considering the possibilities of being anointed at the altar of the blue ribbon.
And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky.
(Pink Floyd, Echoes)
Does anyone ever actually sleep in summer?
Is there even a season when one sleeps? It would be too easy, to say that winter is Demeter’s homage to snoozing; that autumn is its yawn; that spring is a stretching, a reaching out, a first time. But who’s to say that convenience makes it wrong — at least, necessarily so. Maybe they could have had no other name than the Été Café …
(Alice Renez Tay, ‘a dance with the clouds’, 2014)
If one stays awake long enough, might one find a tiger under the table, one might find a tiger under the table.
Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
Perhaps only there if — when — you see it:
when it
re-sounds;
but perhaps only
with you
A crinkle.
When you bite — thus, also at the very moment where it falls apart. Comes together.
Where the thousands come together into one.
As one.
Quand un mille-feuille devient une feuille.
Becomes her.
About the Author:
Jeremy Fernando is the Jean Baudrillard Fellow at The European Graduate School. He works in the intersections of literature, philosophy, and the media; and is the author of Reflections on (T)error, The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death, Reading Blindly and Writing Death. Exploring other media has led him to film, music, and art; and his work has been exhibited in Seoul, Vienna, Hong Kong and Singapore. He is the general editor of both Delere Press, and the thematic magazine One Imperative; and a Fellow of Tembusu College at the National University of Singapore.
