You come to the image expecting brightness, and brightness is what you find: a swimming pool holding the hard blue of a summer afternoon, a white wall, a garden, a road extending towards the horizon. Nothing seems hidden. The world has been washed clean of shadow.
Perhaps this is why you once moved past it. There are images that offer themselves so completely that you mistake their openness for shallowness.
Then you notice the splash.
Something has happened, although you cannot see the moment itself. The water has been disturbed and is already settling. A body has entered and disappeared. What remains is an instant held impossibly still, as though time has briefly forgotten how to move.
You stay with it.
The blue surface carries the trace of an event that has already vanished.
The road has the same quality. You are looking towards the horizon, but the image contains other positions: driver, passenger, someone standing beside the road, someone who has already passed through. The landscape will not settle into one fixed viewpoint.
You move a little, and the world moves with you.
A room opens into another room. A reflection holds another image. The familiar loses its certainty without becoming strange.
This is where the brightness becomes unsettling.
Everything is visible, yet nothing can be held by the eye. Light passes across a room. Someone leaves and the room remains. A face turns away. Water continues settling long after the body has disappeared.
You look again at the splash.
It is almost nothing, yet it holds the weight of what cannot be held: the instant, the body, the movement, the disappearance.
There is no need to look behind the surface. The depth is already there, moving across it as light moves across water.
You remain for a little longer.
The blue is still blue. The water is still water. The road still leads towards the horizon.
And yet something has passed through the image, and through you.
Not an answer, but the feeling of having been there while something disappeared.
Notitia — attending to what is there, and to what begins to appear when you attend.
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