Making Blue

Synaesthesia is a phenomenon where a stimulus in one sensory modality leads to a perception in another, like visual (colour, say) from sound. Synaesthesia is not simile. For instance, ebony (its relevance will emerge) is a tint of black. It is also a hard wood. Ebony feels like stone. This is simile, not synaesthesia. Spears of ebony can kill. This is neither synaesthesia nor simile, but fact and also irrelevant thus far
for it is not yet now-hour. The house on the hill
is dark. It’s a house of many rooms. Each room has a window. Each window looks like a set of vertical stripes in ebony black. Past each, the sky is a paler shade of charcoal. It’s a charcoal night out there and the verticals are either prison bars
or spears. Ebony spears
carried by little warriors whose heads don’t reach sill height. Beneath each window is a ledge. The ledge runs the perimeter of the dark house. Permissible climbing occurs at a certain hour of the night, through a window down to the ledge
with
or without a spear. Navigation
along the ledge leads a curious warrior along the perimeter to the rear of the house. In a room at the rear a hum is starting up. The hum is made up of spliced strips of flat sound. Spliced horizontals of hum press against rear window verticals to skew tangentially into diamonds

of pain.
Flashes of painhum
spew out of the window
fogging up the charcoal night.

In the limestone quarry at the bottom of the hill others are starting to gather. In expectant wonder or terror,
solitary
or in groups
they wait for the return of the pre-dawn spectacular from seventy years ago. No expense has been spared on props and marketing. The gathered are speakers and mimers, not warriors and chanters. An old woman with an aching smile sits on a rock. On the previous occasion she was a child both wondrous and terrified. From high up on a lime cliff a speaker begins to speak, while to the right within a plate-glass chamber, two mimers mime. One mimes death-throes, the other echoes them a split-second later. Down in the pit they repeat the speaker’s words. I will go forth into the night, each says. The sentence is spoken clearly and in its entirety. Not I’ll go, not I will go, but I will go forth, each says again and again until columns of
I
will
go
forth
fill up the night quarry and spill (gravity suspended or irrelevant) up into the fogged up charcoal.

Meanwhile on the hill-slope from the house with window stripes that are either prison bars or spears, ebony spears, and warriors on the ledge are littler than sill-height and horizontals of hum press against verticals of ebony to skew tangentially from the rear of this etc.-etc.-house, the hum is still spewing through the fogged-up charcoal. As flashes of hum reach columns of I-will, their clashes both muddying and muddling sky and quarry, speakers chant and warriors mime, none knowing who is which or whether they will go forth streaking, or reverse back-in forthwith,