Planet Literature

Zacharias Mbizo’s Dream Worlds/5

Today, Zacharias Mbizo’s dream worlds take us high into the air: we will float straight into the cosmos and experience a completely different sense of space and time.

Bumblebee Flight

On the wind of a thunderstorm you ride into the middle of the yellow canola cloud. The carpet of scent embraces you, you are a bumblebee, you cling tightly to a blossom, sucking from it the bittersweet nectar of eternal return.

You are so immersed in your activity that you don’t even notice how the sky darkens, how it freezes into a black wall that finally crashes down in front of you as a flashing guillotine blade.

For the duration of a wing twitch you fall out of time, and you realise: The gates of summer are wide open, you can already hear the whirring of the scythe in the shimmering air, the canola sun is swallowed up by a dark barn, and the misty bride wraps the naked field in her robe of comfort.

As you detach yourself from the blossom and the tempest carries you away, the waving canola tentacles entice you anew into their midst. Its spicy breath penetrates your skin, its glow floods your eyes.

But can you be sure that this is the same canola from which you sipped before you fell out of time? How do you know that the moment without duration, the hole in time, has not caused you to fall into a distant future that only accidentally resembles the present from which you have dropped out?

And are you still the same being that you were before the timequake struck you? Or do you only live on in the fleeting, half-conscious memory of another being whom the maelstrom of time has carried back to the moment in which it threw you out of itself?

More cosmic dreams in The Hidden Chamber, pp. 43 – 47:

Blue Sky

Starlit Night

Image: Jiří Meitner: Canola Field (2010); Wikimedia commons