I look at the grass in the distance as the jeepney hums, stalled by an intersection clog up one pleasant Sunday afternoon along the university avenue. I begin to understand the phrase rolling grass. The green field in the distance begins to assume the movement of ripples as the summer wind blows over them in successive waves. The meadow suddenly becomes picturesque idyllic.
The rolling grass evokes the hint of an artist’s intrusion upon the landscape. The rolling grass has been touched by an artist’s brush and appears to be straight out of an impressionist painting.
My thoughts suddenly reel towards a divergent direction and turn all my musing upside down. Rather than an imitation, the rolling grass that appears smooth and almost downy like fur is an original. It is itself and needs no artist. The rolling grass is no invention. It is the concrete and real. Rather, the painting is the abstraction, a two dimensional artistic impression of wind, meadow, sunlight and movement compressed in flat space. Hanging on a gallery wall, the rolling grass that is the earth’s fur becomes a green ocean rippling with wind-driven energy in the artist’s flat rendition.
I know better. Many summers spent playing in the wild and wide idle lands in the province have taught me that meadows take on a different texture once approached. Grass contrary to being soft is a little rough, even sharp. They cut and scar. They are more than just brush strokes of all imaginable tints of green. Grass is more complex than the picture of a landscape. Beyond the flat space, grass has volume, has texture, and is host to an expansive yet miniature array of life. The grassland is a world in itself, a complexity of its own that no art could capture.
I think this can also be said of fiction. The way I hang onto stories it seems I almost dote upon the unreal, the fictional, the made up as an ideal. When I think about it as my mind kills time with these thoughts, I realize that fiction is so much less. It is more the blurred perception of tangible reality. It leaves an impression, appears perfect with its staged flaws because like the impressionist rendition of rolling grass, fiction is unable to capture the true texture of its subject. It is limited by flat space, by its own medium–words.
I should not deify stories so much. I discovered the true texture of grass when I ran through them, perhaps I shall also discover the texture of life if I live both in its brief and endless moments, and approach reality in the flesh not through two-dimensional space.
