BROWN BOOK:5

 vxvx

In the dead times it will be different.   As it was the darkness was palpable.   A voice rang out painting the stars with a colour out of all understanding.   He placed it carefully, making sure it was safe, then spelled the words that opened the door.   He contemplated, making a choice for the future, something that would illuminate the way, something that would carry him through those dead times.   It was as if a door had opened into a future land.   He looked on the land and it seemed barren.   But then in the far distance he saw something, a speck, a fragment.   And it seemed to move, to grow bigger, and he saw that it was moving towards him as he sat motionless, fixed.

A house came towards him and it was dark.   Its door was closed and barred, its windows shuttered.   He could not see what was within.   He heard the sounds, glimpsed the movement yet all was obscured.   How do we read this?   Nine times it can to him and still he did not see.   How will it come to us?   Will we see?  The house may be dark in the dead times, our movement fixed.

The imagery here seems very much more specific.   It is dark.   There is a sound, a voice. The person who is the subject of this tract puts something down and then says the password or casts a spell to open a door.   He sees something coming towards him.   It turns out to be a house(!).   It is closed up, inaccessible.   It comes towards him nine times but still he can’t work out how to get inside.      This is important to us, because we need to work out how to get inside the house at some point.    And all this is bookended by the reference to the “dead times”, where things are different.   Could this simply be the night, where our author is left alone to compose his or her tracts?

As with some of the other tracts, this feels like either the seeking of some kind of spiritual enlightenment, an “opening of the way”, or the thoughts of someone seeking actual or mental escape or release.  

The image of the house, barred and shuttered is very strong, again speaking of constraint or imprisonment, or perhaps of a secret locked away.   I can’t help thinking, when reading this tract, of Thundercliffe Grange itself, moving towards me across a barren land.

 Thundercliffe Grange, an eighteenth century mansion house with service wings and stable block, set in 22 acres of mixed park land and woodland on the Sheffield/Rotherham border in South Yorkshire