The moth at the centre of the world

The moth arrived quietly, as most significant things do. In the stillness of my apartment, it revealed itself through remaining, silent but for a patter. It clung to the upper corner above the bookshelf, pale and near-motionless, its wings trembling in a rhythm too slow to notice unless I stared. I hadn't moved in an hour; there was no particular need to; I had spent the day's last energies. Something in my mind had paused, something in the air with me, and I had to let myself listen. The evening light had thinned to that peculiar blue that renders all objects slightly unreal, slightly more themselves than they are in daylight. The books below the moth stood in patient rows, their spines a mosaic of colours dulled by shadow, each one a door I had passed through and returned from changed. I wondered if the moth sensed this repository of journeys beneath it, if it had chosen its perch with purpose or merely found itself there, guided by whatever invisible currents direct such fragile beings through the world.

It has been some time since I've written. Two years, perhaps more, depending on how one counts the silences between sentences. During that time, the impulse has remained but the language has simply refused me, or maybe I refused it. A block, yes, but more like a fog, a kind of interior collapse or eclipse. The words are there, just out of reach, waiting for the light to shift, but the breaking-through falters in a re-entry. In the paralysis of words, you have to grasp at them the way one might grasp at a dream upon awakening. It's like watching dust settle before daring to breathe. Those particles suspended in a shaft of afternoon light — visible only in certain angles, certain moments — they mirror the fragments of thought that hover, unresolved. I've filled notebooks with half-sentences, with beginnings that trail off into white space. I've pressed my pen to paper until the ink bled through, as if the pressure alone might summon what eludes me. There is something almost sacred in this silence, though it terrifies me. It is a hollow cathedral where my voice once echoed.

The radiator clicked once, or maybe it was the dishwasher, a pen rolling gently toward the edge of my desk. Dusk shifted in the angled sunlight, and the moth didn't move: a small grey presence suspended against the wall, its wings folded into perfect symmetry, a paper origami left by unseen hands.

Maybe I should've let this moment pass unnoticed. An insect in a room is so passing and coincidental, but the more I live in a daily routine of here and there I've realised that the ordinary is no longer defined by prescription. It was a stillness that stretched as if time loosened its grip on the world and the room became a held breath. My breath, held in return, the little patter of anxiety that has become so usual, so constant that I sometimes forget to name it as such, like the hum of refrigerators or distant traffic. Background music to consciousness.

What followed wasn't a revelation in the religious sense. There were no divine voices, no ecstatic signs, but there felt a type of vision, a sensation I've had only a handful of times in my life: the deep, quiet recognition that something has turned its gaze and faced me. Not so much in a metaphorical sense, but viscerally, as if the world or some slight sliver of it had become animate and aware, and in that delicate moment, recognised something within. This is the sort of experience that language resists: too soft to be called supernatural, too grounded to dismiss as fantasy, too charged to ignore. It sits in the liminal space between meaning and coincidence, where the membrane between self and world grows transparent, almost permeable.

In William Blake vs. the World, John Higgs writes of Blake as a man profoundly out of time, not in the sense of being anachronistic, but in that his mode of seeing refused the world's chosen definitions. Blake, Higgs reminds us, did not differentiate between imagination and reality. For him, the world perceived through the senses was a kind of somnambulism, or slumber. True sight, keen vision occurred when the inner eye opened. "If the doors of perception were cleansed," Blake wrote, "everything would appear to man as it is: infinite."

This sentence has followed me for years. It returns at peculiar moments, in alleyways, trains, or moments of stillness like this one. The moth, in its delicate certainty, becomes a reminder of this premise: that reality is not limited to what is seen, but expanded by what is perceived through the visionary self. Sometimes it hovers in my peripheral vision when I'm caught between waking and sleep, or when light falls in a certain way across familiar objects, transforming them momentarily into something strange and luminous.

Blake was called mad, of course. Madness, as Higgs suggests, often becomes a convenient label for those who threaten the primacy of rationalism. But what if madness is simply seeing something differently? What if it is a deeper form of coherence that cannot survive translation into the language of consensus? Perhaps what we call madness is merely the refusal to participate in collective blindness—a stubborn insistence on perceiving the world not as we are told it is, but as it unfolds itself to our particular consciousness, with all its fractures and impossible continuities.

In that moment in my apartment, I understand what Blake meant by the need to unshutter perception. The moth's presence was not symbolic in a literary sense because I wasn't trying to project meaning onto it. Instead, it is precisely what it is: itself, entire, real; it is because it is, and in being, it refracts something that is difficult to put into words. It's when what is stirred doesn't confine to linear thoughts, but is more memorial. The house of my grandparents, filtered with gold dust, the keys of a piano, the stained glass of a church I visited with my family one spring, where the light pooled in strange colours across the pews and made me feel, for a moment, like I was underwater. A dream I had when young of a winged figure emerging from a field of tall grass. Perhaps this is sacred logic, the way the mind builds constellations across time, memory, space, when presence awakens presence. To see the world through such a lens is not a rejection of reason but an expansion of what reason allows. It is a form of resistance against reduction. Blake refused to reduce the world to atoms and machines, and instead insisted, even as Enlightenment thinking thundered towards its conclusions, on seeing angels in the trees and eternity in grains of sand.

And what of the cost of such sight? It feels like exile: Blake lived on the margins, dismissed, ridiculed, rarely recognised in his time or, or if so, treated with a relentless kind of caution. He saw too much that he refused to unsee. The price of his vision was a life spent in conversation with ghosts more real to him than the solid citizens who passed his window each morning. I wonder sometimes if he ever doubted himself in those quiet hours before dawn, when even prophets must confront the terrible possibility of their own delusion. But perhaps the true visionary cannot afford such doubt: the membrane between worlds is too delicate to withstand that kind of questioning. Or perhaps doubt itself becomes another form of sight, another way of touching the edges of what cannot be contained by our usual frameworks of understanding.

Teju Cole, in his meditative essays, often speaks of perception as layered: what he calls 'double consciousness,' the act of seeing both what is there and what lies beneath. His walks through cities are not travelogues but descents into sedimented meaning: each building and window becoming a palimpsest of memory and ideology. Like Blake, even W.G. Sebald, Cole recognises that mysticism is not when someone invents what isn't there, but someone who listens to the murmur beneath the ordinary. The mystic's gift is not fabrication but attention: a willingness to stand still in the current of the everyday until its surface breaks to reveal the hidden currents moving underneath.

The moth did not speak, but it told me something. It told me that the room I thought I lived in was larger than I realised, that time was less linear than it claimed to be, that memory is not backward-looking but ambient, a mist we walk through unaware. It's not like I can prove this, but I cannot forget it. The moth's brief visitation left an impression disproportionate to its fragile presence, a small disturbance in the air that somehow rearranged the furniture of my understanding. In its dusty wings and nervous hovering, I recognised something of my own restlessness, my own attraction to impossible lights. How strange that such knowledge arrives not through books or teachers but through these fleeting encounters with the more-than-human world that brushes against us when we least expect it.

Eventually, I stood up. The moth remained, and when I looked later, it was gone. Perhaps it had flown off and out a window. Perhaps it had never been there. But the change had already occurred. Something in me had re-aligned, and now the world feels different. Blake wrote of the imagination as something divine: the presence of God speaking to us within ourselves. If that is true, then the act of seeing differently, of attending to the moth, to silence, to the sacred of the overlooked, is itself an act of reverence to the Holy Spirit.

I do not know what the moth was, but it was real, not like furniture or financial troubles, but real like music, or love, or grief, mattering beyond proof.

All I know is this: the visionary does not invent meaning but notices what the world tries to discard. It's worth seeing that discarded thread, even if it is spun from nothing more than dust.

References

Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

Higgs, John. William Blake vs the World.

Cole, Teju. Known and Strange Things.

Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn.