The water’s surface texture, something there, a form that appears nowhere else exactly like that—sometimes in snowdrifts, something similar, but not the same, not fluid. I want to say “diamond” but that is just a cliché. It’s a texture of stacked and dynamic tessellations, each moving in a different way and at a different speed and in slightly—or completely—different directions.
The form that emerges from this, a transcendent configuration that doesn’t correspond to any one part of the water’s surface, any one depth. Not really there at all, perhaps. A reflection, but not a simple recoil of light—a physical reflection, an echo of something deeper, more penetrating than physical. Yet still only echo: ephemeral and transient.
There is a strange persistence despite perpetual movement and change, lagging just behind the wind, transformations in both size and shape, but all through the transition somehow retaining the same elemental form, the same pattern of stacked tessellations.
There is an important message in this. Not mere metaphor. I am convinced that if I can understand this phenomenon thoroughly, completely, not just the physics of it or the underlying Fourier patterning of the various waveforms (those are all meaningless abstractions), but understand it on its own existential terms, in terms of its own expressive being, I will know something of immense importance.
Or remember something essential that I have forgotten.