The last word on the subject – Yes, like an extended essay on grief – as if it was being interminably beamed back from a fast disappearing speck on the far reaches of the cosmos, a Voyager (“a futile, man-made machine, a gleaming spider in empty space, wafting past lifeless planets where sorrow had never existed except perhaps for the pain of rocks groaning under an unbearable burden of ice, and I wept”. Cees Nooteboom. The Following Story, 2003 ed’n, P14).
Unstuck in time (say, like Billy Piper), and, increasingly unstuck in space, it appears that the span between great social events and the existential fate of individuals remains impossibly wide – The Riots – in which a man found on Facebook inciting disorder is today sentenced to four years imprisonment. The sentence is a deterrent.
And I wept, out of a clear blue sub-tropical sky, in the early morning sunshine standing in the crowd on the long suburban lawn still wet with dew, and across the lagoon the bright flame from the base of Apollo 13 roaring and shaking the ground, as the rocket rose into the sky. Crossed it to and fro, since I had no way of knowing at that moment of its ill-fated mission, or, in 1969 that encouraging protest was a crime. The sentence is a rendition.
Traced in the shadow / an indecipherable cause – on Tuesday I watched a storytelling, song, music and dance work based on the poem by Radindropath Tagore, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva . Composed and sung by Pandit Vishwa Prakash, the dancer crossed it to and fro, her eyes framed in kohl black, stamping the ground, while the drummer was like a blackbird holding a snail shell in its beak and beating it against a rock.
And I wept – No, tears were held in suspension – the quality of ecstatic sadness, as of a great loss, in the singer’s voice. The sentence is a manifestation.