Speaking my mind, living my mind; mind being vast empty tracts, more extensive than the universe of potential that waits without waiting for me to speak, indeed to live. The angel descended and stood quietly, not exactly ignoring me, but on the other hand not making further advance towards me. What do you want of me? Me looking at you, you looking at me. Blankly mirroring, surreptitiously distorting. Dark energy, matter, emptiness. A whirling speck of dust. But I must not be hemmed in, I must be free to think my thoughts and attempt translation into language. Again.
Talking briefly of your experiences of India, the changes it may have wrought in you left its mark in me and yesterday happened upon Robin Robertson’s poem Kalighat. There is no part I can extract so I will quote the whole thing.
Only a blue string tethers him to the present.
The small black goat; the stone enclosure;
the forked wooden altar washed in coconut
milk, hung with orange and yellow marigolds;
the heap of sodden sand.
With a single bleat
he folds himself into a shadow in the corner,
nosing a red hibiscus flower onto its back
and nibbling the petals.
The temple bells; the drum. It is nearly time.
A litre of Ganges holy water
up-ended over him. He’s dragged
shivering to centre-stage and
slotted, white eyed, into place. On the last
drumbeat, the blade separates
his head from his body. The blood
comes out of his neck
in little gulps.
The tongue and eyes are still
moving in the head
as the rest of him
is thrown down next to it.
Neither of his two parts can quite take this in.
The legs go on trembling,
pedalling at the dirt – slowly trying to drag
the body back to its loss: the head
on its side, dulling eyes fixed
on this black familiar ghost;
it’s limbs flagging now,
the machinery running down.
There’s some progress, but not enough, then
after a couple of minutes, none at all.
The last thing I notice is a red petal
still in his mouth, and another,
six inches away, in his throat.
* * *
Rabih Alameddine pulled me to dig out my copy of Claudio Magris’s Danube and begin to read it again. On page 23 I found: ‘Anyone with a solid education in science eventually feels at home, even among things which change and continually lose their identity.’ I recognise that sense of things losing their habitual identity. Even my own sense of identity. Am I what I was?
