A prayer

I am lost at sea again -

the tide that once cradled my head

and rocked me, gently, into quiet lulls

now seizes me impetuously,

now fills me with a sleeping dread –

an eerie timber I once knew well

forces the current into a swell

that storms into the serene abode

in which my silent longings dwell

How long? How long, before

I shut my eyes; the final door,

and the shadows that loomed overhead

descend, those thick and heavy lids,

to snuff the flame, burning soft and dim

as its gentle light is torn away –

or would I have then learnt to pray?

On texture and weight pt.2

When one is alone enough, one finally begins, again, to write. At the end of a dry and wordless spell lies the feeling of returning home after a long trip, being able to converse freely in one's native tongue - no longer having to take the same care with which one handles fragile tableware at someone else's dinner party in handling the most basic of expressions.

But speaking in a second language offers a kind of defense, that excuses ambiguity, convolution and other such obscuring elements of speech. A lowering of the listener's expectations that enables one to say: "Yes, well, perhaps I am not being entirely clear...but if you only understood my dialect,  I could paint it all so beautifully - as an artist in his element - and surely, then, you would understand."

How often one feels as a foreigner in another country like a locked chest of antiques - commonplace items, carried into another culture as the most exotic and mysterious of treasures. And again, as children - how we invent secret codes to encrypt our most private and hidden thoughts; we scrawl them across our diaries in invisible ink. How we mourn the great tragedy of translation - because that which cannot be translated is of the highest value, locked away in the vault of another language for safekeeping.

And we are all multi-lingualists in this sense - each of us operates in a multiverse of symbols; each set of meanings a language of its own. A language of thought, of emotion, and then of behaviour. A language of religion, of culture, of place. And we guard, with all our different modes of being, a single one that is no longer a collection of descriptors, but that described.

Grids upon grids, as Foucault describes, placed one atop the other over history, to provide us with new ways of knowing - and describing truth. Organising the world, delineating its boundaries and demarcations - yet it seems now, there is more to be known than ever before. I love thinking of the idea of the universe continually expanding through time and space, as if mockingly, ridiculing our attempts to contain it.

For now we see in a mirror dimly - awaiting what? The gathering of reflections into their very object, the subject itself. Symbols come boldly into their meanings. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us... when the shifting shadows that herald an oncoming light are finally dispersed, scattered into the wind, when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away... when meaning arrives in the full force of its substance, rising through fissures to the surface in a tide - submerging description, language, forms in its course - sweeping over all things, and finally to carve, across the flat and formless ground, the shoreline of eternity.

On texture and weight, pt. 1

Do you feel it between your fingers?

The exquisiteness of life, stretched out before us in ripples, in an endless cascade of creases and folds, tumbling, one into the next. Life's abounding… is-ness as they say, for the lack of a more elegant expression. How dimensional it is; not in a physical sense, but in the variety of ways by which it can be measured, considered.

We live a textured existence. Bradbury writes, in Fahrenheit 451:

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion.

Life is details, whether captured in words, colours, or lines. Detail upon detail, wonder upon wonder. If a stage, how elaborate the production! How expansive each set, how intricate every act. A needless display, some might even call it indulgent. But somehow -

There is so much, there is not enough, there is so little 

Kundera's singular phrase "The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" captures, in one breath, this absurdity: The immense weight of the human experience in all its intensity (the pleasure, the pain) rests entirely on the fragile scaffolding of a scant existence.

How does anything hold?

On essentials

In these past few weeks, my train of thought has been tossed mercilessly between tracks by each new reading, conversation, encounter; veering off its initial course into novel terrain.

It began with the notion of inherency, and a consequent paradox - by which extrinsic measure do people use to ascertain intrinsic value? How have we come to hold belief in the intrinsic value of life (human or otherwise) - a concept so strange, so contrary to what the natural laws of survival dictate? To think, if something as basic as one's right to existence rests on one's individual 'fitness', we could hardly proffer the argument that life in all its forms - weak and strong, sick and well, young and old - is inherently worth preserving.

And next, an onslaught of anthropological concepts that brought the discussion into the realm of universals. Is what is intrinsic, intrinsic to all? Do all human cultures abide by the same basic rules (-assuming the universality of an internal system that guides individual behaviour)?  How do we free ourselves from the very biases that enable us to gather with our senses some symbolic understanding of the world around us? Impossible as an attempt to rid thought of language. 

First, despair. Realising one's necessary partiality, a handicap inextricable from our very nature - an inability to take things at face value, to see things for what they are. Second, hope. Relief at the inconsequentiality of our efforts to understand everything, believing that omniscience lies boundless, wide and deep and far beyond the most foreign of borders.

***

And I too wanted to be. That is all I wanted; and this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bounds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note.

I cannot be sure what the author's (Sartre) intent was, but only of what it impressed upon me - that there is a superfluousness to life that detracts from what we feel to be essential - precious, pure and true. We pore through thick layers of styrofoam and bubble wrap, before finally arriving at the tiny weight, transparent as gold, encased within.

***

And again, it arose: the need to shed
To strip the skin of culture off its seed, each shred
To lay life bare, fresh, bruised and plain
To devour it whole: flesh and pulp,
kernel, shell and grain.

On reductionism

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams; I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner; I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world; the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific points of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the subChristian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.   

C.S. Lewis (1944). Is Theology Poetry?