“The possible, implying the becoming - the passage from one to the other takes place in the infra-thin.”
“…fire without smoke, the warmth of a seat which has just beeen left, reflection from a mirror or glass, watered silk , iridescents, the people who go through (subway gates) at the very last moment, velvet trousers their whistling sound is an infra-thin separation signaled.”
Marcel Duchamp, Notes.
Departures
It rains every evening now. March rains in the temperate lands of northern India. It is a depression across the country — rains all over the peninsula, the coasts rocking under an equinox as a new moon serenades a season of windswept greys. Terrestrial, alive, total. Beautiful.
It is the same rain and yet it is not. Rain as rain is, is the same. But in sea stories, it rains differently even as it is rain as rain is. It brings the messages as of old — of coconut groves running their fingers of soil against the edges of a malefic wind burdened with the weight of water. A lion wild with pain, a piercing in its paw. The earth conspires in aerial rescue and the lion sleeps in paradisaical waters of the Bay of Bengal.
And yet. The rains up here are a madeleine. An invocation. A summon of a summon. An address to the high chair — to cast her eyes on the path of eternal retrieval. Nobody holds this rain in their arms, unburdening it — its sole purpose is recovery. Record-keeping. It is not anybody’s responsibility; it is responsibility embodied.
“And when the top of her dress was around her hips and he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display, he could think but not say, "Aw, Lord, girl." And he would tolerate no peace until he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth, none of which Sethe could feel because her back skin had been dead for years. What she knew was that the responsibility for her breasts, at last, was in somebody else's hands.”
It has to collapse and slumber one month here, every year. The return of the prodigal son, the burden of the bard.
The sun and the thunder are orchestrated by a nimbus maestro.
Lightning wants to play chorus.
“What you see is no miracle either. It is its most debilitated cousin — memory — the nucleus of identity, knowledge. It has no other function apart from living for someone else, the perfect capital M of memory pulsating in the thatness of That. This here is what purpose for pure recollection looks like. Behold and pity. But remember.
“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
This rain is so similar in its colour, odour, antics and rumbles, that it is differently absolutely. It is the only version that stands completely for The Other, and is therefore, not rain.”
Arrivals
Back to the city. Bougainvillea bushes were in full bloom, hanging over important thoroughfares like babies with pink faces from cold virus. Cold is always fresh here, close to the sea; it is unlike fudgy brownies which inhabitants of the great plains might know and understand. It is not lemonade, but it is still most definitely a lemon sponge cake. Everywhere workers could be seen painting, hanging, lighting, wiping and joining. Appliques in every tree. All the roads at perfect right angles as they should be, jacarandas in the middle, paintings across every fence and wall, no debris anywhere, the city a 20-something-year-old person getting their act straight. A “most livable city” ambition. A contemporary identity.
Things feel fine. No frailty, when a city finally arrives. The vision of administrators, dead cartographers. The people can tell other people in other cities how to solve issues in urban administration; they talk about governance and public consciousness. Arriving in society is not a small deal at all.
The driver is a good man. I talk to him every time we run errands. He has his troubles, he thinks about money and family. He has his adult face, which is something I think people grow at some point, like a second puberty. He knows how to be kind, respond to situations adequately and timely in which he is required, to discern which situations really require his attention and action. He has learnt how to be happy, he has probably thought about it, or not. He listens to love songs that I enjoy listening to too, and he probably feels inside him the stirrings of something extraordinary. He probably understands, despite having a family and a job, while listening to a love song, that longing exists. That it exists because of and despite of everything one has and has not.
The city does not want to exhibit a face of longing. No such thing as public longing exists. As cities become cosmopolitan, they begin to construct, like beautiful bio-chemistry programmed to evolve (evolution is only irredeemably inevitable; it is neither good nor bad, neither useful nor harmful - it is simply accidental), spaces that invite and reflect everything public. Hospitality, hope, harmony, humility. Factories that produce chocolates in real Charlie’s industries have disfigured creatures who know happiness and lead a life of suffering. The emphasis is neither on happiness, nor on suffering. Here, books on kindness and love are not written. They are not themes for stories. Why should they be? Do they become significant when adequately plotted in cultural discourse? Pleasant, mellow lives are sold on streets - I, like everybody visit those streets and aspire for a pleasant and mellow life. It is what civilisation is. Conversations abound in beautiful, ephemeral moments of simplicity, a five-act play.
Stories of civilisation will run out of steam - this is not a generalisation. They will always be relevant and significant. But we have had enough of them. Our practices of civilisation - kindness, hope, gratitude - are missing their human link, a link whose nature it is in to be proportionately cursed, ugly, temporary, a little less always. Stories will have characters who are bad. We do not progress because we are hopeful to a fault; we progress because we like to compare things as better and worse. We are good not because we change the bad, we are good because we judge.
To be truly kind, in the twenty-first century, is to remember one’s dark parts. To place them at the top of every paper as the non-negotiable tradition of commencing experiments with a set of inevitable assumptions about reality. Dark parts are limitations woven into reality - a condition we must work with, not against. To do otherwise would be the fault of cities. Faces architectured against topography are never sustainable.