The night has its own rhythms, twisting spirals away from the grace and discipline of the sun. Urgency flows underneath the streets, ice-cold stream of remembrance better forgotten, better left underground. Better people dream less, better people do not lose their way seeking the ineffable unknown, the futility evident in the recognised ineffability of that which they seek – or perhaps it is merely escape. Nonetheless, it is time to drink up; the night shall set its prisoners free when the behemoth rotates around squinting to face the sunlight, again. If you sleep really late at night, you’d think you’d get accustomed to sleeping with the daylight screaming/seeping/radiating in its radiance, take your pick, through the blinds of them windows, at home or here, in a city thousands of miles away; breathe not, stop not, keep calm, carry on, tomorrow will be here, and after a few years you won’t be jaded all of a sudden and will listen to everything’s not lost, see you soon and yellow all over again, and how perfect that the sunshine of the song glows out blinding out of a greying dawn on the banks of a greyish ocean with grey sand under one’s feet
All those years ago, standing under the starlight, I’d written your name in the sand, and then the waves had come and washed it away; came back to the city, and there were these lines in a borrowed book from a library of the East telling of how the sand had washed your name away and so the poet wrote it in the sea instead
Wrote your name in the sand/ Sea washed it away/ Wrote your name in the sea
And so on. Speculative whether you were ever real, or just vision, unspeaking Laura/Beatrice built out of house of cards (but obstinately resilient) fragile memory fragments and no one in yourself. Would that mean you did not exist, or were you episteme, mirror-self with as much doxic legitimacy as she who lived, breathed, smote, swore and silently wept when she thought nobody was looking; I do not know, cannot see how it matters now, with Kronos having wrought his inevitable charm. In The Telegraph published out of Calcutta, there is a tiny section called Scripsi right below the daily editorial, a couple of lines from somewhere, with some cosmic symmetry to the rest of the newspaper, anyway, it matters little exactly what. I remember one line from one edition of Scripsi that has become one of the motifs my mind repeats to myself ever so often, about how the protagonist in your novel of reality might just be a minor character in somebody else’s, or even more brutally, how the character whom you place on a pedestal and worship (Laura/Beatrice, encore) might consider you nothing but a minor player who played the dead body of an absent Claudius to your Gertrude in a scene which might as well be deleted outright to make the narrative more taut. With time, bitterness mellows to the comic, and then perhaps comes full circle to a sort of helpless awareness of the tragic. I do not know what comes beyond, Kronos is the only one with foresight denied to the blind fallen. I only wish there would be definitive closure at some stage, this never ending nothingness is unbearable, I try to smash my way out of it by being pointlessly nasty, but yet that doesn’t work, it is a sort of accursed enslavement, I do not know what else to call it, but it is yet the mark where I find myself returning, to the horror of all those who live in the present, and mine too, but for me it is not pure horror, it is admixed with the absent dialectic of the unsayable – of there being no dialectic where at least sparks could have set off a fire that would burn everything down. The crowd chants with M’sieu Martin, swaying the keys on his piano at Olympia Theatre again. Fryderyk Chopin, yes, he was one who articulated some of the fragile, twisting, yet unblemished branches growing out of the void of the unsayable, and ever so often, added some miniature leaves of startling beauty for the left hand to explore. I will write to you again anon, and yes, dear reader, do remember how it is with Lauras and Beatrices, their silence is akin in a lot of ways to the silence of the reader, it allows you to adopt a face of your choosing and be who you want to be in this story, everybody, or nobody. And if at the end of it all, at Ragnarok, as the skies cry out our awakening in the twilight before the final dawn, if you will think back and remember that one moment of walking carefree down the rain-flooded street, all else will fade away, and it would be alright.