1.
Birds spiralled outside; you descended the stairs and left. Out from the house, across the path, around the trough, through the grove - parting boughs of kottan, jak, fig. Light fractured. Its broken syllables passed your eyes; shadows of leaves crossed your face. You emerged into the clearing in sight of the terrace where the land plateaued near the pond. It was there you lay still beneath the whitened sky as wooden bells sounded in the distance.
He was emerging from a period of withdrawal - it was worse that time. You saw him there, absorbed in mathematical problems, the solutions to which he insisted came faster when listening to fugues. You thought he was perhaps himself again, even when the specialists said otherwise. He was walking through finite fields; infinities were notably absent - there were only specific, discrete elements: a closed, predictable system looping quietly back to zero. He smiled more often there.
‘Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls…’
(Habakkuk 3:17)
He once described a small chamber he had studied, part of a complex of rooms beneath the houses at Old Dongola, Sudan. The walls were adorned with figural scenes and inscriptions: at the centre, a Makurian monarch (King David, r. 1268–1276 CE) kissed the hand of Christ, who was seated in the clouds, while the Archangel Michael spread his wings to shield them both. To the left, the Mother of God looked on, holding a cross and a book. On the opposite wall, Christ raised his right hand in blessing while holding a book in his left. Dated to the late 13th century (when Mamluk forces were besieging the city), the paintings were surrounded by inscriptions: Old Nubian prayers for the city’s protection and excerpts of Greek liturgy. The curves rendering the clouds came up to Christ’s chest, their outlines overlapping the inscriptions. The circle, the nimbus around his head, was fading, his face at its centre difficult to read.
‘As wind will move you onward, ever slow,
To greet you on the left you'll hear the cry
Of nesting chátakas, and, all around,
Conceiving cranes will bless the eye,
Across the sky in garlands, row on row.’
‘Cloud, take in the features I compile
For you of onward journey, day by day
More arduous and more testing: wearied,
Very wearied, on those peaks you'll stay
And by their foaming waters rest awhile.’
(Kālidāsa, Meghadūta: Purvamegha, 10, 13).
Supine on the ground, you looked upwards, displacing into the expanse - the arcing swifts, the kite (a chestnut Brahminy), the clouds, stippled, then linear. You didn’t know how long you’d been lying there. The softening light felt eternal. You tried to construct an image of it - of eternity - placing your mind at the centre of a circle, an eternal present seeing all temporality at once. The successive ‘nows’ that made up time surrounded you. Each ‘now’ held no duration: a succession of zeros. You looked out onto the circle all at once, seeing your own soul running the circumference, and the souls of innumerable others. There was suffering and love; song cycles rolling, relating the circle to itself. Those bodies in flux, the present (infinitesimally divisible), that centre point - all somewhat diminished in substance. You questioned what propelled your body, what desires led it on. Mediating subject and object, you, the lover, belonged to the beloved. You craved permanence; you loved all that was sure to be lost in death. All those efforts to sum infinity looped back to that point of absence. You renounced the centre and returned to the circumference. Connatural was life and its end. From then on, the very nature (evam-dhammo) of life was something from which you averted your mind. It was all conjunct (samayutta) in a single thought, passing lightly.
Send aus einem Taugewölke / Labung uns herab.
Out of a cloud of dew send refreshment down to us.
(Schücking, Hagars Klage, set by Schubert, D 5, 11.)
The department of anatomy, or ‘The Block’, faced Francis Road in Colombo 8. You received the name and case number of your designated cadaver, a body to be shared among ten students; you were assigned its left upper limb in dissecting room B, where six bodies lay on elevated marble slabs. Formaldehyde saturated the room. You were to isolate and demonstrate the cutaneous nerves of that upper limb: rigid, a dull, unnatural grey. Your blade required force to pass through the skin; it was cold. From the incision wept a pale yellowish fluid. You later learned that it was the unclaimed body of a middle-aged farmhand. In the following classes, a lit cigarette would be placed between his lips. He would be given the name ‘Lazarus’ (they were convinced he drew on that cigarette). You stayed behind one afternoon and stood there, gazing at him: his grey face, insensible, serene beneath inadequate light.