I
am writing in one of those frill-free notebooks we used in school. How fast
things become obsolete. Like STD booths. They used to give such good business
said the owner of the single booth on this side of the mountain. Now with the
cellphone zamana he notes that they are a near extinct feature of a quickly receding past.
My
instinct to make a phone call to someone-anyone to tell them how nice the place
is made me wonder about the impulse to share. The way in which sometimes
sharing itself constitutes experience. Almost as if an experience once shared
is a an expanded one. As if to suggest that if no one else knew, it would be
less real. less, true. A web of story telling, that's what it is.
Claustrophobia.
The walls have been pressing down, slowly leaning inwards and constricting my
airways. A problem with the piping, an internal blockage. My hillside holiday
is an invasive surgical treatment. A method of bypassing caving walls. (I sense
an overstretched metaphor)
The
sky has been brewing, but never really following through with its threats. A
few drizzlings here and there.
Reading
a good book that wraps itself around you is a visceral pleasure. Good writing
diffuses warmth around your internal organs. Like a hot water bottle buried in
your bed on a December night. Of course there are other
narratives that are made of darker and heavier stuff, which weigh you down and
linger through the day, following you like a persistence stalker. I guess
that is what art does. It affects affectively.
Old
colonial bungalows with preserved, museumized air.
A
hundred and six years.
A
hundred and sixty years.
The
walls fold in peculiar ways - The
ceiling bows oddly low - The
ceiling stretches oddly high. Some
strange experiment in time and space. We
are used to our built environment shaping space differently. I
like it. This is how Alice felt when she ate the cake - unwieldy and out of proportion.
I
cant believe I had forgotten the sound of silence. The touch and smell of a loud conspicuous silence slipped
my memory. My ears are now
habituated to the midnight clamourings of Indra Vihar. Suddenly I am startled by this equally
noisy silence. The smallest sounds are amplified,
each footstep, murmur and rustle acquire distinct outlines of their own.
A
ringing silence.
I
am reminded of these moments which expose the roots of clichéd phrases. The
fact that each overused turn of phrase contains within it a quantum of truth.
Clichés cant be dismissed because of the mere fact of repetition. Recycled images are not
less true simply because of the fact of reuse. To my ears this is a ringing silence. So I sit here and
listen carefully to this vociferous ringing silence. If I shed my big city skin
maybe this silence will transmute into a silent silence. My ears hear silence
because I am still experiencing in the negative. I experience an absence of certain sounds. It requires a
dramatic feat of re-orientation to stop experiencing in the negative.
Which
is what I intend to do.
how beautiful. ringing silence and the silent silence
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