Beyond Words Swings the Pendulum
Being absent from one place may imply being present somewhere else...but, this 'I' was simply absent, nowhere to be found. It had vanished under the starched creases of life, under the layers of phenyl and pinesol, under the crushing weight and suspenseful watch of CRP (C-reactive protein) and ESR (Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate) numbers.
Yes, the 'I' had ceased to be...It relinquished itself to the unforeseen forces of life...surrendered to That which had evaded It, or That which It had finally invaded. The young boy lay on the hospital bed, confused and bewildered. The doctors too shared his state of mind. There was no sign of sanity anywhere in this over-sanitized world. The 'I' became a meandering prayer looking for solace, for comfort and a shard of terra firma in the midst of this deadly quagmire.
Om namah Shivaya 108 times
visitation from Pharoah Sanders'
saxophone sounds swim into
the deep blue space...
"Was he influenced by Bismillah Khan?"
A question out of that blue, innocent
almost; Elijah Mohammad's charisma
and betrayal, Malcolm X...Art Blakey's beautiful Japanese wife...his third,
the mind, having meandered,
now latches itself back to the
dark locks of the Lord, to
the taming of the sacred river:
once tempestuous and vain
sound of shehnai buries itself
in the ears...finds its way into
the conch shell that the temple
priest blows into, and thence
into the solemn gurgle of the ocean
the being drenched, trembles
encloses itself within a fortress
guarded by an army of gods and
luminous souls: such is this
need for protection from one's own
fears and fugitive aspirations
ablaze now on the scaffolding of time...
pain rises like mist
on a hot summer night, sorrow
sinks heavy like dewdrops
sharp like the promontory
by which we are chained
spaces within escape to
merge with words losing
their colors and scents, feathers
and fall leaves co-mingle in the
musty pages of a yellowing Webster ...
The prayer, like the curling, unfurling smoke from frangipani incense rises incessantly, beseeching the Lord and his divine entourage to bestow their blessings upon the son. A musician par excellence, a multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer, Dhani must have descended from Mt. Parnassus itself...A wordsmith too he has been, forging poems and prose, hammering out ideas. An avid reader, Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, Herman Hesse, William Burroughs, Rabindranath Tagore, Krishna Murthi, Rimbaud, Harold Bloom, Kuntz Hamsun amongst a thousand other authors, poets and philosophers have held him in their thrall time and again. A conscientious seeker, wanting to ferret out something Real through his literary excursion, lately (just prior to the surgery) he was quite taken up by the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Interestingly, Wittgenstein expounds upon the limitation of language and the way it hinders us from imbibing an experience in its entirety, with words acting as a velamen between the individual soul and the 'ah-moment'...Both of us being writers, more by natural proclivity and interest than profession, had to succumb to the idea that the sublimest thoughts lie beyond the realms of words, so convinced we were of Wittgenstein.
After three nerve-racking brain surgeries and months of anguish, Dhani lay languishing in a very lonely and strange world defined by a condition called braca aphasia, an aftermath of surgeries. As a mother, a chunk of me died on the pyres of grief styming from his helplessness. As words abandoned him for a long passage of time, as he fumbled to say the simplest things, as my being yearned to gorge itself on his innate wisdom, the ghost of Wittgenstein seem to chuckle under its elusive breath. Wasn't an opportunity being afforded to us, however grievous the circumstances, to move beyond words to the very core of existence, to the amorphic mass whence it all began? To that state of wordlessness in which chaos was Chaos, and silence said it all?
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