Placelore

Welcome to Placelore Blog

 
 

Pilgrim

Through the thick darkness of the night I travel from Rishikesh, passing as I go thousands of chanting, flower-carrying pilgrims walking towards Haridwar, a city situated on the river Ganges. It is a holy place for Hindus, and millions come there to perform ritualistic bathing to wash away their sins and attain moksha, liberation from the cycle of birth and death.

I am shawl wrapped against the cold and arrive at the city’s railway station at 5am. There are hundreds of sleeping bodies lying casual almost in heaps spread across the floors of the station. There are queues outside the toilets, but the poor are deterred from access by an entry charge. A long train lumbers slowly out of the darkness and comes to a hissing halt alongside platform one. People stir to board the carriages of the cheapest class. Its doors are locked and its windows barred, and after several attempts to enter they uncomplainingly resettle into the shadows to wait. I too am part of the waiting, and an hour will pass before entry can be gained. I leave down my backpack and draw the woolen blanket tighter round my body. Waiting, I have learnt, is an art requiring the light of attention; should I wait for something I am no longer in the state of waiting, which in itself is a profoundly active, timeless state.  

After some minutes I observe an old woman hobbling slowly forward with a water can held in a thin, wrinkled left hand. Her body from the hips is bent downward into a painful decline. She moves towards a carriage, rests against it for a breath or two, then slides into a low squat, lifting her sari as she goes to a quiet defecation unto the tracks.

The smoker’s smoke, the sleeper’s sleep, the talker’s talk—here so much is seen, but no one encroaches upon her public privacy. Given the conditions of the situation, it is an elegant normality of which we are all a part. She washes between her years of legs then quietly rises and ambles away towards the shadows. In her wake the perception of my mortal eye yields to the omniscient eye of inner vision; all upon the platform then are as atoms spun into an atomic dawn, to be retouched in the darkroom of universal chemistry to re-emerge in other tones, other shades, and in other places. Later I board the train and travel south, bearing a strong impression of the dignified pilgrim woman not able to afford the few rupees for an official toilet.  

Witness

The lonely wind

cuts my tears

apart

falling in the cold rain,

how beautiful

the fragrant flowers of Spring.

 

 

 

 

What is I am

Hold me
so that I may go
falling into the tears
of life
for this is
I am.

Enfold me
in your arms
so I may feel safely
the pain which prepares,
cleanses me for being
within

and after
will you accept me
through the ages
when all has died
but the face of
what is
I am

Sunset

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth.

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs--

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Through the Wound

Through the wound comes the healing:

a relationship formed

in the tenderness of loss,

the little girl lost

the little boy searching for God

 

their roots became twisted:

searching through the ages

towards a death un-relinquished

as they climbed the high mountain

towards a cross on a precipice 

offered long ago 

to the torment of the wind.

 

Atop stood a raven

ancient and humbled

being of the worlds

it plucked their false comfort

and wept,

for the death un-relinquished. 

What Piece of Work

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
you seem to say so.

- Hamlet (2.2.295-302), Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

The Dark Tower

1.

On August 6th 1945 at 8.15 in the morning a nuclear-solar energy that does not belong on this earth was released some 549 meters above Hiroshima "Such was the ferocity of the blast, eerie shadows of incinerated humans were left imprinted on steps, pavements and walls.” For days, weeks, months, even years after survivors searched for those missing.

 On first reading about this occurrence some fifty years ago I felt a haunting, periodically this feeling returns.

_____________________

II

(London, June 26th 2017, 8 AM) Although knowing it would be in the vicinity of my journey, nonetheless when I stepped out of Latimer Road station something inside me beckoned to turn around and there it was directly behind, less than 100 meters away, shocking in it's stark, brutal devastation; faintly in the atmosphere you could still hear it screaming … instantly brought in witness to the offering of some primitive form of solace I said aloud to all and to no one - my God  - such brief recognition of our utter helplessness. Momentarily we were, we are, all in that tower, and it stands there now terrifyingly sacred.

Around the area there are photos of those missing, messages, flowers, prayers upon stained paper, and there also written large in black letters the word Why? To that heartfelt question there will be answers of degree from investigations, commissions, politicians but there will be no words from the silence, from the sorrow of Being. 

The aftermath of this, and such an event as this that I have witnessed more directly previously, will follow a course … but for now there is a certain shock and awe felt in that street, in that neighbourhood, not the words shock and awe as uttered vindictively by a blundering former American president, but something closer to the root of the Dark Tower. 

___________________________

III

 There are a few books, which I return to read every few years, one of them is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The title of the book is derived from the Abattoir "Schlachthof-fünf” in Dresden where Vonnegut and other Allied prisoners were incarcerated in February 1945. Throughout the book there is a recurring line: "So It goes." The words appear each time a death occurs and what they imply lies at the centre of any understanding of Vonnegut's work: fatalism, stoicism and the acceptance that nothing worthwhile will come from denying or shrinking away from difficult situations or when the worst has happened. Questioned repeatedly over the decades about whether he thought Dresden should have been bombed, Vonnegut's most meaningful response was that the city had been bombed; the question for him was how one behaved now. "If one of his aims was to provide a voice for those innocent, his method of making himself heard was both courageous and effective; he told us the hardest of truths, but in the gentlest, funniest and most amiable way he knew how." 

 

 

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

 

'The Bright Field' by R. S. Thomas

Distortion

"Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it distorts everything for its own convenience"

Jiddu Krishnamuti

 

Right Now

A man who was studying archery took two arrows in his hands and stood before the target.

'A beginner should not hold two arrows,' his teacher told him. 'You will be careless with the first, knowing you have a second. You must always be determined to hit the target with the single arrow you shoot, and have no thought beyond this.' With only two arrows, and standing before his master, would he really be inclined to be heedless with one of them? Yet although he may not have been aware of his own carelessness, his teacher was. The same injunction surely applies in all matters.

A man engaged in Buddhist practice will tell himself at night that there is always the morning, or in the morning will anticipate the night, always intending to make more effort later. And if such are your days, how much less aware must you be of the passing moment's indolence. Why should it be so difficult to carry something out right now when you think of it, to seize the instant. 

Kenkō and Chōmei

Essays in Idleness and Hōjōki