What is this? Some sort of rejectionist manifesto? A love poem? A pastoral family epic? A cry in the night? A diatribe against neocolonialist bamboozlement? Voices in the wilderness? An attempt at reconciliation between the Powers That Be and the prowlers who moan? A charlatan's handbook of spiritual awakening? Propoganda? Is this Guatemala? Burma? California? Chile? Madagascar? the Czech Republic? India?

This is a documentary film (or a silent movie). It draws from old stories, though it won't rely on familiar outcomes. Fragments of psalms and chatter fill in or widen cracks. In the real world (which is India) events occur with and without reason, time is relative, friends and companions arrive and depart, depart and arrive, the bread rises or doesn't (we are in a hurry, and hungry), the fire is at the same time real and symbolic--this is not some little candle or Mt. Pinatubo: this is the infinite eruption, where inhaling always ends in total dissolution.

Subtle degrees of domination, inebriation, servitude and self-indulgence are what you know as love. But that isn't it at all. Love arrives complete, like a bomb in your mailbox. Scorch yourself in that blast!

 

What? In reality no explanation satisfies. But old oral sources--Talmud, Zen koans (both are given as "public record," as if minutes from court cases), accounts of indigenous tale-keepers everywhere [many abundant whispers]--are truer sorts of explanations than much of what passes for journalism. They accept the premise that most of us bumbling amnesiacs are completely stuck in habitual trances and could benefit from a little quandary, paradox, surprise. To push us toward seeing in a way that surpasses or subverts explanation.

A lot of this is a magic trick but in reality it's more real than the movies we at times mistake for our lives. Considering how lives can shift into movies, it may help to observe a few axioms:

in reality, people can (and do) turn into insects, lizards, wolves, trees, smudges, rain, mutterings, food, fire. (The converse is also true: these beings and things turn into people when convenient.) People cannot be turned into machines or numbers, though of course many have tried and some imagine they have succeeded. People are and are not what they are called.

one way of telling a story is to start at the beginning. But what if it started before anyone can remember? Another way of telling a story is to show many pictures and let the eye remind the mind what the mind already knows.

 

The characters in this film are often fictional or legendary (the accounts of self-immolation are not fictional). The pictures form stories related to each other and to the words, though not directly related in many cases. Motifs occur rhythmically, with refrains and variations, counterpoint and scattering, inversion and implied silence. Sometimes an ineffable hum. Not necessarily harmony. The actors are actual persons, though in most cases the words near them have nothing directly to do with them or their lives. (The portraits of actual persons do not depict fictional characters.)

 

is? In recent living memory a day arrived after which many people began saying "Now nothing will be the same." But things were already not the same. Things have been not the same for a long, long time. Rome was not destroyed in a day. Some people say the Empire never ended, which may be self-evident. But it does change, and perhaps someday we (or our children¹s great-grandchildren, may they live to see the day) will witness the unraveling of all toxic absolutist regimes.

I've taken some liberties. My friends and fellow travelers are at times unwitting actors in this particular movie. Please accept my apologies and deep gratitude. Without you none of this would be possible. Not any of it. (I don't mean just this book.) Some friends I've identified. Many, many others I haven't named but these words apply fully as much.

 

What is the sound of one boy crying? Public record? Irrelevant prophesy?

Or not crying. Lighting a match.

 

(It's even worse than it appears.)

Exuberant strippers strip layers of dust and rust off tarnished surfaces to make some hidden thing visible.

 

this?

News is anything that breaks open. So: an egg.