When there is an eclipse, crows wake up and cry out. Other birds follow, making a din at the precise moment when the eclipse is complete. A rainy night and the sea grey and uneasy but the eclipse began, the moon visibly overtaken by darkness, birds agitate. To arise thinking: It was midnight. Is it dawn already with so many birds awake? If there is no god to speak of, and I am all, might as well begin to explore, even excavate.
It's a black mood and a black time, may be even evil. The sun streaming out in flares, going, gone. Nothing to do but wait for darkness. How can neutrinos stream faster than light when there ain't any. There has to be some way of saying things that is not white or western. The shrill excitement which is piercing and riveting, it's in the words and music, a thick blanket and everyone is sleepless, also shrill and livid, going the same way, a sort of advent. The blanket smells of fever and sweat. Yuddhishtra walks up a stony barren mountain, a stray dog in the procession of the ones he loves, they following behind and falling out, going down one by one, succumbing to the time, but he walks on silent, will not stop to sigh or bewail with the dog, not a pet or especially chosen, simply tagging on when the five brothers and Draupadi choose to wander the cardinal directions as a pilgrimage.
The time of darkness has despair, first to arise, name and figure, no abstraction. Illusions defeated, downed all the cheery ideals. The belief that there would be a right way, a making of things right. Defeat looms darkly —— no inclination to war, too big the forces ranged on the other side. Stand, sit, or look. Look at the thick ranging mass with no power to avoid or avert. Yet, sometimes to see through as if the atmosphere had cracked in the spongy density. A hairline split, eye to it, she looks.
Gentle white house in the twist of a path that will wind over one hill and then skirt another before coming to a plain that flares out wide and which then drops abruptly to the sea. Just behind the eyelids, lurking in the mind, I sold you, did a barter, no help for it at all. And there before the false flowers were made we swung high, back and forth, holding on to the aerial roots of a great tree,
She does not see what she describes, merely coming to terms with what is ever a raging flow, or an inadequate muddied river of drift. Looking out for plot holes, worm holes may be there as well. Something is moving all the time and sometimes it seems as if it is this and sometimes that. Recognise and remember, or the other way round, whenever the sound of an Oh, Yes! reaches her ear. Useless to try for dialogue —— she has tried! —— for figures painted on a wall are silent. So she begins to mumble, chatter and sing, sometimes, of forms she might have seen, or not at all.
Stretch and stretch until there is nothing, everyone is talking about it. Call it endless and relax. As if anything could happen that is not supposed to, no worry of a ditch and if on the edge a universe is there to take the fall. What could one possibly fall off. An escarpment between two cities, Nairobi and Nakuru, where the earth pulled apart in an unseen cataclysm and where automobiles sometimes lose their nerve and go over the edge to the floor of the vast valley far, far below. And sometimes the stretching fetches a recoil. Not as if one planned it, not as if one wanted to. A vicious snap and a stunning blow from what may have been a cause or perhaps is an effect. She cannot think clearly of escape for a while. Everyone, she says, is looking for an exit. There's overcrowding and the gates are strait.
