SOS

London, AFP. A six-year old girl on the east coast of Scotland sends a message in a bottle thinking that it will reach Norway. Forty seven days later it turns up in New Zealand and is picked up, by co-incidence, by another six year-old.

What was written was of little importance-it rarely is. What remains true is the hope that the message will survive, that some deep currents will take it from the infinite green sea to a place of safety, that it will be picked up by some stranger on a far shore who will be able to decipher it, and that there is still some level of compassion out there in the wider world. What does one think before this immense expanse of unknowingness, this troubled, unpredictable sea?

Reflecting on the late Richard Pryor a co-actress said that there are some people, the 'walking wounded,' who carry their pain with them so intensely that one can only wince when one comes across them; that is, only a person who has understood what pain is himself. Wittgenstein was right here: what need, then, to say I am in pain.

But there are many such people who walk amongst us and they go unrecognized under a starless sky. It as if in a storm where one can only see and think about one's own self. V.S.P. writes about how at the age of eighty he'd almost become invisible and how only he can see other such invisible people, hanging around street corners or park benches. And Joan Didion says the same about those who carry the grief of the death of a loved one with them. She can see it in their hunched shoulders, their lost, abstract look. One has to be dead before one can see the dead. Like for like. The fire in the eye can know something of the sun. And the shadows?

There are many mad people who drift across our paths, more than we would care to imagine, and ghosts who are really people who wish they had never been born, shipwrecked on life, rub shoulders with us without our being aware of their presence. The cruelty of fate is that all these people live in different dimensions, times and places; but the universe's grace also resides in this.

Tell it but tell it slant.