Valentine's Park

The creation of a single soul is like the creation of a universe.
Q: 31:?

I repeat myself. Walking back home: the sky is calm and serene but also dull and monotonous, the warm evening air is still; I have the weird feeling that this walk back home would have felt better had I decided in the morning to go to the seaside and not to town. And for a moment it feels as if that other journey-the one not taken-is more real than the one actually undertaken.

I pass a car and note that the side of it has been badly scratched. A meaningless event-and the observation even more so. I settle down to watch a film and the first scene is of a person looking at the scratch on the side of his car. Of course, there is something in us that looks for such co-incidences, hidden correspondences between isolated events..Freud would say it is a remnant of primitive thinking. Perhaps. But , then, all poetry and a significant part of mysticism depends on such primitive thinking in the form of metaphors: only connect. Perhaps it is modern thought, with its desire to tear us away from nature, from 'the given', that is the anomaly?

How many lives go up to make a life? None seem to get off the ground ...maybe this is why they repeat themselves? I've had this thought before. I open the front door and am almost paralysed by the light which brings forth a stream of thoughts..it is as if a hundred summer days are condensed into that moment: the long Sunday afternoons of childhood where nothing happened or the 4 0'clock suicide hour in Lahore where the world stops turning...I pick up a book, at random, and read the words: memory is the intersection of mind and matter.

And all along I recall that a thought-or rather a sentence- had been lodged in my mind, long before I left the house, like an unfinished dream: The whole of summer was rolled into one of his shots.

The day before-or was it the day after-I had visited Valentine's Park. On the way there I had been reading Badiou, and he makes a lot of 1937 as a turning point in history-as if there are a few moments on which everything hinges. A slight displacement either way and we would have entered another universe, our whole destiny would have been radically different. The fragility of time: a moment takes us to or away from the beloved. And I remember an old black&white film from childhood where a man searches for a woman who he's fallen in love with but never talked to. It just so happens that they always cross paths-or nearly do, for although they are always in the same places they always seem to just miss each other by a few seconds..as one enters a room , the other leaves it. It is as if they have to repeat these actions ad infinitum until fate perfectly reconciles their individual destinies (as a quirk of fate, I never did watch the end of the film to see how it ended!).

But isn't each moment this hinge, this turning point? At the park something catches my eye. There is a solitary tree with a faded golden plaque on it: I read the numbers incredulously: 1937.

The park itself is unremarkable-except for a remote, older corner of it. It is as if this part of the park was more ancient and everything had been built around it, a world within a world. It had not only survived all the changes, but like an old tree, endured beyond all sadness. One could pause to think: how many promises were made under these trees, how many hearts broken? Here people had met and held hands and laughed together. How mysteriously ordinary it all seemed. Here the branches of the trees stoop to touch the water. The water is black and to peer into it is to look at another world lying beyond a black mirror. Each thing in the world-ourselves included- has its other life and we only momentarily catch a glimpse of it...

Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence of bronze,
only the sight that saw it faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence.
--Denise Levertov

(with thanks to Roxana for the photo..if you can see it!)