Primrose Hill

You have never seen the Spiritual Sun.

I have - I saw him on Primrose Hill

--Blake

The entangled web of our lives. How we seek clarity! Are these not the marks of your absence, like so many scars? Is that our destiny-to be defined by what we lack?

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I do not miss the land, Jonah, I am not English after all! There are no mystical correspondences between the land and my soul. No words bind me to a place. Northerners like us cannot speak with a sun-and-wheat consciousness. Jerusalem is elsewhere, not here. If you look for it you will not find it. If it comes it will be like a flash of lightning, a dark hieroglyph that breaks up the whiteness. But if not, then not (as the Lahoris say!)

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I remember walking in Lawrence Gardens with the swami once and she stopped at a tree and said: this is where my father used to sit. And for a moment no other tree in the whole world mattered. It was as if everything of value was concentrated in this one place. Trees hold so many voices. As if we could lend them some of ours to make up for their silence. And they could repeat them to us when our faces grow dark, and our voices falter.

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We walked on. And this is the place where it was declared that the second world war was over. And we thought to ourselves: what was that?! And this is where the British used to dance and this is where we would see them strolling with their dogs.

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What else is a place but a bundle of memories? What else is the heart but a rag-and-bone shop? Who is the collector, who the buyer? No, I do not miss London, the grey skies or the darkness before the rain-for that is still with me somewhere. No, today more than any other day what I remember is not London but the loved ones there. And though they seem to be the most distant of dreams, as if a dream within a dream, still I know that in life that is what is most real. I have seen the Sun.

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It is the moon that disappears

It is the stars that hide not I

It's the City that vanishes