on a small scale

In the small room the books have been re-arranged, thrown next together randomly by the swami. Not as if the previous order was any more satisfying. Chance determinations. They've been lugged here, heaped unceremoniously on top of one another, the rituals of orthodoxy quite foreign to you as a matter of right. Books ready to be carted off. You imagine this room at night, words in the dark. The white shelves tired, sagging and sighing under the weight. There's less and less space to move about in here-especially when little R drifts by, poking her nose around. (Most of the day she's pretty content chasing dogs and walking in and out of small ditches and holes. This repetitiveness in human nature, for what purpose?)

By day the little one often repeats the words that she's learned to herself, fearful that she'll forget them. Store them up, re-arrange the words. But she, like a mystic, doesn't tie them too closely to things. Lots of things can be "clocks", even though they don't tell the time.

A random list of books, at eye-level: Stendhal, The Tempest, The Tao of Physics, Murakami, Schuon's To Have a Centre, Piper, Genet's Funeral Rites. What is remembered? Probably very little. Books ain't the thing. This painful storing up of alibis against reality.

Looking for the lost Badiou or even the fabled copy of Peter Brown's wonderful Making of Late Antiquity you come across your lost copy of Menashe's Collected Poems. The strangest of things: small-scale wordings, constructions, the simplest of words, that fold outwards. A stone. A pond. Small ripples that never leave but turn back, time and again, to discover a pattern that was always there. A common word whose literalness breaks established meanings with a second-take. There's a path, that only becomes a path once one has walked it. And then it seems as if it was always there, like a hole in our lives, that we step around but can't avoid.