On obliqueness

February slips out of my fingers. Like snowflakes in the sun. Mehdi Hasan sings in the Naat tradition of Islam quietly on my computer. I watch Chris Marker’s short films, and for the third time, Priya Sen’s heartache of a film No Stranger At All (2022). A daze of state of violence, suffering, love, loss pass through my visual field, leaving behind a sense of the utter quietness of snow; a lingering texture of north India in the early summer. How do thematic markers of a time pass over in favour of a sensation that is obliquely attached to the moment, and yet manages to linger on longer than historical record?

Outside, there is complete silence. Inside, for once, there is also a silence. Not as clear as the first sun of the morning on a pile of fresh snow. Not as clear as purple peaks of Roerich’s Himalayas. But there is this resounding, emphatic, inward silence. Like Bach’s Double Violin Concerto which asserts itself over other noises, and speaks clearly its refusal to be seen in entirety.

Refusal, for me, is always written. Never spoken. But clear in writing, never in speech. I realise not everyone has that peculiar relation to the written word. Refusal to be drawn into the buzzwords of topicality in scholarly and intellectual work. Refusal to be noted down as this or that kind of writer or anthropologist. Refusal to be seen entirely. I demand so much, to be seen in writing. I refuse so much, to be seen entirely.

As light that falls obliquely on the snow, it takes the shape of pink and purple just as in Roerich’s artwork. The monks walk along the mountainways, protected from being thoroughly shaped, and yet, their monasticity having a total presence.

Light is seen but never entirely, never directly.

And yet, in speech, I am recognizable even if falsely. I talk too much, my mother says at times. Too forthcoming, too chatty, all daffodil and sunshine. Speaking does not have the same delectable quality that the whisper of the written word does. Speaking seems oddly like photography in a bad light. You can see the object nakedly, yet everything about it is lost. It particular refusal of directness, violated.

[Image courtesy of the Nikolas Roerich Museum website.]