bhurrababy

“All is for you: the daily prayer, The sleepless heat at night, And of my verses, the white Flock, and of my eyes, the blue fire.”

All summer I had walked in lushness, caressed by light, by olive and lemon and fig trees, embraced by gently rolling hills. Because my time in France was coming to its inevitable end, it had become too beautiful there, too painfully perfect. My parting became a kind of unbearable opera of longing. But then, overnight it seemed, there I was in the Midwest, and there was nothing, and the nothingness, the weird, fierce resignation of it was somehow exhilarating. I surrendered in seconds to this void, and like all landscapes I form a permanent bond with, it, at a crucial moment, a moment of crisis, of change, happened to mirror my internal state identically. My remoteness, my desolation. Stepping off that plane, the world was devoid of everything, a clean slate of sky, a nihilism of space, empty, the end, and yet it was oddly beautiful—like my own brand of nihilism.

“I am not interested in what Bourdieu, or Kristeva, has to say about grief. I don’t want a grid, I want arms. I don’t want a theory; I want the poem inside me. I want the poem to unfurl like a thousand monks chanting inside me. I want the poem to skewer me, to catapult me into the clouds. I want to sink into the rhythm of your weeping, I want to say, My grief is turning and I have no way to remain still. I am not interested in feeling by proxy; I go to the hollow when I want to empty, I go to theory when I want to sit with someone else’s thinking, I go to myself when I want to see you.”

Manjunath Kamath (Indian, b. 1972), Time to Time, 2013. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 183 x 152 cm.

“If I am a witch, then so be it, I said. And I took to eating black things–coffee, dark chiles, the bruised part of fruit, the darkest, blackest things to make me hard and strong.”

“Mi corazón, una febril granada de agrupado rubor y abierta cera, que sus tiernos collares te ofreciera con una obstinación enamorada. My heart is a feverish pomegranate of clustered crimson, its wax opened, which could offer you its tender pendants lovingly, persistently.”

“Crece la sangre, agranda la expansión de sus frondas en mi pecho… Blood blooms, spreads its wide foliage in my chest…”