More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It isn’t difficult, of course, to skip the nostalgia, to fast forward the embarrassment of memory, to speak, as others do, of calcium rather than satori. So, the morning I heard, it wasn’t difficult to turn efficient, to delete pictures of humming birds and cardamom tea and the air ticket you emailed me, never knowing it would be the one to your funeral. It gets easier, friend, with age, to delete, plan breakfast, turn the page. It would have been easier still if you hadn’t deleted the sun.
As a child I ate mud. It tasted of grit and peat and wild churning and something I could never find a name for. Later I became a moongazer always squinting through windows, believing freedom was aerial until I figured that the moon was a likely mud-gazer longing for the thick sludge of gravity, the promiscuous thrill of touch, the licence to make, break, remake, and so I uncovered the old role of poets – to be messengers between moon and mud – and began to learn the many languages of earth that have nothing to do with nations and atlases and everything to do with the ways of earwigs, the
...more
The Strange Thing About Love is that it melts you into an amateur, never again a professional even on the subject of yourself. The strange thing about love is that you disagree, disagree wildly, and then figure it’s wiser to dance. The strange thing about love is that it evicts you from the land of echoes you thought was home and leads you to friends sitting under the stars in ancient bewilderment.
She knows centuries are separated by historians, not poets, that now and then are divided by the thinnest membranes of belief,
she knows the journey from goddess to gran, sylph to hag, prom queen to queen mum is longer than most, more tortuous.
Spare me the glamour of being youthful wife to five princes – Draupadi, the fruit everyone wants to peel. And spare me the sainthood of mad women mystics who peel off their own rind before others can get to them (vaporising into the white jasmine scent of hagiography).
Avvaiyar’s done with ooze and cream, Avvaiyar’s done with the soggy dream of being kissed awake by love. She’s done with the nightmare of smiling and finding she’s forgotten to wear her dentures. She’s so light she can finally take herself seriously. One way to outwit death, she says, is to invite it over. Wear it.
For lovers flatten into photographs, photographs into reminiscence, reminiscence into quiet. And then what’s left? Perhaps just the oldest thing in the world – love without a story.
She knows every sangha has its Devadutta plotting his coup in a blue swirl of powerlust. She knows that everyone everywhere believes they’ve been wronged, that history was written by someone else and that they’re always right.
The thing about age is seeing through the game but being able to smile at those who play it.
Parents They vanish as abruptly as they appear, busy perfecting the art of truancy when they send you away to school. They cry ‘wolf’ many times over but when you turn for a moment they melt away, velvet-pawed, sure-footed, into the night.
And that’s how I discovered that keyholes always reveal more than doorways.
But even as I meander, let my trail be the thread that completes the circle I long to make around you. Love, let me be adjective.
‘Complaint / is only possible / while living in the suburbs / of God ’– Hafiz (translated from the Persian by Daniel Ladinsky)
If you’re playing the game, we are too. We come from a tribe that knows that a versified tantrum is a kind of prayer. We turn invective into love (salty, sometimes sulphuric) and love into obscenity. Our longing reaches for the stars. Domesticated by our fury, even the skies turn terrestrial. And the rest of the time the Earth – this lunatic suburb – is plenty.
The end of the world? Just you and I withdrawing, love, from this conversation.
The body speaks shorthand, coded yet blazingly simple. To hold each other all night is all we want and still we sit apart, tell stories, not trusting the only art that matters right now – stenography.
Those who hope to cut through the fog, uncurdle the dream, but still weep unoriginally for the moon.
and the world when I woke was wet, alive and keeling, keeling right over with laughter –
