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November 14, 2005
The Triumph of November
November is the month, when there is maximum equilibrium in the world. Keeping with the major theme--in the storied monastery, in all respects the merciless light in which the monks have to work, is most favourable in November. We are restricted to sunlight which comes through the fairly low side windows of our working quarters. The older monks have attained the ability to work in the courtyard by moonlight, and then inside deep in the forgotten recesses, by candlelight, brittle and the color of leaves also, but leaves not in nature, but dreams where people are dying. In daylight the courtyard is filled with strangled-looking, fist-shaped yellow leaves, so deep the sandal-clad feet of the monks who labor there are sunken to the ankles. Grey moonlight tints and reflects off these leaves--I imagine that it must. Now and again a loose page from a monk’s manuscript, disattached from his clipboard, is picked up and sails in an errant wind, or because of the steam powered heating fans. And these pages simply commingle with the yellow leaves, which are quite large, forlorn, numerous-- and appear themselves to have such an elaborate network of veins and rivulets, that one can imagine they are text-laden too. Though they are not.. For the production of immortal books, perfect paragraphs, stanzas of indelible verse, are rendered without the copyist knowing what text they are ever intended to fit into, because, the great assemblage is incomplete for lack of truth. This is to be understood; the monks are deprived of the truth, on a small scale as they work to preserve history, and a large scale--as conflicting reality closes in. It is a matter of equilibrium, and here we are, as if always in November, at a point of recognition.
We do know that the main text that the monks were working on had to do, in this period of history, with the question of whether life itself was significant. Life was occurring, no doubt, but was it significant? People were conscious, maybe, but their consciousness was challenged, on the basis of whether their thoughts about being alive, had anything to do with anything but being alive. For being alive was clearly not a sufficient situation, as anyone thinking could know. It just had to be part of some story not totally revealed in the relatively flimsy, though ecstatic, experience of being alive. You see, in the modern epoch, which is always now, and in which these monks worked--being alive--the idea that life was all sufficient had reached its apex, and ordinary people, with whom the monks identified closely, were hampered by the idea that what they did in their life was the sum total point of it. Thus, the very structure of reflection, which requires a discrepancy, had vanished. No one could make reference to any security they might have once presumed, in their thoughts! In the past there was a huge part of the terrain that was shrouded in mystery, and there was no possibility that life itself held the key to anything at all. Eighty percent of it was dealing with obvious phantoms. To be alive was largely spent in rejecting, editing, saving parts of the world in memory bound for . . . where, pray tell! But now the victory of the world is almost complete.
Which can be put many ways. Like, the consciousness of an actor is shifting close, to that of a spectator. Or that November has triumphed. The sheer restricting force of its light, creates a vacuum.
Posted by mortimer at November 14, 2005 08:20 PM