Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
– Simone Weil, Letter to Joë Bousquet
I’ve got two new coffee mugs. On them is a most curious juxtaposition of images—Royal Bengal tigers, gulmohur flowers, parijata flowers, and a crescent moon against a backdrop of blue-green leaves with a terminal ‘catch’ that may or may not be moringa. Each image holds individual meaning for me, but when they are placed next to each other in this way that is not found in nature, it unlocks something in my mind.
No school. I’m loitering about on a Sunday afternoon. My grandfather is repairing the garden tap and singing under his breath. I catch a note, ri. This is rishabha, the second note in the Carnatic music scale sa-ri-ga-ma-pa-dha-ni. One up from the base sa, shadja, this is a note other people sing flat like a reed, impatient to get to the complex bits. But the way my grandfather holds this note, invoking with the lightest concavity the v of the Sanskrit vrishabha, it sounds like the slow unfurling of sepals from the calyx. ri, the substrate, the barely contained power of the beginning. ri, the reddening of the horizon. ri, the revelation. But rishabha also means the bull, ally of Mars, guardian of Kailasa, and surely this martial kinship is not lost on this powerfully built man of polymathic tendencies.
I read the description on the homeware company’s website. It says the design is about the winding path of the river Tista through Bengal. Tista is a Himalayan river. A tributary of the mighty Brahmaputra—the only Indic river that carries a masculine name—Tista emerges from the Tista Khangtse glacier, flows through Sikkim and West Bengal, and enters Bangladesh. I remember eating ice straight from its Gurudongmar stream, sun glinting gold on the blue-green meltwater.
Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.
– Simone Weil, Waiting for God
Both ice and tiger make infrasound, the kind of sound you feel first in your bones. A tiger walks on ice, and your bones are close to breaking. A tiger walks on ice silvered by a waxing crescent moon. A tiger with eyes like the sun walks on moonlit ice under falling, wish-fulfilling parijata blossoms. A tiger walks on blue-green leaves until morning, until all his wishes have turned to sorrows, until the gulmohur sets the sky on fire. A tiger is a flame moving on a river of ice. A tiger is a river flowing on a bed of leaves. A tiger looks up at the blue sky on fire.
My grandfather is an engineer, and the repair—a minor thing—is a success. He hasn’t taught me Bernoulli’s principle yet but I know how to make the green garden hose throw a sparkling arc in the golden air.
Image: Two coffee mugs against an arrangement of vilva leaves (Aegle marmelos), durva grass (Cynodon dactylon), japapushpa (Hibiscus rosa-sinensis), bandhuka (Ixora coccinea), and parijata (Nyctanthes arbor-tristis)—all of which have medicinal and ritual uses in India—in blue glass. Photo © Kanya Kanchana
#fire #water #earth #air #void #attention