In a languorous afternoon at the beginning Of twenty first century, you hear a voice Chanting verses of a song, in Spanish.

Lacking the knowledge, that which makes Men gods, you slowly repeat one (or three?) word To yourself over and over – an abstract mantra.

‘El del cristal’, you later find out means ‘In the mirror’. Language is the devil that has taken you in, the devilish mirror.

‘Infants don’t recognize themselves in mirrors’, you had read somewhere. What is that strips you of your self?

Language, of course, with its magical Labyrinth, that swan gliding with an image Of the sky, in the mirror held up by you.

You put on the shoes, don a jacket and head out into the night. The road is empty at this late hour and the only sounds you hear are that of houses sleeping or an occasional dog bark. You orient yourself with the nearly full moon, a white coin in an unusually clear sky. You have been closeted with yourself all day, so you decide to head to the university campus close by, hoping to catch the hum of conversations, an occasionally shout or some diffuse laughter. You are not interested in the content of such overheard talk; just its presence is what you want. This is just as you go to the farmers market to feast on the visual palette as much as to buy food.

On the other side of the road you see a group of students headed in the same general direction. A young woman in this group, for some reason, begins to laugh. It’s a free laugh, the kind one hears between old friends who have very few secrets left to hide from one another. At the fork you turn and take the road that enables you to walk into the moon, eyes fixed on it just as a compass comes to rest at the North Pole. You see it cradled in the branches of oaks, and then climbs on to the top of the chapel’s steeple. You had read Kazantzakis in ‘Zorba The Greek’, describes such a scene, in which the moon is hidden by passing clouds and then uncovered, as a hen laying a big white egg. You play the same game and call this moon over the steeple an inverted exclamation mark. It somehow fits this night, where everything is lit and is a unsurprise.

You pause on the bridge that runs over a ravine to hear the sound of the small stream that runs below. You say to yourself, that is how kissing a woman at this point would sound, just like that gurgle of pleasure. You walk further to the quadrangle. It’s absolutely empty tonight. You veer off the path and cut across the quadrangle, walking sideways. The roofs of the buildings facing you become a stage for the moon. You want to write a poem, but you can’t find the require thread to string all these discrete images. The silence, while welcome, makes you realize that it is now spring break.

You head home. On the way you pull the branch of a star magnolia to smell it’s flowers. The clutch of these trees with their white flowers makes you want to make a metaphor out of them. You say, ‘these are the moon’s teardrops’. A very cloying one! Soon the moon is behind you, riding on your back and shoulder. You bend your neck and send a pinecone skittering down the sidewalk.

I am pausing from wrestling with mathematical expressions – the sum of the job I have to do to keep my work afloat. However I am also listening to John McLaughlin jam his mofo electric guitar with Zakir Hussian’s tabla, The sound rises as a pot rises out of red clay. See the hands pull on the frets, see the hand pull and tease that pot’s neck. It is becoming longer and longer, you hold you breath knowing that it might just break and collapse on itself, but no it doesn’t. It goes on, it is stretched, stretching your skin too in the process. What a miracle is this! You become hollow, a drum, a dhol, a marimba. The thwack of your palm trying to keep the beat on the wood of the table. Tahk tahk din din, your blood beats as it runs up and down the body. It screams, it is orgasmic, it is annihilation, it is OM, it is the fucking Big Bang. It is only a simpleton full of hunger and desire but it is surely better that your brain that thinks and thinks, and that consequently is trapped in itself.

You know some tricks to escape it and one is this what you are now doing, beating the keys as you see the letters run off at the other end, sewage, pure nonsense, kindling for fires. Still this is the vitamin C you need, you don’t care if for someone else finds what is produced, to be caviar or clay. Yet sometimes you shouldn’t try to explain yourself, even to yourself. Look at this flower, this Japanese magnolia, when you plucked it last evening, it was a closed fist, as soft and secretive as a breast And in a night it has begun unfurling into a vertical galaxy of beauty, a ear holding an echo of some sound that is so pure that it requires one to invent an language to write about it. But will the flower care to explain itself? No, never! All it knows is to open itself to the sun, to the air and then rot. How different are you? Not very different, the same five elements compose you, yet how little like this flower you unravel!

Why this difference? The lack of steadiness of purpose, on not allowing the inner drum beat rise to the surface in all these mad races you run to and fro? All this ugliness to make some one like you because you don’t want to hear what you should hear the most clearly? Just stop. Become a violin, become the wood of the violin, be the sea, be a rock, be the seasons, be the cardinals that greet you every morning, be this joy, be these tears that are falling in this moment, be the very breath whose vibration is what all music is, just be.