Art Note - Ajanta
"In the Holy Caves of India" (on Ajanta cave paintings) is the the fifth most emailed article at the New York Times website[1]. Like many places I have never visited in the Indian subcontinent (for example, all of India above the Tropic of Capricorn has never been visited), Ajanta has come to me only in books. That said, I have ogled plenty at the painting of Padmapani, the lotus bearing Buddha[2], at Ajanta. I am biding my time as I completely forget India (come amnesia, come faster), so that when I return, I will explode - like Ocativo Paz did in his "Indian" books, "East Slope" or "A Tale of Two Gardens"[3] - into poetry.
[1] Does this mean that the "argumentative" Indians have swamped NYT's readership?
[2] Also read that article from the Hindu on Ajanta; much superior to the NYT one
[3] From Paz's "A Tale of Two Gardens":
"It rained, the earth dressed and became naked, snakes left their holes, the moon was made of water, the sun was water, the sky took out its braids and its braids were unraveled rivers, the rivers swallowed villages, death and life were jumbled, dough of mud and sun, season of lust and plague, season of lightning on a sandalwood tree, mutilated genital stars rotting, reviving in your womb, mother India, girl India, drenched in semen, sap, poisons, juices."
I talked to my mother in India earlier this morning , and she reported that our ancestral villages in the Krishna delta region (in South India) have suffered from a massive deulge of torrential rain and flood - the entire harvest has been wiped out. And as the thought of Paz passed through the circuits, I remembered that particularly beautiful passage on rain in India.
Scannings
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