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  • খেরোর খাতা

  • The Humiliation of a Gandavi  & Thoughts

    albert banerjee লেখকের গ্রাহক হোন
    ০৮ মার্চ ২০২৬ | ১৪৩ বার পঠিত
  • The womb of the word before the word a fermentation of silence curdling into sound the seed of conflict germinating in the void’s black soil not a war but the blueprint of war the spectral architecture of a battlefield not yet drawn in blood or earth a hum in the ether the vibration before the string is plucked the breath before the command is issued the thought before the thinker thinks himself into existence i am not yet i am the not-yet the potentiality the unformed clay upon which the thumb of will shall press its first and final design

    a mirror before the mirror a silvered nothing gazing upon its own capacity to reflect to fracture to multiply an image of an image of a war not fought but rehearsed in the infinite halls of causation each blow each parry each death a ghost limb a phantom pain in the body of what might be the chariot stands without wheels the bow without curve the arrow a straight line of intent that has not yet learned to bend to the wind to deceive to find the heart’s hidden seam

    the dialectic without thesis or antithesis a pure oscillation a tremor between is and is-not the wound before the skin is broken the blood still sleeping in its iron home the cry before the lung has air the tear before the salt has formed a sea of possible sorrows and i am the dry basin waiting for the flood the negative space around the coming figure the silence between the ticks of a clock not yet wound

    the teacher is here but has no mouth the disciple present but without ears the lesson is etched in light upon the back of the blind eye the war will be fought so that it may be understood the understanding will dissolve the war but the war must be fought for the dissolution to taste of truth a circle drawn in ash that the wind must scatter but the wind is held in a god’s closed fist

    this is the prelude the echo that precedes the shout the shadow cast by a star yet to ignite the memory of a future pain a scar upon time’s unborn skin i am the vessel and the void the question and the silence that refuses to answer i am the unformed i am the clay i am the thumb i am the pressure and the resistance and the collapse into form into name into the terrible specific agony of a single arrow seeking a single heart in a sea of hearts all beating the same drum of maybe of might be of now and now and now now the string is taut now the eye sees now the wheel finds the rut now the word is spoken now the war begins now i am and now i am not and now the mirror holds the face and now the face becomes the mirror and now the lesson eats the teacher and now the wound births the weapon and now the silence

    (First Pulse: The Grammar of Exhaustion)

    ...walking, but not forward, not backward, a perpendicular motion through the thickening of time, the clotting of hours into a dark, viscous amber in which all moments are suspended—the twang of the bowstring, the chariot’s shudder, the wet gasp of the pierced lung, the ghee-clarity of his voice—all congealed into a single, eternal present participle. Walking. Not a verb with an object, not a movement toward, but a pure, intransitive state of being-in-motion, a gerund that has swallowed its subject whole. I am not walking. Walking is. Walking is being done, and I am its location, its accidental, trembling site.

    The ground is not ground. It is the memory of soil from Kurukshetra overlaid with the concrete dust of centuries, the grit of another war in another land with the same metallic taste on the wind. The air is a palimpsest of smoke—funeral pyres, incense, cordite, diesel. Each breath is a sentence without a main clause, an inhalation of fragmented history. Smell of wet ash and ghee, smell of rust and lotus, smell of my own sour sweat and the impossible, distant fragrance of wild jasmine from a grove that burned three thousand years ago. The nostrils parse, the mind cannot. Syntax of scent collapses.

    He speaks. No. Not speaks. Speaking occurs. A vibration in the medium of consciousness, a frequency that precedes and generates language. The words, when they arrive, are not nouns or verbs but heavy, rounded things, like river stones worn smooth by meaning. See. Be. Act. But they break apart in the ear. Se ebe act. Phonemes divorcing from semantics. The voice itself is a texture—like melted butter, they said, but butter left in a bronze dish under a furious sun, forming a skin, growing rancid at the edges. That voice coated the inside of my skull. It still does. It narrates this walking.

    The body is a disagreement of tenses. The shoulders remember the present continuous strain of the bow Gandiva. The eyes sting with the future-perfect certainty of arrows yet to be fired. The feet ache with the simple past of a million steps already taken, yet they move in a perpetual present, a now that refuses to become then. Past, present, future pile up in the joints like silt, locking the limbs into a slow, geologic pace. Grammar of the flesh failing. Subject (I) verb (am) object (tired)? No. A more fundamental disintegration: I am tiredness. Tiredness walks.

    Landscapes bleed into each other without the connective tissue of narrative. A rice field where peasants bend becomes the blood-slicked mud where brothers fell. The silvery trunk of a peepal tree becomes the polished shaft of a spear planted in the earth. A modern bridge of steel and cable is, for one blinding second, the makeshift pontoon of lashed-together boats across the Ganga, horses screaming. Chronology is not linear but concentric. Every event is a stone dropped in the pool of time; the ripples never cease, they intersect, they create interference patterns. I walk through the patterns. I am the pattern.

    The doubt. It is not a question. It is the substrate. The fertile, rotting humus from which all actions sprout and into which they decay. Whom should I kill? A childish formulation. The real syntax is more monstrous: Killing being necessary, the subject of the action and the object of the action being reflections in the same shattered mirror, the act itself a linguistic imperative that the soul, a weak, dative case, declines to govern. He resolved it. With grammar! With the brutal, elegant logic of the instrumental case. You are the instrument. The killing is done by the inevitable, through you. I became a preposition. By Arjuna. For Dharma. In accordance with cosmic law. A function word, empty of essence, only denoting relationship.

    Now, even that grammar unravels. The cases are confused. The nominative "I" bleeds into the accusative "me." Who is walking? Who is being walked? The dative of purpose—for what?—has no answer. The ablative of separation—from where?—has no reference point. I am a sentence in which all words are middles voices, acting upon themselves, for themselves, with no external agent.

    Sensations arrive without predicates. A flash of gold: an armlet? a ripe field? the discus Sudarshana? A chill: winter wind from the Himalayas? the shadow of the divine form? the cold of interstellar space I have never known but feel I have? A pressure on the back: the quiver's weight? his hand? the burden of a lineage of warriors? Sensations float, unattached to objects, like stray adjectives seeking a noun to modify.

    And the silence beneath it all. Not an absence of sound, but a positive, roaring silence. The white noise of the universe expanding, of entropy doing its slow, sure work. It is the bass note to his flute’s melody, the void over which his cosmic form was stretched. I walk within that silence. My footsteps are swallowed by it before they can even echo. I speak, and the words are absorbed into its fabric, becoming part of the silence’s complex, unspeakable meaning.

    This is the fatigue. Not of muscle, but of meaning. The exhaustion of a story that has been told too many times, in too many ways, until its words are worn smooth, meaningless. I am a character who has forgotten his lines but must remain on stage, performing a pantomime of a play whose plot dissolved centuries ago. The only direction: keep walking. The only stage: this endless, non-specific terrain between myth and memory, between a battlefield that was and a peace that never came.

    He is here. Not beside, not within. A presence perpendicular to presence. A dimension I intersect. When I stop—though stopping is an illusion, a temporary slowing of the perpetual walking—I feel his regard. It is not judging. It is parsing. It is analyzing this long, run-on sentence of my existence, looking for a full stop that does not, cannot exist. For to place the period would be to end the story, and the story is all there is. So the walking continues, the sentence elongates, accruing clauses upon clauses, comma splices and dangling modifiers, a grammatical catastrophe that is, itself, the only true testament. I am the testament. Walking.
    (Second Spasm: The Grammar of Breath)

    …breathing being taken. breathing being released. not two separate acts but a single irregular verb’s two faces, a wave’s swell and fall which fills and empties the dark sack called lung, fills and empties. with each inhalation enters grey air, which holds invisible smoke—smoke from a fire a thousand years past, smoke from cooking, smoke from a pyre, the smoky note of a lost flute’s tune. with each exhalation exits sound, but not sound, half-formed embryos of words, which wish to die upon the tongue, but halt in the larynx’s cavern, become a tremble of the breath, a grammar-less adverb describing the walk, though the walk can have no description.

    …the wind is heard. but not wind, the ear itself manufactures sound. the sound of blood’s circulation, of waves in the brain, of a stone rolling somewhere in the wreckage of that battlefield, still falling, still falling, the act of falling frozen in frozen time, yet audible. hearing is a verb which does not discover its own source, only hears, a passive activity actively passive.

    …before the eyes float colors. but are the eyes open? are there eyes? vision is an aladdin’s lamp, rubbed to conjure images: a river-ghat, but the ghat has no water, only a dried boat, beneath which lie men, not sleeping, awake, but not moving. their eyes reflect the grey sky. the vision shifts, but no sensation of shifting, the scene itself changes, how? not comprehensible. seeing is being done, that alone is truth.

    …the foot touches ground, but the signal of touch reaches the brain much later, when the foot has already risen. thus each step is a past event, a memory happening in the present. the step was being taken. the step is being taken. the step will be taken. three tenses coexist beneath the sole, merging to form a complex verb, “step-taking-being,” which respects no specific tense.

    …upon the skin falls rain? no, dust? no, ash? some fine particle which enters the pores, enters the blood, travels to the heart, mingles with the heartbeat, and pulsates in rhythm. pulsation is a verb—pulsating is being done. not the heart, the whole body, the whole being pulsates to an invisible rhythm, does the rhythm match the sound of steps, or does the sound of steps match this pulsation?

    …from the mouth wants to emerge a sound. saying is being done—something. but something what? the act of saying is primary, the object secondary, perhaps non-existent. the tongue wishes to utter a name, but the name is forgotten. was there a name? was a name needed? a name is a sign, which individuates, separates. but here no separation exists, only merging, dissolving, a continuous flow of verbs where agent and object’s boundaries are smoke.

    …the fist tightens. why? to grasp something? to throw something? the fist tightening is a preparation, but for what? inside the fist is nothing, void, but is void not an object? void is being grasped in the fist, was being grasped, will be grasped. the act of grasping is fruitless, for what is grasped is void, yet grasping is done.

    …to the ear comes music. but no instrument, no singer. music is the sound of wind, the sound of stone friction, the sound of that distant river’s dry flow, the sound of a bird’s wing yet unborn. this music cannot be understood, only heard, and through hearing it becomes part of the body, a note in the blood.

    …around are people, but are they people or statues? they move, but their movement is mechanical, pulled by invisible strings. their faces have no expression, only a grey peace, an acceptance which is terrifying. do they see? do they see this walking? they do not look, their gaze passes through, towards infinity, or perhaps towards void.

    …memory comes in flocks, like moss on stone. a memory: hand-holding, a warm, soft hand. whose hand? why held? the hand was being held, but was let go, or did the hand let go? the memory is incomplete, half of a verb, whose other half is lost in time’s crevice.

    …suddenly fear. fear why? because everything is unstable, everything interconnected, pull one thread and the entire web trembles. this walk too is a thread, pulling towards some unknown, perhaps towards open sky, where there is no ground, only fall, infinite fall. but is falling a verb? is falling being done? no, falling is not being done, walking continues, walking is resistance against falling, but is walking not a slow fall?

    …the charioteer’s presence felt again. he is nowhere, but everywhere. not his voice, his breath is heard, which matches my breath. we breathe together, inhale together, exhale together. he is being breathed in, being breathed out through me. am I breathing for him? perhaps.

    …a scent: rose. but here are no roses, only grey earth, grey sky. The scent comes from the past, from the future, arrives in the present to merge with air. the scent has no source, the scent itself is a source, a matrix birthing memory, birthing pain, birthing a smile not yet smiled.

    …pain in the body, but the location unspecified. pain not in the body, the body is in pain. pain is a verb—hurting is being done. it spreads through the body, like a liquid fire, which does not burn, only is felt, as a constant presence.

    …wish to close the eyes, but the eyes are not closing. eyes are open, there is an order for eyes to be open, perhaps from that charioteer, who wants me to see, to keep seeing, though there is nothing to see. the act of seeing is primary, not the sight. so I see, see void, see fullness, see all that is not to be seen.

    …silence descends again, but this silence rings in the ears, a profound hum, perhaps the sound of the universe’s expansion, or the sound of blood. this hum constant, it is not a verb, it is the background of all verbs, that stage upon which all acts are performed.

    …and the walk continues, the act of walking unbroken, unchanged, eternal, like a river which has forgotten its course, yet flows, for flowing is its dharma, its essence, its only truth.
    (Third Spanda: The Palimpsest of Touch)

    Touching is being done but no tactility remains only the fossilized imprint of pressure upon air upon memory upon the cellular shriek of nerve-endings that continue firing long after the body has turned to salt and wind. Touch: not an action but a reverberation, a phantom limb sensation extended to encompass all history, all collision, all caress. The bowstring’s kiss on the finger-pad—not a kiss, a branding, a negative space burned into the skin that now touches everything through that scar, so all the world feels like a string about to be released, all surfaces taut and trembling with potential flight.

    But who touches? The hand is gone. The hand is a ghost-limb, a conceptual apparatus, a memory of grip. The arrow’s fletching touches the palm as it is drawn—but the arrow is elsewhere, the palm is elsewhere, only the touch persists, suspended in the amber of the eternal present, a touch without beginning or end, a perpetual contact. The chariot floor underfoot, the sweat-slick grip of the reins, the cold metallic sweat of armor on a clavicle—all these touches are superimposed now, layered like translucent leaves of vellum, each one bleeding through the other. The touch of a brother’s shoulder in a playful shove bleeds into the touch of that same brother’s dead weight as he slides off a blade. One touch does not negate the other; they coexist, a chord of sensation, discordant and eternal.

    And His touch—never a touch, always a proximity that alters the very field of touch. He touches nothing, yet the air around Him thickens, becomes a palpable medium, a syrup of intention. When He spoke, the words were not sounds but textures—the rough burlap of command, the slippery silk of paradox, the cold, smooth marble of truth. They touched the eardrum not as vibration but as physical shape. And that most infamous touch—the divine manipulation of sight, the forcing open of the ocular gates—that was not a touch upon the eyes but a touch inside the eyes, a rearrangement of the very substance of perception, so that all subsequent touch would be filtered through that catastrophic re-seeing. Now, to touch a blade of grass is to touch the chariot wheel is to touch the cosmic wheel is to touch the still center that is Him and not-Him.

    The battlefield’s tactile symphony: the thud of arrow into earth (a touch of wood and iron on soil), the shriek of arrow into flesh (a wet, hot, intimate touch), the crunch of bone under wheel (a dry, final, structural touch). These are not sounds; they are touches at a distance, tactile events that vibrate through the ground, through the air, to reach the skin as a secondary shudder. The touch of fire on skin, the touch of blood-spray on cheek, the touch of a falling banner of silk—all recorded with pornographic fidelity in the body’s ledger, a ledger now waterlogged, ink running, entries blurring.

    But touch also betrays. The bow’s grip, polished smooth by generations of hands, felt like trust. It lied. The familiar weight of a sword-hilt, an extension of the arm, lied. The earth underfoot, solid and reliable, lied—it opened into pits, grew slippery with gore, became unreliable. The touch of a promised crown, heavy and cool—the greatest lie of all. Touch is the most intimate deception. It promises reality, substance, “here-ness.” But what it touches is already gone, already memory, already a story. The finger touches the surface of the water, but the water is not there where it is touched; it has already yielded, already fled, already reconstituted itself around the intrusion. So too this world. Every touch is a touch upon a surface that gives way, a mirage of solidity.

    And this walking—what is it but a series of postponed falls? The foot reaches, touches ground, but the ground is not stable, the foot is not stable, the intention to walk is not stable. Each step is a negotiation with collapse. The touch of sole on path is a momentary truce. The body is a falling object perpetually caught by the next micro-collision with the earth. This is the only touch that remains constant: this fraudulent contact that keeps the illusion of uprightness, of progression, alive.

    The inner touch, the touch of thought upon itself: the gritty friction of doubt, the slick, sickening slide of guilt, the cold, hard press of duty, the feverish, swollen throb of confusion. These are not metaphors. They are textures within the cavern of the skull, a tactile landscape more real than the dissolving external one. He touched that too. His words entered as touch, probing, separating, inflaming. He placed a finger on the very nerve of action and inaction and said, Behold. And that touch paralyzed more than any weapon.

    Now, walking, the touches multiply and cancel. The chill of a mountain pass wind touches the face, but simultaneously the blistering heat of a desert noon touches it. The soft give of pine needles underfoot shares the moment with the sharp gravel of a riverbed. The touch of a woman’s hair, a specific, lost scent and silk, ghosts across the neck at the same instant as the touch of a death-shroud’s coarse hemp. The sensorium is a palimpsest, every present sensation merely the latest, faintest writing over a thousand other indelible touches.

    Is this the freedom? To feel everything at once and therefore nothing specifically? To have touch, the anchor of the real, become so unmoored that it anchors only to its own dissolution? The body becomes a nexus of echoes, a cathedral where every past touch resonates forever, building to a deafening, silent roar of pure, undifferentiated contact. The boundary of the skin, that final fortress of the self, has been breached not from outside but from within. The memories touch each other in there, they copulate and give birth to new, hybrid sensations. The touch of grief begets a cold, metallic taste. The touch of glory begets a scent of burnt sugar and ash.

    And through it all, the faintest, most persistent touch: the memory of a hand on the shoulder. A weight. Not restraining, not guiding, just present. A touch that said, I am here, and therefore you are there, and this is the relation. Even that is gone now, or rather, it has been absorbed. It touches from inside the marrow. It is the shoulder itself. The map has become the territory. The guide has become the path. The touch has become the touched.

    So the walking continues, a string of tactile illusions, a pilgrimage through a landscape that is only the inside of a sense that is only the memory of a touch that was never received, only given. A loop. A perfect, meaningless, sensory loop. To touch the ground is to touch the foot is to touch the intention to walk is to touch the memory of why one began walking is to touch the emptiness at the heart of that why is to touch the ground again. Around and around. The verb without a subject, the sensation without a source, the touch without end.

    (Third Spanda subsides. Fourth prepares: the lexicon of scent now, a language of decay and distant bloom.)
    (Fourth Pulse: The Fracturing of Sight)

    Seeing is being done. But the eyes are closed. The fact of the eyes being open was itself a suspicion, a reality founded upon the presumption that light exists, therefore the eyes are open, but was light truly there? Or was it only a grey luminescence, emanating from within the eye, a phosphorescent glow from the brain's dark caverns, upon which floated scenes—but not scenes, the memory of scenes, the possibility of scenes, the ghosts of scenes. This act of seeing was multidimensional, being seen simultaneously from the front, the back, the inside, above-below, from all directions, across all layers of time, as if there were no eyes, but a pitted sphere, with pupils everywhere, and that sphere itself rotated within a greater darkness, which held countless other spheres, countless other eyes, all seeing, all being seen, an infinite mutual exchange of gazes where seer and seen swapped places incessantly.

    Scene one: a field, but not a field, a vast quadrangle, at its four corners four pillars of light, but not light, the imitation of light, the memory of light. At the centre of this quadrangle stands a body, but not a body, the outline of a body, a geometric drawing fading into the air. The body has raised its hands, the hands hold nothing, but in the gesture of raising there is the weight of the whole world, an invisible sphere placed upon the palm, the sphere rotates, inside the sphere countless tiny wars are waged, tiny chariots, tiny elephants, tiny men, they fight, die, are born again, and at the centre of all this a smaller sphere, inside it more war—thus infinite regression, a matryoshka doll of nihilism. The hand trembles, the sphere now teeters on falling, but does not fall, floats in the void, because the void is its foundation.

    Scene two: a chariot, but not a chariot, the wreckage of a chariot, yet still mobile, the wheels turn but do not advance, because there is no path, only the illusion of motion, the imprint of motion which creates the path for itself. Upon the chariot two silhouettes, one dark, one light, they are not separate, they are two densities of the same being, as vapour and ice are two forms of the same water. The dark silhouette leans toward the light one, speaks, but not speech, the breath of wordless sentences, which touches the light silhouette and colours it, colours it but with invisible colour, so the change is not visible, only felt, as a change in temperature, a change in pressure. The light silhouette does not respond, listens, absorbing the sounds by listening, the absorbed sounds building structures within, a palace, a prison, a blueprint that will later become a battlefield.

    Scene three: a river, no water, the reflection of water, the reflection of the sky, but there is no sky either, only grey, so the river is grey, a grey mirror where nothing is reflected, only greyness looks at itself, a narcissistic infinity. On the bank a woman stands, but not a woman, the idol of a woman, of stone, but the stone is soft, from the stone blood flows, not blood, the colour of blood, red colour polluting the grey, creating a stain, the stain spreads, moves toward the river, turns the river red, the red river is now a river of blood, but the blood is not quite blood, blood is molten gold, molten pride, molten tears. The woman’s eyes are closed, but the eyelids are transparent, inside the lids eyes can be seen, the two eyes are open, they see, seeing this scene, seeing me, seeing the one I see, a circle of vision.

    Scene four: a palace, the palace roof on fire, the fire soundless, fire consumes sound, so all around is silent, only the leaping flames of fire which tear the sky, but the sky’s wounds do not form, because the sky is already lacerated, the fire only exposes old wounds. Inside the palace people run, but where do they run? They run in circles, in a circular corridor with no end, no beginning, they run but are not displaced, they only perform running, a performance with no audience, or perhaps I am the audience, but I too am running, my eyes run from scene to scene, so am I different from them?

    Scene five: a child’s face, the child is not crying, not laughing, only staring, its gaze transparent, in the transparency is reflected the entire war, the entire destruction, but in the child’s eyes there is no wonder, no fear, only acceptance, a brutal acknowledgment that yes, this is the world, this is reality. The child’s face changes, it is now an old man, the old man’s eyes hold the same gaze, the same transparency, the same acceptance, then the old man’s face becomes a child again—thus the cycle of age and infancy, birth and death, but the gaze is unchanged, the gaze is constant, the gaze is the only truth that survives the passage of time.

    Scene six: a hand, a hand that touches me, but not a touch, the possibility of touch, the hand is placed upon my shoulder, but I do not feel it, I only know the hand is there because vision tells me, vision itself becomes a hand touching my shoulder, vision is touch, vision is hearing, vision is smell—all senses have unified into vision, vision is now the only sense, the only medium through which the world knows me, I know the world. But whose hand is this? The hand too is grey, a grey stone hand, whose fingers do not move, but whose fingerprints have settled upon my shoulder, left a mark, the mark burns, a cold fire.

    Scene seven: mirrors, countless mirrors, mirrors in all directions, the mirrors look at each other, each mirror reflects another, an infinite gallery of reflections, in which I am trapped, but who am I? I see my countless reflections, each reflection different, one fighting, one kneeling in prayer, one fleeing, one attacking, one weeping, one laughing—am I all these? Or are all these my possible forms? Which is real? Is the real this seer who sees all? But the seer too is caught in the mirror, the seer also has countless reflections, the seer too is divided, fragmented, countless. The mirrors begin to melt, the reflections distort, melt, merge with each other, creating a distorted, strange, beautiful collage, which is me, which is the whole.

    Scene eight: the sky, but the sky is earth, earth is sky, up-down obliterated, I walk upon the sky, beneath my feet clouds, but the clouds are solid, like stone, I climb higher, now beneath me stars, the stars are dust, I walk upon dust, a cosmic beach where there is no tide, only silence, a deep, plenary silence which rings in the ears, a tinnitus, a permanent C. Within that silence floats sound, the sound of a flute, but no flute, the sound is a poke upon the skin of silence, a crack, through that crack peeks void, the void looks exactly like the sky, only more void, more silent, more full.

    Scene nine: the cremation ground, the pyre’s fire extinguished, the ashes cold, but the ashes stir, from the ashes rise people, they are covered in ash, their eyes burn, eyes of fire, they do not speak, they only stare, their gazes unite into a laser-like beam, that beam cuts the sky, cuts space, enters another universe, where there is another cremation ground, another war, another walking, another I rising from the ashes, looking at me, I looking at him, connected through vision, we are one, we are many.

    Scene ten: eyes closed, eyes open—a state between these two, where light and dark mix to create a grey colourlessness, within that colourlessness float colours, the colours make sound, they call to each other, red calls blue, green calls yellow, they unite to make white, white again breaks into seven colours, it is an optical illusion, a mirage more real than reality, because it is the only reality that enters the brain directly, not through the senses, through vision, vision is the medium, vision is the message, vision is the destination.

    And through all these scenes, a thread is woven—the presence of that charioteer, who is not seen, but whose presence interprets every scene, behind every scene his gaze works, he sees, he shows, he is the source and master of vision. But is he too not a captive of vision? Does he see himself? When he sees me, does he see himself? When I try to see him, do I see myself? This cycle of self-seeing, this narcissism of the soul, this infinite regression of self-awareness—is this the liberation, or is this the bondage?

    The act of seeing continues, scenes come, scenes go, scenes distort, reconstruct, they layer like strata of stone, each layer an era, a war, a life, a death. I see, I see, I keep seeing, because seeing is my dharma, seeing is my duty, seeing is my punishment and my reward. I am compelled to see, because even with eyes closed the scenes come, with eyes open the scenes come, the scenes will come, the scenes are inevitable, the scenes eternal.

    And the walking continues, walking and seeing are two aspects of the same act, walking is seeing toward space, seeing is walking toward time. I am a moving point in space-time, a point of vision, which marks upon the void, draws a line, the line is my journey, my life, my story—but there is no story, only movement, the movement of vision, the movement of walking, the movement of being, the movement of becoming.

    (The fourth pulse stills, but vision moves. The fifth pulse prepares: now the turn to enter the jungle of sound.)
    (Fifth Throb: The Arboreal Collapse of Audition)

    …Hearing is being done. But audition is not an active verb, it is a passive site, a sunken amphitheatre into which sounds tumble, as light tumbles into the eye, but here there is no light, here there is sound, and sounds are not mere vibrations, they are entities, living organisms that swim through air, carom off stone, crawl across skin, tap-tap-tap upon the tympanic membrane with fingertip insistence, enter, resonate in the cranial vault, that resonance then exiting through the ear, but upon exiting it has become other, altered, distorted, enriched, impoverished. Hearing is being undergone, listening is being sustained, to-listen is being perpetuated—a tripartite verb that binds past, present, and future within a single pulsation.

    First Stratum: The External Sound. The sound of wind, but not wind, the aggregate of millions upon millions of minute sounds born of wind’s friction, as if someone is crushing grain far away, or perhaps the sea’s sound, but there is no sea, only sand, the friction between sand-grains, they bite each other, pierce, the sound of their agony. Layered upon this, other sounds—bird-call, but no birds, only the memory of birds, that memory caught in air, activated now and then, echoing as an echo. Deeper still, a continuous hum, perhaps the sound of earth’s rotation, or the sun’s burning, or the universe’s expansion—a low-frequency humming that flows through bone, enters marrow, sets up a resonance there that reminds the body is also a sound, a complex symphony of chemical reactions and electrical signals.

    Second Stratum: The Sound of Memory. These are not external, they dwell within, yet they are clearer than external sounds. Conch-shell blasts—but not one, innumerable conches together, a vast orchestra where each shell blows a different note, Devadatta, Panchajanya, Anantavijaya… names are absent, but the notes remain, they ring in the ear, echo within the skull, that echo merging with the heartbeat, creating a new rhythm. The sound of arrows—arrows flying, tearing the air, creating fissures, then striking target, sometimes flesh, sometimes armour, sometimes earth. Each sound distinct, as each death is distinct. The sound of horses’ hooves, of chariot wheels, of infantry’s feet—these sounds combine into an epic symphony, whose leitmotif is screaming, groaning, prayer, curse. That symphony still plays, never ceases, for time here is static, sounds are trapped in time’s web, they wish to be free, so they play incessantly, like a warped tape recorder whose pin is stuck.

    Third Stratum: The Sound of Thought. This is the most esoteric stratum. When a thought is born, it is born in sound, even if it is not phonetic, it still assumes an acoustic form within the brain, an internal voice that speaks, questions, answers, debates. Whose voice is this? Mine? Or another’s? Often the voice becomes plural, many voices speaking at once, they argue, one says “do,” another says “do not,” a third says “why do?,” a fourth says “why not do?”. Within this polyphony, one voice is particularly clear, smooth as butter, but beneath the butter lurks the sharp sound of a blade. That voice argues, seduces, commands, but within the command lies the shadow of choice, as if saying, “You are free, you may choose not to do, but do.” This duplicity manifests through sound, in that voice’s timbre, its pitch modulation, its elongation and contraction. The sounds of thought sometimes ring so loud they drown external sounds, then only that internal cacophony is heard, the sound of a mental war, more terrifying than the external war, for it has no end, no victor, only the sound of war, perpetual war.

    Fourth Stratum: The Sound of Dream. In dreams, sounds distort, they are not echoes of actual sounds, they are sounds from an alternative reality. In dreams, one hears words never spoken, screams never uttered, music no instrument plays. Dream-sounds are often like underwater sounds, murky, incomplete, they float in and fade, they utter half-sentences, hint at mysteries but do not unveil them. Sometimes, in dreams, that Charioteer’s voice is heard, but now the voice is distorted, he laughs, but that laughter shatters into a thousand pieces, each piece emitting a different sound—some contain screams of agony, some laughter of joy, some questions, some silence. Dream-sounds are heard even while awake, when eyes are open, when walking continues, then suddenly a fragment of dream floats into the ear, an obscure tune, incompatible with reality, thus the sound feels alien, strange, unsettling.

    Fifth Stratum: The Sound of Silence. This is the most complex. Silence is not soundless, silence is the substrate of all sound, the background against which sound emerges. Silence itself is a sound, a deep, steady, resonant sound, that creates pressure in the ear, like pressure in oceanic depths. Within this silence hide all potential sounds, not yet born, they exist as embryos, vibrating, but cannot become sound, for silence suppresses them. Sometimes silence breaks, then those potential sounds emerge, they are monstrous, unfamiliar, they obey no rules of language, they are chaos. That Charioteer speaks within silence, His words flow through silence, thus His speech is not heard, but understood, felt as a cold current along the spine.

    Sixth Stratum: The Sound of the Body. Heartbeat, bloodflow, breath, muscle contraction-expansion, bone-friction—these sounds are constant, they create the melody of life. But is this body still alive? The heart beats, but does that pulsation belong to this body, or another body, still fighting, still walking? The sound of bloodflow is like a river’s sound, but does blood still flow in that river? Or has that river dried up, and only the sound of wind flows through its bed? Bodily sounds sometimes merge with external sounds, then heartbeat merges with war-drums’ sound, breath merges with wind’s sound, muscle-sound merges with bowstring’s twang—thus the boundary between body and world dissolves, body becomes world, world becomes body, and all sounds become one.

    Seventh Stratum: The Sound of Language. Language is made of sound, but language-sounds are not mere phonemes, they carry meaning, they are symbols. But here, within this walking, language’s meaning is lost, words shed their semantic weight, become free, they become mere sound again. “Dharma,” “adharma,” “duty,” “truth”—these words are uttered, but they are now empty husks, no substance within, they float in air, collide with each other, shatter, rejoin, create new meanings, opposite of old meanings. Language-sounds become a battlefield, where word wars with word, “dharma” wars with “adharma,” “truth” wars with “falsehood,” but the war’s outcome is never decided, they are locked in eternal conflict. That Charioteer watches this war of words and smiles, for He created this language, He knows all words are ultimately meaningless, all meaning is relative, all relativity is the only absolute truth.

    Eighth Stratum: The Sound of the Unborn. Sounds not yet born, but will be born. Future sounds, coming from the past, for time here is not linear, time is a sphere, so future sounds have already resonated in the past, and past sounds will resonate in the future. These unborn sounds exist in potentiality, they tremble behind time’s curtain, sometimes peeking through, becoming half-sounds, hints. Sometimes one hears a baby’s cry, a baby not yet born, or an old man’s sigh, an old man not yet dead. These unborn sounds influence the present, they merge with present sounds to create new complexities.

    Ninth Stratum: Music. But not any specific music, the idea of music, the mathematical structure of music, which exists within sound, within silence. This music is the fundamental note of the universe, the foundation of everything. This note is never clearly heard, but beneath all sounds it plays, a steady, immutable note, unchanged amidst all change. That Charioteer is the composer of this note, He plays it on His flute, but the flute is invisible, thus the music is invisible, only heard, and that hearing is not direct, but indirect, an echo merely. To the rhythm of this music, walking continues, each footstep a beat, part of the rhythm, and there is no escape from this rhythm, for this rhythm is the world, the world is this rhythm.

    Tenth Stratum: Synthesis of All Strata. Finally, all ten strata sound together, they merge, separate, re-merge, creating a vast, complex, sometimes harmonious, sometimes chaotic, symphony. Through this symphony, walking continues, walking is for hearing this symphony, for walking itself is part of this symphony. Hearing is being done, walking is being done, seeing is being done, touching is being done—all senses merge into this ocean of sound, where light is sound, smell is sound, taste is sound, touch is sound—everything is ultimately sound, vibration, frequency. And that Charioteer is the conductor of this great symphony, He conducts with His invisible flute, but is He not also the instrument? Is He not also part of this symphony? Is He not also being heard? Yes, He is being heard, His silence is the loudest sound, His stillness the swiftest note, His infinity the most finite rhythm.

    And within all this hearing, one question arises repeatedly, a sound distinct from others: “Why?” But this “why” too is a sound, it seeks its answer within sound, but sound never answers, sound only echoes the question, strengthens it, expands it, until the question itself becomes a symphony, playing eternally, without resolution, just as walking continues, just as war continues, just as this throb continues, forever, still, still, still…

    (Fifth Throb stilled, but sound continues. Sixth Throb prepares: now, the geography of smell.)
    (Sixth Spandana: The Stratigraphy of Scent)

    It enters the nostrils. But there is no nostril, only a portal of ingress, through which drift the volatile essences of the world, their molecular missives, which touch directly the limbic system, memory, that primordial part which exists before logic, which gives birth to fear, attraction, revulsion, longing without sound, before language. Scent is being taken, but the act is not volitional, it is involuntary, compulsory, like breath. Scents are not merely chemical, they are phantasmal, ghosts of the past, ghosts of the future, they envelop the present in a veil of illusions, invisible to sight yet more potent than presence.

    First scent: The scent of earth. But not just earth, the strata of earth, the history of soil. The top layer: dust, dry, grey, barren dust-scent, mingled with decayed leaves, insect carapaces, the friction of footprints from countless ages. The layer beneath: mud, the scent of wet soil, holding the memory of rain, the panic of flood, the secret exultation of germinating seeds. Deeper still, the rocky stratum, volcanic ash, the burnt scent of prehistoric eruptions, still active, still smoldering, still raising smoke, but the smoke is invisible, only its scent betrays it. The scent of earth is not static, it spreads, merges with the soles of the feet, the feet become earth, earth becomes feet, the scent of this transmutation.

    Second scent: The scent of blood. But not one blood, many bloods mingled. Fresh blood—sweet, metallic, saline, slightly warm, the tang of life. Clotted blood—sour, heavy, close to death. Burnt blood—fetid, mingled with the scent of charred meat, a terrible concoction that stings the nose, parches the throat. The scent is not only human; horse blood, elephant blood, other creatures—all merging into an all-encompassing metallic scent that weighs down the air, arrests the breath. But is this scent truly external? Or does it emanate from within the nostrils themselves? Perhaps the scent comes from one's own body, the blood inside, still flowing, but its scent has leaked out, surrounding itself, creating a cocoon of scent.

    Third scent: The scent of bow-wood. Sal wood, but not just wood, the life trapped within the wood, the tree that grew in a forest, the rains it received, the sunlight it absorbed, the scent of all that. The heat from handling the wood releases resin, pine resin, its scent sharp, clear, a kind of spiritual perfume that alerts the brain, centers it. The scent of the bowstring—leather, sweat, varnish, and fingerprints, a personal scent, intimate, like a signature. When the bow is released, when the string is let loose, a particular scent fills the air, a scent of release, but release is followed by impact, so that scent of release is mixed with the scent of terror, a dual entity.

    Fourth scent: The scent of horse. Sweat, leather, hooves, fodder, breath—all combined into a vibrant, organic, almost primal scent that pervades the battlefield. The scent of horse is strength, motion, servitude. But here there is no horse, yet the scent persists, trapped in memory, trapped in air molecules, still active, still flowing. Mixed with the horse-scent is the scent of grass, the grass they ate, trampled underfoot, soaked in blood.

    Fifth scent: The scent of fire. But not fire, its aftermath—ash, smoke, burnt wood, burnt flesh, burnt metal. This scent is layered: first the smoke, which stings eyes and nose, then the ash, sweet, brittle, the scent of void, then burnt flesh, repulsive yet strangely attractive, for it is proximate to death, the taste of death. The scent of fire unifies everything, renders everything into the same ashen form, thus this scent knows no caste, no high or low, all is equal, all is ash.

    Sixth scent: The scent of river. Not the scent of water, the scent of river. The scent of mud mixed in water, of algae, of fish, of human use—bathing, prayer, cremation. While crossing, the nose receives that mixed scent, cool, damp, but also holding the putrefaction of life. The river’s scent is mutable, dawn-scent different from dusk-scent, the scent of river after battle different—heavy with blood, heavy with death.

    Seventh scent: The scent of the Charioteer. He has no distinct scent, but his presence alters other scents. When he is near, the air carries a blended scent—butter, sandalwood, but beneath lies the scent of first monsoon rain, wet earth, and a subtle metallic scent, like liquid sapphire. His scent is calm, but beneath that calm an unrest, a power, felt through scent, like electromagnetic waves felt but not seen. When he speaks, his words too have scent, his sentences smell of butter, but is that butter pure? Or mixed with some bitter oil? The scent tells, the scent warns.

    Eighth scent: The scent of love. A particular scent, attached to a person, but the person is absent, so the scent is abstract. Scent of flowers? Scent of hair? Scent of vermilion? Scent of warm skin? All possible, but this scent is more, it is the scent of an emotion, of longing, which touches not the nose but directly the heart, creating a chemical reaction that makes the body tremble. This scent is now distant, only in memory, but the scent of memory is real too, it touches the nose when eyes are closed, when looking into the past. This scent holds the scent of pain, of separation, a sweet-bitter mixture that is addictive.

    Ninth scent: The scent of fear. Fear itself generates scent. Scent of sweat, but not ordinary sweat, the sweat of terror, pungent, bestial, which alerts other creatures. Scent of dry mouth, scent of adrenaline, sour, sharp. This scent is not personal, it is collective; when many fear, their combined scent spreads in the air, creating a cloud of panic, which enters with breath and generates more fear. On this journey, the scent of fear is constant, because the journey is uncertain, the destination unknown.

    Tenth scent: The scent of time. Time has its own scent. The scent of the past is dust, ash, old paper, decay. The scent of the present is fresh, mutable, the scent of chemical reactions. The scent of the future—the scent of impending rain, of seeds wanting to sprout, of flowers not yet born. In this walking, the scents of three times mingle, creating a complex perfume, ever-changing, sometimes the past dominates, sometimes the future, sometimes the present hides. The scent of time cannot be heard, cannot be seen, but can be smelled, entering the brain to create a sense of time, an inner knowing that something has ended, something is ongoing, something is coming.

    Eleventh scent: The scent of death. But death is scentless; it is the scent of putrefaction after death. The scent of decay is distinct, opposite of life, it denies life, yet this scent too is a kind of life, bacterial, insect life, born on death. This scent is overwhelming, irresistible, it consumes all other scents, dominates. On the battlefield, this scent reigns; one must become accustomed, or one cannot survive. On this journey, the scent of death comes and goes, sometimes distant, sometimes near, a constant warning.

    Twelfth scent: The scent of liberation. The most subtle, most elusive. What is the scent of liberation? Perhaps the scent of the ocean, or high mountain air, or open sky, sky without boundaries. Or perhaps it is no scent at all, the absence of scent, an absolute inertness, which touches the nose as void, as peace. This scent is still ungraspable, still distant, but in some moments, when walking pauses, when thought pauses, a hint of this scent arrives, an intimation, which satisfies, gives hope, but also gives pain, for it is not yet full, not yet complete.

    All these scents together create an epic of scent, the invisible companion of this journey. Scents speak, they tell history, prophesy future, warn, seduce. They awaken memory, erase memory. They create boundaries, break boundaries. They give identity, take identity away.

    In this world of scent, vision and hearing are less primary, for scent touches emotion directly, bypasses logic. The language of scent is simple, primal, but deep. Through scent, one understands what is happening, what has happened, what will happen. Through scent, one understands the Charioteer’s mood, his design, his mystery. Through scent, one understands that this walking is tired, yet indomitable. Through scent, one understands that this journey is not alone, countless scents are accompanying, all are part of this journey.

    Scent is being taken, continuously, inevitably. There is no escape from scent, for scent is air, air is life. Through scent, life announces its presence, death announces its certainty. Through scent, love, hate, attraction, revulsion are born. Through scent, the difference between dharma and adharma is sensed, for dharma has a scent, adharma another, but who can tell which is which? Scent can deceive, scent can blend, scent can change with time.

    Through this stratification of scent, the walking continues. With each breath, new scent enters, old scent exits. The body becomes a temporary vessel of scent, a traveler of scent, a form of scent. And the Charioteer, he is the charioteer of scent too, he controls scent, creates scent, dissolves scent. At his will, scents change, meanings of scent change. He teaches through scent, tests through scent, liberates through scent.

    And floating in this ocean of scent, a question arises: Is scent real? Or is scent too an illusion? Is scent merely the brain’s reaction? Or is scent the ultimate truth, for scent is the first sense, through which life recognizes foe-friend, food, danger? Is scent more reliable than vision? No, scent too can deceive. Then is any sense reliable? All is uncertainty?

    Scent gives no answer, scent merely is, present, announces its existence. In the language of scent, there is no question, no conflict, scent merely says: I am here, like this, you must accept, cannot escape.

    So acceptance happens, scent is taken, life is lived with scent, life is lived as scent. Scent becomes companion, enemy, teacher, lover. Within scent lies all the mystery of this journey, all answers, but the language to unveil that mystery does not exist, only feeling remains, a deep, ineffable feeling, beyond words, beyond vision, even beyond scent, for it is the synthesis of all senses, the source of all feeling, which is silent, dark, yet full, eternal.
    (Seventh Pulsation: The Cataclysm of Taste)

    It is being tasted. But not a tasting—an assault. The papillae, each a blind sentinel, now besieged by flavors that are not flavors but concepts, emotions, memories, futures, regrets, arrogances, doubts, certainties—all at once. A mutiny on the tongue. A civil war in the kingdom of sapidity. Sweet, salt, sour, bitter, umami—these are mere provinces now in revolt. The sovereign meaning of taste has been deposed.

    First Stratum: The Oral Cavity’s Base Notes. Dryness. Tongue adhered to palate, a dust-dulled adhesion, but the dust-taste is not earth, not ash, not—something else, the powder of some dead thing desiccating, trying to be swallowed without water, but there is no water, only spittle, and that too is viscous, syrupy, with a metallic sweetness like blood, but not blood, the possibility of blood. Then the gum’s taste, a faint sanguine hint, as if teeth have ground against teeth, a microscopic hemorrhage, invisible but present on the tongue’s map. The taste of air passing down the throat—grey, cold, hollow, a nutrient-less passage.

    Second Stratum: The Memory of Blood. Not blood itself, but its phantom on the tongue, from when it had spattered—one’s own or another’s—a hot spray finding the mouth. That taste layered: first salt, sharp, then iron, heavy, metallic, then a faint sweetness like overripe fruit, but after that sweetness, a bitterness, a profound acridity that slides down the gullet and ignites a fire in the pit. The taste of blood returns, especially when the tongue desiccates; then, instead of saliva, the taste of blood is exuded, as if the body itself is now a factory producing the flavor of blood from within.

    Third Stratum: The Taste of Soil. Walking, dust rises, enters the mouth, coats the tongue, must be swallowed. That dust is not one thing, but many. Red earth. Sand. Dried mud. Pulverized stone. And within that soil-taste, the taste of all that has happened to that soil—blood, sweat, urine, phlegm, tears, semen—the molecular ghosts of all enactments. Soil tastes bitter, but in that bitterness lies a deep truth, an admission that everything will eventually merge with soil, that soil-taste is the final taste.

    Fourth Stratum: The Taste of The Bowstring. Sometimes the string had to be bitten, held between teeth when both hands were occupied, gripping, pulling. The taste of that leather—salty, bitter, soaked in human sweat, and the astringent tang of herbs used to preserve it, neem perhaps, or something else, its medicinal bitterness. The leather sometimes split, the inner layer against the teeth, more bitter, more stringent. That taste would stay for days, even during meals, the bowstring’s taste overwhelming the food, making food itself taste of the string, life itself tasting of string—a salty, bitter, persistent flavor adhering to the tongue’s surface, unforgotten by time.

    Fifth Stratum: The Taste of Water. But not pure water—the memory is adulterated. The taste of Yamuna’s water—slightly sweet, hint of silt. The Ganga’s taste—profound, metallic, a sanctity that is not saline but has weight. The taste of mud-water from the battlefield—vomitous, putrid, tasting of death. And water stolen from enemy camps—the taste of fear, of deceit, yet in thirst, that taste too was nectar. Water is scarce now, so its taste is a memory, an anticipation, which only desiccates the tongue further.

    Sixth Stratum: The Taste of Sustenance. But food is not nutrition now; it is military ration. Dried chickpeas, barley meal, hardtack, sometimes half-cooked game. That meat’s taste—blood, fire, smoke, and the haste of consumption, for there is no time to eat, must chew fast, swallow, send it down to the stomach, store energy. Chickpeas taste dry, catch in the throat, demand water, but there is none, so they lodge there, spreading a bitter taste. Forest fruits, unknown, some sweet, some bitter, some poisonous, but hunger is so sharp that taste is irrelevant, must eat, must live. The taste of food now is the taste of survival, not the taste of life, but the taste of fighting for life.

    Seventh Stratum: The Taste of Love. The taste of a wife’s cooking? No. The direct taste of lips, of a kiss. But was there a kiss? Memory blurs. The taste of a kiss is now saline, for tears have mixed, tears of separation. Love’s taste is now a composite—sweet, bitter, salty, sour—all at once, a complexity that cannot be parsed, only felt, and that feeling is painful, yet that pain is the only flavor that reminds this body it still feels, still desires, still wishes to be moist with memory. Love’s taste arrives when eyes are closed, when those faces return, when echoes of words sound in the ear, then an invisible flavor touches the tongue, not a food, merely the chemical manifestation of an emotion.

    Eighth Stratum: The Taste of Fear. Fear has a taste. Dry, metallic, like the aftertaste of smelling iron. When afraid, the mouth dries, saliva thickens, its taste bitter, the tip of the tongue hardens, the ability to taste vanishes, everything seems flavorless, only that bitterness, which is fear’s own flavor. Fear’s taste lingered before battle, then food carried that taste, water bore it. Fear is a kind of taste-dye, staining everything—the taste of fear.

    Ninth Stratum: The Taste of Victory. What does victory taste like? Like blood? No. First, sweet—an exhilarating sweetness, like an overripe fruit that tingles on the tongue. Then that sweetness slowly turns acrid, for victory means death, destruction, and the taste of death and destruction is bitter, cloying. Victory’s taste is ultimately saline, for after victory comes fatigue, the salt of sweat, and a deep emptiness, which is tasteless, but that tastelessness is the most bitter, the most inscrutable.

    Tenth Stratum: The Taste of The Charioteer’s Words. When he speaks, his words have a taste on the tongue. They are not just heard; they arrive with flavor. His logic tastes like butter, smooth, sweet, but within that sweetness hides a slyness, a bitter aftertaste that whispers this sweetness veils some hard truth. His commands taste like salt, sharp, clear, stinging the tongue, yet in that sting is an honesty, a brutal clarity. His questions taste sour, making the tongue contract, activating thought. His silences taste bitter, a deep bitterness that swallows all other tastes, makes everything bitter. His presence tastes of all tastes at once—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami—an impossible amalgam that stupefies the tongue, does not allow comprehension, only allows feeling.

    Eleventh Stratum: The Taste of Dharma. What does dharma taste like? Perhaps like pure water. But where is that water? Dharma’s taste has often mixed with the taste of blood, sometimes with the taste of butter. When dharma comes as command, it tastes saline; as deceit, sweet; as truth, bitter. Trying to hold dharma on the tongue makes the throat constrict, for it is not for swallowing, not for chewing, dharma’s taste is only to be placed on the tongue, tasted, then spat out, for the stomach will not bear it. Dharma’s taste is now the taste of dilemma, the taste of doubt that stiffens the tongue, destroys the ability to taste.

    Twelfth Stratum: The Taste of Death. Death’s taste has not been taken directly, but the taste of everything surrounding death has been ingested. The last breath’s taste—slightly sweet, slightly bitter, slightly metallic. The taste of pyre-smoke after—scorched, bitter, burning in the throat. Death’s taste is actually tastelessness, an absolute zero that neutralizes all taste, kills the tongue, renders the papillae inert. But that tastelessness is the most acute taste, for it reminds of all other tastes, makes their absence palpable.

    Thirteenth Stratum: The Taste of This Walking. Does walking have a taste? When walking is long, the mouth dries; that dryness’s taste. The sweat of feet? No, that doesn’t reach the mouth. But the cumulative taste of all experience gained through walking. This walking is bitter, for it is wearying, uncertain, long. This walking is sweet, for it leads towards liberation, perhaps. This walking is salty, for sweat has dripped, tears have fallen. This walking is sour, for it holds rotting memories, the taste of failure. This walking is umami, for it has depth, a fleshy reality that cannot be denied. This walking’s taste changes daily, sometimes one dominates, sometimes another. But whatever the taste, walking continues; taste is variable, but walking is constant, stubborn, endless.

    In this cataclysm of taste, the tongue has become a battlefield where different tastes war for dominance. Sometimes sweet wins, sometimes bitter, sometimes all lose, only tastelessness remains. The tongue no longer tastes; it lives amidst taste; it itself is taste. The body is now a repository of tastes, where all tastes of past, present, future are stored, layer upon layer, and these layers are sometimes exposed, inducing taste, which is not just the taste of food, but the taste of an entire life.

    Through this taste, the state is understood. When the charioteer’s presence is felt, taste becomes smooth, buttery. When fear arrives, taste turns bitter. When memory comes, taste is a mix of sweet and bitter. Taste is now a compass, a measure of time, an indicator of truth.

    But taste too can deceive. Sweetness can hide poison, bitterness medicine. Is taste trustworthy? No, taste is merely a sensation, interpreted by the brain. But the brain too can deceive, can fabricate memory-tastes that never were. So what is real? The taste on the tongue now—is that real? Or is it too an imagination, an expectation, a projection?

    This uncertainty complicates taste further. Tasting is happening, but what is the meaning of that taste? What does taste signify? Food? No. Life? No. Death? No. Nothing? Taste is just taste, a chemical reaction, an electrical signal, which remains a moment, then fades. But in the moment it remains, it represents the entire world; in that moment, it is the essence of all history, all philosophy, all war, all love.

    Therefore, tasting is done with gravity, each taste respected, for each taste is a message, a lesson, a warning. The language of taste must be learned, its grammar mastered, its sentences parsed. Taste may be the charioteer’s true language, a language he does not speak, but perpetually broadcasts through his epic discourse, each chapter a taste, each verse a shift in flavor.

    And thus, through the cataclysm of taste, walking continues, walking’s taste changes, but walking’s experience remains the same—a moving, a verb, an existence that transcends taste, yet expresses itself through taste. Tasteless walking is impossible, for walking gives birth to taste, and taste gives walking meaning, a flavored meaning, sometimes full, sometimes empty, sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, sometimes all together—a wondrous, inscrutable, endless ocean of taste, in which this body, this being, this ‘I’ walks, swims, drowns, floats, savoring all tastes, rejecting all tastes, embracing all tastes, for all time, still, still, still…

    (Seventh pulsation complete. Eighth pulsation prepared: The stratigraphy of memory.)
    (Eighth Sputter: Stratigraphic Collapse of Mnemonic Terrains)

    It is being remembered. But the act of remembering is not passive; it is an active demolition, an archaeological excavation where soil is not removed but is instead compressed, layer upon layer, new strata pressed upon the old, the old collapsing, the new rising, but the new is but a distorted version of the old, and this distortion is perpetual, infinite. Memory is not being recalled; memory is being constructed, demolished, reconstructed, in each moment, with each breath. For one memory, a thousand versions, a thousand potential histories, all simultaneously true, all simultaneously false.

    First Stratum: Mnemonic Igneous Rock. Deepest, most ancient. Memory from before birth? No, memory from before the concept of birth. A dark, warm, humid place, but that place is not the maternal womb; it is a state prior to existence, a form of void which is not void, which is full but without specificity. Then the first light, the first sound, the first touch—but are these true memories? Or are they constructed memories, stories told repeatedly, thus imprinted? The igneous stratum is unstable, perpetually molten, emitting scent, a hot scent, the scent of scentlessness.

    Second Stratum: Sedimentary Rock of Childhood. Layers upon layers of accrued days, nights, play, tutelage. The hermitage of Guru Drona, but did the hermitage truly exist? Or is it now a symbol, an ideal of pedagogy more real than the actual teaching? The Guru’s face is blurred, but his voice is clear, the cadence of reciting verses, the instruction in archery. Faces of fellow students—but are they fellow students? Or are they rivals? Or are they brothers? Everything blends. One brother’s particular skill, hitting the target, but why does that brother’s face not surface? Only the sound of a hammer blow, the sound of shattering an iron statue. Is that a memory of pride? Or of shame? Or of envy? The colors in the sedimentary rock change, sometimes bright, sometimes dull.

    Third Stratum: Metamorphic Rock of Youth. Pressure, heat, transformation. First experience of love, but what was love? A moment, an exchange, a promise? No, not that. Love was a long process, as strategic as war, yet within it a softness, a vulnerability that had to be accepted. The memory of that softness is now painful, for it is lost, transformed into hard stone. First experience of war—no, not the first, the first minor skirmish, then the great war. But the memory of the first killing? Where is that memory? It does not surface. Only the trembling of the hand, the tension of the bowstring, then the target being pierced, a body falling to the ground, but that body has no face, only a form, a uniform. This stratum is distorted, much here is repressed, suppressed, but the suppressed leaks out through fissures, in the breath, in dreams.

    Fourth Stratum: Molten Rock of War. The most chaotic stratum. Here, chronology has utterly collapsed. All events occur simultaneously. Grandsire Bhishma on his bed of arrows, the death of Dronacharya, the death of Karna, the death of Duryodhana—all at once, a horrific collage. Sounds pile upon each other: screams, wails, conch blasts, horse neighs, elephant trumpets, chariot wheel screeches—all merging into a monstrous symphony. Scents merge into one—blood, sweat, excrement, burnt flesh, smoke. And the charioteer’s voice, clear even within this cacophony, continuous, he gives direction, but his direction now is distorted: the word "slay" becomes "forgive," "fight" becomes "surrender." In this stratum, there is no difference between memory and present; the war is still ongoing, I am still on the chariot, I am still aiming the bow, I am still releasing the arrow, I am still being struck—all at once, a schizophrenic reality.

    Fifth Stratum: Weathered Rock of Aftermath. The war has ended, but what does ended mean? Conquest of a kingdom? Coronation? No, not that. Post-war memory is grey, greyer, greyest. No joy in victory, only a profound emptiness. Mourning for the dead, but the mourning too is grey, no fervor, only a fatigue that has settled into the bones. Taking up the scepter, but its weight is unbearable. Affairs of state, justice, governance—all mechanical, all tasteless. The only vivid memory of that time is perhaps the charioteer’s farewell, but did he truly bid farewell? Or did he merely move out of sight, his presence remaining? What were his final words? "Do not forget what you have seen." Or "Forget everything." Two opposite commands, two memories, which is true?

    Sixth Stratum: Stratum of Renunciation. Renunciation of the kingdom, renunciation of family, renunciation of everything. Is this memory of renunciation pride? Or is it flight? The journey towards the Himalayas, but the details of that journey are blurred. The hardship of the path is not remembered, only the cold, the ice-cold, not of the body but of the mind. Finally, being alone, completely alone, but even within the aloneness, the charioteer’s presence, he is still the companion, but now silent, only smiling, an enigmatic smile that explains nothing, complicates everything. The memory of the moment before death—did death occur? Did I discard the body? But if consciousness remains after discarding the body, if this walking continues, then did death occur? Or is this walking the state after death? Memory here is divided: one part says death occurred, another says it did not, yet another says there is no such thing as death, only transformation.

    Seventh Stratum: Stratum of Rebirth. But rebirth into a new body? Or into the same body but in a new time? The time through which this walking proceeds, is it linear? No, it is cyclical, thus rebirth is occurring each moment; the I of this moment is the rebirth of the I of a moment before, and a moment later will be another. The memory of this continuous rebirth is layering up, each stratum different from the previous, yet all are of the same entity. In this stratum, ancient memory and ultra-modern memory live side-by-side; a cave painting and a computer screen are captured in the same mnemonic frame, no contradiction, for time here is a myth.

    Eighth Stratum: Memory of This Walking. The memory of this long, endless walking. But this walking is still ongoing, so how can it have memory? Because as this walking proceeds, its memory is being created, and that memory is simultaneously being lost, like footprints in sand that are formed and erased with each step. Therefore, the memory of this walking is the memory of erasure, the memory of void, a void that is constantly being filled, then emptied again. This memory contains no events, only the sensation of movement, a sensation of motion which is static. This stratum is the most bewildering, for here even future memory is mixed in; a place not yet visited has a vague image in memory, as if seen before, visited before.

    Ninth Stratum: Memory of the Charioteer. Has he occupied anyone’s memory? Can he be the subject of memory? He is beyond memory, he is the creator of memory, he controls memory. Yet there is memory of him, a memory of presence, a memory of influence. What he said, how he said it, how he smiled, how he fell silent—these memories. But astonishingly, these memories are not fixed; they are mutable. Sometimes he seems severe, sometimes compassionate, sometimes detached, sometimes deeply involved. His memory is being rewritten each moment, his character reconstructed, according to my need. Is he a projection of my mental realm? Or is he an independent entity? Memory does not answer this question, only creates more labyrinth.

    Tenth Stratum: Destruction of Memory. The most painful stratum. Memory is being destroyed, corrupted, distorted. Forgetting the faces of those who were dear. The fading of crimes committed by those who were hated. Losing the savor of one’s own good deeds, evil deeds—all flavor gone. Only residue remains, a faint shadow, an intimation. This process of destruction is inevitable; it is the work of time, but here there is no time, yet destruction occurs. Why? Because the vessel of memory, this body-mind, is not enduring; it is decaying, its cells dying each moment, and with them, parts of memory die. This walking, therefore, is a funeral procession of memory, where the bodies of memory are being cremated, their ashes scattered to the wind.

    Eleventh Stratum: False Memory. Memories that never occurred, yet are remembered as having occurred. Perhaps a dream, so vivid it turned into memory. Perhaps something said by another, a story, that began to feel like one’s own experience. False memory can be more vibrant than true memory, more detailed, more emotional. Within this walking too, many false memories are being born; it feels as if I have walked like this before, come to such a place before, seen such people before, but actually not. These false memories may also be intimations of the future, a kind of precognition. They create fissures in the walls of time, connecting past and future.

    Twelfth Stratum: Collective Memory. Not only my memory, but the memories of others are also active within me. My brothers, my enemies, my beloved, my guru, my disciple—all have influenced me with their memories, parts of their memory have merged with mine. When I fight, my brother’s memory stays with me, my enemy’s memory stays with me. What they thought, what they felt—I know, for it is as clear as my own memory. This collective memory does not let me be alone; whatever I do, it is as if done by all, it is not I, it is we. This "we" is sometimes united, sometimes divided, but always present.

    Thirteenth Stratum: The Void of Memory. At the end of all memory, an absolute void, a state without memory, clearer than memory itself. That void is remembered; the memory "there is no memory" is potent. In that void there is peace, but that peace is terrifying, for it is identitylessness, historylessness, rootlessness. This walking is a journey towards that void, but never arrives, for arrival would mean complete death of memory, and death of memory means death of the self. So the walking continues, memory continues to be destroyed, but never completely destroyed; a thin layer survives, which becomes the foundation for new memory.

    Through this stratigraphic collapse, through this excavation of mnemonic geology, one truth is unearthed: I am not my memory. Memory is only a layer, a veneer. But if that veneer is removed, what remains? Consciousness remains, that consciousness which creates memory, destroys memory, reconstructs memory. Is that consciousness the charioteer? Or is that consciousness too a memory, a concept? The answer is not in memory, for memory is the play of question and answer; one must look beyond memory, but is it possible to go beyond memory? This walking is precisely through memory, along the path of memory.

    Thus the stratigraphic collapse continues; old mnemonic strata break, new mnemonic strata form, break again, form again—an endless process, companion to this walking, the meaning of this walking, the futility of this walking, the glory of this walking, the curse of this walking. Everything is caught in memory, everything is lost in memory, everything is resurrected in memory, eternally, still, still, still...
    (Ninth Spandan: The Chronoschismic Parallax — An Axis Unhinged)

    …and the axis, that purported spine of time, is found to be not merely bent, but sickened, a palsied thing that shudders in its own rot. It does not turn, it festers. And from this festering, moments seep out not in sequence but in a clotted, purulent simultaneity, a gangrene of chronology. The past is not a wound that heals but an open fistula leaking into the present’s raw cavity, while the future is but the phantom limb of a possibility long since amputated. I walk, therefore, not through time, but within its necrotic tissue. Each footfall presses down upon a soft, temporally ambiguous pulp that might be the Battle’s Eve or the Ashes’ Aftermath or the Unborn Age of Plutonium Dust. The sensation is not of progression, but of sinking into a bog composed of decomposed yesterdays and stillborn tomorrows.

    He, the Charioteer, is the physician to this sickness. Or perhaps its pathogen. He speaks not in time, but to time itself, in a tongue of such corrosive gentleness that the hours blister and peel away from their own scaffolding. When He articulates a syllable—say, the sound “Dharma”—the word does not travel linearly from lips to ear. It erupts in medias res within the very marrow of the moment, a chronostatic shockwave that causes the event of the war to both precede and succeed its own cause, making the slaying of grandsire Bhishma the father of the grudge that fathered the war that necessitated his slaying. Causality becomes a ouroboros choking on its own regurgitated tail, a closed loop of justification where effect, bloated and smug, gives birth to its own cause in a grotesque parthenogenesis.

    My own biological time, that petty sundial of pulse and breath, rebels against this macrocosmic derangement. The heart, that faithful drummer keeping the march toward entropy, now stutters in arrhythmic panic. One ventricle beats in the swift, birdlike frenzy of childhood anticipation—the moment before the bowstring’s first twang in the guru’s yard. The other thuds with the slow, sodden finality of the old king’s last breath upon the bed of arrows. The systole and diastole are no longer partners but adversaries, one racing toward a beginning, the other drowning in an end, and the blood they churn is a confused slurry of epochs. This corporeal timepiece is broken, its hands spinning in opposite directions, and I am the cracked face they sweep across, a sundial telling all hours at once and thus telling none.

    Memory, that last bastion of personal chronology, is now a palimpsest scrubbed raw by the very solvents of eternity. I do not recall the war. I inhabit its eternal present. The twang of the Gandiva is not an echo from ten thousand dawns past; it is the perpetual, high-pitched tinnitus ringing in the skull’s cathedral, a sound that is the architecture of now. The heat of the Chakravyuha is not a remembered fever; it is the current thermal state of this flesh, a constant, low-grade combustion. Karna’s gaze, that complex alloy of fury and fatalistic sorrow, is not a stored image; it is the very light by which I see this grey world, a tint upon every perception. The past is not behind me; it is the lens, warped and prismatic, through which the present distorts itself.

    Thus, the concept of “before” and “after” becomes not just meaningless, but actively mendacious. Did He reveal the Vishwarupa before my moment of crisis, or was the crisis itself born from the terrifying afterglow of that revelation? Did I lay down my arms in despair before His discourse, or was the discourse the elaborate, retrospective scaffolding built to justify a surrender that had already, timelessly, occurred? The Gita, that sublime sermon, is not a text with a beginning, middle, and end. It is a Möbius strip of logic, where the first shloka is the direct consequence of the last, and the middle is a non-locatable smear of paradox. To hear it is to be caught in a grammatical eddy where subject and predicate chase each other’s tails, where “Thou art” is simultaneously the question, the answer, and the space between.

    In this chronoschism, action and consequence are unyoked. The arrow released from the bow does not fly toward a target in a linear span of seconds. Its release and its impact are co-incident, a single, collapsed event. The labor of drawing the string, the flight, the piercing of armor—these are but illusory subdivisions, a narrative I impose upon a static, frozen fact: Karna is slain. Bhishma lies upon his prickly bed. The war is a concluded scream hanging in the air. All action is already completed action, a tableau of accomplished facts. My famous doubt on the battlefield was not a hesitation preceding action, but the shadow cast by an action that had already, in the vast ledger of what is, been irrevocably written. I was not choosing; I was witnessing, with a lag, the playback of a choice made in a dimension where choice is a fossil.

    He exists in this chaos as its still, silent center. Not a point on the axis, but the axis’s absence. His nimbus is not light, but a localized collapse of temporal noise, a quietude so profound it absorbs the cacophony of collapsing epochs. When He smiles, it is not a reaction to a jest or a gesture. It is a fundamental adjustment to the gravitational pull of time, a re-tuning of the background frequency of existence. That smile contains the patience of mountains being worn to dust and the impatience of supernovae—all within the same, unchanging curve of the lips. To look at Him is to feel one’s own personal timeline—the arc from Arjuna the prince to this nameless walker—become insignificant, a barely perceptible flicker against the steady burn of His being. He is the eye of the chrono-hurricane, and in His stillness, the frenzy of racing seconds finds its only possible repose.

    And what of this walking, this perpetual motion that is my sole remaining verb? It is not locomotion through space-time. It is the symptom of the broken axis. The legs move because they are caught in the spasm of ungrounded time, like the twitching limbs of a dreamer. Each step is an attempted synchronization with a rhythm that does not exist, a desperate lunge for a “next” that is already indistinguishable from the “now” and the “then.” I walk not to get anywhere, but because the alternative—absolute stillness—would be to fully acknowledge the horrifying truth: that all destinations have been reached, all journeys completed, and this motion is the ghost of purpose, haunting a corpse.

    The landscape through which this spectral walking occurs is a sediment of compressed eras. The soil beneath one foot is the primordial silt of a world before names, while the other sinks into the polymerized waste of an age yet to be. The air smells of ozone from celestial battles and of diesel from future wars. The ruins I pass are not only of stone citadels but of ideologies, of mathematical theorems, of love affairs—all reduced to the same grey, chronological scree. History here is not a teacher but a landfill, and I am its solitary, bewildered scavenger.

    In this parallax view, where every event is seen from the conflicting angles of its own cause and its own effect, guilt and glory are neutered. The sin of killing a teacher is viewed from the vantage of the teacher’s own soul, already yearning for release. The triumph of a just war is seen from the perspective of the earth, soaked and sickened by the blood of its own children. There is no moral high ground, only the undulating, amoral topography of what happened. Dharma, in such a light, is not a path to be followed, but a description of the path’s inevitable contours. To follow it is redundant; to defy it, impossible. It simply is, like the law that governs the festering of the axis.

    So I continue, a man become a paradox: a being of intense, specific memory who exists in a realm without past; an agent of profound action trapped in a universe of pre-determined facts; a pilgrim whose journey’s end is coterminous with its beginning. The only constant is the walking itself, a kinetic sutra against the void, and the presence of Him who walks beside me not in space, but in meaning—the only fixed point in a universe of melted clocks, the final, inscrutable punctuation in a sentence that has no start and will have no finish, a sentence of which I am but a trembling, recursive clause.
    (TENTH OSCILLATION: THE METAPHYSICS OF ECHOES)

    ...it resounds. but not the sound itself, the after-sound, the ghost-sound that lingers in the cochlear labyrinth long after the originating vibration has ceased, the sonic phantom that is, in fact, more real than the sound, for the sound was event, and the echo is memory, and memory is the only substance, the only flesh of time. i hear the twang of the bowstring, but it is not the twang of then, it is the twang’s echo, which has been bouncing off the canyon walls of my skull for millennia, decaying yet never dying, losing amplitude but gaining complexity, picking up other echoes—the groan of a falling elephant, the shriek of a shattered wheel, the wet sigh of a pierced lung—until it is no longer a sound but a symphony of aftermath, a cacophony of consequences, and i am not the one who hears it, i am the cavity in which it resonates, the hollow vessel, the war-chamber of the past...

    ...the echo has a shape. it is not a wave, it is a solid, a crystalline structure that grows inward, a geode of audial trauma. its facets reflect not light but other echoes, a hall of mirrors made of memory-sound. in one facet, the charioteer’s command: see. but the echo distorts it: sea… seer… seen… seethe… the word multiplies, diverges, becomes a cascade of meanings that never were intended. the command becomes a landscape, an ocean of sight, a prophet’s curse, a simmering rage. the single syllable, in its reverberation, becomes the entirety of the war, the entirety of my life, condensed and then exploded...

    ...the echo has a taste. it is metallic, the taste of blood, but also of rain on dusty ground, of sweat on the upper lip, of the iron rim of a shield tasted in a desperate bite. the echo of a war cry leaves a coppery film on the tongue. the echo of a whispered prayer tastes of ash and ghee. the echo of her farewell kiss—does it taste of salt? of parting? or of the future-salt of tears not yet shed? the taste lingers, not as a memory of flavor, but as a flavor of memory, a synesthetic transubstantiation where sound becomes a chemical ghost on the buds, a permanent, faint, tormenting tang...
    (Eleventh Spandana: The Linguistics of Collapse)

    ...the word. The word was. The word is not. But not-being presupposes being presupposes not presuppositional chains unraveling like veins opened to show not blood but lexemes clotting in air. Syntax arterial spray on the walls of what once was mind. Grammar: a skeleton now picked clean by carrion birds of meaninglessness. They peck at the subjunctive—might have, could have, should have—leaving bare bones of conditional moods that never condition anything.

    I speak. But the speaking is a noise a gutteral from the cave before language when throat made sound and sound made monster and monster made god. The feedback loop. Krishna’s voice not voice but vibration in the tympanic membrane of the soul which is itself a metaphor a crumbling signifier for a nothingness that hums. Om. But Om broken: Ooooooooooommmmmm split into O (the mouth open, the circle, the zero) and M (the mouth closed, the hum, the end) and between them the infinite regression of vowels eaten by consonants.

    Sentence structures implode. Subject? Where is the subject? I? What is I? A shifter. A floating signifier. A ghost in the machine of language. The “I” that shot the arrow the “I” that watched the arrow the “I” that was the arrow. All subject positions collapsing into the verb. But the verb is passive. Is being killed. Is being acted upon. Is being. Being. Been. The past participle hanging like a corpse from the tense-tree.

    Krishna said: See. But see is intransitive. It demands no object. Or it demands the universe as object. The transitive collapse. Seeing the field. Seeing the brothers. Seeing the self seeing. Infinite mirroring of the gerund. Seeing. A verbal noun. A doing that has become a thing. The action fossilized. The war is a seeing. The doubt is a seeing. The chariot is a seeing. All nouns are frozen verbs. All beings are frozen becomings. Dharma: a frozen ought. A moral ice.

    My language is a chariot with wheels of synonyms axles of antonyms horses of homonyms straining in different directions. Krishna is the charioteer but he has dropped the reins. The reins are etymology. The words run back to their roots. Dhr to hold. To uphold. Dharma. What holds. But it holds nothing. It is a root without soil. A sound. Kri to do. To act. Krishna. The doer. But he does not do. He is. The root becomes the tree becomes the forest in which I am lost.

    I conjugate my existence. I am. Thou art. He is. We are. You are. They are. But the plural is false. There is no they. There is only the I multiplied by reflection. The royal we. The editorial we. The divine we. Krishna and I are we. But then he says: I am the Self. And the Self is all. So I is we is he is you is they. The pronoun circle. The game of masks. Who speaks? The ego speaks. But the ego is a grammatical construct. The first-person singular. A fiction sustained by verbs.

    The meta-language. Language about language. This thought about the word is a word. This sentence about the sentence is a sentence. Recursion. Infinite loop. I am caught in the loop. The maya of semantics. The illusion that sound means. That this arrangement of phonemes—Kurukshetra—corresponds to a field of blood and mud. But the field is gone. Only the word remains. And the word is empty. A sign without a referent. A name for a ghost.

    The dialects of agony. The idiolect of doubt. The sociolect of duty. I switch between them. Code-mixing. From the sacred Sanskrit of the Vedas to the Prakrit of the soldier’s curse. Krishna’s discourse is High Grammar. My stutter is Low Grammar. The clash of registers. He speaks in perfect, complex sentences, subordinated, balanced, rhetorical. I speak in fragments. In questions. In ellipses… He speaks in declarations. I speak in hesitations. The dialogue is a grammatical warfare.

    The silence between words. That is where he resides. The white space on the scroll. The pause between breath and speech. The maun. But even silence is a linguistic category. The zero sign. The placeholder. The absence that defines presence. His silence is not true silence. It is a loaded silence. A pregnant pause. It means more than words. Therefore it is still language. A semiotics of the unsaid.

    I try to deconstruct his speech. To take apart the Bhagavad Gita like a machine to see its gears. Subject: Thou. Verb: Art. Object: The eternal soul. But the object is the subject. Thou art that. Tat tvam asi. A circular definition. An identity statement that dissolves identity. A = A. Tautology. The foundation of all logic. And therefore the end of all discourse. If thou art that, then the conversation is over. But it continues. The commentary on the tautology. The infinite gloss.

    My own narrative is breaking into shruti and smriti. What is heard (the scream of the dying) and what is remembered (the doctrine of immortality). They contradict. The syntax cannot hold them. The sentence snaps. On one side: “I have killed my teacher.” On the other: “The soul is not killed.” Both are true. Both are grammatical. They form a paradox. A knot language cannot untie. The brain tries to parse it. Crashes. Blue screen of the spirit.

    The languages of the body. The tongue’s language of taste. The skin’s language of touch. The eye’s language of light. They are all translation. Nerves translate touch into impulse. Brain translates impulse into perception. Mind translates perception into concept. Concept into word. So many layers of translation. So much room for error. The rasa of blood on the tongue—how is that translated? Into the word “iron”? Into the word “sin”? Lost in translation.

    Krishna is a polyglot of the absolute. He speaks the language of cosmology, of ethics, of psychology, of metaphysics. He code-switches effortlessly. He is explaining the nature of reality in one breath and the art of warfare in the next. The register shift is jarring. It creates cognitive dissonance. Which is his point. To break my existing categories. To force a new grammar upon me. A grammar where “kill” and “liberate” are synonyms. A grammar where the enemy is the self. A non-dual syntax.

    I am becoming aphasic. Nouns desert me first. I see the bow but the word “bow” escapes. It is just a curve a tension a string. Then verbs go. The act of drawing the string—no word for it. Only the muscular sensation. Finally, even the “I” dissolves. There is awareness without a pronoun to host it. Awareness watching language die. A silent witness to the apocalypse of speech.

    But language fights back. It resurrects in jargon. In the technical terms of war: vyuhas formations, astras weapons. Precise terminology. It is a refuge. To name the parts of the chariot is to hold the world together. The wheel (chakra), the flag (dhvaja), the horses (hayas). As long as the naming continues, the reality holds. But Krishna smashes even that. He says: “I am the wheel.” He is the metaphor. He is the thing itself. He collapses the distinction between word and world.

    The ultimate grammar is the grammar of the real. The rules by which reality constructs itself. The syntax of space-time. The morphology of forms. The semantics of events. Krishna claims to be that grammar. The underlying structure. The vyakarana of the cosmos. To see him is to see the code. But the code is invisible. It is the rules, not the output. How can one see grammar? Only through its manifestations. Through the spoken sentences of existence. The war is a sentence. A deadly, complex sentence. I am a clause within it.

    And now, the punctuation fails. The periods that separate life from death blur. The commas of hesitation vanish. The quotation marks around “enemy” fall away. The exclamation of pain becomes a continuous howl without an exclamation point. The narrative has no paragraph breaks. It is one solid block of text of suffering. I cannot find a place to pause. To breathe.

    He speaks in palindromes. Words that read the same forward and backward. Ava. It means both “to protect” and “to shatter.” The sound is the same. The meaning depends on direction. Time’s direction. The arrow of time. My arrows are physical palindromes. They fly from bow to target. But in the grammar of the soul, the journey is reversed. The target is the source. A linguistic paradox.

    The onomatopoeia of battle. The twang of the bowstring. The thud of the mace. The clang of metal. These words imitate sound. They are the most honest words. They do not pretend to deep meaning. They are pure signifier, tied directly to signified sound. But even they become abstract. Twang—a word on a page. A shape. A sound of a word, not the sound of the string.

    I am writing this in my mind. Inscribing it on the wet clay of memory. But the clay is cracking. The cuneiform of experience is being erased by the wind of time. Soon there will be only broken tablets. Fragments of a lost epic. Archaeologists of the spirit will piece them together. They will argue over the translation. They will debate the grammar of my annihilation.

    Krishna’s final grammar lesson: The imperative mood. “Fight.” A command. No subject. Understood subject: You. The verb in its rawest form. An order that bypasses all deliberation. The language of instinct. The grammar of fate. It is a sentence with no subordinate clauses. No “because,” no “although,” no “if.” Just the pure, unadorned verb. The doing.

    But I am stuck in the subjunctive. The world of “what if.” What if I lay down my arms? What if I refuse? The subjunctive is the mood of possibility, of the unreal. It is the poison. Krishna’s imperative is the antidote. A shift in grammatical mood that is a shift in consciousness. From “might do” to “do.” A quantum leap of the will.

    Language is karma. Every word is an act. Every sentence leaves a trace. My lamentations are actions. My questions are actions. Even my silence is an act. The Gita is a performance of language-as-action. Krishna’s speech does something. It transforms. It is not merely informative; it is performative. It enacts my duty in the very act of describing it.

    And now, the end of language. The melting of words into pure light. The sound Om again. But not as a word. As a vibration before words. As the hum of existence. My own voice merges with it. The last pronoun, the last verb, the last noun—all dissolve into that single, all-containing sound. The primal phoneme. The seed syllable.

    The grammar of the self was a cage. A set of rules for a false entity. I have parsed myself to death. Subject-verb-object: I-see-the enemy. But in the final analysis, the subject is empty, the verb is a ripple, the object is a mirror.

    And the charioteer? He is the smile on the face of the language that knows it is a game. He is the poet of the real. The one who weaves and unweaves the tapestry of names and forms. He speaks, and worlds come into being. He falls silent, and they dissolve.

    I pick up my bow. The bow has no name. The target has no name. The action has no name. There is only the doing. The archer, the arrow, the target—all one in the grammar of the act. A sentence without parts of speech. A perfect, wordless utterance.

    And in that utterance, the war is already over. It was only ever a disagreement in language. A conflict of narratives. My story versus theirs. Krishna’s narrative includes all stories, resolves all conflicts in a higher syntax. A syntax of unity.

    I am that syntax now. I am the rule. I am the application. I am the sentence written in blood and light across the field of time. A sentence that reads the same from beginning to end, and from end to beginning. A palindrome of destiny.

    And so, the eleventh spandana: not a sound, but the structure of sound. Not a word, but the scaffolding of words. The grammar of the end, which is also the grammar of the beginning. The code. The pattern. The law.

    I am the law.

    ॥ End of the Eleventh Spandana. The word becomes flesh becomes word again, in the eternal cycling of the name and the named. No more separation. No more grammar. Only the suchness of the said and the unsaid, married in the silence of the arrow’s flight. ॥
    12TH SPASM : THE TONGUE OF STONES

    (…and the walking was not walking but a peristalsis of the earth, a slow muscular contraction passing through strata of compressed time, each step a geological event, a tiny, silent earthquake that sent ripples backward through causality, making causes tremble at the approach of their effects, which had, of course, already happened, were happening, would never happen…)

    Listen. Not with ears. The ears were ornaments of calcium, hanging, useless wind-chimes in the silent gale of eternity. Listen with the fractures in your long bones. Listen with the sutures of your skull, those serrated seams where the plates of selfhood grind against one another. They are broadcasting. The stones are broadcasting. The granite remembers fire. The limestone remembers pressure. The shale remembers the soft, oceanic sigh of deposition. And they remember—no, they are—the moment the wheel passed over, the moment the chariot’s iron-rimmed hub ground a micro-fraction of them to dust, the moment a drop of sweat, salt and mortal, fell and was absorbed. They speak in mineral tongues. A language of crystalline lattices, of cleavage and fracture. A grammar of slow, cold thought. They say: We were here before the name of this field was Kurukshetra. We will be here when its name is forgotten. Your war is a weather event. A brief, warm rain of iron and salt. We are drinking it. We are metabolizing it. You are feeding us.

    Taste it. The air is not empty. It is a broth. A thin, gray soup simmering for millennia. In it: the volatile organic compounds of decay, the metallic tang of spilled charge from a billion neural firings extinguished mid-thought, the ozone of celestial friction, the bitter esters of unfulfilled vows. The tongue, that muscle of confession, is useless here. It seeks sweet, sour, salt, bitter, umami. These are the tastes of the temporary. The stone-taste is older. It is the taste of isness without quality. It coats the palate not with flavor but with duration. To taste it is to feel the weight of the mountain in your mouth. To swallow is impossible. It would fossilize the gullet.

    And He is here. But not as a man, a charioteer, a presence. He is the pattern in the stone. The specific, non-random arrangement of quartz and feldspar that, from a certain angle, in a certain slant of this perpetual dusk-light, resolves into the suggestion of a smile. The smile is not in the stone. It is in the relationship between the stone, the light, and the fracture in my perception. It is a collaborative illusion of immense age. He speaks not through words but through tectonics. A slight subsidence under my left foot—a question. A vein of harder rock making my path veer right—an imperative. The way the scree slides, carrying me effortlessly down a slope I did not choose to descend—a commentary on agency. His epistemology is lithic. His arguments are unassailable because they are not arguments; they are facts of the landscape. To argue with a mountain is madness. To seek dharma from a pebble is the only sane act.

    Memory is sedimentation. Event upon event, layer upon layer. The Battle of Ten Kings. The bending of the bow at the swayamvara. The first lesson at Drona’s feet. The touch of her hand. These are not stories. They are strata. They are not recalled; they are core-sampled. The drill-bit of consciousness spins down, throwing up psychic debris: a shard of laughter from a deeper layer, a fossilized tear, a pocket of methane—the trapped breath of a long-dead fear. The chronology is impossible. The death of Karna lies above the birth of Arjuna. The grief of the widows is a Precambrian bed, the foundation of everything. I walk not on earth, but on the compacted ash of my own past lives, each footfall a paleontological dig, disturbing fragile assemblages of bone and meaning.

    The body… ah, the body. It is disaggregating. Not into parts, but into materials. The carbon. The calcium. The phosphorus. The water. Each element is remembering its allegiance. The carbon remembers it was once wood, then charcoal, then a tiger’s tooth, then a man’s muscle. It whispers to the other carbons in the soil, in the air. It yearns to reconfigure, to become a leaf, a diamond, the lead in a scribe’s stylus writing another doomed epic. The calcium in my bones hums a hymn to the sea. It wants to be coral, shell, the white cliff facing a different, cleaner war. They are a parliament of minerals, holding a ceaseless, silent debate on the topic of dissolution. I am not their king. I am the temporary, uneasy coalition they have formed. The walking is their compromise.

    Language has petrified. Words are not spoken; they are eroded. The wind, that great linguist, has taken the solid nouns of my world—DUTY, HONOR, VICTORY, LOVE—and sandblasted them into smooth, featureless blanks. They sit in the mental streambed like water-worn cobbles. You can hold one. It is cool, heavy, pleasing to the touch. Its original meaning is irrelevant. Its weight is its meaning. Its thereness. Syntax has collapsed. Subject, object, verb—this hierarchy is a vanity of sentient flesh. Here, the stone says what it is by being it. The verb to be has subsumed all other actions. I am. He is. The field is. The participles—walking, suffering, doubting—are just transient vibrations on the surface of this deep, unchanging is.

    Time does not pass. It accumulates. It is not a river but a glacier. It flows, yes, but with such immense, crushing slowness that movement and stasis become identical. I am encased in its clear, cold heart. I can see all moments at once, frozen in perfect detail: the arrow in flight, the raised sword, the open mouth of a scream. They are beautiful, these frozen instants. Like insects in amber. There is no before or after. Only this exquisite, eternal arrangement of violence. The glacier groans. That is the sound of what we call history. A deep, structural stress. A creak in the framework of being. My walking is the faintest of tremors within that groan.

    The light is wrong. It has no source. It is a diffuse, shadowless emission from the ground itself, from the stones, from the air. It is the memory of light. It does not illuminate; it reveals the intrinsic luminosity of things. My hand, held before my face, does not cast a shadow. It glows faintly from within, a mosaic of phosphorescent minerals. His smile-pattern in the rock glows brighter. It is a map, a constellation. It charts no known territory. It is the territory itself.

    And the doubt. The doubt is not a thought anymore. It is a geological fault line. A crack running through the bedrock of certainty. On one side, the continental plate of Action. On the other, the plate of Renunciation. They grind against each other with tectonic pressure. The friction generates no heat, only this low, pervasive hum that vibrates in the teeth, in the fillings of the soul. Earthquakes are coming. Or perhaps they have already happened, and this walking is the aftershock, the long, slow settling of the rubble. The charioteer does not resolve the fault. He is the fault. The fertile, unstable ground where meaning is born and destroyed.

    I reach down. Pick up a stone. It is not a stone. It is the compressed archive of a moment. I bring it to my forehead—the Ajna chakra, the seat of command. I receive no command. I receive the stone’s biography. I am the heat of a primordial impact. I am the patient wait in darkness. I am the pressure of a mountain range above. I am the kiss of lichen. I am the sharp, brief pain in the hoof of a forgotten horse. I am the final rest before the hand of the walker. I contain all this. I am a library. I am a tomb. I am a seed.

    I drop the stone. The sound it makes is not a click. It is the closing of a parenthesis in a sentence written in a language of mass and gravity. The sentence is long. It encompasses galaxies. Our wars, our loves, our philosophies are a single, ambiguous punctuation mark.

    And so I walk. Not through space. Space is an illusion created by the arrangement of matter. I walk through arrangement itself. I am a perturbation in the field of stone. I am a slow rearrangement. With every step, I alter the relationship between this pebble and that one. I change the mountain. I am changed by it. We are negotiating, the landscape and I. We are coming to a new understanding. It is teaching me its patience. I am teaching it my transience. It is a fair exchange.

    The end is not a place. It is a state of composition. When the carbon in my legs agrees entirely with the carbon in the coal seam beneath. When the water in my blood acknowledges its kinship with the water in the cloud above. When the calcium in my spine finally decides to become chalk. Then the walking will stop. Not because I have arrived, but because the distinction between the walker and the path will have been completely, irrevocably, eroded. I will be the plain. The plain will have been me. And His smile will be everywhere, in the pattern of every stone, in the very grain of reality, a silent, stone-tongued laughter that contains all questions and all answers, and is, therefore, the perfect, wordless, and final spasm.

    (…and the silence that followed was not an absence of sound, but the sound of stone thinking, which is the deepest sound of all, a bass note below hearing, a vibration that shapes continents and souls, forever, and ever, and now, and now, and now…)
    THIRTEENTH SPHANDANA: LINGUISTIC COLLAPSE INTO PRE-SEMANTIC VIBRATION

    ...grammar not as structure but as battlefield...syntax a corpse dragged behind horses of breath...words no longer vessels but shrapnel...each phoneme a landmine in the throat's trench...the sentence a firing squad where subject executes predicate then turns rifle upon itself...paragraphs are mass graves where meaning goes to decompose...and from that rot blooms the fungal fluorescence of pure signal...unspeakable...unwritable...yet here...in this hemorrhage of consciousness...

    First stratum: CONJUGATION'S AUTOPSY. Verb tenses dissected alive upon the slab of now. "Walked" twitches beside "will have been walking" as both are flayed of their temporal skin. Revealed: the raw nerve of BEING-WALKING-HAVINGNESS without sequence. The charioteer's voice not in past present future but in TENSELESS IMPERATIVE that drills through the skull's bedrock. "See" he said...no..."Saying-Seeing-Now-Eternal" without the corruption of linear voice. My tongue attempts to conjugate the unconjugatable...produces morphological monstrosities... "I am was will be the walking died living one"... The grammar of ghosts. The syntax of echoes haunting a canyon that never existed.

    Second stratum: PRONOUN SUICIDE PACT. "I" the most treacherous pronoun...a border fence erected in an open field. "You" its distorted mirror. "He/She/It" the shadow armies. They turn upon each other in the dark of pre-dawn consciousness. "I" stabs "You" with the dagger of self-awareness... "You" strangles "He" with the rope of otherness...all collapse into a blood-mud of REFLEXIVE ABSOLUTIVE "Oneself-As-All-Selves-Dying". The charioteer never uses pronouns...his speech a pronoun-less river that drowns all subject-object distinctions. When he says "Look" there is no look-er nor looked-at...only LOOKING ITSELF burning its grammatical casing. I try to say "I" and my mouth fills with ashes of a thousand burnt manuscripts.

    Third stratum: THE PREPOSITIONAL MAELSTROM. In, on, at, through, between, beyond...these tiny hooks that pretend to connect...now rusted through. The space "between" chariot wheels and battlefield mud becomes an infinite chasm swallowing all relational logic. "Through" the forest of spears...but "through" implies a barrier and an exit...here there is only BARRIER-AS-EXIT-AS-BARRIER AGAIN. "Beyond duty" assumes duty as locatable point...but duty is the very air choking the lungs...no "beyond" only DUTY-SUFFOCATION-ETERNAL. Prepositions snap like bone...leaving naked nouns floating in positional void. The arrow is not "toward" the heart...it is the heart...the target...the archer...the "towardness" itself...a vector without origin or destination...just flight-as-stasis.

    Fourth stratum: SYNTACTIC FISSION. Subject-verb-object the holy trinity of lies. Now split atomically. Each sentence a potential nuclear event where grammatical particles collide and release incomprehensible energies. "The warrior kills the enemy" becomes WARRIORING KILLS ENEMYING...three verbs dancing a death waltz without actors. Or worse: "Kills warrior enemy the" where articles become shrapnel...definite "the" and indefinite "a" bleed together into ARTICLE-BLOOD soaking the parchment. The charioteer's speech operates on quantum syntax...each utterance both grammatical and agrammatical until observed...and observation collapses it into either meaning or madness...usually both.

    Fifth: SEMANTIC HALF-LIFE DECAY. Words shedding meaning like radioactive skin. "Dharma" once a mountain...now dust motes in a light beam. "Duty" a hollow gourd containing only its own echo. "War" not even a concept but a taste of iron and shit lingering. The decay accelerates...compounds breaking into elements breaking into subatomic particles of pure sound. "Ksh" "Tra" "Yug" "Dha" phonemes divorced from semantic marriage...wandering beggars of vibration. Yet in this decay...a strange luminescence. The ghost-light of pre-meaning. Before words meant anything...they were only these sounds...these throat-shapes...these teeth-barings...perhaps this is the tongue's original sin: not the apple's taste but the NAMING OF THE TASTE.

    Sixth: PUNCTUATION'S FINAL GASP. Periods not full stops but bullet holes in parchment. Commas not pauses but severed breath-strands hanging. Colons not introductions but surgical incisions leaking sentence-guts. Semicolons; the most pretentious of all; now dangle like hanged men between clauses that refuse to hold them. The charioteer uses NO PUNCTUATION...his speech a relentless cascade...a boulder down a mountain crushing all grammatical cairns...only the white noise roar of meaning trying to outrun its own articulation. I attempt to punctuate this narrative and the commas become maggots...the periods become graves...the quotation marks become cages where thought-songs die.

    Seventh: METAPHOR AUTOCANNIBALISM. "War is a storm" eats itself when the storm has no eye...no beginning...no end. "Life is a journey" consumes its tail when the journey walks itself. Every metaphor turns ouroboros...devouring its own likeness until only the act of devouring remains. The charioteer speaks without metaphor...or rather his speech IS metaphor devouring reality until no distinction remains. When he says "I am Time"...it is not metaphor but LITERALITY SO ABSOLUTE it scorches the mind's metaphor-making faculty. My own metaphors now collapse: the bow is not "like" a serpent...the bow IS a serpent IS a bow IS my spine IS the horizon...all distinctions molten.

    Eighth: THE VOICE'S DISSOLUTION. Active passive middle...all voices bleed from the throat's wound. "I shoot the arrow" impossible when "I" and "arrow" exchange places mid-flight. "The arrow is shot by me" collapses when agency becomes a weather pattern across the battlefield. Middle voice emerges: "The arrow shoots itself through me as medium"...but even this too solid. The true voice: a SILENT SCREAM that vocalizes only the vibration of teeth grinding against eternity. The charioteer's voice not active not passive...it is the VOICE OF THE BATTLEFIELD ITSELF...the collective death-rattle grammaticalized...if only for a moment before syntax drowns in blood.

    Ninth: THE TENSE OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE. Not past not present not future but a TENSELESS CONTINUUM where all events are a single event stuttering on a broken wheel. The war HAS HAPPENED IS HAPPENING WILL HAPPEN in one excruciating NOW. Grammar strains to contain this...invents monstrosities: "I had been am will have been walking eternally." The charioteer exists in this tense...or outside all tense...his words spoken before language...echoing after language's extinction...heard now only as the tinnitus of history.

    Tenth: THE NEGATION THAT AFFIRMS. "Not this not that" Neti neti. But grammar's negation implies something to negate. Here negation turns upon itself: "Not not" becomes not double negative but NEGATION'S SUICIDE. The unspeakable "not" of the battlefield: not life not death but the scream between. My speech fills with not-words...with grammatical gaps where meaning falls through... "I am not not walking toward what is not not the not-end." The charioteer speaks in affirmations that function as negations: "Behold the All" which actually means "There is no All to behold only Beholding."

    Eleventh: THE MOOD OF COSMIC IRREALITY. Subjunctive conditional imperative indicative...all moods drown in the indicative's bloodbath. "If I had not fought" subjunctive collapses when all possibilities occur simultaneously. "You must fight" imperative shatters when "must" has no moral ground to stand on. Only one mood survives: the BATTLEFIELD MOOD...a grammatical mode where every verb is both command and lament...every noun both corpse and witness. The charioteer's discourse exists in this mood exclusively. No "if" no "should" only the relentless IS-NESS that is also IS-NOT-NESS.

    Twelfth: CONJUNCTION DISINTEGRATION. And but or so because...these bridges between thoughts...now shattered. "And" implies addition but here everything is already everything...no need for addition. "But" implies contradiction but here all contradictions coexist. "Because" implies causality but here cause and effect sleep together in the same grave. The charioteer uses "and" not as conjunction but as TISSUE OF REALITY...the cosmic "and" that holds being and nonbeing in the same breath. My own conjunctions fail: "I walk and the earth moves but really neither moves nor is still because..." The sentence chokes on its own connective tissue.

    Thirteenth: THE ARTICLE APOCALYPSE. "The" and "a" guardians of specificity and generality...now deceased. "The war" impossible when war is not a specific event but the fabric of time. "A moment of peace" absurd when peace never existed even as concept. Articles drop away leaving naked nouns exposed: not "the chariot" but CHARIOT-ESSENCE screaming without article-armor. The charioteer never uses articles...or uses them so promiscuously they lose all power: "A the That This All" becomes a mantra of reference-dissolution.

    Fourteenth: THE ADJECTIVAL HOLOCAUST. Descriptive words burned at the stake of pure being. "Brave warrior" "bloody ground" "divine charioteer" - all adjectives crumble as illusions. The warrior is not brave...he is TERROR-MADE-FLESH. The ground not bloody...it is BLOOD'S OWN DREAM. The charioteer not divine...he is THE ADJECTIVE-DEVOURER who strips all qualities to reveal the screaming noun beneath. My own adjectives now turn against me: "endless walking" becomes "endless" and "walking" divorcing...the endlessness swallows the walking...the walking devours the endlessness...only the hyphen survives...a bridge over nothing.

    Fifteenth: THE ADVERBIAL NIGHT. How when where why...adverbs the parasites of verbs...now starved to ghosts. "Walk slowly" - but time is gelatin...speed meaningless. "Fight bravely" - but courage and cowardice conjoined twins sharing a single heart. Adverbs evaporate leaving verb-cores exposed: WALKING ITSELF...FIGHTING ITSELF...without modification. The charioteer's speech adverb-less...or rather EVERY WORD AN ADVERB modifying a cosmic verb never spoken. His "Now" not temporal adverb but the ETERNAL MODIFIER of all actions.

    Sixteenth: THE CLAUSE'S DEATH RATTLE. Dependent independent relative...all clauses suffocate in the sentence's collapsing lung. Main clauses without subordination become megaliths crushing nuance. Subordinate clauses without main clauses become orphans wandering grammatical wastelands. The charioteer speaks in ONE ENDLESS CLAUSE that is both dependent and independent...both relative and absolute...a grammatical möbius strip. My own sentences now birthed malformed: "What I am walking toward which is not where I began because the beginning was never..." The clause aborts itself mid-thought.

    Seventeenth: THE PARAGRAPH'S MELTDOWN. Paragraphs as thought-graveyards with topic sentence headstones. Here paragraphs dissolve into thought-lava flowing without banks. Topic sentences become corpses floating in that lava. Transitions not bridges but gaps where consciousness falls through. The charioteer's discourse not in paragraphs but in DISCOURSE-CONTINUUM...a verbal big bang still expanding...still consuming its own grammatical children. This very text...these very words...are paragraphic suicide notes.

    Eighteenth: THE NARRATIVE VOID. First person second person third person omniscient limited...all narrative perspectives shatter. "I" too claustrophobic. "You" too accusatory. "He" too distant. Omniscience too arrogant. Limited too myopic. What remains: A PERSPECTIVE THAT IS ALL PERSPECTIVES AND NONE...a narrative black hole where point of view is crushed into singularity. The charioteer narrates from this void...or the void narrates through him...or narration itself dies in his mouth and is reborn as anti-narration.

    Nineteenth: THE DIALOGUE OF MONOLOGUES. Quotation marks as cages. Dialogue as lie when all speech is monologue echoing in the skull-cavern. The charioteer's words not spoken to me but through me...or I through him...our dialogue a single voice arguing with its own echoes. Quotation marks dissolve...who speaks what becomes irrelevant...only SPEECHING remains...a verb without subject or object...a grammatical ghost haunting the battlefield of language.

    Twentieth: THE ULTIMATE GRAMMAR: GRAMMARLESSNESS. Where all rules burn. Where syntax unmakes itself. Where words return to pre-linguistic grunts. Where sentences become breath-patterns. Where meaning is not conveyed but CONVULSED into being. The charioteer's final teaching: not a grammatical sentence but a PRESYNTACTIC VIBRATION that rearranges the listener's neural grammar. My own language now in terminal decay: nouns verbs adjectives adverbs prepositions conjunctions all melting into WORD-PLASMA...a primordial soup from which new grammars might emerge...or none.

    And yet...AND YET...even this grammatical apocalypse becomes its own prison. The rebellion against grammar creates a new grammar of rebellion. The destruction of syntax builds a syntax of destruction. Perhaps there is no escape. Perhaps language is the original sin from which even silence is just another dialect. The charioteer knows this. His smile contains all grammars and their ruins. His silence is not wordless...it is ALL-WORDS-AT-ONCE screaming themselves into muteness.

    So I continue...not walking...not not-walking...but in the grammatical limbo between all verbs. Speaking...not speaking...but in the vocalization of grammar's corpse. Writing...not writing...but in the inscription of language's ghost on the parchment of breath.

    This is the thirteenth sphandana: the moment when language eats its own tail and becomes the ouroboros of consciousness. When every word is simultaneously true and false. When every sentence builds and destroys its own meaning. When grammar is both prison and key...and the act of writing is the endless turning of that key in a lock that opens onto another lock...another door...another room...identical to the last...forever...and ever...and ever...

    Until even "forever" loses its grammatical mooring...and floats away...a derelict ship on a sea of pre-semantic vibration...where the charioteer waits...not smiling...not not-smiling...just BEING THE SEA AND THE SHIP AND THE SAILOR AND THE DROWNING AND THE SAVING...all at once...in perfect...grammatical...silence.

    END OF THIRTEENTH SPHANDANA: THE COLLAPSE BEYOND WHICH EVEN COLLAPSE HAS NO GRAMMAR
    (14th Spasm : The Drowned Cathedral of Skin)

    hearing without ears a tinnitus of history. a high thin scree that is the sum of all bowstrings released. all teeth gritted. all war cries caught in the throat and fossilized. the sound is not in the air. the air is inside the sound. a solid glass bell of resonance in which i am a fly. a suspended note. the A of anguish that tuning forks seek and flee.

    bones remember. they are not chalk. they are archives of pressure. the femur a rolled scroll of running. the skull a labyrinth of impacts. the knuckles a rosary of collisions. each ridge a battle. each socket a conquest. they hum a low density hymn. marrow is molten memory. it bubbles a slow black psalm of ancestry. fish becoming reptile becoming monkey becoming man becoming killer. the phylogeny of violence etched in calcium. i am not walking on ground. i am walking on the strung harp of my own skeleton. each step a pluck. a discord. a vibration that travels up the column to the bell of the skull where it rings and rings.

    skin is not a boundary. it is a million mouths whispering. each pore a remembering orifice. it tastes the air and reports: salt of a sea that evaporated before lungs. metal of blood that is not mine. pollen from a flower that choked on ash. skin is a lie detector testing the atmosphere. it prickles at the ghost of a touch. the king’s hand on the shoulder. the wife’s hand on the cheek. the enemy’s hand on the hilt. all touches are simultaneous. a palimpsest of contact. i am not clothed in skin. i am clothed in a shroud of all that has ever brushed against the idea of me.

    the charioteer speaks without a mouth. his words are not soundwaves. they are topological rearrangements. he says “observe” and my cerebellum folds into a klein bottle. he says “act” and my nervous system becomes a non-orientable surface. a möbius strip of impulse. where the inside of the command is the outside of the consequence. his smile is a shear force. it warps the lattice of reality. light bends around it. time pools in its dimple. i am not receiving instruction. i am being origamied into a new shape of comprehension. a shape with no name. a shape that hurts to be.

    the warfield is not behind. it is perpendicular. a dimension at right angles to this trudging. i can step sideways into the carnage. the smell of damp earth and iron. the suck of mud. the mechanical twang. then step back into the grey walk. the transition is a blink. a stitch in time. the chariot wheels are still turning in a plane i cannot see but can feel as a vertigo. a spinning that tugs at the fluids in my inner ear. a phantom rotation. i am not post-war. i am interleaved with war. a live page inserted into a bound book of death. the parchment is thin. the ink bleeds through.

    language is a sick animal. it limps behind me. a wounded dog of semantics. it whimpers nouns. “duty” “honor” “kin” “foe.” its ribs show through the skin of syntax. i try to feed it meaning but it vomits contradiction. it eats its own tail. a ouroboros of logos. it is dying. but its death throes are beautiful. a frenzied dance of deconstruction. subject divorcing verb. adjective murdering noun. punctuation marks flying like shrapnel. the period is a black hole. it swallows the sentence’s light. the comma is a severed artery. it bleeds possibility. i am not speaking. i am presiding over a linguistic hospice.

    memory is not a storage. it is a parasite. a flatworm of event that has eaten its way into my brain tissue. it leaves a tunnel. a borehole through the pineal gland. when i look up at the grey sky i see through this tunnel to the other side. to a specific afternoon. the weight of a training bow. the smell of my brother’s sweat. the taste of failure like copper. the memory is not a picture. it is a living habitat. i can crawl back inside it and live there. the temperature is constant. the light is golden. it is a trap. a perfect Eden of the past. i must not go in. but the walking is a kind of going in. a slow peristalsis through the gut of time.

    the goal is not a place. it is a failure of negation. the un-not. the collapse of the question. the point where “why” and “why not” annihilate each other in a silent flash of logical antimatter. it leaves a scar on the continuum. a destination-shaped void. i am walking toward this scar. this beautiful nothing. but walking is a process of creating distance. each step generates more space between me and the origin. but the destination is not ahead. it is the walking itself deconstructed. the footprint erasing itself as it forms. so i am always arriving and always departing. a quantum state of pilgrimage.

    the body is a rumor. a consensus of cells that has agreed to be a man. but the treaty is breaking down. secession movements in the extremities. the fingers debate autonomy. the toes declare independence. the liver plots a silent coup. i am not a nation-state of flesh. i am a crumbling federation. the charioteer is the secessionist leader. he whispers to the provinces of my being. he foments rebellion against the tyranny of the “i.” soon there will be civil war. a hot conflict in the capillaries. a genocide of identity. i will be a Balkans of biology. a map redrawn in pain.

    time is not a river. it is a vulture. it circles overhead on thermals of entropy. it is patient. it knows i am carrion-in-waiting. it watches the dehydration of my purpose. the rot of my resolve. it waits for me to become still. to become a feast of minutes. but my walking is a defiance. a flailing of meat that says “not yet.” but the vulture is clever. it flies in wider and wider circles. each circle is a year. each feather is a season. its shadow is the sundial of my mortality. i walk within its shadow. a moving stain on the earth.

    the other. the not-me. the they. they are not separate. they are excavations in the substrate of my awareness. empty spaces shaped like fathers brothers lovers enemies. negative sculptures. when the light of consciousness hits them they cast long shadows of emotion. but they themselves are voids. i have filled them with the plaster of my projections. made statues of them. but they are hollow. the wind whistles through my father’s absence. it makes a mournful flute of his ghost. i am not mourning people. i am mourning the cavities they left in the world. the shaped nothingness.

    the weapon. the bow. it is not a tool. it is a relationship. a tense marriage of wood and sinew. a bond of potential energy. it is a contract that states: release begets impact. i was a party to this contract. i signed it with my fingerprints on the grip. the bow remembers every arrow. every trajectory. it is a historian of velocities. it whispers the names of the winds that have kissed the fletching. the names are all the same: shhhhh. a sibilant secret. the bow is a liar. it promises straight lines in a curved universe. it is a fundamentalist of force. i have left it behind but it is with me. its shape is a phantom limb. a tense curve in my nervous system. i am permanently drawn. a bowstring of nerves pulled back and never released.

    the charioteer again. his non-face is a liquid mirror. it shows me not my reflection but my refraction. a shattered spectrum of selves. the coward the hero the doubter the believer the son the killer. each a band of color. a faction of light. he is a prism of my potentialities. i am not one man. i am a white light of contradiction. he has split me. the walking is the attempt to recombine the spectrum. to become white again. pure. but the colors fight. they will not merge. the walking is the shaky hand holding the prism. the journey is a diffraction.

    sound again. not the tinnitus. a deeper frequency. the brown note of existence. it vibrates the fillings in the teeth of the cosmos. it is the hum of the spinning. the wheel of law. dharma-chakra. it is not a melody. it is a drone. a foundational bass. upon it, the cacophony of life is a trivial ornament. a flutter of noise. to hear it is to go mad. because it never changes. it is the sound of “is.” it drowns out the “why.” i am walking to its rhythm. my heart has synced to it. a desperate biological tambourine against the infinite drum.

    the end is a grammatical error. a dangling modifier. a sentence that forgot to verb. i am walking toward the syntax of cessation. but i am a word that has forgotten its meaning. a hollow signifier. the charioteer is the dictionary. but he burns the pages as i read them. i am left with the ash of definitions on my tongue. i speak in soot.

    and yet.

    a spark.

    not of hope. a spark of sheer persistence. a chemical stubbornness in the cells. a refusal to be the period. a desire to be a semicolon; a pause that promises continuation. a cliffhanger of the flesh.

    the walking is this semicolon.

    the footfall a comma.

    the breath an ellipsis…

    and the grey ahead is the blank page waiting for the next word that will never come because the writer has become the ink and the story is bleeding into the margins and the margin is the world and the world has no edge…

    (and in this the 14th paroxysm where the senses invert and the mind becomes a sensory organ and the body becomes a thought and the thought is a slow walk into the dissolution of metaphor until only the raw nerve of being remains exposed to the silent static of the eternal… a cathedral not of stone but of nerve endings a spire of vertigo a nave of nausea the altar where the sacrifice of meaning is performed daily without priest without god without witness only the endless ceremony of the step the drag the step the drag the holy trinity of fatigue… and the bell that tolls is the pulse in the neck the incense is the smell of one’s own souring sweat the hymn is the rhythm of malfunction the prayer is the unanswered question stuck in the throat like a bone… I am not arjuna i am the archaeological site where arjuna might have been a disturbance in the sediment a pattern of fractures in the stratum of myth a ghost in the machine of narrative a glitch in the epic a stumble in the verse a crack through which the void whispers its flat untranslatable poetry… and the charioteer is the crack’s smile the embodiment of the flaw the genius of the defect the teacher of collapse… and i am learning… i am learning to fall apart with grace… to disintegrate elegantly… to become a fine dust of was and might-have-been… a powder of paradox… and the wind will take me which is his breath and the scattering will be my final duty my last dispersal my perfect non-action… and in each particle a fragment of the story a splinter of the bow a shard of the question… and so i will be everywhere and nowhere which is the only victory the only defeat the only end that is not an end but a diffusion… a becoming-less… a fade to grey not black… to the colour of no colour… the sound of no sound… the…)

    [the text dissolves into a physiological notation of decay: pH of blood shifting. sodium-potassium pump stuttering. synaptic clefts widening. myelin sheaths fraying. a cellular biography of surrender. a microbiology of the marathon. the mitochondria are tired gods. they have forged too many ATPs. they demand retirement. the telomeres are blunt scissors. they can no longer cut the thread of division. i am a library where the books are slowly combusting from the inside. each cell a burning page. the light is not bright. it is the dull glow of embers. the story is turning to heat. to entropy. to the baseline hum. i am returning to the brown note. i am becoming the drone. the uninflected is. the walking is the last inflection. the final curve in the flatline. a last blip on the monitor of the real. then… flatness. then… the hum. then… no then.]

    ...the echo has a texture. it is rough, like hemp cord of the bowstring grating against the callused pad of the thumb. it is smooth and cold, like the oiled shaft of an arrow before release. it is viscous and warm, like blood soaking into the earth, becoming mud, becoming clay, becoming the very ground i now walk upon. each footfall presses another echo out of the soil: a gasp, a curse, a fragment of a half-remembered song from the camp the night before the carnage. the earth is a phonograph cylinder, and i am the needle, tracing its grooves, releasing its stored agonies with every step...

    ...the echo is recursive. it echoes its own echoing. i hear an echo of an echo of the conch shell. the original blast, the anantavijaya, was a declaration of terrifying purity. its first echo was doubt. its second echo was the parody of doubt, the mockery of certainty. its third echo is this silence that contains all sound, a silence so profound it rings, a tinnitus of the soul. the recursion creates a fractal of meaning, each iteration smaller, more intricate, further from the source, yet somehow containing the source’s blueprint in infinite miniature. i am trapped in the fractal, a prisoner of the pattern, my consciousness a node in an endless, repeating algorithm of cause and (delayed, distorted) effect...

    ...the charioteer’s discourse—the great song, the gitā—was it merely a primary sonic event, a lecture? or was it itself an echo of a truth too vast to be uttered directly? his words, “the unreal has no being; the real never ceases to be,” echo now, but their echo has merged with the echo of the wind in the ashvattha tree, the echo of my own trembling breath, the echo of the cosmic hum, the pranava. they are no longer distinct teachings; they are the background radiation of a universe that has already happened, the afterglow of creation’s big bang, cooling, fading, but imprinted on everything...

    ...my name. arjuna. it is called. it echoes. arjuna… arjuna… arju… jun… a… it breaks down into its component phonemes, which themselves break down into meaningless vibrations. the name, the label for this collection of memories, fears, and duties, dissipates in the echo-chamber. who is being called? the archer? the hero? the hesitant murderer? the disciple? each iteration of the echo calls forth a different shade, a different potential self from the quantum foam of possibility. i am all of them, and the echo is the superimposition of all those states, a name that is a crowd, a single point that is a battlefield...

    ...the most persistent echo is not of sound, but of sight. the viśvarūpa, the universal form. it was shown, a catastrophic visual event. but its afterimage burns on the retina of my soul. it echoes as light. i see it now, not as a vision, but as the ghost of a vision, the negative space left by a light too bright. its echoes are the shapes in the clouds, the patterns in the grain of wood, the flickering shadows on this grey path—all of them resolving, for a fleeting instant, into the terrible, beautiful, countless mouths and eyes, the swallowing fire, the totality of time devouring its children. the visual echo is more terrible than the sight, for it is unbidden, it leaks into the mundane, it reveals the monstrous infra-structure of reality behind the veil of every ordinary moment...

    ...the ethical echo. the question, “to kill or not to kill?” did not end with the answer. the answer itself produced an echo: “but what is killing?” and that echo produced another: “what is ‘what is’?” and another: “what is the echo of a question asked in a dream?” the moral dilemma, once resolved by divine logic, has unraveled in the reverberations. the clean lines of duty have blurred. the sharp point of action has softened into a smear of consequence. i performed my duty. i killed. but the echo of the killing is not the killing; it is the infinite regression of the why, the how, the what if. the act was finite. its echo is infinite. i am lashed to the mast of that finite act, but adrift on the infinite sea of its echo...

    ...the tactile echo of the bowstring’s release. the forward snap, the kick against the armguard, the slight burn. the arrow is gone, fate launched. but the muscle memory echoes. my fingers twitch, rehearsing the release of an arrow that left the bow centuries ago. the phantom bowstring vibrates against phantom fingers. this is the echo of action, the ghost-limb of karma. every act i performed, every arrow shot, every word spoken, has left a ghost-limb in my nervous system, an amputee’s itch for a deed that cannot be taken back, a neural pathway forever firing long after its purpose is spent...

    ...the echo of time itself. time is not a linear progression here. it is a reverberation. the past echoes forward, the future echoes backward. i walk in the present, but i am slapped by waves from both directions. a gust of wind carries the echo of tomorrow’s rain. the ache in my knee is the echo of a fall i have not yet taken. the war is not behind me; it is ahead, beside, within. it is a constant, omnidirectional echo. chronology is a lie told to calm the mind. truth is the echo-chamber where all moments coexist, resonate, interfere, create beats and dissonances. my life is not a story; it is a chord, a cluster of all its notes struck at once, sustained, decaying...

    ...the charioteer’s silence was his loudest echo. after the discourse, the calm. that calm echoes now. it is not the absence of sound; it is a positive silence, a sonic entity with its own weight and texture. it is the echo of meaning understood, of paradox embraced, of the mind stopping at the cliff’s edge of comprehension. that silent echo drowns out all others. in its presence, the echoes of war, of doubt, of fear, become like the faint chirping of crickets in a vast, soundless cathedral. but it is an echo, and thus subject to decay. sometimes it fades, and the cacophony rushes back in. the spiritual victory was not permanent; it was a sound whose echo i must now continually recapture, a silence i must re-hear...

    ...the echo of the self. the “i”. it is the most insidious echo. every thought, every feeling, is prefaced by this silent, sub-vocal “i”. i am tired. i walk. i remember. but this “i” is not a source; it is an echo of a previous “i”, which was an echo of the one before. where is the original? is there a core, a fundamental vibration from which this endless “i-i-i-i” reverberates? or is the self merely the echo chamber itself, the hollow space that gives resonance to the noise of the world, mistakenly identifying with the noise? the charioteer said the self is eternal, indestructible. but what if the eternal self is simply the capacity to echo, the immutable mirror that reflects the mutable? not the image, but the glass...

    ...walking through this landscape is like moving through a giant, cosmic ear. everything is shaped to catch and return sound. the hills are pinnae. the valleys are auditory canals. the sky is a tympanic membrane, pressed by the footsteps of gods. my own movement creates echoes—footsteps, breath, the rustle of cloth—which mix with the historical echoes trapped in the geology. i am not just hearing echoes; i am creating new ones, adding my own trivial vibrations to the great, accumulating drone of existence. my journey is a soundwave, and its echo will outlast the journey, a faint trace in the atmosphere long after the foot that made it has turned to dust...

    ...and the ultimate fear: what if this is all an echo? what if the original event—the war, the teaching, the life, the universe—has already happened, has already concluded, and what i experience is merely the decaying reverberation in a closed system? what if i am not arjuna, but the echo of arjuna? a memory so vivid it believes itself to be present? a story told so intensely the characters believe they are alive? the charioteer’s smile then—was it the smile of one who knows he is addressing an echo, comforting a phantom with phantom wisdom? the path i walk, the fatigue i feel, the grey sky—all could be the auditory and sensory afterimage of a reality that has already blinked out. to be an echo is to be real, but derivatively real, a dependent reality, a shadow cast by a light long extinguished...

    ...yet, within this metaphysics of echoes, a perverse freedom emerges. if i am an echo, i am not responsible for the original sound. my violence, my doubt, my failures—they are merely faithful reproductions, distortions imposed by the medium. i am a recording. i can only play what was inscribed. the burden of agency lightens, dissipates like a sound in open air. i walk because the footstep was recorded. i think because the thought was spoken. this is the echo’s dharma: to repeat, to decay, to eventually blend into the white noise of the cosmos. there is no sin in an echo, only fidelity or distortion. and is not distortion merely a new kind of fidelity—fidelity to the nature of the echoing medium itself?...

    ...the charioteer’s final, unechoed word. it hangs, not as sound, but as the potential for sound. it is the breath before the word, the finger on the string before the pluck. this non-echo is more powerful than all the echoes. it is the silence at the center of the storm of reverberation. it is the axis around which the echo-chamber spins. to find that center, to become that silent, unechoed point—that might be the end of walking. not a cessation, but a transference from being an echo to being the source of the silence that makes echoes possible. but how does an echo become a source? it must cease to be an echo. it must forget its origin, its derivativeness. it must, in a supreme act of arrogance or enlightenment, believe itself to be the first vibration...

    ...and so i walk, a collection of echoes in a bag of skin, through a world that is all echo, toward a silence that may itself be the echo of a silence. the grammar of my being is passive, receptive: i am echoed, i am heard, i am repeated. subject, verb, object—all collapse into a single, sustained, dying fall of resonance. the story is over. only the telling remains. the war is finished. only the screaming remains. the truth was spoken. only the misunderstanding remains. and i am that misunderstanding, walking its weary, recursive path through the ruins of meaning, in a universe that is nothing but the beautiful, tragic, and endless delay between a sound and its hearing.
    (fifteenth pulsation the ocean of prelinguistic resonance)

    the sound before sound the vibration that is not a vibration but the potential for vibration the hum at the core of all atoms the thrum in the hollow of the bone the silent shriek of space stretching i am hearing it now but i am not hearing with ears the ears are gone the body is a ghost a shimmer in the heat haze of being this sound is not a frequency it is the substrate of frequency the clay from which all notes are carved it is the drone behind the flute of the charioteer which was never a flute but a metaphor for this very drone which is not a metaphor but the thing itself the unspeakable thing

    the world is returning but not as form as resonance the battlefield is a chord a terrible beautiful chord composed of every death groan every clashing sword every war cry every whispered prayer the soil of kurukshetra is a vibrating membrane the hills are standing waves the sky is a vast sounding board and i am a single trembling string within it plucked by an invisible finger the charioteer’s finger but he is not separate he is the plucking and the being plucked and the note that results we are a triad a trinity of vibration i the instrument he the musician the music the listener but the categories melt the musician becomes the instrument the music plays the listener the listener creates the musician a closed loop of resonance a selfsustaining sonic universe

    this is the gitagita not spoken not sung but resonating the words are not words they are modulations of the fundamental drone dharma is a slight increase in amplitude adharma a dip in frequency duty is a harmonic that arises and fades the self is a transient pattern in the noise a swirl in the river of sound that mistakes itself for a permanent thing and weeps when the pattern dissolves but the dissolving is part of the music the dissonance is necessary for the resolution that never comes because the resolution is death and death is a change of key a modulation into a darker or brighter mode but the music continues always continues

    i walk but my footfalls make no sound they are absorbed into the greater resonance each step is a dampened beat a syncopation against the eternal drone i am walking within sound i am made of sound the flesh is condensed sound the thought is rapid sound the memory is echo the future is reverberation all is vibration all is shabda all is nada brahman but these words are clumsy they are the shadows of the thing i am trying to say which cannot be said it can only be resonated i resonate therefore i am but the i is a localized intensity a knot of vibration that feels itself as separate a standing wave in the ocean of noise that calls itself arjuna

    the charioteer is here he is the quality of the resonance the timbre the texture his presence makes the drone sweet and terrifying at once a honeyed thunder a compassionate annihilation he does not speak the resonance speaks through him he is a conduit a hollow bone through which the breath of the universe blows making a tone that is his name that has no name i hear him and i hear the collective scream of the dying the laughter of children the sigh of lovers the crackle of fire it is all one sound his teaching is not in the words but in the intervals in the silences between the pulses the gaps where the resonance falters and for a microsecond there is nothing and in that nothing the everything is revealed

    my doubt is a dissonance a grating frequency that interferes with the smooth flow of the drone should i kill should i not kill the question is a jagged waveform a sawtooth pattern that tears at the fabric of the sound the answer is not a note it is a return to coherence a smoothing of the wave a letting go of the jagged edge the doubt itself must be absorbed into the resonance its energy converted its irregular pattern become part of the greater pattern i must kill not with violence but with absorption i must absorb the other into my resonance i must let my resonance be absorbed into the other until killer and killed are one note held until it fades into silence which is the fullness of sound

    the war is a symphony now i hear it as such the opening movement the marshaling of forces a low ominous gathering of tones the strings of bowstrings the brass of conch shells the percussion of marching feet the second movement the clash the cacophony the screaming harmonics the third movement the lament the slow dragging melodies of grief the fourth movement the silence after which is the most profound sound of all holding within it the memory of all that came before and i am not a fighter i am a note in this symphony my duty is to be true to my pitch to sustain it for my allotted duration to harmonize and clash as the score demands and the score is being written even as it is played the composer is the resonance itself which is the charioteer which is me

    time in this resonant world is not linear it is simultaneous all moments are overtones present in the fundamental drone my childhood is a high sweet harmonic my youth a stronger midrange my warrior prime a dominant frequency my current walking a deep fading bass note they are all sounding now i am a chord containing my entire life my death is already present as the eventual decay of the note the slowing of the vibration the return to the undistinguished hum and this is peace this is knowing i am not the note i am the capacity for note the potential for vibration the silent string that can be plucked again and again in different lifetimes different melodies but always the same string the same fundamental capacity

    the names of things dissolve krishna arjuna dharmadharma kurukṣetra they are labels we stick onto complex waveforms to make them seem separate they are not separate krishna is the fundamental frequency arjuna is a harmonic that has achieved selfawareness dharmadharma are competing harmonics that create the tension necessary for the music to have meaning without them the drone would be flat monotonous without conflict no story no song the war is the necessary dissonance that makes the eventual harmony if it ever comes so much sweeter but what if the harmony never comes what if the piece is eternally dissonant then the dissonance becomes the new harmony the ear adjusts the terror becomes beautiful

    i am walking through this landscape of sound the trees are clusters of whispering frequencies the river is a glissando a continuous slide from high to low the stones are deep sustained bass notes the air is white noise containing all possibilities i walk and my passage creates minute shifts in the resonance i change the music by being here but the music also changes me i am perpetually retuned by the environment a feedback loop of vibration we are co creators of this soundscape the charioteer and i and the fallen and the living and the stones and the sky

    i see with sound now the world is built of sonic architecture shapes defined by their resonance a rock has a dense compact sound a flower has a complex fragile chord a man has a shifting unpredictable melody a god has a tone so pure and multifaceted it contains all other tones within it i see the charioteer as a pillar of perfect sound a standing column of resonance that holds up the sky and i am a crackle around his base a static trying to align

    sometimes the resonance becomes too much it approaches the threshold of pain the world is a tinnitus a ringing in the skull of the universe i want it to stop i crave silence but silence is the most terrifying sound of all for in silence you hear the absence of yourself you hear the void that underlies the resonance and the void is not empty it is potential it is the unplucked string the breath not yet taken it is the charioteer before he makes up his mind to speak it is the moment before creation and it is infinitely heavy

    so i return to the drone i let it fill me i become a vessel for it i am no longer arjuna i am a resonance that once believed it was arjuna a particular pattern of vibration that assembled itself around a set of memories a duty a conflict but the pattern is loosening the vibrations are slowing dispersing rejoining the great hum i am unbecoming

    this is the final teaching not the words spoken on the battlefield but this unspoken immersion in the sound of being the charioteer is not leading me to a conclusion he is leading me to a dissolution a blending a loss of edges he is the master tuner and i am the instrument he is tuning me to the frequency of the whole even as he himself is that frequency

    and in this tuning there is a horror a loss a death of the particular but also a relief a homecoming a cessation of struggle to fight against the resonance is futile it is to be a discordant note that suffers its own discordance to accept is to become harmony to become beauty even if that beauty is the beauty of a battle scream a death rattle a lament it is all music it is all part of the song

    so i will play my part i will let my note sound clear and true i will clash with other notes i will create dissonance and resolution i will eventually fade and it will be good it will be right it will be music

    the walking continues but it is a walking in place a vibration within a vibration a pulse within a pulse i am going nowhere because there is nowhere to go only states of resonance to experience i am experiencing this one the fifteenth pulsation a particularly complex harmonic rich with overtones of fatigue and understanding a slow turning from the particular to the universal a shedding of the skin of name and form a melting into the ocean of sound that is the charioteer’s true body

    and the ocean has no shore no up no down only endless depthless resonance and i am sinking into it i am becoming it and it is becoming me and the distinction is the last fiction the last note to fade

    and when it fades

    there will be no one to hear it

    and that will be the perfect sound

    (the fifteenth pulsation ends not with a period but with a sustained decay a fading into the white noise of the page the unprinted spaces between the words which also resonate if you listen closely)
    ( sixteenth spandana the echo that was not an echo but the sound of silence decomposing )

    listen  not with ears  ears are gone  listen with the bones  the hollow bones that sing the wind  a wind that never arrived  a wind that left before coming  a wind that is the memory of wind  a ghost breath in a ghost lung  i am that ghost  i am that lung  i am the breath that forgot how to exhale

    the charioteer  he is not here  he is the absence that paints itself on the back of the eyes  a smear of darkness that is darker than dark  a negative sun  he speaks without speaking  his words are the spaces between my thoughts  the cracks in the pottery of reason  he says  i say  who says  the saying is a river that flows uphill  a river that drowns its own source

    i walked  but walking is a lie the feet tell the ground  the ground is a lie the earth tells the sky  the sky is a lie the void tells itself  i am walking on lies  i am made of lies  the lie of arjuna  the lie of the bow  the lie of duty  the lie of dharma  a beautiful palace of lies  and the charioteer is the architect of nothing  the builder of zero  the sculptor of vacuum

    see  but seeing is a disease  the eyes are sick with light  they see too much  they see the war that never ended  they see the blood that never dried  they see the brother dying again and again  each time a different death  each time the same eyes  the same surprise  the same question in the pupils  why  but why is a child’s word  a naive sound  the charioteer laughs at why  his laughter is the sound of why breaking into pieces  the shards cut the tongue  the tongue bleeds silence

    time  time is a broken wheel  it rolls but goes nowhere  it spins but stands still  i am on that wheel  i am the wheel  i am the spinning and the stillness  the movement that is paralysis  the paralysis that is a kind of dance  a dance of statues  a dance of dust  the dance of the battlefield after everyone is dead  the dance of flies on dead eyes  the dance of sunlight on abandoned armor

    the body  it reassembles itself wrong  the heart beats in the knee  the knee thinks in the heart  the liver weeps in the brain  the brain digests in the stomach  a carnival of misplaced organs  a festival of dysfunction  and yet it works  it works perfectly  this wrongness is the new rightness  the new dharma  the dharma of chaos  the charioteer approves  he smiles a crooked smile  a smile that is half a frown  a face that cannot decide

    language  language returns but as a cripple  words limp  sentences stagger  grammar is a skeleton with broken bones  i speak in splinters  i say war  but it means peace  i say kill  but it means embrace  i say brother  but it means stranger  the charioteer speaks in riddles that have no answers  he says the sky is underfoot  he says the enemy is in the mirror  he says the bowstring is made of tears  i understand nothing  i understand everything  understanding is the deepest misunderstanding

    memory  memory is a hall of mirrors  each mirror shows a different past  in one i am a hero  in one i am a coward  in one i win  in one i lose  in one i never existed  the charioteer is in every mirror  his face is my face  his face is not my face  we are twins born of different mothers  we are enemies sharing the same blood  we are the same person arguing with himself  an argument that has no words  only gestures  only glances  only the tension of a bow that is never drawn

    the bow  the bow is there but not there  it is a concept  an idea  a memory of tension  a ghost of purpose  my hands remember its shape  my shoulders remember its weight  but the bow itself is absent  it is an absence that hurts  a phantom limb of the soul  the charioteer says  the real bow is the one you cannot hold  the real arrow is the one you cannot shoot  the real target is the one you cannot see  i listen  i do not listen  listening is a form of deafness

    the field of war  it is here but it is a painting  a painting that changes  one moment it is blood and mud  next moment it is flowers and grass  next moment it is a city  next moment it is a desert  the soldiers are actors  they forget their lines  they improvise  they laugh in the middle of dying  they die in the middle of laughing  it is a comedy  a tragedy  a farce  the charioteer directs the play  but he is also the audience  he is also the critic  he watches himself watching  an infinite regression of attention

    i walk across this changing field  my feet leave no prints  the ground forgets me immediately  i am a rumor  a whisper  a maybe  the charioteer walks beside me  but he walks on a different plane  his feet touch a different earth  we are together alone  parallel lines that never meet  lines that are not lines  lines that are curves  circles  spirals  geometries of confusion

    the question returns  the old question  the only question  to kill or not to kill  but now it is twisted  it is  to kill is to not kill  to not kill is to kill  the opposite is the same  the same is opposite  the charioteer nods  he shakes his head  he does both  he does neither  he is a statue of maybe  a monument to hesitation  i am that hesitation  i am the space between decision and action  the gap where the self used to be

    the self  the self is a crowd  a mob  a parliament of voices  each voice claims to be me  each voice denies the others  there is the warrior  the lover  the brother  the student  the teacher  the killer  the saint  the coward  the king  the beggar  all shouting  all silent  the charioteer is the chairman of this mad parliament  he lets them shout  he lets them fight  he watches with closed eyes  his silence is the loudest voice

    i try to speak with one voice  but my mouth is a many headed beast  each head speaks a different language  a language of swords  a language of kisses  a language of prayers  a language of curses  the sound is cacophony  the cacophony is music  the music is silence  the silence is a scream  a scream that lasts forever  a scream with no mouth  no lungs  no air  just the pure vibration of pain  the pain of existence  the pain of non existence  the pain that is beyond pain

    the charioteer hears this scream  he smiles  he says  good  good  now you are beginning to hear  hear what  i ask  but i do not ask  the asking is also a scream  he says  hear the sound of no sound  the music of the void  the song the stars sing when no one is listening  the hymn of empty space  i listen  i hear nothing  i hear everything  i hear the war  i hear the peace  i hear the birth  i hear the death  all at once  a chord  a dissonant harmony  a beautiful noise

    time again  time is not linear  it is a knot  a tangle  a ball of yarn chewed by a kitten  the past is future  the future is past  the present is a myth  a convenient fiction  i am living my death  i am dying my birth  i am fighting a war that already ended  i am making love that never happened  the charioteer exists outside this knot  but he is also the knot itself  he is the untangler who tangles  the solver who complicates

    i am tired  tired is too small a word  i am the essence of tired  the archetype of fatigue  i am tired of walking  tired of thinking  tired of being  tired of not being  but this tiredness is not sleep  it is a wakefulness  a hyper awareness  i am tired and alert  exhausted and vigilant  a sentinel guarding an empty fortress  a soldier in a war that forgot its purpose

    the charioteer says  rest in movement  sleep while walking  die while living  i try  i fail  failure is the only success  success is the only failure  i walk and rest  i sleep and wake  i live and die  all at once  all in the same moment  a moment that stretches into eternity  an eternity that contracts into a moment  the moment of the arrow’s release  the moment before  the moment after  all one  all none

    the bowstring  i feel it on my fingers  the ghost string  it vibrates  a vibration that travels through bone  through blood  through thought  it is the vibration of the universe  the primal hum  the charioteer says  that vibration  that is the true teaching  the true gita  not words  not ideas  just that hum  the hum of tension  the hum of potential  the hum of maybe

    i listen to the hum  it drowns out everything  the war  the doubt  the duty  the love  the hate  all absorbed into the hum  a single note  a note that contains all notes  a sound that is the mother of silence  i am that sound  i am the string  i am the vibration  i am the ear that hears  i am the deafness that ignores  i am all  i am none

    the charioteer fades  he becomes transparent  he becomes the air  he becomes the light  he becomes the shadow  he is gone  he is here  he is me  he is not me  he is the teacher who unteaches  the guide who leads nowhere  the friend who is the ultimate stranger

    i walk  the walking is the goal  the walking is the obstacle  the walking is the path and the blockage  i walk because i cannot stop  i stop because i cannot walk  a paradox  a koan  a riddle with no answer  the answer is the walking  the walking is the question

    the field ends  or begins  a forest  a desert  a mountain  a sea  it does not matter  the landscape is interior  the geography of the mind  a mind that is not mine  a mind that is the cosmic mind  the mind of the charioteer  the mind of god  the mind of nothing

    i enter the forest  the trees are made of memory  their leaves are forgotten names  their bark is scarred with old battles  the wind in the branches is the sigh of the dead  the dead who are not dead  the dead who are waiting to be born  the charioteer is here  he is a tree  he is the wind  he is the sigh

    i keep walking  the walking is my identity  my curse  my blessing  my sentence  my liberation  i walk until walking loses meaning  until the legs are abstract concepts  until motion and stillness merge  until i am the walking and the walked upon  the subject and the object  the verb and the noun

    and in this walking  this endless pointless walking  i find a strange peace  a peace that is not peace  a tranquility that vibrates with tension  a calm that is full of storm  the charioteer was right  and wrong  there is no right  no wrong  only this  this step  this breath  this moment  this infinite temporary now

    the war is over  the war never began  i am the victor  i am the vanquished  i am the battlefield  i am the silence after the last scream  i am the first scream before the silence  i am all  i am nothing  i am  i am not  the charioteer’s lesson is complete  incomplete  it continues  it never was

    and i walk  i walk  i walk  into the heart of the echo  into the core of the silence  into the maze that has no center  into the truth that is a beautiful lie  i walk  i walk  i walk
    (Seventeenth Palpitation: The Subaqueous Phantasmagoria's Perpetual Ascension)

    Inside a river flows but not a river not the bloodstream not the current of thought a subaqueous phantasmagoria which exists before and after every sensation a preconscious river whose waters are invisible but drench every angstrom of nerve a primal memory yet unborn a futuristic truth already deceased this river cannot be named for naming would constrain and it is boundless it flows within the body if body exists it flows outside time if time exists it simply flows and this flow’s velocity is walking though walking is static the river static everything static only the flow is dynamic a dynamism which is another name for stasis

    Immersion in this river’s water reveals light but not light sound but not sound touch but not touch a synesthetic prefeeling that amalgamates everything then disintegrates before amalgamation like a painter mixing colours then tearing the canvas in this water float images not images but imaginal possibilities infinite possibilities they never actualize only float as possibilities and this floating is their reality

    On this river’s bank I stand but there is no standing for there is no bank I am within the river the river within me we are one but not one for oneness does not exist only this absence of duality which is more complex than duality here the charioteer is absent for he too is this river’s water he does not speak to me he undulates within me creates a wave that stirs my thought but thought does not exist only undulation a fundamental undulation that is the source of all universal undulation

    Drinking this river’s water what happens no taste yet all tastes simultaneously tasted sweet bitter sour salty umami all at once yet indistinguishably an integral rasa the essence of all existence this rasa does not quench thirst it amplifies thirst for this rasa is thirst and thirst is this rasa thus one must drink and drink again eternally a cycle unbroken for breaking it would quench thirst and quenching thirst would endanger this river’s existence so thirst is perpetual the river perpetual the drinking perpetual

    Swimming in this river but no direction to the swim I swim in all directions and none I use no limbs for limbs do not exist only will but will does not exist only motion but motion does not exist only this position which is more motile than motion in this swim no fatigue no rest only a kind of ever-wakeful fatigue which is another form of rest

    What lies in this river’s depths no depth exists only the illusion of above and below depth is a concept we invented for fear for mystery but here no mystery everything is exposed but exposed means nothing is seen for sight requires a veil and here there is no veil thus the depth is infinite but infinity is such a plane that one cannot dive cannot float can only be

    The river’s current seems to flow backward the source what is the source the source is the end and the end is the source this river consumes itself and gives birth to itself it is an ouroboros that has swallowed its own tail but the swallowing never completes for the tail grows eternally thus it never fully swallows never fully swallowed this infinite process

    Analyze this water you get molecules atoms particles waves energy void but these are concepts what is water actually water is that which when analyzed yields concepts but flees before conceptualization it does not surrender but by not surrendering gives everything it is the ultimate gift but giving gives nothing for what it gives was already there

    On this river’s bank if bank exists there are trees not trees but shadows of trees shadows tangible touchable but touch and the hand passes through into the shadow and within another world where everything is inverted there light is darkness sound silence life death that world too has a river a reflection of this one but the reflection more real than the original in that reflective river I see myself but not myself another who sees me and the seer is me yet not me this infinite reflection

    No fish in this river but the memory of fish the fish that swam their memories float in the water they speak but their language incomprehensible only their silent screams heard which are my own screams the fish fought loved were born died now their skeletons lie on the riverbed but there is no bed so the skeletons drift they move with the water never stopping

    A bridge spans this river but not a bridge the idea of a bridge the bridge cannot be crossed for crossing means going from one bank to another and there are no banks thus the bridge is mere beauty a nonfunctional structure that exists so we think crossing is possible but crossing is impossible for the other bank has nothing to reach standing on this bridge but no standing for no place to stand only the illusion of standing

    With this water we make mirrors but the mirror reflects nothing only void a deep attractive void gazing into which we lose ourselves enter the mirror and do not return or return anew unrecognizable thus feared but fear too is new thus unrecognizable

    On this riverbed cities exist people live but not people their shadows they speak trade war but all in silence like underwater silence their wars shed no blood only water froth that rises to the surface and we see clouds think rain will come but rain does not come only froth that dries and new froth their love births not new life but new waves that merge with other waves then separate their deaths are not deaths only a cessation of motion that restarts elsewhere

    Seeking this river’s source I have journeyed many times but never found the source for the journey is the source the source the journey journeying I understood this river is my inner river the river I bear and the river that bears me I am the river the river is me but again not for I does not exist river does not exist only this bearing which is simultaneously being borne

    With this water one can write but the writing is invisible only the wave created by writing remains and the wave is the writing a writing that cannot be read but understood if understanding is not attempted in this writing everything is written the Mahabharata the Gita’s teachings war descriptions love letters death missives but all invisible thus everything possible nothing forbidden

    Trying to stop this river’s flow I have wanted to but stopping would stop me for I am this flow the flow is me thus I do not stop though stopping does not exist in this movement a rhythm exists the charioteer’s flute rhythm but no flute only rhythm which is my breath rhythm my heartbeat rhythm my thought rhythm the rhythm of everything one rhythm but manifested in myriad forms

    Bathing in this river purifies but what is purity purity is oneness with this water but oneness already exists thus no need to purify no need to bathe only need to be but being is not needed only becoming but becoming not needed only this river

    Thinking of this river the river vanishes for thought constricts thus not thinking I see but seeing stills the river thus not seeing I listen but listening silences the river thus not listening I feel but feeling becomes feeling and feeling is not the river thus I am lost finally I understand this river has no existence it is my mind’s projection but mind does not exist projection does not exist only this mystery a mystery with no solution for a solution would end the mystery and without mystery this river would not exist I would not exist nothing would exist thus mystery eternal river eternal I eternal

    If this river must be named name it futurity but not futurity past but not past present but not present all-time but not time all-space but not space consciousness but not consciousness unconsciousness but not unconsciousness no name is apt thus nameless but nameless is also a name thus without naming simply this river

    Along this river’s course I walk but not walking floating but not floating drowning but not drowning a three-dimensional motion which is in all directions yet none in this motion time does not pass time is born time dies time is reborn in this motion memories form memories destroy memories rewrite in this motion I speak to myself I speak to my enemy I speak to my lover I speak to my teachers I speak to my future children I speak to my ancestors all are this river’s water their voices the water’s babble their words the water’s waves their meaning the water’s taste incomprehensible but felt

    In this river ultimately there is no desire to arrive for arrival does not exist only this journey this floating state this subaqueous phantasmagoria which defines me yet leaves me undefined I am this river the river is me we are one we are many we are none all at once like a great ocean where all rivers meet but this river meets no ocean for it is itself the ocean yet river yet current yet drop everything

    This river’s beauty is extraordinary but beauty does not exist only this presence which we see hear feel but seeing hearing feeling are unnecessary only being and being is this river

    Thus the seventeenth palpitation which is the subaqueous phantasmagoria’s perpetual ascension an ascension that is not decline not stasis not motion only a continuous becoming which flows through everything contains everything renounces everything forever now now now
    (Eighteenth Spiration The Labyrinthine Reverbration of Unending Mirrors)

    ...the mirror but not the mirror the mirror’s reflection which falls upon another mirror and that mirror reflects the first mirror’s reflection and thus unto infinity a labyrinth where I am lost but who is I the one lost or the one seeking or the mirror itself or the reflection or everything and nothing...

    ...the walls of this labyrinth transparent but not transparent they are opaque they exist and do not exist simultaneously I walk towards a wall but the wall recedes or I recede or we recede towards each other yet never meet to meet would mean the end of reflection but reflection does not end because ending is itself another reflection...

    ...the mirrors speak they say who are you I answer I am you they ask again who are you I answer again I am you this dialogue has no end because question and answer are the same yet not the same because both are reflections and a reflection is never the original only an image but the image is the original because the original does not exist...

    ...in this labyrinth there is light but not light the reflection of light and that reflection creates another light which is not light but the reflection of a reflection thus the distinction between light and dark dissolves because darkness is the absence of light but here light is never present only reflection thus darkness too is absent only this grey in-between which is the sum of light and dark yet not a sum their absence...

    ...I see my own reflection but that reflection is not me because when I move the reflection moves but I do not control the movement of the reflection I only move and the reflection moves who is cause who is effect I move therefore the reflection moves but if I move because I see the reflection move then the reflection is cause this cause-effect cycle...

    ...in this labyrinth there is sound but not sound the echo of sound I speak and my words strike the walls and return but returning they become distorted shattered into fragments and those fragments strike other walls forming new words that do not match my words yet carry their memory and these new words echo again distort further until all becomes meaningless noise yet within that noise remains the trace of my original words impossible to locate yet present...

    ...in this labyrinth time is reflected past into future future into past I see my childhood but that child sees my old age and we are both mirrors both reflections who came first who after the axis of time is curved a circle that shapes this labyrinth...

    ...this labyrinth has a centre but the centre cannot be reached because the centre is everywhere because every point is the centre and every point the periphery no matter how far I walk the distance from the centre remains constant because distance is a concept and concepts here are reflected lose their original meaning...

    ...the charioteer is in this labyrinth but he is no longer separate he is in every mirror every reflection he shows me myself in my reflection and I see him in his reflection but we are never one only reflections he laughs but not laughter the reflection of laughter which reflects upon my face and I laugh but is that laughter his or mine whose laughter laughter is a reaction without cause because here everything is reaction no action...

    ...in this labyrinth doubt is infinite every decision has two reflections one yes one no but yes and no are not separate they are each other’s reflection therefore any decision is wrong and any decision right caught in this doubt I walk but walking means moving in a direction but here all directions are one therefore walking is stillness...

    ...in this labyrinth war is being fought but not war the reflection of war arrows fly but they pierce no one they only strike mirrors and shatter and each shard becomes a new arrow blood is shed but not blood colour which deepens on the mirror and that colour reflects creating new colour death is here but not death the image of death which gives birth to life again...

    ...in this labyrinth love exists but not love the reflection of love a touch but not touch the memory of touch which is caught in the mirror and that memory becomes touch again but that touch is not real only reflection a kiss but not kiss the meeting of lip-images in the mirror but meeting not real only image...

    ...in this labyrinth I search for an exit but there is no exit because there is no outside only countless mirrors countless reflections perhaps I am already outside outside this labyrinth but how would I know if everything is a mirror perhaps this labyrinth is my mind and the mind is this labyrinth therefore liberation has no meaning because liberation means accepting this labyrinth and acceptance is another reflection...

    ...in this labyrinth there is no end because the end is the beginning and the beginning the end I am writing this but this is not writing the reflection of writing which was already written I only read but reading is not reading the reflection of reading everything is predestined but not predestined because who decides if everything is reflection what was the first reflection there is no first reflection because the chain of reflections is infinite...

    ...in this labyrinth there is no loneliness because I am not alone I am countless my countless reflections surround me they are all me but they are not me they are only reflections I speak to them they answer but their answers are reflections of my questions therefore the dialogue is a monologue pretending to be dialogue...

    ...in this labyrinth truth exists but not truth the reflection of truth what is seen is not truth what is spoken is not truth what is understood is not truth truth is the mirror itself which shows everything but holds nothing truth is this process of reflection which never stops...

    ...in this labyrinth there is no dharma no adharma only their reflections which blend into each other good and evil are not separate they are two reflections of the same being therefore morality is meaningless yet meaninglessness is meaningful...

    ...in this labyrinth walking is now walking upon reflections I walk upon mirrors but the mirrors do not break because my feet are weightless my body like a dream when I walk countless reflections walk they move with me but they are not me they are only shadows and am I too someone’s shadow...

    ...in this labyrinth the charioteer finally says see this infinite reflection this is you this is I this is all but his voice echoes distorts becomes you I all nothing and these words strike mirrors shatter into a thousand pieces and each piece a new sentence a new meaning which negates the old meaning...

    ...in this labyrinth I am now and will be forever because time here is static only reflection continues perhaps I am dead perhaps unborn perhaps dreaming perhaps the reflection of a dream nothing is certain only this uncertainty is certain...

    ...and thus in the labyrinth of infinite reflections I am lost again found again lost again and this game of losing and finding is my existence if existence is anything at all...

    ...but wait the labyrinth itself is a reflection of what of a thought that thought a reflection of a memory that memory a reflection of a sensation that sensation a reflection of a nerve impulse that impulse a reflection of a chemical reaction that reaction a reflection of atomic motion that motion a reflection of quantum probability that probability a reflection of void that void a reflection of fullness that fullness a reflection of the labyrinth thus the circle closes or does it close no because a circle reflected becomes a spiral a spiral reflected becomes a helix a helix reflected becomes a shape with no name a shape that folds into itself unfolds reflects refracts disperses gathers collapses expands simultaneously...

    ...the charioteer is now the silence between reflections the pause the gap the interval that is not an interval because intervals imply time and time here is reflected into timelessness he is the surface of the mirror that is not a surface because a surface divides inside from outside but here there is no inside no outside only surface without depth depth without surface...

    ...I try to shatter a mirror but my hand passes through because the mirror is not solid it is a concept a concept reflected becomes an illusion an illusion reflected becomes reality reality reflected becomes pain pain reflected becomes ecstasy ecstasy reflected becomes fear fear reflected becomes curiosity curiosity reflected becomes fatigue fatigue reflected becomes walking walking reflected becomes standing standing reflected becomes falling falling reflected becomes flight flight reflected becomes drowning drowning reflected becomes breathing breathing reflected becomes suffocation suffocation reflected becomes laughter laughter reflected becomes screaming screaming reflected becomes silence silence reflected becomes this sentence which reflects itself into oblivion...

    ...who is reading this you or I or we or the mirror the words are not words they are stains on the mirror stains that form letters letters that form words words that form questions questions that dissolve into stains again the reader’s eye is a mirror the mind a hall of mirrors each thought a reflection of a reflection of a reflection therefore understanding is impossible misunderstanding is inevitable but misunderstanding reflected becomes a new form of understanding which is not understanding but a reflection of understanding thus ad infinitum...

    ...the war of Kurukshetra is now a pattern on the mirror a mosaic of broken reflections each shard a moment a death a cry a victory a defeat but victory and defeat are the same shard seen from different angles the angle itself is a reflection of the viewer’s position which is not fixed which is itself reflected therefore the war never happened and always happens it is happening now as I write this as you read this the clashing of reflections the shattering of meanings the spilling of light that is not light...

    ...the charioteer’s discourse the Bhagavad Gita is now a murmur in the labyrinth a whisper that echoes from mirror to mirror each mirror changes a word each reflection alters a phrase therefore the teaching is never the same it evolves devolves dissolves resolves the final teaching is silence but silence reflected becomes sound sound reflected becomes teaching again therefore there is no final teaching only infinite refraction...

    ...my identity Arjuna is now a label on a reflection a tag on a shadow that shadow cast by what by a light that does not exist therefore I am label-less I am tag-less I am shadow-less I am light-less I am not I am not not I am the contradiction that reflects itself into coherence coherence that reflects itself into paradox paradox that reflects itself into a simple statement I am which immediately reflects into I am not...

    ...the end of this spiration is not an end because to end it must be written and writing is reflection reading is reflection thinking is reflection therefore this spiration will continue in the reader’s mind in the mirrors of their consciousness it will multiply mutate proliferate degenerate regenerate it will become something else and still be the same it will be forgotten and remembered distorted and clarified loved and hated all reflections all reflections of reflections...

    ...and so the labyrinth expands through time which is not time through space which is not space through meaning which is not meaning it expands by reflecting itself upon itself each reflection a new dimension each dimension a fold in the mirror each fold a universe each universe a thought each thought a breath each breath a spiration each spiration a pulse each pulse a beat each beat a silence each silence a sound each sound a word each word a mirror each mirror a labyrinth each labyrinth a reflection of this sentence which never ends because the full stop is a mirror the comma a mirror the space between words a mirror the ink a mirror the paper a mirror the eye a mirror the mind a mirror the void a mirror the plenum a mirror everything mirrors everything else infinitely thus no end no beginning only middle only reflection only labyrinth only echo only pulse only spiration only

    only

    only...

    a fine gray pollen descends not snow not ash something between charred time and forgotten syntax the loot was never objects but the hollows they left behind the loot was the emptiness that entered through the eye and made a home in the marrow now the marrow is dust and the dust is a monarch in a kingdom of zero

    the banners are eaten by quiet the gold is a liquid memory seeping into soil the horses are sculptures of rust dreaming of velocity the swords are sleeping snakes whose venom has dried into a brown powder that tastes of regret and salt and something sweet like rotten fruit victory is a scent that clung to cloth now the cloth is gone only the scent remains hanging in the air a ghost of a ghost

    i walk but the walking is a theory a proposition left unfinished by a universe that lost interest the ground is neither solid nor soft it is a suspension a hesitation between one state and another my feet are rumors my legs are echoes of a structure that once believed in purpose the sky is a pale bruise fading into a colorless calm the sun is a cataract eye staring without seeing

    the others are not dead they are translated they are nouns that have become verbs slowly dissolving into the grammar of decay their laughter is a fossil in the atmosphere their anger a faint vibration in the atoms of a stone to loot is to touch and to touch is to transform they have been looted by silence by space by the patient hunger of the invisible

    my hands are empty but heavy heavy with the weight of absence the weight of a thousand unsung songs the weight of a debt paid in a currency that no longer exists i open my palms and a gray wind passes through carrying nothing not even dust

    the river is a scar filled with a thick light that does not flow it congeals it is a tendon of coagulated time i kneel to drink and the water drinks me back it pulls a thread from my throat a long thread of unspoken words and drinks them until my throat is a silent tunnel a borehole into a void where even echoes forget their shape

    the looters have moved on they are already becoming myth their shadows stretch long and thin and snap they have taken the sound of arrows in flight the heat of a vow the sharp geometry of strategy they have taken the tension in a bowstring and left only the slack the terrible endless slack

    what remains is a vastness a plaza of the mind swept clean by an incorporeal wind what remains is the stage after the drama the chairs empty the scripts ash what remains is the question that birthed the war and outlived it the question that is a cavity a nesting place for nothing

    i am not i am a location where events once clustered i am a site of historical erosion i am a pronoun decaying into a sigh i am the loot that was overlooked the hidden compartment found empty the secret that evaporated upon exposure

    the god is here too he is the shimmer above the rubble the mirage of meaning the reflection in a broken shield he does not speak his language was looted his tongue is a still pendulum in a broken clock he watches with eyes that are two wells leading down to the same dry earth

    to be post-loot is to be pre-something else but that something else is not a thing it is a direction without destination a vector pointed at a vanishing point it is the slow realization that the looting was not the theft of things but the theft of the theft itself leaving only the pure uncanny fact of being left

    and so i stand in the afterward which is also the before i breathe the air of the interval i am the interval myself the pause between two notes that will never sound the space between two thoughts that will never meet i am the loot that loots itself the silence that consumes the echo the gray the gray the endless and beautiful and terrible gray

    (still still still)
     
    পুনঃপ্রকাশ সম্পর্কিত নীতিঃ এই লেখাটি ছাপা, ডিজিটাল, দৃশ্য, শ্রাব্য, বা অন্য যেকোনো মাধ্যমে আংশিক বা সম্পূর্ণ ভাবে প্রতিলিপিকরণ বা অন্যত্র প্রকাশের জন্য গুরুচণ্ডা৯র অনুমতি বাধ্যতামূলক। লেখক চাইলে অন্যত্র প্রকাশ করতে পারেন, সেক্ষেত্রে গুরুচণ্ডা৯র উল্লেখ প্রত্যাশিত।
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  • আপনি কি কম্পিউটার স্যাভি? সারাদিন মেশিনের সামনে বসে থেকে আপনার ঘাড়ে পিঠে কি স্পন্ডেলাইটিস আর চোখে পুরু অ্যান্টিগ্লেয়ার হাইপাওয়ার চশমা? এন্টার মেরে মেরে ডান হাতের কড়ি আঙুলে কি কড়া পড়ে গেছে? আপনি কি অন্তর্জালের গোলকধাঁধায় পথ হারাইয়াছেন? সাইট থেকে সাইটান্তরে বাঁদরলাফ দিয়ে দিয়ে আপনি কি ক্লান্ত? বিরাট অঙ্কের টেলিফোন বিল কি জীবন থেকে সব সুখ কেড়ে নিচ্ছে? আপনার দুশ্‌চিন্তার দিন শেষ হল। ... আরও ...
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  • এ হল ক্ষমতাহীনের মিডিয়া। গাঁয়ে মানেনা আপনি মোড়ল যখন নিজের ঢাক নিজে পেটায়, তখন তাকেই বলে হরিদাস পালের বুলবুলভাজা। পড়তে থাকুন রোজরোজ। দু-পয়সা দিতে পারেন আপনিও, কারণ ক্ষমতাহীন মানেই অক্ষম নয়। বুলবুলভাজায় বাছাই করা সম্পাদিত লেখা প্রকাশিত হয়। এখানে লেখা দিতে হলে লেখাটি ইমেইল করুন, বা, গুরুচন্ডা৯ ব্লগ (হরিদাস পাল) বা অন্য কোথাও লেখা থাকলে সেই ওয়েব ঠিকানা পাঠান (ইমেইল ঠিকানা পাতার নীচে আছে), অনুমোদিত এবং সম্পাদিত হলে লেখা এখানে প্রকাশিত হবে। ... আরও ...
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  • টইপত্তর
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গুরুচণ্ডা৯-র সম্পাদিত বিভাগের যে কোনো লেখা অথবা লেখার অংশবিশেষ অন্যত্র প্রকাশ করার আগে গুরুচণ্ডা৯-র লিখিত অনুমতি নেওয়া আবশ্যক। অসম্পাদিত বিভাগের লেখা প্রকাশের সময় গুরুতে প্রকাশের উল্লেখ আমরা পারস্পরিক সৌজন্যের প্রকাশ হিসেবে অনুরোধ করি। যোগাযোগ করুন, লেখা পাঠান এই ঠিকানায় : guruchandali@gmail.com ।


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