Sylvia's Journal

Maybe it is axel’s imminent arrival that makes me wax poetic and wanting to write poetry after reading Bill Collins. And reading Collins came from finding out that the Obamas held a poetry reading event at their white house. This is how one thing leads to another.

Collins’ poem ‘Some day’ reminds me of a childhood pre-occupation that I discovered much later I shared with my younger brother, and who knows how many other earthlings. It is (or rather was as it has stopped haunting me), the feeling that I am just a small puppet in a large play and that some giant (we don’t have to get religious about this) is looking at us ant like creatures scurrying around our small universe that we think so big, doing stuff that doesn’t matter on a cosmic scale.

The childhood image was always accompanied by a weird physical sensation of distancing – a sudden telescoping of the world into the infinite distance and me getting to be the size of a pinpoint, the space around me of cosmic proportions. The most salient part of the experience was always this telescoping which I haven’t heard anyone else talk about, not even my brother; but the notion that we are actors in some larger play I know I share with many.

I haven’t written any poetry lately but I know something is formulating itself in some part of my being. I have this image of me sitting in my new lemon ice living room, on the Afghan tushaq with my laptop – trying not to look at the hideous furniture because it might take the poetry away, or, the opposite, looking for a spot of beauty behind the ugliness that will unleash a torrent of poetic thoughts. Maybe.

Axel wrote me from Dubai after an Indian meal and a lassie. He is already foregoing beer when he doesn’t have to. A beerless existence is actually not all that bad for 6 weeks, I can testify to that. In another 6 weeks we will be returning to the US already, incha’llah, as they say here. Deo (or puppetmaster) volente.