It snowed today. It is the first fall of the year. Perfect pink light, permeated by falling flakes, floats into my room. Outside the window, I can sense the presence of pure white, untouched, pristine snow.
“You know what's it called”, from the direction of black eyes, gleaming as if their possessor has just arrived at an absolute truth. “Virgin Snow”. To which, I silently, “Looks like you’re on a row”. The silence necessitated, or so it seemed then, by the natural presence of a third.
London hasn’t seen a fall like this for years. For a world without a higher order, without first cause and final effect, it operates rather comically. It seems to conspire sometimes for the express purpose of causing events that complement one’s personal history. “The best in town, Troy Restaurant”, said a leaflet that a probably emaciated brown or yellow hand slipped under my door this morning.
Must I be haunted into remembrance then? I capitulate. “Sculpture has memory”, he says while we talk about the abstractness of music and my Muslim heart gives in to musings of Hindu mythology.
So it was with the flute that Krishna, so lovingly held close to His lips. The hollow bamboo reed also suffered. It underwent the agony of being pierced. Seven holes were the result. And those holes produced Divine Music when they came in contact with the Divine Breath of the Lord of Lords!
For days I walked with that phrase reverberating in my head, awed by its eloquence. Sculpture has memory. Months passed, reverberation subsided, was replaced by other words.
Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting and modern. But the catastrophe was later, later. O'Hara triumphed but lacked the power of precursor ship.
I later realized the phrase was eloquent yet technically incorrect. Growing up affords one to marvel such contradictions, reverence them. Sculpture cannot have memory because it is purely spatial, it has no time-dependence. A sculptor instantaneously envisages his composition as a whole. Music, on the other hand, has pure time-dependence.
Putting together a musical composition is harder because of time delay in conceiving its parts. The first movement doesn’t lead as easily to the second as does David’s foot on Goliath’s head.
So now, there is a fondness in reminiscing those moments, in the same way an old sweater of a loved one is breathed in deeply, a photograph touched with the fingertips without any consciousness of time until one is shaken by the peremptory reality of present.
A cold turbulence in my pink fabric. I get up to re-latch the window. There is virgin snow outside.
It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that?...
Ker raha tha gham-e-jahan ka hisab
Aaj tum yaad be hisab aaye
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