Yin yang

nontransparentthings 007

yin yang, 2023

“FitzGerald described the endless hours he spent translating this poem of two hundred and twenty-four lines as a colloquy with the dead man and an attempt to bring to us tidings of him. The English verses he devised for the purpose, which radiate with a pure, seemingly unselfconscious beauty, feign an anonymity that disdains even the least claim to authorship, and draw us, word by word, to an invisible point where the mediaeval orient and the fading occident can come together in a way never allowed them by the calamitous course of history.”

— WG Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

I did not pay so much attention to the part of The Rings of Saturn where Sebald writes about Edward FizGerald or his translation of Persian poet Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát. It was in watching the documentary Patience: After Sebald by Grant Gee, based on the novel, that I’d return to the book for a second immersion into the lives of the two men. This was because of lines from the Rubáiyát (stanza 64) quoted in the documentary, which has that introspective effect:

Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who

Before us pass’d the door of Darkness through,

Not one returns to tell us of the Road,

Which to discover we must travel too.

So that when I looked at this image I took, while I was having a casual chat with my neighbour (the lady carrying the baby), in August 2023, selected from several shots, these lines from Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát come to mind. But at first, I was thinking of creating an image that says something about age difference, the infant face of the boy and the grown-up face of the lady being a perfect window.

The boy is not hers but another neighbour’s, and she was trying to comfort him. Her smiling face is because she readied herself for the shot, unlike the boy’s grimaced face, whom, not really aware of what was going on, also had his own worries. Still, it doesn’t stop me from thinking of their facial expressions at some poetic level and what levels of consciousness both reveal. Her face has the assurance of age. His, many questions, like why did I come into this world? Or to plug in Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát, I am thinking how strange it must be for him that he wasn’t warned, by the myriads who before him passed the door of Darkness through, of the Road which to discover, he must travel too.

And this thought held me and drew me to lines from Ahmed Maiwada’s We’re Fish (poem 65):

Death’s trigger is pulled

The moment you’re born;

Life ends at birth,

Daughter or son,

Funeral shall happen

In time, short or long.

When lips are sealed,

At the close of the songs,

Other dead, assembled, sing, “Till we come.”

It is an imagery of the cyclical process of life, of being, of interacting with the world. A yin and yangness. I must have been thinking lately about this aspect of our being and put my thoughts into verse earlier this year, in January, in a poem titled “Carbon,” where I intoned: We wake from dream to tortured dream/ from Gogh’s starry night to Guernica / womb to marketplace . . . and from death, which we wake from dream into.++

I have been a little away from my non-transparent things series, where I write on photographs. During this time, however, I wrote a photo essay titled “Four Photographs,” which is similar to the series. If this is your first time reading it, here is the introductory essay to the series. And here, here, and here, you will find some of the entries. I always recommend something to read after each series, and here is a short story by Elnathan John, “Learning Gertrude.”