The Anatomy of Journey
Page 19
A noise somewhere.
A deep noise, like noise from the throat of an enormous, ethereal being.
Like mountains making love.
Thunder.
Rolling, rumbling thunder.
Rumbling, grumbling, and rumbling, until a sudden crack of lightning and light becomes sound through a beautiful alchemy.
Inside, the dance of rain on canvas begins and the monochromatic music of rain comes to life. Strictly binary music - creating infinite permutations of heart wrenching rhyme in the narrow gap between the sound of silence and the sound of a drop of rain hitting the earth. An infinite spectrum of sounds, of melancholy, of a joy that can never be expressed accurately, fully.
Inside, I am outside with the rain. Every fiber of my being is with the thunder. I can see the night outside - the dull, grey cast from the light of a cloud-soaked moon on the wet, wet bark of a tall Pine tree, chalking one side of the tree white against the black of night, as drops of silver rain slide down the branches and the trunk of the tree, riding the ridges of its rough bark, and as it rises and rises - this tree that pines - against the slope of the mountain, straight as an arrow, its grey-green branches and its green-green leaves explode against the storm-grey of the storm clouds like a roman candle, shearing the vision -
Thunder!
I cannot match this rain's meter and rhyme.
She sings with such carefree abandon and yet is well within the bounds of poetry. The grey clouds make fun of my writing; if I could only borrow their glorious dark color for my ink I would write a song that should make thunder dance. I don't know why I still exist when I cannot even come close to letting you know how I feel when it rains. I don't know why I still breathe when I cannot write two rhyming lines that capture this epic painting that is being drawn by the most mystical creatures of the land - thunder and clouds and lightning and rain.
Why should I be alive after witnessing such perfection?
Why don't I just melt into a poem?
A limitless pause we spend listening to this music in monochrome. Eventually, 3 gets up and walks to the mirror with a torch in his hand. Now, I am back inside. The shape of the tent, my friends on their beds, the texture of the canvas and the sound of the raindrops on canvas come rushing back, sound and sight mixing before separating, before making sense. I stare at 3. He is kneeling in front of a dressing table that has a mirror attached. He turns on the torch, directs the painfully bright beam of light at his eye but doesn't look at the beam; he is staring into the mirror.
'Dude, come here. I'll show you something,' he says to me, still staring at his eye.
I get up from where I am sitting, walk to the mirror and kneel next to 3. The floor is bone chilling. My knees start to become numb immediately.
3 hands me the torch and tells me, 'Point the beam into your eye, but don't look at the beam. Keep looking at your pupil - the pupil of the eye on which you are directing the beam. Then see what happens.' I turn to the mirror and turn on the torch. Looking straight at my right eye in the mirror, I point the beam directly into it.
The pupil contracts.
I turn the torch off, and to my complete astonishment the black, circular pupil immediately dilates, like a crosshair locking on to its target. I point the beam again, and again, immediately, like an instinct, the pupil contracts.
You know and I know that pupils dilate and shrink. But to witness the great design of the eye at work is an amazing experience. When I saw my pupil dilate - change shape in beautiful display of form and function - it caused a cognitive shift in awareness. In that moment I realized how separate I am from my body.
*
Zing-Zing Bar
The path to our destination is not always a straight one. We go down the wrong road, we get lost, we turn back. Maybe it doesn't matter which road we embark on. Maybe what matters is that we embark.
Barbara Hall
Day 6
Elevation: 13,383 ft.
Distance from Leh: 304 km.