HOD


The crew of a spaceship reported encountering a sea of crystals leading towards a radiant point. The crystals were not only luminous, but the crew discovered that on looking at them, instead of looking through them, or into them, or at an opaque surface, they were looking into themselves. Through some strange inversion of vision, their physical sight was transposed into a psychological penetration through which they saw into themselves and understood themselves as they really were. Almost as if a different person, possessed of unusual perception, who had known them intimately all their lives, was assessing them, summing them up, weighing them, but with the sympathy and emotional identification that could only have come from their own selves, and not from any other person, no matter how intimate.

They were so intrigued that they overcame their wonder and fear and pressed on to see where this strange phenomenon led. When questioned later, however, they were unable, however, to describe their experience of the point to which the crystal sea led/in which the crystal sea/terminated. They would try to describe the sight or experience, which ever it was and would stop short after a few hesitant words. The look in their eyes at this pint suggested that they were trying to/straining to/hard/ desperately to communicate something but simply could not find the words. Their eyes seemed filled with stories or memory/the meaning of something glorious which they remembered but could not describe/were strangely unable to describe. They could only describe their journey home in which nothing unusual/spectacular happened



I once read Marvel comics science fiction story based on the encounter of a man with himself as he was in the past. The story was based on the premise that such an encounter would distort the space-time field of the earth, distorting the gravitational field of the earth in a manner that would lead to natural catastrophes. In a similar manner, at periods of personal/psychological and interpersonal upheaval, one self may be compelled to encounter itself at various points in time, the person who one thought one was up till now, and the person one sees oneself to be now as well as the person who one is becoming. Am I not the same person who had to acknowledge that I am a man like any other man and that those adulteries I committed in the course on my marriage represented not only a departure from what I would have expected of the high standards I had set myself when I was getting married but are expressive of needs which unfulfilled which I found an outlet/or which I allowed to find an outlet through the channels that were available to them? So I too committed betrayals as damaging as that which was inflicted on me by the person I had betrayed earlier. But the again, were those betrayals not representative of high points in my limited sexual life, which I can point to as the most significant of my experience with the hot blood that can course between desiring bodies? So in betrayal, I discovered/ recovered myself. But the betrayals, though now understood as acts of self discovery, implied that the home of my self understanding and a centre of my social self had either been shattered or been radically reconfigured. This reconfiguration is what I am trying to stake stock of, at this point of my life, where, with Dante, “I woke to find myself in a dark wood, with the right way wholly lost and gone”. I have become homeless, both in psychic space and in the domestic space I had so carefully built up over six years. Like Castaneda’s traveller to Ixtlan, I cannot return home even if I wanted to because the home as I understood it, either in psychic space or its domestic configuration, no longer exists. The homes I inhabit now are makeshift homes, constructed out of the bare materials with which I constructed my home before the enriching of marital life, but having been in that multipersoned state, the unanticipated return to the interpersonal and emotional minimalism of bachelorhood is like returning to an abandoned/old house, which has long been abandoned and fallen into disrepair which one is compelled/forced to inhabit but is unable to turn to its former quality of habitation/as a habitable state.