Paromita’s Reviews > Journey to the South > Status Update

..So each emerging constellation brings in its wake whole networks of images—highly diverse networks that penetrate all real and dream worlds, in which we may occasionally glimpse a common, dreamlike pattern.

I heard the hum of the current from which characters of all alphabets emerge like crystals, and which throws them into clusters, so making words and sentences out of them; their constellations then refer back to the current that formed them, a current whose life endures in them. Also, over distances of space and time, they refer to and call to one another. ..

Or that the journey had a single center, but that this center was a void, and that the light that lay across objects was the silent light of emptiness, the glow of nothingness. But emptiness, too, can take many different forms; its light transforms, as if the void knows different times of day.

It’s also possible that the journey has had many destinations, and many centers; that the light that served to illuminate things came from more than one point; that rays from many sources were reflected in objects, and crossed, merged, and strengthened …

...and that all I experienced in the days to come was variations on the notes of that nighttime music of the platform—notes of expectation, restlessness, anxiety, and a strange happiness.

As we traveled, I sometimes had the feeling that the whole journey was contained in the marionette-like movements of the figures in the cold bluish light, or words echoing through the station, thereby acquiring a strange, even eerie meaning, or the fluttering of a bird’s wings up by the glass vault, and other things besides; ...

...a whirl of unfinished monster images, heading for the light and searching for their finite form, with no guarantee that they will reach it, that they will not remain forever in the larval stage; the hum of words that are but convolutions of unknown sounds; and rippling tangles of lines, in which future characters can only be guessed at.

the continuous transition of the void into shapes, and the blending of these shapes; the agonizing yet delightful surf of twisting, merging, and disintegrating lines; the sounds and scents from which words, images, and objects are born, and into which they crumble back; ...

In this form, the sea, in invisible waves, poured itself out on the shore, so becoming part of the urban space, the streets, the houses and apartments, embracing all things and faces, sharing in every gesture and act; in conversations, it was heard in the gaps between words.

...To do so, I would have to push through all the torn drapery of the past it was caught up in, and even then I would find it cold and indifferent.