Nothing posted here for a long time. I wanted to, but too busy. There was a time two years ago when I could book an hour at the internet café and write one straight off, but these days I convince myself I don’t have an hour to spare, and in any case a gushing torrent of spontaneous words presupposes a dam recently burst. Approximately ten blog posts have been planned; but the ideas grow stale, if not taken at the flood.
We live in a world constantly flooded with beauty and blessings if only we know where to look. It’s as if we stand on a seashore where every pebble is a precious stone. In the affairs of men or otherwise, it’s not a question of identifying an opportune moment, but savouring the essence of the moment already before us.
Which is exactly what I was not doing this morning when the angel showed up. I was panicking at the enormity of a commitment I had taken on, with no idea of how long it will take me to finish. It’s a piece of software I’m writing. It has a deadline.
So when an email arrived from a dear friend, who respects me perhaps more than he should, I suddenly felt ashamed at being so far from a state of grace, so sunk in my role of assassinating the day.
Angels move in mysterious ways. A few months ago, I came across Raymond, whose comments on various blog posts fascinated me. I tried to beard him in his lair but he didn’t have a blog himself. He did have a Facebook account, so I got one too and discovered he had set up discussion groups, particularly one about Apophatic Mysticism and his forthcoming book on the same. (My spell-checker denies that there is any such word as apophatic. But then, it still doesn’t recognize blog, either, after all this time. Nor online, for that matter.) I wasn’t interested in being on Facebook, preferring cloistered anonymity to an online blogospherical social whirl. But I have digressed to tell you how I got on to it.
Then, in an idle moment (such as I have been denying myself lately), I had looked up my dear friend Anup from India, and saw that he did (apparently) have a Facebook account, though he’d never mentioned the fact to me. His name is common enough, so I examined his photo closely. It was rather a distant shot, young man leaning against a rock, for all I know it could have been the Marabar Caves, famous in the West from EM Forster’s A Passage to India. I thought it looked like my friend Ghetu! So on 9th October I had left him a message asking if he was indeed Ghetu. No reply. Until this morning, when an email arrived in my inbox:
Anup sent you a message.
Re: hello
“HI VINCENT
how are you? actually what are you doing? because are you vagabond like me?”
Young Indians speak a dialect form of English with nuances unknown to those of us in England who think we have a copyright on the language. So perhaps “vagabond” referred to laziness. He recently wrote a guest post on a blog called Lazybox. I followed the link and saw he was online. So there followed a chat session notable for its absurdity. He didn’t answer my questions (such as where he was at the moment), merely asked similar questions of me, as if he didn’t know me at all. I didn’t answer them because I thought he was fooling around, but when he asked why I didn’t show a picture of myself, I replied that I did, and he could see for himself that I am half man, half horse. To which he replied in words to the effect that my picture was no proof. I could be an impostor, not a centaur at all. So true. And that was the moment that I realized he might be one too (an impostor, not a centaur), though quite innocently.
So, dear Ghetu, your friendship worked on me, rescued me without you doing a thing. Your impostor-namesake irritated me. Forgive me for imagining for a single moment that it could have been you. Even in phantasmal form, you send me angelic messages, making me see that the cause of my irritation was myself.
When you treated me so strangely in our online chat, my soul felt that you could see through my pretensions and were disgusted at what I had let myself become. I felt your disapproval, even though it wasn’t you. That’s how much you are a true friend.
For you (or is it my imagined version of you, as a watchful angel?) I shall be more sensible, and refrain from panic.
a wayfarer’s notes 