In Visible Cities

When a city drains itself of people and leaves only its buildings breathing, it is invariably redolent of a dead future that we collectively and inexplicably conceive of, always at present. Yet should a city be devoid of buildings - its myriad metaphors of steel, and glass and obdurate modernity - it no longer becomes a city, but an aimless habitation where time has dropped final anchor, and the present becomes trapped in the past. One wonders about the difference between a dead city and a non-city, the triumph of staid human will over the resplendent geography of nature, and is unwarily led to the question: amidst the dead weight of stasis, how shall he live? Encircled by the illusive glow of false riches, how can he live?


Something prompted me to look outside my window one clear morning. There was an unusual presence of movement and energy. Overnight, without my noticing, a colony of wasps had built a nest. I clambered atop my desk for a closer look, separated by a vertical plane of glass, and was transfixed in awe for many a minute. Why did they choose this spot? How did they communicate, what words what language? Who taught them these rudiments of construction? From what did they use to build honeycombs of such beauty? Where is their queen? You see, when man thinks of God, he conceives of God from the narrow eyes of man. When man thinks of insects and animals, his stubborn ego similarly speaks. And the wasps, teeming on their kingdom, unperturbed, resolute, dignified, secretive, mysterious, themselves nature’s living palette of liquorice, honey and caramel.


They call Leichhardt Sydney’s little Italy. He has never been to Italy, though he has lived in another little Italy – Lygon Street in the suburb of Carlton in Melbourne. So his frames of reference are akin to comparing an ersatz with an epigone, never knowing what the real place is like. His sole purpose there, after a very long bus-ride, was simply to while away a Sunday afternoon and explore a new precinct. Café Italia served up a delicious café latte, and one need not have had visited Italy to know when an intoxicating alchemy is at work right in the cauldron of one’s tongue.


Tucked quietly away from the main street, along a two-lane road, is a café with an espresso machine placed on the window sill. It was mid-afternoon on a Saturday, and the surrounds were strangely quiet. The grey clouds above cast a mild otherworldly pall, and the surreal pallor infused the al fresco café with a lambent continental mood. The girl comes over to take his orders, and then gives the table a once-over, vigorous wipe. “There! Doesn’t haveta be cleaned anymore till tomorrow!” she says with a light flourish. This is a place he can feel right at home, and lean at his table for hours on hours, savour a book, a coffee, be at times distracted by the traffic and the world and the occasional stranger-by, and dip into the random conversations from nearby islands of tables that would inadvertently, but gently, lure his traipsing reverie.


Can you still write? You have not been able to read a novel in earnest the last few months, or be inspired by a line of poetry. Even longer have you last fallen in love and embarked on a capricious wanderlust, the torrid, heady stuff that keep florid pens aflutter. You remember how during one such thrall, one never before, the pages of the notebooks you carry about yourself were filled as quickly as you could turn to the next page, although without your realizing, that name – one that could send tremors at the mutter of a syllable, one whose name when called could call you swiftly home – turned gradually, into a rock, a fort.

You can never bear to throw away your notebooks, no matter that they have come to resemble cemeteries, those pages tombstones, those words epitaphs, all left to languish at the mercy of an evanishing memory, this memory the solitary clue to the coffin buried dead beneath.

I hope you can still write. Words are meant to be written, to be latched on voices, etched on paper, fragile repositories of your deepest, fragilest yearnings. Never mind that there would be times when the voices you long to hear would become silence and disappearance, never mind that at times words inscribed would become indecipherable hieroglyphics. When the sentence is ended, it is for another to embrace.