'Lonely Words'

I'am as lonely as a snail in the still/silent night-desert. There is no one for me to talk to, about many things, so I am putting these lonely words in a hole in a wall and covering it with mud and straw.

'Mirrors'

Emotional pain is most difficult to bear when its origins are obscure. Many of the symptoms that we experience result from our inability to connect the memories from our past to create a cohesive and sensible story of our life. Some of these memories have been suppressed in order to protect us from being overwhelmed by particularly painful experiences. The protection, unfortunately, is incomplete and requires considerable mental energy to sustain.

Our scattered memories resemble the shards or fragments of pottery that an archeologist unearths at a dig. Each fragment provides only a hint of the form and function of the whole vessel. The fragments of one vessel may even be found interspersed among the pieces of many others, so that they must be sorted one from another before each can be reassembled.

The work of healing a sickness is like finding, sorting, and putting together the pieces of an ancient pot. The work is often tedious, and some of the slivers may be sharp and dangerous. The result, if we are patient, is a beautiful object, elegant in form and function, and eloquent in the tale it tells of its creation.

'The Empty Existence'

"There is nothing but emptiness, the empty existence I exchanged for the truth."

'The Lonely Snail'

To grass, or leaf, or fruit, or wall,
The snail sticks close,
nor fears to fall, As if he grew there,
house and all Together.
Within that house secure he hides,
When danger imminent betides
Of storm, or other harm besides of Weather.
Give but his horns the slightest touch,
His self-collecting power is such
He shrinks into his house with much Displeasure.
Where'er he dwells, he dwells Alone,
Except himself has chattels None,
Well satisfied to be his own Whole treasure.
Thus hermit-like, his life he leads,
Nor partner of his banquet needs,
And if he meets one only feeds The faster.
Who seeks him must be worse than blind,
(He and his house are so combined,)
If, finding it, he fails to find its Master...

p.s. No doubt the snail is a creature of anti-sensibility, but in the most romanticized sense. That is, the snail is not one of the scuttling crowd who, fearful of vis-a-vis contact with others, make their way conventionally through life, lonely but in good company. Instead, the snail is a prince of sorts. He is not homeless; he has his house, which not only secures him, but stands as a frightful dominion of power. The snail is not un-social, he is energetically anti-social. In the snail, sensibility doubles back on itself. The self-collecting power which facilitates a full retreat at the mere touch of the horns must be read as over-sensibility, not insensibility. In fact, the snail much resembles the poet of sensibility, "Well satisfied to be his own/ Whole treasure." The poem represents how easily a sensible withdrawal from society can turn into a feeding frenzy. Sensibility can speak for or against integration into the social - in a sense it builds its own crises as fast as it finds solutions - this is the case for the snail...

Anamika