The Lady with Circular Vision

I know what I’m writing on this paper borrowed from the monastery will seem incredible to everybody. But still it’s hard to resist the urge of putting it down as ink on paper.

I’ve been here in the monastery for over two months. Before coming here, I’d heard some rumors about the place from the local people in the village of Tsang-Zai. I depended on my memory and imagination to figure out the sources of the rumors. (And if the legends were true, this little effort of mine had also been looked at from every angle in a very distant past.)

In my memory resides similar stories (or, so I think) of succession and deterioration. From where I come, no miracles occur any more. In the perpetual light, everything is too obvious and commonplace. We see the same corner of the streets, the same slope of the mundane rooftops, the same street shops (whose other sides we never looked at, or never thought of looking at, as if they had no other side). Things have been falling from above to below with certain acceleration from our Old ancestors’ time. Nowadays nobody cares about that. For us every event is as indispensable as birth is and as inevitable as death is. For us every moment is the end of our time here.

I have been running away from that stagnancy for 70 years. I have traveled far and long. I have been to the kingdom of Noble Akhuyam :-
Marhan, the poor slum-boy, was exalted by the prospect of seeing the noble king in broad daylight. He hasn’t been able to sleep in excitement last night. The king has been his idol for a long time, ever since he came back victorious after defeating the tyrant ruler Singmon. Marhan of Delayum, the slum dweller, under the primitive sun, has spent infinite hours fighting the invisible enemy with a sword ( a cane, actually). He has played the game of kings with his friends, he has become the King and the Provider of Justice. Sitting on a broken stone pillar imagined as throne he’d pretend the Ancient Legend of Solitir has come true :-
A long time ago, the mountain of Solitir was inhabited by an ancient tribe. It is said that they were the first wise men in this phase of the time. They didn’t have the custom of naming objects and people, or speaking or writing. They believed in visions and thoughts. The famous legend says that there was a wise stone chair that nobody knew came from where, in their midst. Anyone who sits on it possesses the infinite wisdom bestowed in it. The source of this wisdom is not undisputed. Some say that it was the first thing God created. But there are others who think that many many years back, this served as the seat for the great philosopher Ciang-nitse and one day he will reincarnate to wean away the darkness of our ignorance. The stone seat will again go back to its owner:-

Mystery shrouds the early ages of this world where memories falter. Nobody now knows who were the first people to set foot on the bank of the blue river of Pen or where they came from. But the fact that left its imprint on later times is that they were different. They were the first Lin-ear people and founded the advanced rural civilization of Tsang-Lin.

They were the first to realize that civilizations grow and will continue to grow along the banks of the rivers. They dug deeper into the earth to find the secrets. They unmade everything that was there and tried to make everything that was not there. They played with shapes and symmetries to find the thing sought for. They figured out that mysteries are hidden in experiences not experienced ( i.e. granularities and abstractions).

To model the unknown mystery they first developed the game of incertitude : Life is a stream of words. Replace some of them randomly with the contradictory word. To decode is the game. The main challenge is that every life then would yield innumerable possibilities of verity. Some would seem completely meaningless i.e. inconsistent and abrupt while some others would seem more fluent and meaningful.

In the glorious hours of Lin, was born the great philosopher Ciang-nitse who studied the game intensively. He was considered as the greatest master of the game. He devoted his whole prime in formalizing a method of finding the original sequence of words from the tangle of reverse meanings, contradictions, deviations etc. He was searching for the primary point when the game originated (and that is shrouded in oblivion). But in the end he came up with this fact that the game never originated. The contradictions are intrinsic of the language spoken. He wrote his last book called ‘Zong Chiamon’ (The Deceitful Doctrine) when the twelfth mountain was still there guarding the edge of the world( After that all path was open and he fell silent). This was a confusing story where cause and effect, verity and falsity, past and future got convoluted in a maze of parables and mind games. In the great library of Tsang-Zai, I came across a passage of this memorable work (and that is all that is left of it) :-
When I asked him, he said that there is no such person in the monastery of Zinad (Infinity it means in my native tongue) who can see everything from all sides of space and time. For that’d mean she will be able to see the contained and the container as two independent entities without realizing the relationship of containment. But as the claims go, she should be able to see the ‘containment’ as a whole, too! This is leading us to a contradiction. His logical clarity amazed me, though I secretly denied to believe these words. Something in me whispered that this decision is going to be important for me as the luminescence is crucial for the cricket. Also, he added, that’d mean that for her every memory is a glimpse of the future and future is nothing but a collection of memories. I’d admit that these words made me think.

I strangely felt like coming back home. The name of the monastery also suggested that I have walked a full circle somehow. May be the whole landscape has changed by now due to an earthquake. Old people have died. New people have been born. They have given birth to new languages and cultures. The unchanging age has taken refuge here in this monastery amidst fickle civilizations. But still the basic essence has not changed.

I tried to imagine who the lady could be. None of them have ever seen her. When later I asked the monks, they smiled. “you’ll see”, they said. My mind started this impossible job of searching through the infinite memory of lost times. In fact, I was astonished how clearly I could remember the faces of people who once were part of my life after such a long time of drowsy oblivion. My mother, the dreamy blue eyed aunt who almost ironically never slept, the downcast and lean housemaid girl with a very shrill voice and all others. Anyone of them could be the lady of the monastery, as they all relate to the sense of absolute through their sense of static. They never thought of future as something different from past and have never expected anything.

(I am excited by the progress of my investigation. Several days passes by)

Yes, they live in a self-contained totality, there’s no doubt about that. But still they have never seen this sign anywhere :

“This is one sentence out of infinitely many such”

they have spent their lives in a fragmented whole , while I have tried to look beyond it. They can not be the one.

Amidst the gongs of bells and clement air of the monastery, I was left with only one option. But as soon as this revelation struck me, I knew it was wrong. It had to be wrong. Simply because I have witnessed this revelation which was not in my past. Because never ever, not even while writing this manuscript up till now, it crossed my mind. Orator was right. The only way to achieve absolute vision is to avoid all communications. Expressions, however abstract, creates imprint of inherent details on mind. And the details blind our eyes against overall vision.

There is no lady with circular vision because I myself completely overlooked the fact :

“I am the lady with circular vision”