in the skin of a lion, musings

darkness--there is only form, details unseen. presence takes on a new, sublime feel. one hears only a voice, for example. and quite suddenly, faith is required in the other to remain there, seated beside you, and real. what is heightened by the night is not the fact of merely being there, of existing in space-time dimensional being, but rather this belief in one another, this other-worldly connection. communication, one could call it. a dialectic.

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"She felt as if she were the only one alive in this building. In such formal darkness. There was a terrible taste from that one drink still on her tongue, so she walked behind the zinc counter, turning on the tap to wash out her mouth. She moved the dial of the radio around a bit but brought it back securely to the same station. She was looking for that song he had half sung along with earlier, the voice of the singer strangely powerful and lethargic. She saw herself in the mirror. A woman whose hair was showing, caught illicit. She did what he had wanted to do. She ran her hand over her hair briefly. Then turned from her image.
    Leaning forward she lay her face on the cold zinc, the chill there even past midnight. Upon her cheek, her eyelid. She let her skull roll to cool her forehead. The zinc was an edge of another country. She put her ear against the grey ocean of it. Its memory of a day's glasses. The spill and the wiping cloth. Confessional. Tabula Rasa.
    At the table she positioned the man comfortably so he would not fall on his arm. What is your name? she whispered. She bent down and kissed him, then began walking around the room. This orchard. Strangers kiss softly as moths, she thought."
--from Ondaatje's In The Skin Of A Lion

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this moment of rebirth. a once fumbling nun, subverted, and now a woman, alive. tabula rasa. how chance and chaos can metamorphose a human being in an instant. probability lurks at every corner, awaiting to jar one's totalities. a most cunning trickster. the subtly of the parabol/parable/parabola.

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the sheer juxtoposition of structure and chaos. ondaatje astounds me time and time again. it is how so much can be extracted by so little said. he has the presence of a thunderous whisper.