Unlettered Just When: Hai, Hai Gandhiji

Before I was working regularly, back around, I think '96-'97, I'd go over to the Univ. of KY's stupid cntr & read. This was a communal activity for me. I felt encumbered enough, maskless enough--to coin a word, that it didn't matter the weight of fantastic individuals as Gandhi or also some solemn Judeo-Arab, who I would characterize as subjectively as possible, as a relief thru identity--making up new fleeting personas. The halls of the new part of the Student Cntr seemed plain-like, where intelligence could freely roam & the older part had a dusty too well-worn quality, appositely I was looking at study as being a new vocation which nothing could mar & embellish=the well had no bottom & my sorrow had no end-time, so I looked at immediacy, nothing more. During one loud cicada-filled Summer's afternoon my translating face ever watchful & made-up of "sighs, glances, & whispers" (Potok's words, in IN the Beginning), I thought I was glimpsing behind a veil which thence exposed a hard-souled reciprocal look upon me - the observer was observed! The face looking back was a not so diminutive Gandhi, now a wakeful giant in the MInd's Eye, & fear that I would effortlessly be defined by a tableau-rasa, without a constituent baby step into the blue of yellowing pgs, would ensure all academic, school-of-life efforts had come to nothing. I can only say that I must have been looking at an individualized icon of self hitherto unseen. Gandhi was a womb of knowledge, whose night-watcher was guard-like personas I'd dream at the periphery of my 4 cornered room. Easily Mother India, as head-waters in religion siphoned across continents: Gandhi held my heart Open, light to my Mind, & the step it was to take to find the menu I read off of for so long thru intra-mantra slavery, whose service was thence broadened in its proffer in diet-as-consciousness. This piece is delivering me thru images, probably the persons I find in the corners & shadows of the rooms I occupy. When I was in Jerusalem the first time, I imagined the world stocked w/spirits--clouded by jinns & ophans=which are wheels that make a room conceived of as that of shapeless angels making our conscious space manifest. Down by the washing machines, it was December--I'm there at the yeshivah for 10 days, & my cousin has been at her yeshivah then yr round... I want to hug her, but wholeness in my piercing what is conventional to most, this contentment!! was cheerless--& well (Orthodox) women don't touch men non-matrimonially. I watched what I saw, that the world had gotten fragmented, & I was scurrying for the details, but that the big picture was better for perspective about religion, self-realization!! because to enter into its arms of erudition meant giant steps, not mental langour=this thing that shoves me clear into the grey...& makes me look for anything I can for collusion of mental anguish (grasping=dukka in Sanskrit)/this effort & corporeal heated condition of forced thought.