prose 9
Art of Writing
I shall first say something about the art of writing as it is the more important of the two arts (painting and writing)....in the eyes of the friends of true beauty, a letter is the source from which the light confined within it beams forth. The letter, a magical power, is spiritual geometry emanating from the pen of invention... it contains the secret word and is the tongue of the hand. The spoken word goes to the hearts of such as are present to hear it; the letter gives wisdom to those that are near and far.
The written letter looks black, notwithstanding the thousand rays within it. It is the portrait painter of wisdom; a rough sketch from the realm of ideas; a dark night ushering in day; a black cloud pregnant with knowledge; speaking, though dumb; stationary and yet traveling; stretched on the sheet, and yet soaring upwards.
The heavenly traveler (thought) occasionally gives his course a different direction by means of man's fingers, and having passed along the continent of the pen and crossed the ocean of the ink, alights on the pleasant expanse of the page, and returns through the eye of the reader to its wonted habitation.
(While trying to trace the history of ply-splitting, I was told by Erroll Pires of NID, Ahmedabad, that 'tangs', camel girths were mentioned in the A'in-i-Akbari, written around 1590. Later I obtained this amazing book in an English translation of the original Persian. It is an incredibly detailed report by Abu'l-fazl, a scholar and historian in the court of the greatest Mogul emperor, Akbar the Great. (1542-1605). In over 750 pages, he writes exhaustively on every conceivable aspect of Indian life at that time. From the price of saffron to the names of drums, from labourers' salaries to rules of games, nothing misses his inquisitive gaze and tireless seeking after precise information.
Usually this fact-thick approach makes for difficult reading but occasionally his subject sparks his imagination as in the sentences quoted above, where he becomes carried away by the magic of letters and words.
He ends with 70 pages of creative writings by his contemporaries. There I found this, " I cannot understand the juggler trick which love performed; it introduced your form through an aperture as small as the pupil of my eye into the large space of my heart, and yet my heart cannot contain it". A splendid antidote to all those facts.)