Form in early movies flickeringleaves in the outline of the canopy, color lost as if eachleaf alight were a dart of flame off green gone ashen to the eye,each leaf a page-smoke the distance each page has cometo history: the haze of each past raises its shade of dust each veilits valley of living the distance between I and the next like tree ringsthe steps as much an aerial as mortal perspective The trees bend in sequence,the eye watches thin air, but sees the wind– Ed Roberson§How does one define the present? Does it exist? Does the present keep becoming a memory and therefore the past? How can it be made time-bound? Am I just a witness or do I also participate in life of the present and help it along to becoming the past?The past has been divided into periods. What do the time brackets hinge on: floods/forest fires/human tragedies? Does the human meet the natural only in catastrophes?– Romila Thapar§I cannot escape the smell of darkness. Like the mongrel that dodges my feet every time I step into the street. The smell follows me around. Wraps itself around my body. Turning it taut. I cannot shake it off. It is as if the smell is grafted into my skin. Like the shadow that turns the day into night. I have no sense of smell. Except an imagined one. I just know what a certain something will smell like. Fear, for example. I know what that smells like. I know its odour. I run from the smell of fear.gather wreathsat the rim of the poemlet it die on your tonguerunning out of breathas it mournsits own passingThis irrational time like impending griefHistories of the present?I’m struggling. I need a lesson. On Time. Both the unfolding of time, as it does in, say, Nature; and the nature of time as well, when it fractures, as it often does; as it appears to me to be doing now. A ‘fracturing’.In my head is an image of this ‘fracturing’. It is simultaneously – like a split screen in a film – both static and dynamic. Is it ‘fractured’ literally and therefore immobile? Maybe. But the ‘fracturing’ is also a process that takes place over time. A kind of motion, which appears to me to be of the simultaneous kind. It moves back and forth in time. Its forward movement haunted by what it has been through. Time past attaching itself to a time unfolding. Time future. A kind of shadow time? Like trying to capture the space a ‘being’ traverses from one moment in time to the next. The possibility of capturing this movement and freezing it into an image.From the seemingly confused – what is confusion after all but the failure to articulate a niggling thought that seems almost within grasp – to the almost mundane – this is what actors that practice a certain method made famous by our Russian theatre-man deal with sub-text. To express that which is not made visible by the interval between the lines.Fracturing. Life. But also, text. And then taking a step back, letting it all be a part of an immense scattering. Now perform the ‘gathering’. The bringing together of these fragmented and scattered bits of time.What then do we mean by ‘the Present’? I cannot help but talk about our particular present.Time stretching into a landscape of unalloyed grief The virus – spelt W-A-R – will become the cause. Once it retreats+ENDS? or is ‘pushed’ into the margins. For make no mistake, it is not going to die or mutate into some kind of a harmless ‘companion’ to humanity. It will always remain on call. For our political masters. The world over. To befriend and call up when needed. As history has already shown, our respective nations have done precisely this when it suited their nationalist-fascist agendas. We are doing it even now through this crisis, when the ‘other’+IRAN is being blamed as the virus-carrier/warmonger. Nations by their very definition as nation-states exclude a vast number of perceived majorities. Not just that. The citizen as supplicant – or much worse. A beseeching petitioning polity that will need to beg for very single scrap of what we call ‘our rights’. We will be watched all the time and told exactly what to do, say and perform. This, I fear, will become the new normal. This WAR+VIRUS. China Russia Hungary. India too is headed that way. Forgive my agitation. The truth is I am agitated. For the future is no longer a reality about to arrive. Or a storm that will bypass us at the last moment and veer swerve change direction. It is here already and we are in the midst of it.Our history is the Present. Time persuading both the past and the future to hold their breath. While it un folds. A Present that is as horrifying as it is un stable. unceasinglythe worldfolded on itselfunfold the worlduncreasingthe foldsunfoldinguncreasingthis worldtrappedinto its own foldsstitch stitchthis unfoldinguncreasedfabricinto a cloakmake invisiblehide deepwithin its foldsMore immediate anxiety…a close twin to the earlier one? Perhaps…Smoke-filleddisquiet turnedinward outover landlandwrappedeyes made mistmade hope madeinter mit tentlandscapes swimming snappingadrift anchors in a state of anchor less nesscrashing against each other blindthought unable to steerthe disquietseeking refugein a quietnow no more a sanctuaryelsewhere in this dream the disquiet-filled landwrapped around eyes adrift blindsmoke spiralling inwardThe un-finished-ness of the anxiety of the irrational times…?words fill my breathless mouth withbreath leavingholes in our conversationcausingme to question whatcould possibly be happeningfor something is I look around unableto recognise people around me causing me to questionwhat could possibly be causing breath less mouthto take breath words fail to registerinaudibleamongst babblebeing utteredon the edge of languagefailing steadfastlyresolutely refusing to communicate wordsfill my mouth with breath less nesscausing me to question whatcould possibly be happening for something isI look around unable I share this new text with my friend the Historian…‘read then she said without hearing read also between lines printed, like so many whispers muttered as I lay with my head upon your shoulder, in that oft repeated pose of lovers who have lived centuries apart but never failed to repeat themselves without for a moment becoming jaded or repetitive or predictable in this their collective outpouring of silent understanding through senses made intuition on the less than white paper and tell me what you hear-read or let me guess as I too read between lines printed like so many whispers muttered over centuries for it is not only about understanding each other is it’Romila replies in her perceptive pithy manner…The problem is whether there is an understanding or is understanding evasive and hence the constant return. But how impossible life would be without this constant return over the centuries. Me:– the constant return suggested here could well be longing– understanding is never collective in the way an established theory may appear to be– evasive is intriguing because it suggests a reticence either on the part of that which needs to be understood – a poem, a piece of text, a relationship, a moment in time, anything that has the possibility of the ephemeral built into it. After all any understanding is in itself transient for when we arrive at it the possibility that the ‘meaning’ has changed evolved mutated into something else…like our virus? Or just old fashioned ‘love’ of the other. (I use ‘old fashioned’ for a different way of loving then the one we have increasingly begun to see unfold now in our times. But that is another discussion!)– I agree that life would be very different or even impossible without this constant return to different modes of possibility filtered through understanding over centuries (though every impossibility in our lives has led to possibilities we had not foreseen till we arrived at the cusp of the impossible and only then if we were able to see see we would find a way).– To me the distance between these time zones across hundreds of years is of lesser importance as long as there is a connect. In this. Our now. it is also about opening up understanding itself as possibilityas a possible ‘history’ of a Present forced upon us§ confused the birdstrayingfrom its flight path The Being as ‘document.’ An archive that is neither ‘spoken’ nor ‘material’. Nor architectural. A visible symbol that ‘houses’ the historical. It simply resides within. With and in. As memory. And as in memory. The act of bearing witness to our vast ‘unfolding’ of what I call this ‘Cannibal Time’ has no concrete home to inhabit. The archive takes on the smell of a morgue where historical moments filed one upon the other lie interred. As an act of witnessing, it chooses to deliberately stay-hide-remain in the mind. A necessary refuge.The mind as a space for the ‘clandestine’; for remembering; which in turn translates into a ‘quiet resistance’ and ‘re-telling’ when and if the possibility of seeking ‘retribution’ for crimes committed against the ‘order of things’ arises. So, evidence. Of some truth or fact that may have unfolded in a particular moment in history. The evidence bearing document-being as witness. One who stands between the act of deliberate erasure and a historical ‘happening’ that needs to be made known in a ‘new ‘moment in time. New because of its immediate birthing even if the just born stature is brief transitory and its demise imminent. A moment that may or may not arrive during the witnessing being’s lifetime. Therefore precarious. In the aftermath of what has been ‘seen’. The seeing and the manner in which we see; the reporting of what we have seen is also what makes us a witness.The world needs to experience through my witness the trauma that I have lived seen been subjected to in as close to the original ‘event’ as possible. Even if the sight the viewer is subjected to is full of horror or dismay. The unfolding of ‘history in the making’ and the ‘war as you go’ on our screens and our print media has a different task. It causes an enforced numbness that is meant to normalise or in some cases obliterate our ability to feel-sense-imagine the horror of what we do to each other. There are no rules that govern traditional methods of gathering evidence any longer. History and decoding what actually happened is near impossible.You think you are ‘looking’ at history being made; history is looking right at you; staring directly into your eyes; questioning your role as a witness; who blinks first in this eyeballing; is history not just in the making but also simultaneously overseeing its own unmaking? Perhaps.There is a palpable uncertainty about what is being manifested today. The recording of history has no moorings to rely on. This unfolding – this age of perpetual war – is without anchor or precedence. And definitely without the underpinning of any morals. Or ethics. The first victim is ‘truth’. We can no longer decipher the fake from the real. Our ‘reality’ unfolds as ‘napalm’. The fire spreads destroying ‘history’ (and entire helpless populations) while it usurps the nomenclature of the ‘historical’, installing the untruth the false the fake the fabricated as that which took place. An erasure as history. The act of erasing becomes our new historical fact.As you and I lay bare what is going on in our mind-lives, in an urge to shake-free, or is that shake-loose of our growing fear-despair? Our privileges; our luxuries; our plurals of every kind are no match for the singularity of the violence we allow as bystanders. It is not enough to drown-swim in our anguish at what is being unleashed in so many unequal wars around us. ‘Purpose’, the first part of purposelessness, of life, of action, of thought combines with a moral numbness that we can no longer hide behind. The ‘self’ metaphorised as a machine without content. A void that re–presents our being as a shell filled with emptiness. An ironic ‘taking up’ of volume and space by what? Nothingness? Nothing. To be. Done. This is the opposite of what the war-machine reduces the Other to. A dehumanisation that is on our side of the threshold and not something that happens to other-Others. A ‘stripping’ that is so severe that it rejects the ability to act. Devoid of emotional depth. No. Recognisable. Human. Traits.This, births, the indifferent-indifference. An alienation from one’s self that is so extreme ‘our being as shell’ loses all understanding. A meaningless that begins to fill the ‘nothingness’. A sign of our distorted time where even time is dislocated from its moorings and fails to record the ‘dismantling’ that has visited us in this time of perpetual war. How do we prepare ourselves for embarking on a programme that genuinely responds to the growing plea: Enough! We do not want to live in a constant state of fear. How indeed? We all appear to lead a protected life. One in which there are a number of buffers between ‘that’ which happens to other people and ‘us’. How many of us actually believe that the violence that visited the Muslims of Gujarat or the women and children of Iran or the people of Gaza is going to step over the threshold and stab you between the eyes?Each one of us is minutes away from becoming a statistic, a burning, a maiming, a rape, a killing, a image, a text, a report, a victim.Violence is no longer something that happens to other people.Naveen Kishore is a writer, theatre practitioner and the founder of Seagull Books.