Sometimes I grow convinced that I am the only thing that changes in this landscape. I arrive, I depart, and then I return only to find the same iron table rusting out in the garden like the discarded stage of some rocket ever-orbiting in the bottomless stillness of space. A year spent far away from here, cast into the rushing worldstream, and then I surface once again on the dirt road that runs through this forgotten village to find the same three crones sitting on the same crumbling stone wall weaving temple offerings from dried palm fronds. Gradually, over the course of my stay, one month, two months, I myself grow more and more constant, as if through sacred contagion—until at a certain point the whole situation seems to reverse itself, and I incarnate the empty fulcrum around which everything else tips and sways: the leaves and petals on the iron tabletop now trembling in the slightest breeze, the fingers of the reverent old women ceaselessly weaving, weaving. Sitting reading on my porch, motionless except for my page-turning arm, sometimes I grow convinced that I am the only thing that does not change in this landscape.
Hallucinating in the sun, a movement catches at one loose corner of my stilled eye—and turning my gaze back from nothing to something, focusing, I witness a slow scuttle across the hot stones of the garden path. It seems to be a praying mantis, but it isn’t praying, it is crawling, it has lost its vertical posture, and its little hands have abandoned their pose of motionless supplication in favor of a more practical paw-like progress. Huge, bright green, and beautifully ugly, it takes several minutes of hard labor to cross the path and vanish into uncropped grass. I close my eyes then, briefly, in deference to its disappearance.
It has never occurred to me that a praying mantis does anything other than pray. I know they eat their mates, but that too has always seemed to me a religious gesture. But now, this crawling over hot stones, even that assumes a vividly liturgical dimension. I sit perfectly still—except for my pen-pushing finger which crawls across this sun-struck sheet of paper, image by image, toward a bit of light reflected in the half-blind eye of an old woman weaving her own images with palm rather than paper. And absence is ritualized as well, as she blinks, and the light shifts and, for a moment, is extinguished. Let me stop writing then, let me lay down my pen and clasp my hands together in an image of prayer. Or let me scuttle over hot stones to the rusting iron table, let me drop my images lightly down upon it, let them shudder slightly in the breeze.
Wonderful. Thank-you.