By Luke McCusker, 08/03/2019. It is part of the earth and it is part of our worlds. Everything you do leaves something behind. Your existence is remembered in material.
The defunct penitentiary in Mansfield, Ohio has been turned into a local tourist destination. It is where they filmed Shawshank Redemption. Now, you can wander the cells of former inmates, encounter Morgan Freeman’s ghost in the mess hall, linger in the cavernous chapel. The pillars are three stories high and corroding to a Statue-of-Liberty green. Pigeons have made homes there, unaware of the human significance of the place. Their feathers gather in corners, pile up, accumulate. Time and slow loss and what is too abundant to be held, too costly to be swept up.
The trash that gathers in the gutters, on the rooftops, in every available corner of India. The trash dragged along by monsoon wind, sorted by weight. Lingering long enough to lose form, to lose a name, its utility dissolved by acid rain, crushed out under the wheel of a rickshaw, chewed loose by a bone-thin mutt or a pack of four. The leaf from the tree, the weakened branch, the tired hand. What accumulates is the overabundance of lived lives, too numerous to count, to entangled to trace.
If you could trace it. Choose any bottle, any filthy styrofoam scrap from the dust. Carry it from the roadside, find the spicket sticking from the side of the lowest step of the sari seller’s shop. Turn the valve clockwise. Keep turning. Four times, five times, ten times, much farther than you should need until saffron water the color of an indigenous pottery display at The Met sputters and flows and rinse the cup clean, nearly clean until a name appears, the logo of the manufacturer. The dirt that lingers is the scar of a thumbnail, of pressure from a knuckle. You identify other markings, the sandal print, the dog tooth dent. You have to follow back months and years of history, follow it like a thread, cut around the periphery, cutting a shape from the foam–and even as you cut little flakes are lost to rain that will wash them to the aquifer or to the sea, that your great-grandchildren will eat in the tail of a salmon or the claw of a blue crab. You keep the thumbnail scar, feel along it, around the edge of the knuckle mark, until you feel a thread emerge, distinct, and you follow that thread down Chandni Chowk Road, past the spice sellers, under the Big Peepal Tree growing through the tangle power lines, around the tight corner against a wall past a reckless rickshaw, narrower and narrower, pushing aside orange dyed linens drying on a power line. Past the door to the sahn, past fifty years to the father of the cha seller, to a memory of spice and warm milk, a shadow of a time, faceless and nameless, pressed between sandstone bricks, gathering in the silence of where what was meets now, where the alley meets Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Marg. You take the seller’s hand, feel the end of the thumbnail, identify its shape, identify the knuckle. The cup let from the hand, crushed under time, tangled in a billion threads, saffron and India green, left but not lost, piled and accumulated, evidence waiting for a name or oblivion, or already whole in namelessness. Remembered by the earth, if the earth can remember.
I mean the styrofoam cup, and the life it falls from, already so much. Cleaning out the gutters is not the only kind of redemption, and not every kind of redemption saves.
I am in Kolkata for a day following my meetings at Shantiniketan. Some thoughts from those meetings soon.
