Black Hole

I miss fountain pens. I always had a painful revulsion for ballpoints and biros. Blue or black ink or ball-point the GCSE lady with short-hair and that pruned South Asian accent would say. And now these girls actually ask me if it’s okay if they used a ballpoint when the ink finishes from their pens. And some of them carry ink-bottles in their bags. Some don’t. They share. Royal blue ink. And when it would gasp its last it would pale into a twilight blue. And when renewed, it would be a rich sapphire – that was the one I loved. It was closer to violet.

But now I like black ink. It looks more scriptural. It reminds me of pale parchment, and lavish, rotund script. There is something nothing about black. Something that tells you that things can begin from it, and end into it. The whole let there Be Light deal. The whole, “Write, write whatever shall Be.” I bet it was a Fountain Pen that Wrote, with rich, black ink as heavy as a summer night when the electricity fails. And you can see these houses plain and vulnerable. And you can see the sky that you always miss. Darkness has its possibilities.

Fountain pens and ball-points are just like tea and tea-bags. The latter in both equations are made to be trashed. Use and dispose. They’re cheap. They’re accessible. They speak of lonely boys who rush and buy one before the 1550 class, or have one at 1730 to call it a day. There is something selfish about both. When you make tea in a teapot, it requires patience. You sit there, and you wait. And tea colours according to its temperament, under the right conditions. You have it in a glass or earthenware mug or a cup made out of china. One tea-bag per sorrowful person. And tea that can be programmed to be light or heavy, for you and you alone. A tea-pot meant that there are two at least, two for joy. I was to get my grandpa’s fountain pen as a becoming gift. But I never set out for that adventure. It became to unbecoming. My own adventure turned out to be quite different.

And come to think of it – my lousy reverie for a holiday longing to see mountains – I want to sit atop not to watch the sunrise and listen to eagles. I don’t want to see the sun sprouting through the lavender loam of the horizon like a desperate seed. I want to hear the darkness of a night’s way on that mountaintop. How do mountains sleep anyway? Was it not Said that they would sing when one of Them sang. He had heard the mountains singing with him. I do not think they will sing to me.

But it’s worth a shot. Some run through two. Others mount the same one over and over again and measure that as reaching the summit of happiness. I spoke that day about a song that speaks about miles and miles of mountains and one asking for the sea. And she keeps saying that volcanoes melt her down. I remembered what I had written about volcanoes. I talked about them now, my first lesson which was not free for them anymore, about them being mountains having a sea of fire in them; that how seas begin from valleys which are cradled by mountains. How mountains have been Called pegs that hold us all, together. And then the Pen stopped writing and that ‘when’ is Marked when mountains would neither sing, nor sit, nor stand. They would simply float as random rocks that stray about some other black-holes.

And so I remember the poor underground man, the ‘anti-hero.’ He was so cool. He was so grateful that he had his ennui. He wished for the world to go to hell so that he could have his tea. Bet that tea was not made out of a lonely tea-bag stacked with others awaiting their slot-machine fate. And he was alone, trust me. And I think I said something about sitting in my burrow and sweeping. And it was thought of as a typo. What thought came from that king of infinite space, bounded in a nutshell, quintessence of dust he calls it? Yet he was the one who picked out Yorick’s skull and said, ‘The skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once… a fellow of infinite jest...to what base uses we may return.’ And to that his Samwise says, ‘’twere to consider too curiously to consider so.’ And another had already said that he can show you fear in a handful of dust.

Even though there is no mountain – which (eventually) Must crumble to dust –
there is no teapot, nor any fountain pen, my only fear is not to be a loser, a loser Big Time. I can imagine my mountaintop, perfect perforated stars, a deep violety night sky, a blue earthenware mug of tea, and a Samwise with me, and a Light that no shadow can touch, but I wish not for the dust that might have to be tossed aside like colourless ash. Too light, too cheap, too paltry.

I turn so pale now, a whiter shade of pale. And I have taught them about the invisible man. An albino who was interested in the problems of light, and he eventually discovered how to be invisible completely as he was a shadow in college anyway. And I explained all that by saying that when light darkens, it eventually becomes transparent. And how many random particles of dust roam around black-holes.

6:103. I love that one. I once wrote it in a million places I think. La tudrikuhu alabsaru wahuwa yudriku alabsara wahuwa allateefu alkhabeeru. No vision can grasp Him, but His Grasp is over all vision. One needs to blink twice to see in the dark. Two eyes, blinking twice. Latif comes from the word lutf, to have subtlety. Hence the word, ‘latifah’ – to sift out the sensibility of the joke (cracked by Yorick?) with a subtlety. And mix THAT subtle etiquette to Grasp everything with being Aware all-ways. It can see Through you, whether you hide in a mountain, a teapot or a fountain pen. It can See through you. Even if you’re transparent. Even if you’re lost in a black-hole. Even if you’re blind.

I am reminded of my friend and father, Jake.

And as another has said, on his blindness, ‘those also serve, who only stand and wait.’

Works Not Cited

Al Qur’an

Genesis

Hamlet, the play by Shakespeare

Jennings, randomly

LOTR, the movie, by Tolkien and Peter Jackson

Notes from Underground, the novel, by Dostoevsky

On His Blindness, the poem, by Milton

Rhythm of My Heart, the song, by Rod Stewart

Volcano, the song, by Damien Rice

Wasteland (the), the poem, by Eliot