[Plucked from a journal entry written in 2006. New York City.]

Some nights ago, traveling back from another night out in town, the train took me on the wrong direction. Changing tracks at an outer burrough stop, I listened to an animated young boy, who couldn’t have been older than 20,  talking to a stranger, who sat beside him, about his kids. When the train arrived, it took us mid-way through a tunnel beneath the river and stopped dead on its tracks for a good half hour. That was where, with no devise in mind, I let time slip through, bearing much irritation and impatience.

When the train started moving again, I finally hopped on the right number, taking me uptown.

And there they were.

Those deep dark passages that we never believe could ever store any history, always the black blank canvas through which the train zoomed past, were lit up by rows and rows of spotlights at this ungodly hour of the night.

Three incidents of the sublime were experienced.

The first was a feeling as if one is travelling through an amusement park ride, through a tunnel of love, the gaiety and exhiliration of seeing so many dazzling spotlights, whizzing and burning past the train window. Their ferocity was warm and intensity was enveloping. They bleed over everything, exploding into all corners in one pulsating and blinding light.

When this ended a few stops down the line, the tunnel dimmed into a hallowed passage, with yellow blubs scattered chaotically in random corners. As the train trundled by them, now at a slower speed, they turned into little flickering orbs, like gigantic fire flies drunk on the sewage olfactory. Or at times, something more bedazzling, but equally dangerous, like willow o’ wisps.

In that fleeting experience, you enter into a place where you can pretend that while the universe is infinite and incomprehensible, one’s place is always assured, one’s being always watched and understood. That  at the end of the line, you are accompanied by those unnameable witnesses (spirits, guardians, wraiths) that can attest to the richness and complexities of your passage. Even as words fail you later to evoke this lost feeling as it has failed me.

Finally, at another turn, the lights came up once more. But this time, squinting hard enough to see beyond the revealed stage, the bare structures that supported this colossus – another world emerged. Along these walls, the body of Atlas, are graffiti that seldom know light or need light.

Dark, raw, gritty. Primordial forms.

To think of another race labouring underneath the foothold of civilisation. To wonder how they felt and understood colour, because their palette range was wide-ranging. To imagine their poetry, the blueprints of their existence, could be so eloquently inscribed in a place bereft in most instances, of light.

What do they dream about? How do they think of lines, forms and colour? More importantly, what is a culture, that possibly knew more about sounds and touch compared to sight, like? More so, when we consider what a paradox it is that the traces of their dark history is impressed in a visual manifesto.

Maybe someday, someone will write their story into existence. But, how does one write about darkness? In the black womb, what was revealed in each passing moment, observed carefully enough, is something that, despite its brevity, makes a certain lasting impression.

It’s like that dream you never want to wake up from. The one that leaves a poisonous, treacherous yet beautiful mark, as you surface back to face another world, bringing back some silent knowledge, some quiet, unobtrusive hope that makes living possible.

(SS)