“I write endlessly in the register of prayer.”

I’m supposed to “review” your book, Emanations. How do I do this when pertinence only appears as a stain? I half-heartedly resist the temptation to take this line, on endless prayer, to be the key to your book—not without reference to where it appeared last, in Sisyphus’s Music Box, where you said it was a prayer with neither subject kneeling nor object knelt for, but a prayer suspended in the “hidden remains I intuit.” So I don’t take the first person personally, even when it taunts at the existence of a human self:

“I am bound because ignorance makes me sick I am bound because ignorance makes me sick I am bound because ignorance makes me sick”

Ignorance is sickening because it’s still bound to a paradigm of knowledge; it appears only relative to knowledge as its failure. But non-knowledge is a third term that baffles the paradigm, that steps away from the binary, that sits outside the duality of enlightenment and ignorance; the self that would draw that distinction is an illusory inheritance of Western metaphysics. Deliciously, yours is a lyric poetry where the speaker’s throne has always already been vacated. In that empty space there’s a shard of life that stutters itself into a tentative form, barely discernible from the formless: in the tired whirr of repetition, Beckett’s bouquet’s wilted. Good riddance to the bad subject—make room for the withdrawn, the retreated, the renunciatory trace:

“Near, like amber, a voice that is put away shackles itself to a figment.”

Distance is sexy, if sex is the parabolic intensification of nearness until you almost believe that touch has transpired. All the more sexy when it suggests warmth, whether in the colour of amber or in the rub of voice. Any voice will do, so long as it’s draped in the honey of having lost itself. Distance is not to be mistaken for abstraction: there’s flesh here, wreathed in restraint and half-light; the body that only flickers piecemeal into view is nonetheless undeparted. I relish the echo of who I imagine is your forebear: “On a table, in the empty room: here is no ptyx / Abolished bauble of sonorous uselessness.” But yet also, Mallarmé could never.

“In a room I am where you are not thinking.”

Prathna, do you feel society, or at least its undercurrents, pivoting toward the unknowable? We fumble for the divine, turn our own pockets out for mysticism’s last dregs. As a child of scientists, I thought rationalist empiricism had secured its place at the end of history and didn’t think twice. Then suddenly I felt droves of people abandoning the edifice of science, which promised truth—or at least freedom from illusion. If our moment in time calls for a restitution of cosmology’s importance, your poetics is the shadow side of a planet going retrograde. Yet the energy that drives your book from line to line is not mystical: it does not claim a first-hand experience of the divine. The last strains of intuition do not disclose meaning, but necessity:

“the price of pleasure I sold and gained stillness so I could live”

With what’s left of ourselves a staircase of tatters, we preserve our lives. We shuffle our drives to prioritize vital nourishment. You show us how the marketplace of renunciation is full of paradoxes: that we must sell in order to get back a sliver of life—enough to count for survival. I can’t shake the Zhuangzi line where he proclaims with deadly simplicity, “Knowledge is infinite. Life is finite. If we use our finite life to chase infinite knowledge, we run ourselves around until we run aground”:

“They say many things about the body Once it has exited The room or returns Unoccupied by thinking”

Reading Emanations is an exercise in the suspension of thinking, if thinking is the kind that reaches for understanding and so fills the room with its tireless seeking. I feel like so much of your language is at the threshold of Attachment, like every sentence has already packed its bags, like it has the determination to leave home and a sense of closure behind. Speaking in divergences, I have to show everyone this stanza because I love it and it makes me crave:

“It does not matter if I am flattened out for the wanton but not willing to be sold as allegory I am disorganized life the mending sear of reason
grasping for the breach”

Though pleasure as we know it has paid a heavy price, still it works itself through the cracks— through the subtlety of language, of sounds bouncing off each other, reason to breach, wanton to willing, of the contradictions of cauterization that know well the pains of healing. Since ancient times emanationism is the belief that from a primal Godhead radiates the energy of existence outward into the world we know as such. The human layer is at a far remove from that core of emanation: so fallen, we receive only the faintest rays. What does an emanation do when the classical image of God the hierarch is no longer at the head? When instead the source of power that makes waves for us to live by is the hard-won, hard-fought sense of wonderment at the world—and for re-enchantment to breach the surfaces of exhaustion?

“How often do I speak to you In a voice of what you call God or wonderments What will it take for you to know that it’s enough To wander into marvels”