For 12 months, I will devote the first 12 minutes & 12 seconds of every day to writing-through Bhanu's 12 questions. You know the ones.
Below you’ll find the first tract. If you would like to receive the next tract, please send $5 via Venmo.
¡Gracias totales!
<<BEGIN HERE>>
7 June 2025. 9AM.
Yesterday, just after meditating in front of my altar with Kālī standing on Śiva’s head, an orange female cardinal died instantly when she flew into the glass window. It marked a many ending. Today, I return to Bhanu’s 12 questions, which are not twelve and are unanswered during many lifetimes. (Did Bhanu purposefully write impossible - not rhetorical - interrogatives?) Is she asking in regard to “these times” of experts who provide all the answers. Let me not feel so entitled. Can I answer? Who is the rightful owner of the answers - is it Alexander or The Oracle? I seem to have placed myself in someone else’s past (twice). How unfeelable.
ONE
Two questions. Why two?
If I switch the question from second person to first? Who am I? Then who am I and whom do I love? When who is interrogated, is I left out? Who is the I in question? Who does who love? Does I love who? Does whomever love who I is? Is this split or leisure?
I sit here. In a room of things I’ve placed about in order to construct a space I understand. A ragamala harmonium; rectangles of silk in six colors; my brother’s painting, FRAGILE in black, bold type.
That’s 12 minutes, 12 seconds.
TWO
From which where did I come? How did I arrive? Would this be redundant or clarifying? First person. When will where begin? Where is from? When is from? How is arrive? How does arrive? That was unanswered quickly.
THREE
How will I begin? I see I’ve made these questions all about me. You has vanished and I is sad.
If I may: How will one begin? How would one begin? Questions are webs.These questions are rivers. The answers cannot be contained in the answers. These answers express the questions, expressed as questions, without grammar - no tense, no punctuation. What would might the answers? Might the answers be paintings?
FOUR
How will I live now? A timeless four. How I live now (present tense).
FIVE
Cannot begin here… handwritten version at this right-angle, lined end.
I’ll wait.
(Whether by enjambment, end-stopped or split rhyme, I did not want to end that way. And I hate that I’ve said this.)
FIVE (clear my throat)
What is the shape of your body? What made that readjustment possible? I had not intended... I am sure that page, as with that ending, began before that page-producing tree was felled, even before the seed of the tree was fertilized, before the first leaf saw its first sun. That FIVE was created for this FIVE and before this and before question five and somewhere there are tunnels and the subterraneans.
Is that true? Before this form and precisely for this answer? Before the cold and fear in Colorado, before the blogs… before all those snows… the answer the question contains, the question is the vessel.
Deux
Are you asking about moi?
SIX
This is the third 12 minutes, 12 seconds.
My mother gave birth to six babies and the mothers of my parents each gave birth to six babies. Is there something six-times-suffering about motherhood? Let me ask another way: Is six insufferable? Is… well… is SIX impregnated with suffering? I only ask because of mother… and the mothers… and the six…
Would the question change if father were involved? Who is responsible for the suffering of your father? My father… six… no, that’s not right… but… their fathers, yes, six.
Ouch. Flesh pulled along the gravel. I could not complete the sentence. Question number six.
SEVEN
Venus. Earth. Sun. Saturn. Mars. Mercury. Moon. Jupiter. What do you remember about Earth? You remember the globe as if out there, as you point to the stars. You remember when the “eye” sees Venus but that’s not you remembering “out there.”
I remember Earth is me.
EIGHT
What are the consequences of silence?
NINE
What is dismemberment? (The essential question.)
The 4th 12 minutes, 12 seconds.
I am extremely nauseous. Deep breaths. Are those tears in my throat, stinging? Is it possible for rage to be that small, so small it fits there where it stings? What’s wrong?
TEN
Describe a fearless morning: Describe a fear-free wakening.
I’ve turned my back to face the wall.
ELEVEN
Preparation for death. Is.
TWELVE
The message. This unspoken articulation. Do wrong answers have consequences? 8-12 are disembodied.
Silence. Dismemberment. Fear. Death. Invisibility.
I have seven minutes left.
8. What are the consequences of silence? There are no consequences. We continue notwithstanding. As the Hṛṣīkeśa mango seedling existed notwithstanding the asphalt; notwithstanding the street demolition and its tools; notwithstanding the variety of rapports toward a mango seedling. And yet behold the seedling, coiled like a spring and placed atop a pile of dirt by the gentleness of one of those thin men wielding the tool sharp enough to destroy concrete.
Mangifera indica waited there for me following the glorious ballet of its arrival, having survived everything and everything for that moment, our encounter. The moment just before this a man on a moped introduced himself and quickly spoke directly to me, sincerely: Go home! (Did he know he would be written here?) As I stood in front of the dirt, the seedling’s leaves at eye level, I tilted my head to see the man who has paused to look back at me. Smiling, he motioned for me to take. I motioned back to confirm permission. Did I deserve to take? Did I misunderstand? The worker seemed as happy to give as I was to receive this treasure. Had he seen this many times before? Are mango seedlings, with nearly broken backs from making a way through the sidewalk, a dime a dozen in his world? What could possibly be the meaning of it all? The answer, unspoken, returns to fertilize… so long before this contemplation and also so entirely because of it.
I rushed with my tree to my quarters, threw open the shutters, put the roots in water, and placed the container at the sun-filled window; its mango leaves drawing out, unfolding like an octopus around the steel bars; mango leaves like-eying, as if meaning to look out across the courtyard as a prisoner might do just before dying and I thought about love. I thought I loved it enough to protect it, that I could help it grow. I thought about its future. I contemplated which of my friends had land best-served to support this young stem?
But the monkey, the rhesus macaque, the monkey I saw coming up the alinda with calculated exactness no randomness would explain… the diurnal rhesus macaque who loves fruit. The matrilineal individual, gesturing with agaze of oneness, it seemed, toward me. I stood nearly thoughtlessly and moved inside, closing the doors but not the shutters.
At home on the sill, with one precise and perfect reach through the bars, this monkey - making the rules - grabbed the mango seedling and bit the seed in two and bit the rooted idea of I twice: at the juicy seed and then at its branch just below the leaves, eliminating any chance for survival. The monkey, one of the “first-in-space” beau monde, of the “many breakthroughs in antiretroviral medication research” nobility, of the A-list “first cloned primate” (none of whom have survived to adulthood), my distant kinfolk, this monkey, this monkey here, tossed the mango carcass then hurled itself into the trees to vanish behind a trembling verdure reflecting the conflicting stories, frenzied in my body, head to toe, a vexed reflection of the gooey death at my feet and all.
3,600 seconds from where I write today, in front of that window where the female cardinal died the other day, 2,500 of my primate family, with their prehension kinematics and harmonic arches, have no chance to steal a mango seed from a tourist but perhaps one of them will raise a hand.
The consequences of silence? Isn’t silence its own consequence?
9. Tell me what you know about dismemberment?
The question seems so harsh, too harsh to contemplate. (What a luxury.) The question dismembers some synapses and tethers my thinking to immobility, paralysis, weight. Might I reorganize the words… an effort to avoid stuttering, dismembering articulation… I know something about it but I’ll have to leave it for another day.
10. The fear-free awakening…
Someone I once met, takes long baths each night before bed.
11. Preparations for death:
Create an avatar of my young self to sell my writings as if they were written now.
12. Would the answer also be conditional?
