Page 11 - GALIET THE KING AND THE CORPSE: The Four Cardinal Corners and the Quest of the Blue Cloak, the Mask and the Sword IV GALIET THE KING AND THE CORPSE: The Four Cardinal Corners and the Quest of the Blue Cloak, The Mask and the Sword

Unlike absence, there are moments that linger in our memories, vast and vivid, as altisonant spicules booming with moontale, or implicit chic meters woven with manna, or milky hands holding the vermilion petals of the senescent sun at a perfect point in space and time, or the sublime longings for rainspark in the deserts at noontime, or feverish nectars tessellated with tales, riddles and rhymes. In the splendid tales of The King and The Corpse1 (where thorn bushes disappear), we are awed into a grandiose and memorable universe of philosophical impressions, stupors in marvel and in mystery, reverberating with the perennial riddles and dilemmas that have stunned and stung humankind since the beginnings of stars. To zoom in on this sequined mass, masterfully woven on 24 sub-tales of garland storytelling secreting synusias from Shiva, we discover, through our enraptured readings, the microcosmic woven with the macrocosmic, kingdoms and burning grounds, penumbras and the furies of dark, and riddles that mark the decipherings of wisdom as if deciphering larks. Perennial geometries such as the struggle among the three aspects of our beings and the conflicts between the forces of good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, virtue and vice, justice and injustice will be explored through Somadeva’s effective characterization, symbolism and setting by ruminating on these enchantments.
1 Tales of Ancient India. Trans. J.A.B. Van Buitenen. The King and the Corpse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.
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