Video

Excerpt from Chapter 1.

The gods belong to what is.

—MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Heraclitus Seminar

Being- In-Between

It was right before the old woman became possessed. I was looking at the ground, fascinated by the play of light and shadow on the dance floor created by the sun coming through the woven palm- leaf roof covering the open pavilion. We had been up all night wake keeping, and I was feeling pretty tired. Now late afternoon, I found myself starting to doze but not quite going to sleep, in a kind of twilight existence, when a type of synesthesia set in, and the play of light and shadow started to take on a musical dimension. As this modality thinned, it simultaneously spread out and grew deeper. I was somehow between the light and the shadow, the sound of the drum and the rattle, between the call of the priest and the response of those who were gathered. Everything was on the move, including the ground, and I was suspended in between the shadows, the sounds, the smells, the heat, the wind. And this was precisely when the old woman leaped out of her chair, transposed into the sublime countenance of a dancing god.