Free Incendiary Circumstances by Amitav Ghosh Page B

have become so commonplace as often to go unreported. They have become a part of the unseen foundations of our awareness, present but unnoticed, like the earth beneath a basement.
    The thickening crust of our awareness is both a sign and a reminder of our unwitting complicity in the evolution of violence: if that which mesmerized us yesterday ceases to interest us today, then it follows that the act which will next claim our attention will be even more horrific, even more resistant to yesterday's imagination, than the last. The horror of these acts is thus exactly calibrated to the indifference upon which they are inflicted. Their purpose is not warlike, in the sense of achieving specific ends through violence; their purpose is horror itself.
    In one of its aspects terror represents an epistemic violence, a
radical interruption in the procedures and protocols that give the world a semblance of comprehensibility. This is why it causes not just fear and anger but also long-lasting confusion and utterly disproportionate panic; it tears apart the stories through which individuals link their lives to a collective past and present. Everyday life would be impossible if we did not act upon certain assumptions about the future, near and distant—about the train we will catch tomorrow as well as the money we pay into our pensions. Not the least of the terror of a moment such as that of September 11 is that it reveals the future to be truly what it is: unknown, unpredictable, and utterly inscrutable. It is this epistemic upheaval that Michael Ondaatje and Agha Shahid Ali point to when they mourn the maps of our longings and our forty-day daydreams: the pure intuition of poetry had led them to an awareness of this loss long before the world awakened to the knowledge that "nothing will be the same again."
    On October 11, a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center,
The New Yorker
organized an evening of readings to raise money for the victims. I was one of those invited to read, and I chose to read two of Shahid's poems. Several of the other readers chose texts that hearkened back to the wars of the twentieth century: Winston Churchill on World War I; Remarque on the trenches of the western front; Auden on the declaration of war in September 1939. When it was my turn to read, I was struck by the sharpness of the contrast between Shahid's voice and those of the poets of the last century; by the vividness of emotion; by the almost palpable terror that comes of having looked into the obscurity of a time that will not permit itself to be mapped with the measures of the past. It was as though news of times to come had been carried to the capital of the world by a messenger from a half-forgotten hinterland. Time had turned on itself: the backward had preceded the advanced; the periphery had visited the present before the center; the "half-made" world had become the diviner of the fully formed.
    Yet the message itself was neither a presaging nor a prediction;
it lay merely in the acknowledgment of the loss of a map. But to be aware of the death of a teleology is not to know of what will take its place. The truth is that on the morning of September 11, I had nothing to say to my children that had not been said in Michael Ondaatje's poem "The Story":
    Â 
With all the swerves of history
I cannot imagine your future...
    Â 
I no longer guess a future.
And do not know how we end
nor where.
    Â 
Though I know a story about maps, for you.

"THE GHAT OF THE ONLY WORLD"
Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn 2003
    T HE FIRST TIME that Agha Shahid Ali spoke to me about his approaching death was on April 25, 2001. The conversation began routinely. I had telephoned to remind him that we had been invited to a friend's house for lunch and that I was going to come by his apartment to pick him up. Although he had been under treatment for cancer for some fourteen months, Shahid was still on his feet and perfectly lucid, except for occasional lapses of