The Taj Mahal, the eternal resting place of a dead princess, appears as a living body thanks to the crystals distributed among the marble. On this sunny day, how all these precious points of jade and turquoise from China, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and coral from Baghdad, malachite from Siberia sparkle! ... Dazzling, the stone beats as if proclaiming the resurrection of Mumtaz, "the chosen one." As if love emanated from death, eternal light in the pale fluorescent whiteness.
Adorable and wonderful Taj Mahal, "the crown of palaces"! All perfect works, like this pantheon, come a moment when they become deified. So great is the wisdom contained in these works of art, so unfathomable and immeasurable their geometrism, so full of grace, that they could well be considered as roundly finished as an evocation of divinity itself. The Taj Mahal surely proclaims it in its transparency, in its more than physical breathing and in its supernatural aura.
"As far as we know -Goethe writes somewhere in his prodigious Italian Journey-, ancient artists had, like Homer, a knowledge and understanding of nature as great as can be imagined (...) Just as the great creations of nature, those of men have arisen in accordance with true laws of natural order. All arbitrary and presumptuous things fall by their own inertia, and only the necessary and God remain."
The Taj Mahal is pure living matter, an organic architecture (like that of the great Gaudí). And it is so true because it has been built following the same laws of nature. But by human hands and minds. If those men were here nearby we should listen to them with devotion.
We do not remember their names, but we still admire them for their deeds. All those artisans, all those thousands of artisans carried the Taj Mahal within them. Our Gaudí also carried the dragon within him, symbolically speaking. All his collaborators, all the artisans who supported him, carried the dragon within them.
Today, however, at this stage of civilization, we note with sadness that techniques are no longer, as they once were, an applied art: techniques, by moving away from the hand, have become despiritualized. And it is as if the ancient link between the energy of will and tactile sensitivity had been lost.
Before the Taj Mahal –placed on the ground at the level of the bright red cinnamon trees– Goethe's theory of the "original phenomenon" is imposed on us as truth: "everything factual is already theory in itself. It is not necessary to look behind the phenomena: they themselves are already theory." So simply seeing them already becomes thinking them.
According to this belief, Goethe insists that, before a given phenomenon, all thought, or all judgment, must be suspended, so that a sensory apprehension of the meaning of concrete reality occurs, intuitively rather than rationally. Which is one and total at the same time, as Heraclitus already saw more than two thousand five hundred years ago.
The Taj Mahal is the evidence of the ungraspable. What makes its structure suggest a ship among four minarets resembling space rockets?
In its gardens drawn with a set square, we observe squirrels scurrying as if nervous about having lost paradise, and parakeets entering and leaving the dry trunks, marigolds and those strange bell-shaped flowers, of an intense blue.
We, the visitors who have come from afar, embody the mystery, here. They look at you, they touch you as if you were from another world: the world of the exuberance of matter. We are the presence of the unknown as much as this extraordinary levitation of stone can be for us. But since this is not a conventional round trip, we perceive that the Taj Mahal also belongs to us absolutely, because we no longer ask what it is worth but what it represents for us.
In the midday of the Indian city of Agra, on the banks of the Yamuna River, we surrender to the fascination of the small quadrangular kites in the contemplation of the fragile and unstable art in which invisible children entertain themselves...
We hear that kites can only be flown now that it is spring. In summer, the sun is so strong here that it is not advisable to look up.
We observe, then, the flying rags. In the same sky, the turtledoves circle and, when they stop, we hear their muffled and longing cooing.
We return to Delhi on the Jhelum Express (who knows from what distant lands it comes!) and the journey takes four hours, more than double the outbound trip. It is a sleeping train, with plastic curtains separating the compartments.
When the lights are already dimming, the sky is tinged with an indigotine blue. Until, lulled by the rattling, a dream assails me as if written by J.V. Foix: we find ourselves in the human thickets of a dimly lit Indian station. –"They don't know where they're going!, They don't know where they're going! –voices shout behind us. But we push forward, determined, as if we were certain that the path is up the stairs, to the other side of the tracks. The rags claim us as our own shroud. The bridge is metallic and at the very top there is a lampstand that casts a small light.