Editorial
The light here in Bombay turning now, falling at an angle, elongated, preparing for winter, the season that passes most rapidly. In a life which has been spent in many geographies, there came a time when the one home became a refuge, a place where the changing light could be mapped, the turning seasons lived. “This,” you could say “is how the summer light retreats here.” Advent and return could be differently understood.
Almost Island goes back, after an unintended break, to the concerns of its opening issue, prose. If prose has become, to a great extent, a space for what is rational, most of the texts here defy that rationality. Others keep it in order to investigate the self's encounter with history, or use it to speak of the logic of dream. Prose is a great instrument, capacious. In childhood it was alive in tales told, myths, fables, folk stories. It expanded and contracted according to the teller. With writing, prose can be even more various, go further out with language.
“In writing poetry, one is always aided and even carried away by the rhythm of external things: for the lyric cadence is that of nature: of the waters, the wind, the night. But to write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythms of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral; there one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help, on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke