MANTRA MUKIM

Glitching

Chandrayan-2 still circles the moon, reaching once every week the precise traumatic point from where it dropped the lander on 6 September 2019. On the day the lander plummeted into the gravitational well alone, slowly glitching from within, unknown to the knots appearing on my hand as I tracked its descent with a desire like that of a postcard — words addressed to the bottom of the well, a surface that itself remains unbroken to be able to contain, to receive. Perhaps I had forgotten that language does not draw water without glitching first; it adores untimely visitors. An intimacy unknown to the sovereign watching the lander from Sriharikota, for whom a glitch is always a fall not a landing. Did he think landing was belonging? The lander was scheduled to land softly on the Moon surface at 20:23 UTC, soft not because if wanted to null all difference between itself and the crystallised feldspar, submerging itself in a vast sameness, but instead in this dream of landing softly the lander was to sneak around the various crevices of its host without sticking out, like a migratory egret landing on the caked skin of a buffalo. Landing softly in this circumstance, without breaking the skin of the Moon and without breaking its own skin, would mean being allowed into the land as land, tilling the soil with soil, not as contesting but as constellating desires. The prime landing site (PLS54) chosen for the Chandrayan-2 was at 70.90267°S 22.78110°E , 600 km from the south pole, a co-ordinate now trapped inside the machine’s algid mouth like one’s last word. On the high plain between the craters Manzinus C and Simpelius N. where now the lander’s debris spreads for kilometres, there are unmarked graves for every little organ that travelled as one from the edge of dusk, glistening with metals extracted from Dandkaranya. On a slow buffering telecast I see the lander abandon its axis and relinquish all contact. A ruin is a scaffold. Ruin is my hand without a world. Failure Analysis Committee blamed a software glitch in the lander that caused it to crash at a high velocity. Nothing moves, it seems, unless wounded. Glitch is a wound without an outside.

It owes us nothing.

Mantra Mukim is a poet and essayist and the incoming Marie Skłowdowska Curie fellow at UMR Héritage, Paris. His most recent works have appeared in 87 Press, SpamZine, Datableed, and Hotel.