Everything the Light Touches

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It was two weeks after the ruined Magift tournament plot, he was trying to nag Leona into getting up and into class while he was fast asleep in the gardens. It was like any other day, but then a rustle came from behind and the prefect came in, wadding through the bushes, with their eyes first cast to the ground looking around trying to find something until they spotted Ruggie and Leona. Instead of the playful voice of his subordinate, a different voice came out of the speaker. Your voice. And, damn, did you sound annoyed. WHAT!! You’re not allowing us to take a break?! Haven’t a mage as great as I-mmph!” You clamp one hand over Grim’s mouth and use your other one to scratch under the cat-monster’s chin to help him calm down. Everything The Light Touches is a fascinating film, it takes a simple premise; an Elvis impersonator, and reveals the incredible number of layers, and stories, to the man beneath. It is sympathetic and understanding and doesn’t shy away from the difficulties of Juan’s life, and the problems that he has encountered. Not many documentarians can face head-on what a subject offers, and delve further, but Evans has. And by keeping the film simple, and undertaking its making primarily alone, Evans has kept the intention of the film clear and precise. Because of this, Juan Lozano, through Evans’ eyes, becomes much more than a man, he becomes a hero.

Everything the Light Touches brings together, with startling and playful novelty, people and places that seem, at first, removed from each other in time and place. Yet all is resonance, we discover; all is connection. Janice Pariat: I always enjoyed it as a subject in school until I was forced, by a particularly ridiculous education system, to choose between “arts” and “science” and had to leave it behind in choosing the humanities. This is precisely what the novel, and perhaps all my writing, rails against. The need to fix and categorise, to splinter, to divide. I don’t think I returned to botany in any meaningful way until I began my research for Everything the Light Touches, a decade or more after I was done with school. But I returned in a new way, a Goethean way, that re-taught me the subject, that made me look at it with new eyes. I also started spending a lot more time in the outdoors, in forests and open spaces, following rivers and chasing waterfalls. I tended a small garden. Kept some house plants alive. Noticed more. Began conversations with green living beings, and learned, in all this, to be a humble observer, note-taker, storyteller. Kunzum: You said at the book’s launch that the first character you came up with was Evelyn—10 years ago. What made you take up her story a decade later?

Crowley moves towards the door as if to passive-aggressively say ‘OK, meeting over, bye!’ but pauses mid step at Grim’s growl. With a smooth swoop the masked man glides out of his chair and to the large arched windows that look over the campus. Outside several students cheer and run around, feeling free from any academic worries for a week and almost appearing drunk on the pleasant spring temperatures. and ur not staying w any of us sooooooo. its gotta be someone u really like if ur staying more than one night w him If I had to sum the book up in four words, it would be "Four people, four journeys." Shai lost her job at an NGO in Delhi, returned home to Shillong, and journeyed to a remote village to be with the nanny who brought her up. Evelyn is a student of Botany at Cambridge who leaves Edwardian England to journey to India in search of an almost mythical tree. Goethe is a philosopher, poet and playwriter who leaves his native Germany to spend time in Italy where he expounds on this theory that plants cannot be categorised, labelled and named, because they are everchanging. Linnaeus is the famous scientist about whom it was said, "God creates, Linnaeus classifies". Each of them is on a journey uniquely their own, and yet whether they know it or not, their journeys are interlinked. Wh- No. Ruggie, you bastard.” You harshly whisper to the boy next to you, while he just giggles at your glare.

I would, if I knew where everything was. So, it looks like I will be here for a while. Sorry for the inconvenience… your majesty .” OH, my dearest prefect,” Crowley stops his rhythmic fingers, as if now noticing that you were in his office, even though he was the one who opened the door to you, “how in-tune you are to a soul’s needs to know that I am in distress!” Reading this book was like taking time off to wander into a forest and spend a few days taking in all that nature has to offer. You just stirred your drink. Should I tell him? He wouldn’t go around telling everyone, especially if he thinks he could find a way to lord it over my head… Well, it should be alright if one person knows, he could know a few tips on surviving a few nights alone on campus.We see Goethe himself as a character in this novel, we see his own metamorphosis, his journey to Rome and he refinding himself there. Especially when he visits the streets of Rome with a woman he had fallen in love with, she is a commoner, not even aware of his achievements, for her the Pantheon is the place near which she buys curd. It is through her that he starts seeing everything arround him differently. He also arrives at his inspiration for the metamorphosis of plants that he wrote later. The author has a beautiful prose style which manages to be accessible and easy to read whilst at the same time being poetic . Everything the Light Touches is published by HarperCollins. For more on Goethean science see: tinyurl.com/goethean-science You lean against the outside wall of Mr. S’s, and slide down, seating yourself on a patch of grass and hiding away behind the staircase leading up into the shop. This shouldn’t be so hard. Just say 'Hey! Super last minute here, but anyone got a couch Grim and I can surf on during break?'

In a similar way Evelyn who is living in a different century is undergoing herself a metamorphosis. She has been an outlier always, pursuing botany in a male dominant scientific world in 18th century Britain. She embarks on a journey to India in search of a tree which seems to contain all the trees in itself. She is fascinated by British explorers, and imagines herself traveling these remote worlds they visit. Her disillusionment with the conventional Botanical need to separate and study the plants analytically, she feels that this has removed the wonder that she used to feel for plants. The wonder that she shared with her grandmother as they journeyed through forests when she was young. Its in Goethe that she finds her inspiration, he was interested in the study of the whole over the parts. His metamorphosis was a poets challenge to the scientific view of that century. Hey hey hey! Where are we supposed to stay until then? I’m a growing Master Mage, I need plenty of room to stretch my legs at!” Grim spats out as he tries to climb your shoulder. You wince a bit at the claws that dig into the skin under your shirt, and try to hold onto Grim while he looks at the man that has now pushed you at the door’s threshold. You haven’t noticed anything too out of the ordinary at your dorm, well nothing stranger than what usually comes with a haunted house. Just the regular ectoplasm cleaning and drafts that sound like someone screaming. Fairly normal.

Pariat calls her novel “a deeply political work”. The story brings alive the landscape of Meghalaya, its sacred forests, verdant hills, caves and streams, where the threat of extractivism looms large upon Indigenous communities. The book carries a strong motif of connecting with the larger world through movement and travel, what one of the characters calls “being more in the world”. It poignantly depicts the Nongiaid, a fictional nomadic tribe, and their disappearance after they are forced by the state to settle down. “The Nongiaid formed as one of these very important elem-ents that speaks very directly to this tussle between fixity and fluidity. They are the unsettled, wayward, wild, unruly and untamed that the Linnaean way of seeing is constantly trying to suppress, isolate, manipulate, tame, get rid of, and eliminate. This shows up in the larger context of our nation because you cannot speak of the Northeast, you cannot set a story there, no matter how wonderfully, beautifully, unnecessarily frivolous, without in some way alluding to this. That it is a region that is sacrificed so immensely to the larger nation-building project.” So we auditioned a bunch of skies and were able to, in VR, just spin them around until we found the sky that we liked, and we then imitated that when we did the shot. Then, we would change the sky even when we did reverses or other angles, much like you would if you were shooting it. In a real shoot, you might wait for a different time of day or shoot part of the scene, a sunset compared to sunrise, because that might have given you a little bit more of a glow where a glow would not have been if you were to do a dead reverse on sunrise. All of it still has to look like we didn’t shoot that much, i.e., that it looks like it’s a normal film version of a cheat and not a computer you can do anything you want cheat. I don’t usually like short stories but this book is more than a collection of individual stories ,the author somehow manages to draw out the similarities and differences in a particularly successful apparently effortless way .Thos is not easy to do ,I found myself pondering coincidences and links to other stories whilst I read . I discovered Dr. Pariat is currently reading Funeral Nights by Kynpham Singh Nongkynrih, another Khasi writer. The book raises questions on the role of indigenous wisdom and science in looking at Nature. It forces us to think about our propensity to categorise things, and reminds us that while we can be classified, each of us is also unique and constantly growing and changing. We start looking at development differently, and wonder if the need of the country is more important or the lives and lifestyles of the people. We are forced to reflect on the purpose of life, and when and whether we should let others go.

Besides, You think to yourself, if I can’t withstand it I know Ace and Deuce would find some way to get me out of there. Your shoulders relax, you didn’t even realize how tense you were, but remembering how your idiots dropped everything to try and rescue you and Grim from being kidnapped by Scarabia last winter break made you feel better even if only for a moment. As much as I loved the writing, I confess I didn’t quite understand the purpose of the characters’ stories. For me, it made more sense as short stories where the reader revisits each character. Or maybe that’s how it was meant to be. And yet, there were moments when I was utterly captivated by the poetic nuances. It was like a picture being drawn before my eyes – word by word.Evelyn, travels from Britain on a ship to India, hoping to find a secret in the sacred Himalayan foothills, only to be given an impossible proposition. nothing too exciting. going to someone else’s place for a few nights. itll be nice to get off campus for a while Wise, funny, touching, wide-ranging, deep-delving; whip-smart dialogue and graceful, paced sentences, thousands upon thousands of them. Written by a novelist with the eye of a poet, and a poet with the narrative powers of a novelist, this is a book that needed to be written, that tells true things, and is entirely its own being.”—Robert Macfarlane, author of The Lost Words and Underland