Prageeta Sharma

With video & sound art by Alan Sondheim

On Our Way to Seattle

“One of the Strongest Fears is the Fear of the Unknown”

            —after Krishnamurti

We are on our way to Seattle to enjoy the verdant landscape you love 

and that you may be treated by a new oncologist. 

I had been fretting about the trip but it’s really a fear of an indescribable future

one that I can’t paint in terms of scenery or markers.

Yet in this following of fear around too many corners, 

which as Krishnamurti says about fear:

“We are apt to make an abstraction of fear, 

that is to make an idea of fear. But we never listen, apparently,

to the voice of fear that is telling its story.”

So I will listen to its voice: I will listen during our long drive with two animals

curled in the backseat: one in a small crate, the other finally trying to nurture her. 

The dog noses the cat with a sweetness.

I will pay attention to their sighs and voices. 

I will take in images of the road’s character as it drowns in a brown plain. 

We forgot your Canon camera and will have to rely

upon our phones to document the cool air-conditioned feeling

against the hot exterior of I-90 roads and the portraits we discover.

I must notice the days are precious and roads are scant with cars,

a solace of steady days. 

Do not sink to the fear of unknowns.

I must think like Rilke, be only isolated in thought, in

writing. Look up. Take in the sensorial, even in stink.

Evaluate the world right now: There is a chemical smell followed by dung

scenting the car from the fields. The knowns are these bright mountains 

and an easy highway: the knowns can be insistent as odors. 

Our worries are for the cows who look uncomfortably crowded 

not for the free reign we believed in because it makes us all feel sad and packaged.

Look today at fear as an abstraction. It is an idea of the road, not murky,

not the “actual state of fear” as it will only be introspective.

You are staying in the complex abject that takes you into

moments that are too frightened, too enclosed

to understand that all “consciousness is partial.”