I was standing in Milan’s great railway station and found that I wanted to become something else, a mythological bush or tree perhaps. There in that Milanese crowd, clutching my slippery suitcase, a man among thousands, one with an ache at the base of his skull, I saw that I needed to become Daphne. Ovidian Daphne. Formerly a thing of flesh and then a flowering thing. “Bring on the metamorphosis,” I thought. “Gods, help me for once!”
An old woman saw I was talking to myself and she gave me the stink eye. I smiled as if she was a beloved relative. They hate that, the stink eye people. She scurried off bobbing her head like a magpie.
“Oh bring on the disambiguation! Come on, Apollo!”
Standing in that middling and aggressive throng I knew that it would be better to be a laurel tree: a laurel with a soul inside it.
“Let us,” I said, “become vaguely Rabbincal about the matter rather than Greco-Roman.”
“My small metempsychosis, my wee soul wandering should be reversible like a good garment.”
The Rabbins called this “ibbur”—the belief that a soul can occupy a body temporarily, without passing through life and death.
“Alright,” I said. “Right here in this train station I am a laurel with a soul inside it.”
And though no one noticed I felt better.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 