raised by a family of poor Muslim weavers. Kabir, a follower
in his very early life of the Vaishnava saint Ramananda,
never abandoned worldly life, living rather as householder
and mystic, tradesman and contemplative. Kabir was
illiterate, expressing his poems orally in vernacular Hindi,
enunciating a large body of work written down by two
of his disciples and passed on also through a wellestablished oral tradition.
The Kabir poem which inspires Clemente recites: "I eat
with truth, I sleep with truth, I sit with truth, I stand with
truth."
These words remind me, strangely, of the 138th Psalm:
O Lord, thou has searched me, and known me.
Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou
understandest my thought afar off.
Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art
acquainted with all my ways.
The references in both texts to sitting, standing and lying
down reverberate; they both seem, to paraphrase Henry
James in The Portrait of A Lady, to take the measure
of one's dwelling. The comparison of these two texts
in connection to Clemente is not as inapposite as it
might seem, even given the weight in his work of India
and Indian religion, for Clemente is an artist who seeks
wholeness through travel and living intimately with the
Other, sometimes bringing to bear elements, including
religious ones, of his own history. In other recent works,
from 2011, Clemente began more emphatically to use
HYLAND
