"I don’t know them any more!"

The reality sieves through my pensive mesh of loneliness. For sometime it would roam on my mindscape, looking up and putting its hands together for an ugly clap to pull my feet downwards. Carpe Diem! It evokes embarrassment in me, a kind of abashment which scolds the lack of self-abnegation. To drink a day to the lees without leaving a dreg would sounds like moments circumscribed within one’s own vicinity of interests and nothing else. And where are the other “ME-s”? Wonderful are the people who can do it. People who are selfless even to a small extend, to sacrifice their interests, to outflow, to be for others, to live for them, to be unconcerned what one to oneself is. To feel salvation by others’ smiling faces. It’s simply noble!  

Predictability! There is secureness in it. Calmness and certainty. For me it was always wearisome. People unpredictable propels a kind of excitement. I long for them. A wilderness that can give you space for guessing and re-guessing only to be fooled and surprised. “Family…” is so tender, their eyes make you haste away your rotten longings, like a bird combing back its ruffled feathers. It’s the only place for which I can leave the “carpe diem” to starve and wilt. There are laughs, hugs and affections bestowed in plenty from all sides. Love and regards mellifluously sung. But somewhere it’s so "Puritan". There is suffocation brimming, “throbbing waiting”, “I shall be rush out as I am” (Never thought that I would fall in love with Eliot’s Waste Land. Tiresias came with me at several reads. But then Love is unpredictable isn’t it?) Close those windows or my soul may fly out!  

Loneliness- it rustles behind the curtain waiting to be pulled back its silken fabric, to be viewed and acknowledged. Loneliness- Sssshhh…hold your tongue and sit still- I know you long to be stroked, cared, nursed and respected. You grow despicable because you’re always orphaned at the beginning of your existence. I would come to you when sleep buries all. Come along. Together we can interpret the ambiguities of silence- Silence which builds frontiers before us- silence chopped off and detached from us- silence embraced and melted with in us- silence immaculately pleasing. Come along. We shall rush out as we are. I long for my feet to be steeped in wet sand, waves to swish over my skin, trailing back with its white froth. The blackened moon is shifting its place in the blue infinity. We can tilt our heads and see the stars emerged and sprinkled in shapes awaiting to be sort out. I have got my tears- evapourating the bleeding soul. Hold my hand; we can build castles in this shore, only to be tampered by some sporting wind. Do you hear those words thundering? "As flies to the wanton boys are we to the Gods, they kill us for their sport!" What’s our little love in this galaxy? You cannot pluck the stars and collect it on your basket, can you? Still hope rejuvenates the desires. Do you see those worms emptying their belly to get fed on us? Let’s gaze at each other and have a straight smile, to be sanctified before they shame us on our graves!

Words once written seem to loosen their feel from the heart, packing up their aroma and taste, they look back with a blunt stare and leave me without waving goodbyes. They go away as quietly as a scribbled paper drifting towards someone’s doorstep, like a fading whistle in an empty street……..And then…"I don’t know them any more!”

And why do we meet such people?

Sometimes I feel that my life is just a flash back, that I am out there in that future with these memories twirling me back to this space, that I have already known you! Do you remember that cold night? We were sitting outside, my toes pressed in the soft grass, fingers twitching against its coldness; rifting water drops in between the green blades. I was narrating Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona. You said you adored that man with that thick black frame, his raw talent and egotism. You said you have fascination for someone “different”, just because they are “different”. Our families’ subdued noise of laughter, loosened conversations and undulating arguments after the hangover of a typical friendly dinner oozing out from the house just felt like an uninteresting movie playing in the background. We didn’t see the stars. We didn’t see the moon. The breeze was not emotional enough to move the leaves. You told me to narrate the story in every detail, that you love detailing so much. You said I am a good story teller. I said you are a good listener. We complimented each other. So special to each other. Vivacious smiles, laughter, wonder, never pausing for what to say next, never disrupted by silence. Words slipping, stretching themselves, and slithering out of our mouths, it rolled and sparked and ablazed the air around us. It’s as if I have watched that movie in a lonely feverish afternoon, lying in my couch only to narrate it to you. I shook your hand and doubted if you were something illusionary. You said how you enjoy non-entities and abstractions. I said how I long to concretize those abstractions. You said you won’t usually put the lights on until the sun completely sinks into the ocean because you want the last of the rays to be fallen on your floor. You said you loved gloomy tree tops with their distant fragile looking branches and dreamt of painting one with a naked woman lying on it, with her flowing frizzy hair tightly entangled with the top boughs. There will be tinctures of orange, grey and blue, colors spilled and smeared in profusion in the sky, with some whiteness of the paper eying out. You talked about your crush with Vermeer and his interior lightning and Girl with the Pearl Earring. It was all too much for me to take in together. I told you to gulp down your words since it’s snatching away all that I want to say.

Why do we meet such people? Like two similar fishes colliding in an upsurging wave, being grabbed by an unknown hand, to be out in the air, amused, wriggled, only to dive backward to swim their own ways.  

I used to draw only blood dripping bird wings, broken glass pieces and barren trees when I was small. What did you draw when you were small? Did you have too much colours, vibrant and variegated? Do you have some bright shades with you so that I can mix it with my dark ones? Do you have silence? Do you have sorrow? My sorrow left my body, to make me “drab and destitute” and lurks somewhere in the dark, just to be back when you leave me. My silence lost its path, dejected, crestfallen and weeping; it’s no longer “a silence”.  I didn’t want to play hide and seek because the moments you are in hiding would be the longest ones to me. I didn’t want to seek because I would hurt something by my “intentional indifference” to the things hidden by intentions. My heart would get lacerated. I have to pretend that it’s not my heart at all. And it’s hard to pretend that something is not mine when it’s undeniably and pathetically mine, mine and only mine!

There is an idea of Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gave, and you can shake my hand and feel the flesh gripping yours and may be even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable…I simply am not there.

Distractions

Everything in the room looked dislocated and chaotic due to my days of negligence. Dust to be wiped off, things to be replaced and trashes to be thrown out. When was the last time I had stuck something on my walls? There are no more hangings, faces and childish sketches to décor my fantasies and distract the solidities. Stop searching for the colours, certain combinations won’t work out! Roots and Shadows was sitting precariously on a pile of other junks with its frayed edges brownish and shabby. “Mini” stepped into my memory somedays back, at the day before her marriage, my cousin sister’s. The bride was taking in that air of acceptance just like any other girl, persistently smiling smiling smiling until her cheeks getting that dirty tweak. She seemed to have plunged herself into that image of Mini in these pages. “Behind the façade of romanticism, sentiment, and tradition, what was marriage after all, but two people brought together after cold blooded bargaining to meet, mate and reproduce so that generation might continue”. I don’t know how the jewels, garish bangles and flashy dhuppattas becomes the center of focus, excitement and sole sensation for a girl to make over the dry dry agreements and conditions behind it.  “It was the marriage that mattered not the man.” It was the marriage that mattered! For her? “We like our women not to think”. We would probably wish for a fresh delicate blossom, delicately looking, ever sustaining that delicacy, seldom swayed with all its delicateness, indelicate to wither its beauty so soon. And it’s not so difficult to prune and domesticate even the wildest ones which have the tradition and legacy of submissiveness in their gene. I wish all blossoms had some thorns in their very petals;)

 I have my leaking nose and aching throat with their seasonal conspiracy with each other motivated by the windy rain being battered right over my face. I should divert my attention to some willing distractions to avoid the pain. I chose The Boy in Striped Pyjamas to content me enough. The midnight quietness across the hall was shuffled and waggled by the boys’ slow pitch exchanges between the thorny fence. “They smell worse when they burn, don’t they? They smell worse when they burn don’t they? They smell…” One line glued to one end of my conscience, swallowing the subsequent scenes. I have this occasional premonition of being in that moment just before when you are going to get burnt alive! Alive with so many others packed together, getting nauseated by their sweat, being claustrophobic, hungry for a bit of air. A fear added to man's primal fear of snake, height and darkness. I promised myself to stop the watch right before Bruno finally getting burnt with the boy in striped pyjamas. The mother’s wailing would call for other distractions to appease myself. I didn't keep my promise. Hence this distraction of wrestling with the keyboard to stack out some thoughts, helter- skelter, like clothes spread out in “drying-combination” to get some sunlight! I really don't know why am I posting this. I got used to posting so much that not to post something is a distraction. Now Pardon me for this deliberate distraction here:)

"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant!"

The private lady had “selected her own society”, closed her “valves”, and peeped through the lattice at the strange faces, unmoved like a stone. It’s Emily Dickinson. The most peculiar woman. An eccentric being of “finest secrets”. Was she arrogantly sure of the durability of her art even while having a word with her sister to annihilate them all? I wonder how so much of that reclusion hasn’t hampered her insight. I am so comfortable with her except the fact that the rope of "death" recurrently squeezes her lines. Our reservations nullify each other with a laxity which gives enough spaces for the words alone to hang in the air. And I would have get caught for stealing away all her purposefully shuffled manuscripts crammed in her drawers if I was allowed into her privacy. I fell in love with you the moment I heard you saying "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant!"

 My soul gets wet, my soul gets burnt when I am with him. It's Neruda. Teach me your language in that green ink. I heave sighs and sighs and pine and pine for that piquancy of unrequited love, loss, passion and cravings. Have you been a woman at somewhere at sometime? You urge me to transform myself into a man who wants to entwine with several women and uncover all their furtiveness. Such a gentle torture, so rudely polite.You seem like an alien descended here, first to objectify and then to subjectify and then again to objectify this “love”. You inflict so much of pain in me that I would remain freakish and insatiable all my life. I wish I would have never met you. Tell all the Truth but tell it slant!

My Hamlet is waiting out there with his pale forehead and “leaden eye despair”. I have left him with his contempt for “incestuous sheets” and “pernicious women”.  How would I pacify his melancholy? You are too young and too old. Come out of your shell and don’t argue that “I could be bound in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space”. You and I think too much. I have your future with me. I feel like a God, helpless to inform you of it. I suffer with you. I am delaying myself so that you won't take my face in your arms and condemn “God has given you one face and you make yourself another”. It's not meant to be uttered like that.Tell all the Truth but tell it slant! 

I know you have that secret wish never to see my face again since it will demolish all the unpleasantness we had the last time we met. It may bring back all the dusted love. But “what I wouldn’t do to see your face again”? You made me apprehend that love is not that easy to find, that deception will wag its tail every time I search for something more tender, more pristine. Purity should not be demanded beyond a limit. It no longer exist in its nudest form. Have a look at me now so that I would get one more chance to make you laugh when I stumble and fall and bleed. I would doubt the pleasure behind that pricking joy. Aren’t you sad? Tell all the truth but tell it slant. Lest I may not survive!

There is so much beauty in you...

The mundane indolent air is wafting across the open window. Why the night  reminds me of day as some distant past? So distant that only streaks of some moments were lived in a day. All the other bits like a blurred picture, mute and shapeless, faint splashes visible in some nooks of the canvas. Does a procrastinated smothered event waiting at the other end of the bridge, to be unfurled? 

I lay in my bed with an imagined tiredness. There is no sorrow, no love, no desire- like my body reluctantly dragged in here from the day -only some thoughts, thoughts, thoughts- mixed and dimmed -so much of clatter coming out of my memory satchel. How the memories scream like an abandoned child at the end of a day- wooden benches-resounding classroom walls- deviating talks. It passes like it never happened- the perceptions. Thousands of it! Perceptions! Few registered ,lot indifferent. 

She said she wants to go long walks with me, to hold my hands, to lock her fingers with mine, to soak herself up in our talks, to count the waves, to fly kites, to get wet in the rain, hot coffee, films and window shopping.  She said she wants to take me in her palm, like a bluish butterfly grappled in between, to enclose me in a translucent glass so that I won’t slip out of her clutch! “Sounds so filmy as usual. You fictionalize too much”. She looked away with her beaming smile.  There is so much love and beauty in her.  Love which injures me, beauty which scares me. It contrasts with my distortions and contradictions. Leave me. Let me wallow in this filth, let me wallow in my relentless guesses and infatuations. This plainness dwindles my narcissism.

I wonder what he thinks in his long lonely drives back and forth. There will be city lights, horns and buzzing crowd. Do you hear the songs dad? Or do you retrospect?  Do you retreat into that fidgeting child of yours…my little toes darting towards you, pestering you to yield to my puerile longings?  We would have played with that silence in between our seats if I were beside you. Have you had a glimpse of me in my mom’s eyes even when I was unborn? Because there is so much beauty in your vision which stretches so long and so incisive.  The spangles of its glare injure me. Leave me. Let me wallow in this filth so that I would be a feeble ray in this darkness rather than be something grotesque in that spot light.

I thought I stopped playing with my shadows sometime back. But I am not. Not yet. There is so much beauty in you which makes me toss my mirror away and merge with you...but you are always one step ahead...;)

That's How He Redefined It!

It's the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge - Albert Einstein 

Chilled evening rain with its patter sneaking in my ears, scattering the audio bits of Wuthering Heights. My ears spiced up by the voice of Juliet Stevenson with the intonations and stress patterns flaring up the weight of the words, the weight of the semantics, the weight of the literariness! The language lab window across my chair was ajar allowing the short whispers of breeze to horn in. But I could hear, conjure up, feel, the white husky whispers of the scorching dew fall to which the benumbed "fixed" Heathcliff must have remained unmoved, leaning against the old ash tree, growing ferocious by Catherine's death news - savagely howling - chapter sixteen- I repeat it till my tongue stiffens - Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living;...I CANNOT live without my life! I CANNOT live without my soul!


He was on his chair, up the small platform at the far end of the lab completely enwrapped in some book, most probably some science-fiction, his favourite genre. "Do not rely only on film adaptations. Images and visual impact disperse the essence of linguistic aspects, it will only help you to know the story". Where as the audio is a different experience, you can savour the enticing charm of the syntax, evincing the raw beauty of the dialogues, the fairness of the narration... Yes he is right. How can he be ever wrong in here! Many evenings I have spent here, in this lab, the "Beyond the syllabus Program" as he named it. An initiative in which he was the sole sustainer from its very commencement to the close. A good student always goes "beyond the syllabus", new pastures waiting to be grazed! Language lovers from all departments came. Some appreciated it and highly benefited from it. Some doubted its use (madly in love with ignorance!). Some became "regular users", some "occasional visitors". He never compelled anyone. Compulsion was a displeasing word in his "word collection". It was completely voluntary. It was for the pupils who seek improvement, who have the zest for knowledge, for refinement, who have the genuine likeness for this subject, not for the ones- the girls who see it as a pretty option before entering into the marriage market. Numerous world class audio lectures, audio books, a plethora of knowledge, of information, an audio treat, a literary feast! He was incredible for me. Charismatic! The passion he has for teaching! The clarity and depth of his knowledge! The focused lectures ("talks" to be precise than "lectures"), focused yet vast- one hour- a journey from age to age- from Romantic to Victorian -right back to Elizabethan- sliding down to Medieval. Spontaneous sly puns embedded in satire, sarcasm, yet tender! "Knavish speeches which sleep in foolish ears"! And the Audio Clubs! How can I ever forget those Friday afternoons in my life! How he could elicit the rapture of language learning by songs! Took an idea, a theme- subtle ideas which usually fail to poke our attention...related it to a bunch of songs- then it to the realities around us. Vocabulary building! Another venture. Taught us that words have stories to tell, the "etymology" which otherwise would have bored us. 


I would go on pages and pages on his activities. He showed me how much a teacher can do! For me it became a path for "discovering" myself. He was never an influence. The aura of inspiration he has formed cannot be encompassed or be confined to an "influence". He showed us the lands to toil in it, made us understand how fertile it is, made us greedy for its fruition, how the saltiness of sweat in our brows would taste! And when he "retired" the very word would have shriveled and felt the shame, it would have wanted to drown itself somewhere for ever from the dictionary. Retirement? For him? Busier than ever before with his "extra readings" (as he calls it) and social activities. Inventing and contributing efficient methods of language learning for the dumb and deaf. What's more noble than that? A true teacher, who disliked to be photographed, who abhorred the showy and the braggarts...!


It is said that the best teacher is the one who can inspire. And when I copy pasted that Einstein quote at the beginning I have done it with such a gratification and blessed feeling. I am sure there would be a teacher who must have swept your feet off in every one of your lives. A teacher who illuminated some corner of our soul, leaving a part of them, ever enkindling our growing sensibilities. Who have "awakened joy in learning". And what we have towards them is not mere admiration and respect. The word "gratitude" can bear no corruption to a limit. Let's remember them and be grateful to them with all its purity and faithfulness in this corrupt world!  

അനാഥമായൊരു മുറിഞ്ഞ വാക്ക്...

സോഫമേല്‍ ചാരിക്കിടന്നു 

നൂറ്റാണ്ടുകള്‍ പഴക്കമില്ലാത്ത 

ഒരുപുത്തന്‍ വാക്ക് സ്വപ്നം കണ്ടു 

അപ്പോഴുണ്ടു വിദൂരതയില്‍ നിന്നെന്നപോലെ 

ഒരു വാക്കിന്റെ നേര്‍ത്ത ഗന്ധം 

നാസികയില്‍ കൊണ്ടു

ഉറക്കച്ചടവോടെ ഞാന്‍ എണീറ്റു പുറത്തുവന്നു 

മുറ്റത്തൊരു വാക്ക് ജനിച്ചുകിടക്കുന്നു 

അലസമായി ഞാനതുകൈവെള്ളയില്‍ പൊതിഞ്ഞെടുത്തു 

രഹസ്യമായി 

അകത്തു മേശമേല്‍ കൊണ്ടുപോയി കുത്തിനിര്‍ത്തി 

അര്‍ഥം തിരഞ്ഞുപിടിച്ചു തിരിച്ചുവന്നപ്പോള്‍ 

രണ്ടക്ഷരങ്ങള്‍ കളവുപോയി 

മുറിഞ്ഞ വാക്ക് ....മുറിഞ്ഞ അര്‍ഥം!

ബാക്കിവച്ച വാക്കിനെ തിരുകിക്കയറ്റാനായി

ഞാനൊരു വരി മെനഞ്ഞെടുത്തു

വരിക്കുള്ളില്‍ വാക്ക് ഞെരുങ്ങിയിരുന്നു ഞരങ്ങി 

വരിക്കു വാക്കിനോട് പ്രണയം തോന്നിയില്ല 

വാക്കിനു വരിയോടും... 

മുറിഞ്ഞ വാക്കിനെ വെര്‍പെടുത്തിയാലും

വരി പൂര്‍ണമായിരുന്നു, അര്‍ദ്ധപൂരിതമായിരുന്നു   

നിഷ്ഫലതയോര്‍ത്തു കരഞ്ഞുമടുത്ത വാക്ക് 

മുറിഞ്ഞ ശരീരത്തോടെ വേച്ച് വേച്ച് 

വരിയില്‍നിന്നുമിറങ്ങി നടന്നു 

അനാഥമായി....മൂകമായി.... 

അര്‍ഥം പകര്‍ന്നുനല്‍കാനായി...

അര്‍ദ്ധമില്ലാത്തൊരു വരിതേടി

ആരോ എഴുതിയുപേക്ഷിച്ചുപോയ ഒരുവരിതേടി...!!

Unfathomably Simple

I initially didn't want this one to be projected onto this screen...I did't want to spray the grey melancholic spots to the other hearts- a destruction like by virus- a "string of nucleic acid with attitude"- bouncing my head like a ball-springing up and down...from sympathy to sorrow...from sympathy to empathy...but I couldn't deceive my heart so long...couldn't hold that grief from being articulated. 

 She always put on a smiling foolish face infront of me...silently embarrassingly grinning at my snobbish remarks on her lack of sophistry in taste and intelligence. For me she was just "silly and simple"...the "silly" in this pair of adjective was larger and bolder in font to my view than the "simple"...It would be more proper to say that I actually remained callous to her "simplicity"...in fact to anything "simple". Her "missing you" and "need you beside me" text messages were just another set of cliches for me added to other soulless pretentious friendship messages with which I daily let my inbox to be filled with. And so my outbox and her inbox were equally empty. And then there were silences in between. Silences to which I brutally remained impervious and added to her wounds over wounds. 

Things became tragic lately. A physically and mentally decaying beloved is something terrible. "I never imagined that he would become like this...almost like a caged animal...", as she hardly finished her words I gruffly intruded with my scoldings over the phone for her "uncivilized metaphor"...but she stuttered and stammered at the other end in between my short pause..."but it is like that...exactly like that...worse than animal...my dad...my hero...now in a lonely room...just existing...with no memory...no taste ...no desires...just a diseased body...simply existing...unaware of his own existence". As she bursted out in tears I groped for words with a pain in my throat tightening my nerves ...I was in no way eloquent in consolations! With what philosophy would I console her for philosophies are now like open eyed corpses just like fate, apathetic to an excruciating human life. All that she demanded was some kindness from me...costless kindness of words and understanding...atleast a calm listening. As I flied from sympathy to empathy holding the phone tightly gripped in between my sweating fist I couldn't see those grey spots in the white walls of my room for hot tears swelled my sight. As I closed my eyes there were only the bigger red red spots taunting at my coldness and reservations, screaming for a reparation. If it was something from a sentimental  melodramatic movie I would have dissected this "empathy" and related its cause to "mirror neurons" and "soft-wired brain" proved by empathetic psychoanalysis. But here there was only "pain" at those moments...pain and nothing else..."simply" pain...so simple...just like her! I was aware that the simple was the unfathomable...the simple was the complex...but never felt it so simply...so unfathomably!

The Versatile Blogger Award - My Picks!

Here I am to finish my duty of passing the Versatile Blogger Award which I have received  from Anand to the blogs of my choice as per my last post. So these are my picks!

• To Pygmalion : She is this one strong intelligent woman who writes so candidly on the personal and the social. She does not write for the sake of writing and when she writes it is with much depth and sincerity. I truly admire her boldness and candor!
• To Mohammad Israr for Misterio Vida : He writes on various issues -social, scientific and the cultural. Some of his posts are hilarious too having high social relevance. A blend of creativity and knowledge!
• To Zeba  for Zebra Talk : It was only recently that I happened to join her blog. Her brilliant way of sharing her reading experiences make me read her posts over and over. Amazing writer with much profundity!
• To Siddhartha Joshi for Lost and Found : I absolutely love his fiction works with subtlest details which almost take us completely into the ambiance of the story and the feelings of the characters. Brilliant writer!                                               

My beloved  KP, Saru and Lady Fiona whom I completely adore have shared this award with me from Anand. (They would have been my first picks without a second thought if it was otherwise). So I extend my hearty congratulations to them!


Congratulations to the winners and I would be extremely glad if they accept my humble compliment and now it's their turn to pass it to the blogs of their choice! Make it a good experience! Thank you so much!

My First Blog Award - Most Delighted!

I am extremely delighted and honoured to receive this wonderful blog award "The versatile Blogger". I am expressing my sincere gratitude to you Anand for this sweet appreciation and it is highly encouraging for a beginner like me. I am a person who value appreciations to the core and this was an appreciation worth of immense appreciation from his part! Thank you so much for all those who have visited my blog and left in their valuable feed-backs. Special thanks to my regular readers whose comments and suggestions are really a cause for my improvement and inspiration:-) I would like to give a special thanks to Pygmalion and Krishna Priya who have been there from the very beginning to amaze me by their critical, intellectual and honest support:-)

As per the rules of this Blog Award I am obliged to list seven things about me. So here they are;

1) I am a hard core romanticist who follow the "heart" rather than the "head".

2) A freedom lover who is not so particular about "conditions" and "prescribed rules" in life.

3) Uncertainty and confusion rule my mind and hence a deep thinker filled with doubts and questions marks.

4) A receptive person who is open to new ideas and perspectives.

5) I appreciate anything and everything which appeals to me as having substance and beauty in life.

6) I am a very secular human being untainted by religious or any kind of ugly prejudices.

7) Writing for me is a pleasure and a need and a catharsis.

Special note: I perfectly remember creating this blog by getting a small spark of idea from Halim Sha's blog whom I met on facebook. I never thought of blogging before and is thankful to him who had unknowingly became a cause for this and I eventually became interested in blogs (I never forget people and the places from where I start my journey- point wanted to be add to the list!).


Once again thanks a lot! I will be soon passing this award to the most deserving ones!

   

The Latter in the 'Either-Or'

"You want to say something?" No nothing at all! The beauty of her silence has a blushing comfort on him. She conspired with her head before each exchange with him. Planned words pleased him more since he often couldn't digest or rather understand her spontaneity. How artfully she learnt to abandon her heart with her fist sweating and clenching in the darkness. Words growled inside her...throbbing and scolding her hibernating longings. She feared whether the fluttering of her veiled wings would  reach his ears and betray her smiles and silence. Her mask was a slowly built up one out of numerous silences like this, suspending her wings in vain exertions for a sudden flight. She couldn't entreat him to fly with her. No that was not possible. What would he do in such flights for her flights were always unplanned and instinctual, filled with "commas" and "question marks"?? He hated commas and question marks...he loved only "exclamations and full-stops"! "Brackets" vexed him like hell. How earnestly she grasped all his likes and dislikes and gave him the warm shock of mystery at times when her repression overflowed! How dexterously she kept him in ignorance of the fact that what he found and believed as a big beautiful straight exclamation-"she!"- herself was a clump of commas and question marks! There were only two choices...either she should fly single or she should walk double. She couldn't dare to do the former for she was damn sure that she'll find only the white white blankness when she folds back her wings after the return. She couldn't afford for a "neither nor" too...it would be dreadful for her...so she picked the latter in the "either-or". The "either-or" mocked her too often that she had to defend her choice. Picked choices should not show off its distortions. Its distortions should be concealed anyway by any self argumentation. So she found out a meek solution for the growling moaning words inside her...throbbing and scolding her hibernating longings..."words in print"! Words in print are mute! Fictionalize it! It will become more mute to him! The commas, question marks and brackets hardly visible to him. And fly in "the viewless wings of poesy!"


I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant!
                                                              -Alan Greenspan

Hamartia

How is it like to die after an encounter with each moment to be reborn in the next? The dark circles of the incomplete thoughts, memories and experiences loom over the sunken eyes as if to leap over the coming moment to extinguish its luster. The deep cuts on the old trunk are easily noted than the freshly emerging mushy leaves. The newborn leaves are lost among the dusty large stark ones...these old ones whine and whine, loudly rustling in the wind to be noticed and the new tenuous soft rhythm of the fresh leaves with the silken sways never reaches the blunt ears. And if I could listen with a much more heedfulness, I may hear that delicate noise or may be even capture the sound of the roots which was ever unheard and unattended. 


From wake to sleep (never know the exact boundary) the mind strolls through illusions...sometimes engrossed in the thrilling overturns in a narration, the goosebumps by the vomited imagination hung before me from an eloquent mind, sometimes the arresting all pervasive fluctuations in a song...perverse priorities and nonsensical persuasions. Nonsense excites my senses and the brazen irrationality can never be beaten down for there is a natural prone to it. Is it my hamartia? Existentialism and its niceties have a strong hand on my scudding bunch of "ideas scraps". "The greatness of man is that none can save him". I long to discern the true distinct face of my hamartia before the attack of a disillusionment. I don't know whether a disillusionment should be taken positively or negatively. May be there will not be a disillusionment and may be my hamartia is not that grave and drastic to be the cause of an unaware disaster. I wish to be a pebble in a sprightful stream so that I get constantly washed off by the running water...washed and washed...dying each moment  never knowing what it is to be like burning in the hot fumes of the past. I like to tag the "fuming past" as "hamartia" of the collective suffering human conscience. (I think I am more vulnerable to absurdities now a days...sometimes it soothes me much more than logicality).  

Never Getting Cloyed!

When I was in my high school I happened to get a Jiddu Krishnamurty book Freedom from the Known from my school library ("Wisdom Literature" is something that grudges to leave its hold on me even more than the fictional category). I was hooked by this lean, radiant, intense looking man with his sublime prose both in its texture and substance. All of them were his speech collections and the fact that he never professed a System or never asserted a Guru like role attracted me more. And I found some of his published "Notebooks" (which he didn't write it for publication but for his own sake) in which he recorded his daily sensitive observations and perceptions with photographic details and extreme incisiveness. For a long period of time I used to read it over and over. My father use to pinch my ears with a stern askance "Is it something that much 'incomprehensible' to read this same thing over and over?" He is of the opinion that one should be able to try different genres and different authors at the same time since it can trigger a deeper understanding with a better perspective. The "same thing' will stagnate one's mental growth preventing a wider acquaintance with other great pieces unless this "same thing" is something of utmost profundity (later he was convinced a bit that it's profound). I have considered his suggestion strongly and it has done me much good I guess if I exclude the fact that the stride from one author to another always takes much time like in the case of Krishnamurty Notebooks. I never get cloyed reading the same thing repeatedly until some new thing strike my taste by "serendipity". For the past few days I have been thinking over this matter and was trying to analyse why the hell am I doing that? This reading and relishing the same books again and again and again which I have read a couple of times before- watching the same movies which swept my feet off- hearing the same songs etc, when I have thousands of other books left in this world to be perused, movies to be watched for a new experience and songs to be heard for a new whiff? 

And then my mind got clicked in a thought -that's exactly what "good and classy" art is supposed to do-to make us go for it again and again. And that's why some of it fall under the "Canon" and widely acclaimed as "classics" or "great"! Some works have a matchless depth and myriad dimensions which leave space for further explorations. It even beats the callousness or fatigue by "familiarization". Art has a power to "defamiliarize" the ordinary and give things a new colouring  which we haven't noticed yet (as it is said in Lyrical Ballads) - Take the famous illustrative example of the painting Sunflower by Vincent van Gogh, which make us feel that we are seeing a sunflower for the first time in our life. But doesn't this defamiliarization after the first brush of familiarization get dimmed? The answer is often no. From each new read a distinct perspective may evolve, a new beauty which we have skipped or missed, a new meaning which was concealed somewhere at the first read. Take music. For instance a Karine Polwart song- I prefer to hear her exquisite pieces whenever I am in leisure since I can sense in them a perfect confluence of intellect, compassion and thawing music rendered with a peculiar tenderness cutting through us with her deep voice. She takes soft and unobserved themes and allow it to flourish in her songs. Each time I hear it a new feel gets added to it. Some music will unleash its beauty and its subtleties only after repeated hearings just like any other art. In Krishnamurty's Notebooks he described with a unique clarity the same trees, mountains, sky and birds and flowers but those seemed like different trees and flowers at each recording since he gave it a look from a fresh perception and state of conscience. So  I think my speculation prompts me to think that it's not a bad deal never getting cloyed with the same thing, if along with it I can be more vulnerable to get into new ventures rather than waiting my taste to get collide with a new thing by serendipity.


Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety. Other women cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry, where most she satisfies.


                                                                        

Cryptic Creativity

I do often stare at my little pieces of knitted words which seem to me as some sort of stutters and stammers emerged from my crisscrossed thought-wires and wonder...Is it something which directly got sprouted from my mind as "leaves on trees"? Or at where did the thought coalesce with the artistry? Where do all these perceived elements stash themselves, later to be spurted at some moment's urging? At times the effusion is so eloquent and at other times I do tap my fingers with a sweaty uneasiness as if the words have some ugly attitude, like we ourselves are "whiplashed between an arrogant over estimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves”. (Time to question the creativity).The legendary creative minds wrote of their enchanting and enigmatic process which brim our wonderment. Wordsworth said of it in a poem itself;

 For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasures fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Coleridge's Kubla Khan occurred while he was in an opium dream...the hangover of the drug lighted his "territory" imagination, transcending the creative confines. But I like to share something incredible and fascinating which I have read recently of the creative inspiration of the American poet Ruth Stone. Ruth Stone lived in rural Virginia and while she use to work at her fields she may sometimes feel a poem from a far off distance, and the poem would be like running towards her like a "thunderous train of air"(as it is described) and she would "run like hell", as fast as she can- she would be chased by the poem - she would run and run to get into her house- grope for a paper and pen- so that she can seize the poem and put it to the page as it would passes through her! And sometimes (the most fascinating part) she would delay in getting the paper and alas, the poem would air through her and at that very moment she would quickly grab a pen and grab the poem too by its "tail' not allowing it to be missed and would pull it back wards and transcribe it onto the page and since it's from "tail to head", the last word will be the first! What an amazing and ineffable feeling that would be!...Imagine you to be hunted by a poem which comes like a "thunderous train of air" and finally getting possessed by it and there it is!-stanza one, two, three -and imagine it to be backwards like she said in the otherwise case! And there was a third possibility too which she had said...sometimes she may totally miss the poem and she would watch it going away from her after the possession, leaving it for another poet! Generous and consoling thought! So if an idea gets stuck in your guts, stuffed and rotted, with all its unwillingness to turn up, then don't get upset...console yourself that someone somewhere may spell that idea more beautifully than you may do. And you yourself may read it later somewhere by someone and may savour it and get lured by it than you may "if it were your own"!

Crestfallen Reveries

Where do that colored beads take me?

The beads of constellating reveries

Rolling and glistering

They swell my sight

Trance?

Oblivion?

Languid?

In “Lethe”?

Am I the bleak shades in the buried vision of a painter?

Hankering to be splashed onto the canvas?

To concretize the envisioned images.

Am I the movements?

The grace in a dancing figure?

Am I dust?

Clay in the fist of a sculptor?

To be fused and churned

To be pressed and wrought

To be an enticing Galatea?

Estrange me from the air

 Design and fabricate!

"Do I wake or Sleep?"

Slip of Fingers!

I live in my fingers

The fingers which deck my haughty eyes

The fingers which tickle my ears,

With the turning of the forbidden keys

I dart out to the forbidden space

To be ravished and chiseled by the rain

My anklets unquiet 

Drenched and dripped 

With the pattering piercing downfall

When the convulsions of the intoxication wither

I dexterously elude the repercussions

And brush off the silent judgments

With a foxy tag of "slip of fingers!"

I no longer drape the nudity of my ragged mind

I no longer pull the cloak over me

To curb the blizzard of brickbats 

No longer shrivels my charmed naivety,

By the envy of the bliss of a crawling infant

For I am cauterized by the burning embers

Embers of the forlorn past!

And as these words are born

I would like you to tag this 

 As slip of mind

Wedded with slip of fingers!

Independent India vs. Independent Women

You can tell the condition of a nation by looking at the status of its women.
- Jawaharlal Nehru

“Independence”…the word itself sounds so soothing…it resonates a special vibration that excites and blooms a victorious smile on our beloved nation in its 65^th year of Independence and it’s high time we should reanalyze how far we have dwelled deep on to the meaning of that amazing word beyond its surface glamour especially in concern with the status of women. Of course the changes that swept across this “marginalized” sect have been tremendous…changes changes and changes in every facet to make them no more marginalized.  Many of the established biases have been reestablished erasing the gender typing…lifting the “Emotional Sentimental Fragile Dependent Submissive” race from the clutches of “Aggressive Brave Autocrat Dominant Independent” patriarchal culture. But does the society ceased to be patriarchal??? Oh don’t label this question as some bloody feminism… it's too far from it…How much that boasted of  transformation occurred in each of us…both males and females? Can the question be placed in a more psychological level apart from the structural changes or reforms in the political arena… but from the “individual” who is the very bed-rock of all establishments? Has the stain of gender- stratification got washed off impeccably from our collective conscience?  Autocratic minds are a disgrace to the supposedly democratic country. Centuries ago revolutionary Shelly asked the world “Can man be free if woman be a slave?” …Can a Nation be really free if woman is not independent in her very essential psyche?

Definitions...

I am already defined by the externals where I myself fumble for definitions to define me. I have often thought of definitions as a string of scrupulously formed “construct” which acts as an ideal to where you are instructed to trek so that you can fit into the images carved by these definitions (I am talking about definitions of abstract aspects of life, not the precise scientific definitions). Blend in the images or you are a great misfit, a disdained menace for that perfect balance. I have read somewhere that we have a proclivity for image formations…an image about a friend, an image about parents, siblings… an image wrought out by all our ugly biases and preoccupations about every single human soul we meet and they in turn will have there own images…and it’s with these images that we have relationship and not with the persons as they are. A bond between images…you relate to images and images only…and that’s why we crave for a perfect image…an image according to the “definition”…and in the midst of the interior scrambling to get into that image the quintessence of you will be in vapours. I don’t know how far that idea parallels itself to reality…but yes there are “definitions” and “images” sculptured into the conscience.
 
 Definitions become a jest when I try to define even the preliminaries of  what makes the "me" since definitions demand minimalism in words for definitions are not "explanations"...well the "me" may be a comfortably formed gist of all the integrated "images" of  the "me" reflected from the "past me". My friend once defined me as someone between a Nora (a submissive woman protagonist in Ibsen's play Doll's House) and an Antigone (the brave rebellious self willed girl of the Sophoclean Greek Tragedy). What she meant was that she always think of me as someone who's neither a typical Nora nor an Antigone but a complex mixture of both the traits. We usually try to associate people with a particular character that we have gone through in fictions. Identifying myself with the characters is a sound technique since characters can be defined with a certain objectivity and there by there may be a chance of sudden epiphany like effect of your realization of "self" with the characters. But I feel even characters cannot be defined...characters are not destitute of complexities and complexities need explications, not definitions...and people are beyond definitions just like abstract elements. But why do we often fail to acknowledge that they are not just images which we have formed in our petty minds with all our wretched preconceptions, but entities something beyond that images?... entities with a turbulent ocean bearing in their hearts..."each human being is a legend" as some writer said...with all their beauty, cruelty, love, aversions, hurts and complexes (we are not saints of-course) I use to feel that there is a wave untouched and unrecognized and unappreciated in each oceanic soul and appreciations have only a faded flush when we forget to appreciate what really should be appreciated. Images limit people and limit the relations chaining it in superficiality !

Insatiable Sensations...

I plucked out my sensation beyond sensation
And gave it you...
"Where's the root?" you asked
Well...the root was steeped in mud
It could have dirtied your hands
"But I wish to see the roots..."
It's from the roots the sensation has grown
The fair palpability of  fragrance
Feel it!
Inch by inch... 

It will take you to the root!

Do you see that??

It's winding all over you...

The roots of overwhelming sentience

Wait....be gentle...

You are in a bubble...crystal clear...

Chuck out the skeptic thorns

"Willing suspension of disbelief!"
You are in a bubble...

Revel in it...

Before its fragility fractures it

Before the wind betrays it

Revel in it!

And then slowly you get it...

The sensation beyond sensation

Comprehension beyond comprehension

Which I often talk about.

A thought which waited like ages

Soared up... 

A retaliation after endless subjugation!

The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but be in the lake...to luxuriate in the sensation of water. I do not work the lake out...it’s an experience beyond thought...poetry soothes and embolden the soul to accept the mystery!  - Keats

                                                                     

Reflections...

The smile on the face is sprawled all over the mirror...the reflection on the mirror makes the real face unreal...not the face alone...even the deep running roots of the mind seem to be an unreal reflection...Is reflection something which turns the 'real' into 'unreal'? Or is it something which sketches the reality of reality?


Unreality is like an incessant voice...and is it only a feeling that silence is a cessation of voice? In the dazzling flamboyance of voice the fathomless grief of silence is melted and merged into the darkness...the blackened voice which is inextricable from the brewing darkness! What if the silence seeks for a form and frame of its own? Silence has often become a mere interval...an interval between two voices...a small vacuity between two words...a bleak shadow of voice. Does the shadow have more magnitude than the solid reality? Does the silence have more depth than voice? Is it an absurdity of  unreality which is disguised itself as reality to measure the two immeasurable distinctive elements? Mind is inclined to reflections...it lives in reflections...loses itself in reflections. The reflected smile on the mirror has more beauty...or the reflection convinces so. The reality is fallen and shattered into an irrevocable state...the silence heaves sighs amidst the roaring voice....!


PS: This a translation of my last post. Specially for my friend who asked for it. It's a loose translation since I fear that a strict translation may consume the beauty of words as well as beauty of meanings intended.

പ്രതിഫലനങ്ങള്‍

മുഖത്തിന്റെ പുഞ്ചിരി കണ്ണാടിയില്‍ ചിതറിക്കിടക്കുന്നു...മുഖത്തിന്റെ പ്രതിഫലനം യഥാര്‍ത്ഥ മുഖത്തെ അയഥാര്‍ത്ഥമാക്കുന്നു. മുഖം മാത്രമല്ല മനസ്സിന്റെ വേരുകള്‍ പോലും അയഥാര്‍ത്ഥമായൊരു പ്രതിഫലനമാണെന്ന് തോന്നിപ്പോകുന്നു. യഥാര്‍ത്ഥ്യത്തെ അയഥാര്‍ത്ഥമാക്കുന്നതാണോ പ്രതിഫലനം? അതോ യാഥാര്‍ത്ഥ്യത്തിന്റെ യാഥാര്‍ത്ഥ്യത്തെ  വരച്ചുകാട്ടുന്നതോ? 

യാഥാര്‍ത്ഥ്യം നിലയ്ക്കാത്ത ശബ്ദം പോലെയാണ്. മൌനം ശബ്ദത്തിന്റെ നിലച്ചിലാണെന്നത് വെറും തോന്നലാണോ? ശബ്ദത്തിന്റെ തിളക്കത്തില്‍ മൌനത്തിന്റെ അഴല്‍ ഇരുട്ടില്‍ അലിഞ്ഞു പോകുന്നു. ഇരുട്ടില്‍ നിന്നും വെര്‍പെടുത്താനകാത്ത കറുത്ത മൌനം. മൌനം മൌനത്തിന്റെതായ രൂപം തിരഞ്ഞാല്‍ ? മൌനം എപ്പോഴും ഒരു ഇടവേള മാത്രമായിപ്പോകുന്നു. രണ്ടു ശബ്ദങ്ങല്‍ക്കിടയിലെ ഒരു ഇടവേള...രണ്ടു വാക്കുകള്‍ക്കിടയിലെ കൊച്ചു ശൂന്യത...ശബ്ദത്തിന്റെ നിഴല്‍ ...നിഴലുകള്‍ക്ക്  യാഥാര്‍ത്ഥ്യത്തെക്കാള്‍ വ്യാപ്തിയും മൌനത്തിനു ശബ്ദത്തേക്കാള്‍ ആഴവുമുണ്ടോ? അളക്കാനകാത്ത രണ്ടു ഭിന്നതകളെ അളക്കാന്‍ ശ്രമിക്കുന്നത് യാഥാര്‍ത്ഥമെന്ന് സ്വയം ധരിക്കുന്ന അയാഥാര്‍ത്ഥ്യത്തിന്റെ  വിഡ്ഢിത്തം ? മനസ്സ് പ്രതിഫലനങ്ങളില്‍ ചാരിനില്‍ക്കുന്നു...പ്രതിഫലനങ്ങളില്‍ ജീവിക്കുന്നു...പ്രതിഫലനങ്ങളില്‍ സ്വയം നഷ്ട്ടപ്പെടുന്നു. കണ്ണാടിയില്‍ ചിതറിക്കിടക്കുന്ന പുഞ്ചിരിക്ക് കൂടുതല്‍ സൗന്ദര്യം...പ്രതിഫലനങ്ങള്‍ അങ്ങനെ വിശ്വസിപ്പിക്കുന്നു...പെറുക്കിയെടുത്തു തിരികെ വയ്ക്കാന്‍ കഴിയാതെ ഉടഞ്ഞു ചിതറിപ്പോയ    യാഥാര്‍ത്ഥ്യം...ശബ്ദത്തിന്റെ ഗര്‍ജനങ്ങളില്‍ സ്വയം നിശ്വാസമടക്കുന്ന മൌനം........