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"!