The Comprehensible?

       I see that loneliness is not a quiet phenomenon. It is absolutely noisy and chaotic. The long lonely hours of my egotistic contemplations…Wait…are the words comprehensible? Many say it’s incomprehensible…hopelessly tangled with crowded images and strange feelings. May be. For it takes great effort to see things from another eye. To hear those sounds from another ear. To feel those thoughts from another mind. “To feel those thoughts”; it can be done only by the metaphysical? It’s almost impossible to be rational and emotional at the same time.

     The woman in me switches back and forth to being emotional and rational. At one time it pines for the beloved, for a small touch and the feel of that familiar breath. The other times it convinces and consoles the heart that being only emotional can bring stupidity and misery. That I should reread Donne’s Valediction Forbidding Mourning though I have taught the poem a few times in class. The poem forbids any lamentation from the beloved’s part since the man who has parted from her and the woman who is in waiting are like two legs of a compass. The very celebrated metaphor that any literary enthusiastic would always cherish and wonder. Like the fixed leg of a compass makes the outer leg draw the circle in its perfect way and would reach back the same destination, the trust, the love, and the strength of the bond would wonderfully preserve their everlasting compassion and intensity for each other.

     Longing in reality can be unromantic, miserable and a series of disturbing tantrums. Reality can be beautiful when it gets the consolation from these metaphors and valediction forbidding poems. I have always groped for beauty in reality when it starts to slowly sink into those monotonous moments. I have groped for lines, words, or may be at least the sound of those iambs. That Shakespearean rag of me comparing my beloved to a summer’s day or me imagining him sighing like a furnace as the young lover in him longs for this chaotic woman.

     I don’t know the words here are comprehensible or not. The tiredness in me has brought me on a low key where my hands shiver to dive deep and scare the perceiver, the non-existent reader, the echoing empty theatre. Whatever that is difficult has got its quality of being difficult through times of effort, keen attention and perseverance. Some may loathe it since it would challenge their comfort zones of being all “normal” and never wanting to sieve through and accept the challenge. Whatever that is easy is easily admired and applauded because it can be commercialized; call it popular, the taste of the mass, and the comprehensible sweet ticking sensation of “can be understood”. Some artists can play at both ends.  I can try to be the one.