Lemon Trees, Tears and Sorrows

However chaotic and distorted one’s perception is, the artist has to reassemble by his contemplation over the wounds. For a momentary salvation. For recuperation. For Consolation. It takes so much time in one’s life to lift the fog and discern the falsity of appearances. But it never ceases. The distorted vision never ceases as long as we are incapable of an unknown sainthood.

 As it’s always said an author is an isolated being. Detached. To comprehend the reality with vividness. The isolation is a choice. And the choice is for others and for oneself.

Lemon Tree. The movie is the story of struggle and defeat. The lemon tree grove- thick and fragrant- with the yellow fruit flourished- big yellow spots all over the field. The woman nourished and looked after the tree for five decades- the land and art she inherited from her father. Her emotional attachment and her courage to not let them go- to not let them be uprooted for the defense. The story is poignant. The woman is courageous- admirable- melancholic. Have I been in her place would I have struggled that long- to protect one’s own grove? Do I have the capacity to love and feel for the lemon trees with the intensity with which she feels? Sheer empathy will not give us a glimpse of her exact feelings. One has to experience in real in one’s own life with the given circumstances.

Circumstances. It would be such a curious an act to imagine people displaced in alien circumstances and how would they react, contribute, refute or accept. It would be curious to know how would they hold one human being despised and abandoned by the other. “What are you thinking? What have we done to each other?” Words somewhere from a thriller movie echo my thinking. Why should we destroy each other in possession with each other if possession is all that about it. If love only means one thing and should mean one for all.

Who can see you beyond your skin? To define you not by the loss or the preserve of your virginity, not to measure inch by inch the corporeal taints, not to see you as filth of another man. But to see beyond your smiles a silent suffering, shivering murmur and shocking nightmares. Who can judge the sanctity of your soul against the sanctity of your flesh and bones? There are nails sprouting to bleed my clenching fists when all the roaring definitions come back to my memories. Dallying along my solitary path. You could hug a tree and rub your tears on its rough bark and bruise your face. You could climb over it with your staggering wavering limbs all the way to the top, and hide somewhere among the branches, with such a quietness of an angelic grace or a demonic stealth (for both are undifferentiated in today’s world)  with only the wind among the leaves hissing on your ears, curbing the heart wrenching human sounds. H U M A N   S O U N D S. As heavy as an unadmitted guilt, all glittery and showy, with poison tucked in on each man’s sleeve and the polishing façade of truth so untrue.

My survival is my own effort. The more I am humiliated the more I find my worth. The more I am condemned in the name of some man made institution of relationships, the more I see its dishonesty, its futility, its fear of human weaknesses and how it struggles to ward off the ever threatening daring souls by malice and cowardice. For there is strength in sorrow. There is acceptance in sorrow. There is clarity and discernment of truth in sorrow. There is compassion in sorrow.     

It's for Its Own Sake!

 The day is empty. A typical Saturday idleness. I play with the pillows and try to hold on to one after another- Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Whitman or Poe, Sylvia Plath or Frost- anything which can mask this emptiness. Anything which can give life to this very day. And I try to cover half of The Glass Menagerie.The house is acting as if I am an uninvited stranger sitting in some corner and reading a magazine. There is clatter from the kitchen, slushing of water from the shower, sounds so familiar and air so seen yet unseen. Laura Wingfield and her glass menagerie. Her crippleness and her shyness. Her fragility and her fantasies. Laura….and her glass menagerie! I wish it was I who could dance with Laura. I wish it was I who would call her Blue Rose. (Please give undue stress to the single diphthong in the one letter word “I”)  She would have had a wonderful time with me.  And I am tired of this victimization of characters. They crash and burn all alone in American dramas. Too much of expressionism for expressing negativity and its dimensions in life. Their incapacity to be in reality overwhelms my capacity to be realistic and practical. Tom, Amanda and Laura- their inability for connectivity is so transparent that I am forced to think over it disturbingly after every narration Tom make from his memory.  And the text is not moving steadily, I am in stagnation. It seems everything is flowing back too much to Amanda’s past or flowing out too much to Tom’s future or hanging loosely so high in Laura’s other world! And I didn’t want to touch the critical appreciation part since it’ll remind me that it is of the syllabus and I am not suppose to “read” the text,  but just to know the summary and have a superficial study to jot down some points!  Superficial study! How shameful for these characters! I wish they would come out of these printed papers and slap us!

Every day she calls and says of things missing and things lost. How she is not in ease with the recent dislocations and how she is paying for her lack of culinary skills! Everyday she talks about the need for change and her blurring ability for conversations and her “useless” withdrawals. And the last time she kept the phone it was with a bang, with a shaken voice from the other end- “I thought at least YOU would understand!” (Her “you” was drawled but sounded beautiful) And I was thinking about how useless is her drawl in the YOU there, same as that of her useless withdrawals! I wanted it to connect it with a Gautier quote (though I wouldn’t dare to do it in her presence!) “Nothing is truly beautiful unless it cannot be used for anything; everything that is useful is ugly because it is the expression of some need, and those of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and infirm nature.” Human beings of poor and infirm nature…are not aware that useful is ugly and beautiful is useless. Always there is this unconscious inner craving for beauty. Someone can’t tolerate a misplacement of things on the table, a stain on the carpet, a bend of the furniture- we scream at ugliness and throb and throb for beauty! Beautiful faces, beautiful places, beautiful words, beautiful world! Everything should be beautiful! And useful! How paradoxical! Can “beautifully useful” be an oxymoron?

Gautier wanted to defend the “art for art's sake” by the useful and beautiful dilemma! And so words here are for their own sake. There is no purpose. Non- utilitarian. How comfortable!  This gives a justification for my incoherent, dissipated, disconnected writing here. It gives a justification for my decision to post it here. (The secret behind the decision is actually to avoid the dormancy of this blog). And it’s much effortless if the head is an "unweeded garden" full of “things rank and gross in nature possessing it merely".  If someone asks me what am I writing I would say “words words words”. And if someone asks you, what are you reading? , just say “words, words, words”. (That’s what Hamlet said, but he was mad or pretended to be mad. But often there is very little difference between the two). I always misunderstand that there are certain things vital to my survival. And it will take me sometime to realize that they are not. Not at all vital, not even the last thing needed for my survival. The mind rejects the idea first and there will be vehement argumentation and trails to show that it’s not the case. And before the final surrender a sense of “nothing to lose” put out my exhaustion. This “nothing to lose” comes from “nothing to gain”- it was for its own sake :)

"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...;)

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!

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"!

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 !

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.

'Waste in Niggarding'...

At times I make a conscious effort to better the "flexibility of my adamancy" in being "inexpressive". Can adamancy be ever flexible since "adamancy" itself stands for "inflexibility"?  May be it's feasible for a person who finds comfort in the belief of being "partially adamant"! Somewhere from my childhood I picked up the romantic impression that "silence" is more charming than "voice". My dad always had and still has a silent understanding with my quiet withdrawals, has an unsaid appreciation on my dull tastes...his understandings were silent and beautiful. That’s why when I texed him once a short apology grieving myself at my thoughtless misbehavior he didn't bother to reply but brought me my favourite audio book with an implicit smile sparkling in his eyes to cheer me up. I badly wanted to show him that I have always known his "voice of silence" but with great difficulty I blinked back my "expressions" convincing myself that "he knows that I know that he knows!" [Now this reminds me of my heroic concept about my father figure. During my early teens (and sometimes even now) my dad was my yardstick with which I measured the likableness, dignity and individuality of "the other guys". Freud might state this precisely as a part of "father fixation". And how far I have changed the adamancy in that perception pattern is a question I deliberately keep away from confrontation].

A tincture of "expression" is wanting among the variegated shades of my idiosyncrasies. Expressions of???  emotions...closeness...the manifestation of my sentimentality. I find myself least demonstrative when it comes to the unfurling of affections. It's as if I am hoarding at one corner all the fondness that's destined to be gushed out at the right time and at the right circumstance. And later when I have to patch up for my frugality I find myself floundering...expressions slipping and sliding...

In Shakespeare's words,
Making a famine where abundance lies, 
 Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel
....makest waste in niggarding....
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee. 

  Wasting the “expressions” in "niggarding". 

PS: I really long for that skill to depersonalize what I write (See...again that adamancy of in-expressiveness...it's like a virus!). Eliot said that writing should be a "continuous extinction of personality" rather than the "expression of personality" which I cannot conceive at all. I hope that the dominance of subjectivity in these "expressions" is humble enough to derive "universality". Each post is an "expression" which I have failed to express somewhere.    

Confusion Worse Confounded

Everything is connected and intertwined...but the farrago of varied ideas and systems of thought have turned into a big mess impotent to form a synthesis, unable to find a clear ideation. As my professor was lecturing today on Aurobindo's Philosophy and Integralism, the necessity of going beyond the physicality of things, from finite to infinite and so and so, suddenly a desire for a complete ignorance came over me...the bafflement of a confused soul...it's better not to be aware of all these possibilities of elevations and the blindness of self- limited human intelligentsia than to be known about all these and still failing to be there in that illumined state. 

There is this notion that we view the world through language. My world is thoroughly bewitched by language for my major concern is 'language' and its beauty...the technical as well as the aesthetic aspects of it. Along with it goes the critical interpretation and analysis of the splendid ideas expressed through this wonderful means. One idea overlaps the other...a whirlwind of theories, ideas, imaginations and concepts...a platter of myriad perspectives...I sympathize and  empathize with characters standing from their different zones and perspectives and there comes the sterility of a proper judgement because each character has it's own undeniable justification to make. This is not a romantic gibberish but a reality in which I wade through. It's all about "life", the limitlessness and profundity of literature, its ability to play with our emotions and feelings, touching the subtlest of our sensibilities, molding the centers and peripheries of human psyche. 

My prof once told me that what we get from all these, (by pruning and refining the wilderness of our intellect) is a final solace! Am I getting that final solace? Isn't that solace seems so distant and unreachable when ideas often augment rather than taming the wilderness. Undoubtedly he deserves the claim of that solace since he is a mature sagacious full fledged individual who perfectly knows how to channelize his acquired erudition where as I am only a wobbling beginner stuck and perplexed in the midst of these upsurging confusion. So may be I should be much more patient and awaiting for some time to march on calmly inorder to inweave a proper cognition...!

PS: Apologies for this muddled piece since I typed this out of a sheer need for deluging my chaotic musings crossing the sleepy frontiers of a restless night!

Flimsy Reasonings and Rude Rejections...

He was critically scrutinizing the contours of my face, his eyes threatening to decipher the meaning of my every expression, to discover all the twisted ways of my mind, to fish out all my self deceptions...yes he has always unwrapped my self deceptions and conceitedness smoothly winning over my defensive arguments which I bootlessly do to prevent my ego being wounded. My EGO!...it was freakishly wounded and harshly subjected to alterations each time he brought out a new discovery about me. 

Why this rejection? I just want to know the reason behind your rejection. Or are you unable to trace the reason? Are you that much self ignorant? Or are you not convinced of your own flimsy reasoning?

Surely he has shown the best and the worst in him to me alone...for he seemed to be a web of  coded mysteries and great composure to others while there slept in a swirl of emotions and affections stored inside the caverns of his heart. He has given me the best words and the worst hurts. He always had the finest to offer, the finest of his considerations and possessions. So why do I reject him? Surely I cannot question the gravity and naturalness of his love, the transparency of his feelings. His earnestness is beyond the reach of such questionings and doubts. Are you unable to trace the reason? Or are you not convinced of your own flimsy reasoning? Is it because I am incapable of such strong affections and feelings? Or is it because I want to define him purposefully as another version,  another victim of my overwhelming detachment and negligence.

I am afraid whether I can return your feelings. I am helpless that you feel that way...His face testified the bruises of mortification...A hefty silence...silence that lacerated me into a strange shame and desire for non-existence. He struggled to digest the idea. 

It's exactly this fear of rejection that prevented me to ask you these much time...and finally it happened! 

And it's this fear of mortifying you that compelled me to dodge you from asking me! 

Mortifying? It's not just the question of mortification dear...I think you should retrospect once in a while at least to get a glimpse of that knowledge of how ignorant you are! 

Another discovery! My EGO!... freakishly wounded and harshly subjected to alterations each time he brought out a new discovery!

Vainglorious Flights...

It's a vainglorious effort to step out of this whole structure, to deviate from the collective conscience, from belongings and identities, from labels and possessions. I am ignorant of what do I hoard by possessing, what do I hoard by belonging. When the mind calls for aberrations, the disentanglement from the quelling attachments and belongings, the withdrawal begins and soon after the commencement of these withdrawals there sneak in the hollowness, the emptiness, the dis-figuration of fixed patterns, the threat and premonitions of alienation which is more weird  than non-existence. So from the half way itself I turn back...I escape from belongings only to 'belong to escape'...to be possessed...to be attached.


 At one half the mind lectures itself  the essentialities of conforming, of confinement, of adherence to the script. The other half tempts to strike out the script, to reconstruct or never to construct at all...to weld the wings, to unfasten the shackles and just...whoosh...!!! And even if it ends like the flight of Icarus, that sensation of immense emancipation at the moments of that complete flight before the burning down and final fall by heading towards the sun will alone serve for an ever sought gratification.

Love at 'Heights'

I am Heathcliff! He's always always in my mind not as a pleasure, anymore than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being...Catherine's words just linger and linger... It feels that some words have a high sense of superiority and priggishness that when they form a beautiful idea they just horn in every time some thoughts in relation to that idea go through our minds. So when I think of "love" these words show that priggishness. 


Every time I go through Wuthering Heights a dozy snake lurking somewhere in the inside gets up and stings me and stealthily returns to it snooze leaving me to wriggle with a poisoned pain, reviving the complexity of my notions on this BIG FAT LOVE. "Fierce, pitiless, wolfish" Heathcliff and "self-willed passionate and egotistical" Catherine with their blazing passionate bonding got etched in my mind for ever grudging to leave me. Heathcliff even digs the earth, opens Catherine's coffin and looks at her face with an ardent wish to die, to merge with her, to defrost the separation created by life and death, to attain that mystical reunion. Surely it's the story of the unfulfilled and destructive passion of two strange creatures, unfulfilled only because of that very strangeness and larger than life essence in them.  This fictitious love has its all consuming nature, a sweet torment and tempestuousness throughout it's existence. It gives me a taste of this piquant emotion, lifting me from a shallow notion of love as an addiction, as an obsession, as a mere desire for a sense of belonging or a cloying attachment to another being to a different plane unknown and ineffable. 


May be it's just a girlish amazement on the beauty of their idealized love which floats on a platonic level. Patricia Meyer in her Female Imagination speaks of Heathcliff as "powerful, manly, mysterious , fully conscious of his own worth, frequently brutal, he remains nevertheless absolutely submissive to the woman he loves. Heathcliff is every woman's dream." So my adoration for Heathcliff  and Catherine might be an infliction by this so called "female imagination". Whatever be it, it's this possibility and pleasure of feeling the unfeeling, knowing the unknown and reaching the unreachable that prompts me to revel in fictions.  

The Essential Confessions of a Catharsis Seeker

"It's irritatingly confessional..." , one of my highly erudite pedagogues' reprehension on Kamala Das's poetry.


"As I was flung between the assigned feminine roles and the rebellious self questionings on the unquestionable social conditioning..."...oops! Is it "irritatingly confessional"?...I pause in between but my pen scorns to pause...it's unabashedly facile when it's confessional. 


So...why confessional? It's like you click click click your inner chattering and when these self-centric pieces are born it wedges the gap between 'you' and the 'inner you' , that vacuity is gone, the outline of the inner landscaping becoming bolder and bolder and there is this sudden clarification, this drained off feeling, a purified sense, a cathartic effect. Oh yes...catharsis! This "externalization of the internal" as Wordsworth puts it even rationalizes the irrationality of some queer ways of perceptions and thoughts.


Every thought dangles itself incessantly until it's gorged by these grossly confessions. It has become an essential menace...the essential confessions of a catharsis seeker.


I also know that by confessing
by peeling off my layers 
I reach closer to the soul...
I shall some day see
My world de-flashed, de-veined, de-blooded...
                                                      -Kamala Das