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........

Waves and Ripples...

Of all the games you played

The most indelectable for my delectable heart

Was your love.

Everything that exists seeks for reason to exist

Same is your love.

But I wish if it were bereft of reason…

Reasons take away the beauty!

 You teased my Ennui

“Speak…. Speak…

Your dumbness stinks

Don’t stare…just speak!

 You owe me your thoughts,

Every little move inside…”

I could find the blotches of distances

We vacillated between the two extremes

Leaves of different trees…

You the waves of ocean

I the ripples in river…

Both designed to meet and dance

But I loathe the ripples to be engulfed by the waves…

I loathe it because you love it,

As a pleasure and an untangling knot  

That makes the ‘ripples’ to be seen as ‘waves’!

Forget it dear…

Let me be the ripple

As ‘you are the wave’!

And if you want to confront me with ‘syllogisms’

Remember….

Reason takes away the beauty

For me!

'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.

Sanely Insane

I first met her at my apartment elevator. Unlike some other indifferent tight-lipped creatures who either cast their eyes fixed at the floor or at the ceiling (making the moments all the more awkward) this tall lady, gigantic in figure, frizzy haired (but comely in that frizziness) and dead white in complexion, had an unfeigned smile and an unassuming countenance. Rarely found pleasing genuineness.

“Which floor?" she asked and without waiting my reply she continued..."I am new here, actually not new. I have been abroad for some years and now came back. I am all alone...it's so suffocating you know..."

       

She was highly garrulous whenever I met her in most of the evenings on my way back from college. "I have been to temple, every evening I go there...it's good for my mind..." and the prattling may extend for some time, complaining how the loneliness is stifling her, how she misses her only daughter who's in a far away boarding school, and her husband who comes only once or twice in a year.


 Noticing my new acquaintanceship with the lady my friend had a new warning to give, "hey...don't listen to her too much...there's a news that she's out of her mind. Her family doesn’t live with her. However hard they tried she's not yielding to be treated". 

"But she seems normal..."

"Normal? Oh no dear, she's not normal". My mom reminded me of how my personal estimations often proved wrong and how my slippery judgments always betray me when it comes to people.

“When are you going to understand all these?”

Yes...when am I going to stop the rejection of normalization? When normalcy rejects me? Of course it always has a propensity to reject me... 
   
 Funny enough for my friend the personal estimation evidently proved wrong. The lady said of her purple painted walls, "purple is good for my mind...my husband says so...."

She cleaned and cleaned her squeaky-cleaned flat and said, "someone is putting some dirty powder all over my floor ...every hour I cleans it up but still it's untidy...

"Hey...don't drink the water from the tap, some one has mixed poison in it…I use only the bottled"

As she started throwing things from her balcony in a grip of frenzy the watchman grumbled, "It's pathetic that the lady is not celled. What if she strangles someone...? Mad creature! 

 Things went rampant and her husband did the inevitable. Whether she yielded or not...it was just "inevitable".

A few months later when she saw me at the library the frizzy haired tall gigantic woman  with her unassuming  smile rushed towards me from the other end... "Hey you...it's been a long time…I was just planning to meet you. I have joined a distance course in literature. I think I should do something seriously... at least to escape this damn boredom...so will you please help me to sort out some doubts...it's very confusing...the books..."

While she was running her eyes all over the book shelves still maundering, my friend who was with me quickly grabbed my hand and dashed to the exit door saying, "Are you 'mad'? Don't you know that she's 'mad'?"

Amused by my smile she asked..."What so funny?"

"Nothing...the idea of insanity...it's so strange and stupid sometimes!"

"Oh yes, stupid for you insane people!"

As we laughed a feeble current of pain and muddiness aired through me... still laughed…”it’s good for my mind?”...am extremely good at acting (often to myself)!

   

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