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........

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!