Right, another juvenalia...
To Whatever they call life.....
With accepted terms of prejudiced compromises,
in bowdlerizing smiles quite indispensible;
Will you sleep with me?
beneath dirty linens of dementing grey matters,
Will you bid for me?
when I sell myself for veneer flatters
Will you, for all the faults and lovely waltz,
take off your hat when I die
or
push me unto the stage
for
yet another try?
To attempt to justify the true essence of humanity in words is a torture of great magnitude.One such unparalleled venture to honestly reflect the true portrait of humanity was successfully accomplished nearly a century back on this very day; it is indeed no accident that the nirvana of the english language should share an epic birthday with the buddha himself.
Here is an excerpt of one of the most beautiful endings in the english literature......
.......O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921
Canary Wharf
What is that ineffable feeling which seizes you the moment you are about to bid that eventual adieu to the city?
A silence built upon a million memories: of roads, faces, shires, bus-numbers, loves, parking spaces, accents, libraries, pubs, mistakes, cafes,slangs, weather and even a radio station…..
Any city isn’t just a city.
It’s a story.
Of yourself.
You move and the cities move with you.
You carry them around in your head.
Tales of forever.
Wonderful treasures and wistful haunts, companions of distant gazes and evening teas.....
Festival Park
PS:
* In the science of addictions it is said that it takes 21 consecutive days to push an 'habit' from conscious to unconscious. Same about de-addiction.Wilful wresting of such wisdom keeps one healthy!
*Am chasing books built around the backdrop of various cities(Ulysses-Dublin,Malgudi days-Mysore..types); Not travellogue(On the Road), or story types (A tale of two cities);
So any Suggestions, Recalls, Recos are welcome!
Buddha's Dilemma.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
~~George Santayana.
Another two minute poetry project till the microwave howls the shout.
Apologies to Norah
Wish just like a three year old
I could grab
a red and yellow crayon
and
make many many lines whorls ugly figures,
in a mad joy
and call them sun moon sky god;
But somewhere on the way
I lent the crayons:
one to Aristotle
another to social courtesy
now I wade through insomnia
trying to pluck painful fruits of words
from the tree
they call poetry…..
Purpose black and white...(16/10/2003-Calicut)
~The search for an art..... either in the making or in the appreciation....is the most terrifying adventure imaginable.....If you accept the full adventure of this course, you will surely lose your mortal soul!.....you will be changed so that your mother will never recognise you, so that your father will disown you your friends betray you, your loved ones live in terror of you......but then all these things happen any way.......... so what you have to lose....
----Stan Brakhage lecturing in the school of the Art Institute of Chicago (Fall1971)
~You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.
----The portrait of an artist as a Young man
Yes....
~First string~ page 13
Outside it was drizzling; a sort of programmed rain as if some master benevolence was in control.
The drizzle was unexpected for this season, but it didn’t stop me from my usual evening stroll. As I stepped out I got a feel of dampness under the feet, the whispering wind chilled my marrow and I knew I was due, for my cigarettes.
Monsoon smoking is a privileged indulgence, you can say, a rare kind of bliss bestowed upon only a few. The shopkeeper was a pretty woman in her early thirties with a strange but fair attractive face, an intriguing pair of button eyes, an upturned nose and sensuous full lips.Can’t remember how long I gazed at that face. Sure must have been drowned in the devil of meticulity. As in any other such elevating moments that life offers us seldom, I was beside myself. Suddenly it felt quite awkward. Her eyes just told me that. Silently. Out of acknowledgement, she blushed crimson. I drew a pale blank. In the practice of life, things can get out of control just like that. Playing the old pretext of looking for something, I broke eye contact. Needless to say, It was hugely relieving.
I served under 'time' for some moments, then I asked her in my best of the charming ways for my particular brand of cigarettes. A sultry reply arrived in an apologetic tone for not having that particular brand followed by if the ‘double strike’ would do? She almost recommended it. Bright, beautiful sparkling set of teeth. And what a smile!! ? I would have jumped into a compliment any day, but today, I found myself holding back, stuck, and why? Was she so extraordinary? Was it the weather? I tried hard not to succumb to my own thoughts. I won! Now it would be easy.
With my seventh smile I asked for a pack of what she had suggested and as I collected the box from her hand, I felt the feminine gentleness of her fingers that you often read in the books. She reflexly withdrew and stood silently with a palpable approval within. Encouraged, I asked for the light in the most casual (Im not in this world) manner a.k.a. ‘Humphrey Bogart style’.
This took time or so it seemed.
But she dropped the lighter into my hand from not more than a few inches, which seemed to me, like light years. Her little caution had turned into my big void.
And I turned to go she called me with a melodic “excuse me” and placed some loose change right into my hand. I felt more than her hand and now the very familiar smile was picnicking in the corner of the frame. I slowly fell into the abyss of her eyes, half closed gazing vacantly towards the floor and the angles of the lips curved into a tentative semi-smile, that’s going to haunt your soul like a devil when you sit with a steaming cup of coffee on a rainy evening.
When I walked back home, I caught smoke from a distant chimney caressing the raindrops in the horizon. There was some life there, may be inanimate, but there......
~Sixth string~page 47
Past the whoosh of whirling spires parks smiles and courtesy nods with the calf crying tired by pumping blood against winter and gravity I stand before the library desk split within between catching air for my lungs and looking to add a memory for the blonde librarian before me whose early twenty image with that body language reminds me only of students working in supermarkets to colour the shades of their future; yes, of course this place is a less competitive supermarket with black shadows of wanton souls impressed on paper as word-epitaphs assembled by their deweys waiting to be sold, bought borrowed etcetera filling the whole room with a scent of bare buoys sleepwalking in the broad daylight. What was such a devil's delusion that the god was tempted I mutter to myself and then she calls my first name in a timbre that it can mean only one thing in the universe that my book request has arrived, conveyed in a safe box from far away and I acknowledge all that by smiling and scribbling a residue of what is supposed to be my name and a smell of dying carbon engulfs me as I open the box; ah now I remember wasn’t she the girl who wavered off my fines some weeks back and called me the nice chap who had participles with salads for breakfast whilst laughing a laugh that left you itchy, salty, and drowned yeah, that tsunami laugh. Returning the pen I noticed that she had long slender hands with fingers delicate and dangling that would have inspired an impressionist into a mad frenzy to paint them playing a piano, not poor me I ponder what neruda would have said of those hands if he ever shook it, would he have kissed it or would he have shared it with silence and wrote about it later ah what a cocktail of borderline and schizotypal onions with romanticism pickle, then I catch myself gazing at my own arthritis aspiring fingers that would have made even Tolstoy proud for carrying unabridged war and peace for a continuous month and then as she whispered a farewell into my ears I caught her fingers now laid bare over the white table clearly presenting at the distal end a faint dark stain of unmistakable nicotine a story of woe, silence and epiphany in the making, subfusc subfusc I meditate aloud......... only to be drowned by the rain outside.
empire 'zero' central
d i S-----t u R b---e -D
d- i -----st---- or-e t--d ,
d / i/ s / mem / / be // r / ed/ ,
(self- d i s.... p e ....n s.... e d, daaaaaaaaaazed)
and
distr
aught
floating through
hazed invisible
c
~ l~
~~ o~~
~~~u~~~
~~~~d~~~~
~~~~~ s,~~~~~
whispering naked((secrets))…........... you can’t find
and
when
time tears through
the innocent heart,
B
l
e
e
e
d
into the
sorrrry mind.
wedded to soaking red memories
walk……..a--w---a----y..
all the
retinues of your oxygen(o2) ,
in fruitless enqu???iries,
distr
aught
(self- d i s.........p .....e.... n s e d, daaaaaaaaaazed)
d/ i/ s / me // mbe// r/ ed/ ,
d- i-- st---- or---et-- d ,
d i S--- t u R b------e--D.................
-- ( fall 2002/onboard cauvery express)
so long,
When the weariness of the day pushes you into an almost sleep and suddenly you are jolted up to grab the pen and jot down whatever the pen wants to say.......
A reason to hate you....
No!
You are mistaken.
I did not
hate you when
you seduced me that night
and
dropped me like a fulfilled dream.
No!
I did not
hate you when
you pretended
to be busy
and
did not
return my calls
But,
I hated you
when
you spilt wine on my new skirt
and
tried to wipe it off with your tie
Of all the things…….
so long,
White noise.
Meant dampened feathers, nothing more.
Forceless upon our backs there fall
Infrequent flakes hexagonal,
Devised in many a curious style
To charm our safety for a while,
Where close to earth like mice we go
Under the horizontal snow.
--Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Snow Storm
Frozen silence
