Musings

How can I tell
If I shall ever love you again
As I do now?
--William Carlos Williams

Do not go gentle into that good night : Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Tulips: An extract

"The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions."

Sylvia Plath

Soon: Vikram Seth

I shall die soon, I know.
This thing is in my blood.
It will not let me go.
It saps my cell for food.

It soaks my night in sweat.
And breaks my day in pain.
No hands or drugs can treat.
These limbs for love or gain.

Love was the strange first cause
That bred grief in its seed,
And gain knew its own laws—
To fix its place and breed.

He whom I love, thank God,
Won't speak of hope or cure.
It would not do me good.
He sees that I am sure.

He knows what I have read
And will not bring me lies.
He sees that I am dead.
I read it in his eyes.

How am I to go on—
How will I bear this taste,
My throat cased in white spawn—
These hands that shake and waste?

Stay by my steel ward bed
And hold me where I lie.
Love me when I am dead
And do not let me die.

Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae: Ernest Dowson

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was grey:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I'll Open the Window: Anna Swir

Our embrace lasted too long.
We loved right down to the bone.
I hear the bones grind, I see
our two skeletons.

Now I am waiting
till you leave, till
the clatter of your shoes
is heard no more. Now, silence.

Tonight I am going to sleep alone
on the bedclothes of purity.
Aloneness
is the first hygienic measure.
Aloneness
will enlarge the walls of the room,
I will open the window
and the large, frosty air will enter,
healthy as tragedy.
Human thoughts will enter
and human concerns,
misfortune of others, saintliness of others.
They will converse softly and sternly.

Do not come anymore.
I am an animal
very rarely.

Feeling cynical, morose, and totally beaten

From The Hermit: Ionesco
I don't have any desires, or rather only a few, or rather I don't have them anymore. If I have any, they were not worth being exploited and encouraged. Perhaps I actually do have desires. But they are dormant. I'm not inclined to wake them up. What are my desires? That people leave me alone; that other people's desires leave me alone and don't involve me in their repercussions. What I desire most of all is not to have any desires.

I philosophize too much. That's my weakness. If I had been less of a philosopher I would have had a happier life. When one is not a great philosopher, one should not philosophize. And even when they are great they are pessimistic, or their conclusions are impossible to fathom.

Sunday evening and a bunch of stray thoughts

Ionesco's eating at my head again. Seeing — yet again — the hermit's psychedelic vision.
House me in a quiet room in an uninhabited obscure building somewhere in the corner of a ghostly town — only an open window lets me see and feel the sturdy ever-growing tree bearing lovely pink flowers. And through the window, I see life taking a beautiful form — and I'm overcome by a strange sort of peace, with the bright sun lighting up my face into happiness.
I'm sort of disheartened today. Disheartened because I can't stand up for what I believe in. Because I'm afraid. Because I'm walking right into the bleak unknown in spite of my heart screaming "no."
But I'm going to see I get through this by myself. I'm not vulnerable.

Of Memories

The morning paper recently carried an article on "repressed memories" and how we should deal with them so we can come out stronger after we've faced our demons. This is one topic I have always been intrigued with.
Repressed memories or "motivated forgetting" are childhood or past memories that have been erased from our conscious mind. Such memories may later resurface or be recalled as a result of a certain incident or without any provocation or reason.
There are ongoing debates among psychologists and psychotherapists on whether or not traumatic experiences can be repressed out of conscious awareness and later recalled — spontaneously or through treatment. Divided opinions shroud this rather obscure topic. Some even question the very concept of "repressed memory." I don't have an opinion here as I'm neither an expert in this filed nor have I studied psychology, apart from a very distressing paper on Freud and his friends in college.

But age and experience have taught me that memory is unreliable. I have pictures in my mind of my childhood, and I'm not certain if they really happened.
I have always found it rather strange that I remember very little of my childhood. The little that I recall is again a hazy gray, but they were definitely not the best years of my life. The human mind functions in the most complex ways. It does exactly as you want without you giving it a conscious command. The mind chooses to throw out the ugly and the bad and automatically blocks bad memories; it works as an automatic defense mechanism. This is all very well and I'm glad the mind works the way it does but I'm still left with a couple of nagging questions as to what's real and what's not.

Blue as hell

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before." Edgar Allan Poe

Today, I feel like a blob of cold blue jelly splattered on the kitchen floor.

The animal kingdom

Living in Bangalore is challenging like in most other cities. You run out of things to do on weekends and on those rare, hard-to-come-by holidays. Bangalore, as they call it, is the city of pubs. (And thank God for that!) The idea of spending your weekend in a pub, getting drunk with your buddies and unwinding after a hectic week at work is appealing to most of us. After all, what’s better than a couple of good drinks to bust your stress? This, unfortunately, doesn’t work every weekend. We crave variety. Human nature is such. (And there is no guessing why so many marriages end up in a divorce!) So, looking for a change of scene, a couple of friends and I set out on our much delayed trip to the Bannerghatta National Park. The idea wasn’t, at first, at all enticing, but I gave in for the sake of a change in routine.
The Park is about 20km from the city. So we booked a cab and got out early in the morning. Once there, we chose to go on the much-hyped safari tour, which promised a whole lot of tigers, lions, bears, et al roaming freely in the splendor of the jungle.
The safari tour was fun, I would say, at least for a first-timer like me. What played spoilt sport was the vehicle we were bundled into like a herd of sheep. It was a small van with dusty, unclear glass windows. Our view was further obstructed by the grills encased around the vehicle for the purpose of protection.
Of the animals I saw on the tour, the lioness with her cubs left me with the greatest sense of awe. She exuded beauty, pride, splendor, and magnificence. The bears were the funniest of the lot. There looked the laziest and the dirtiest --- kind of resembled the disheveled black pigs that are so often seen in a village. A group of them spread themselves on the road and would not budge in spite of the approaching vehicle. I also got to take a close look at the black bucks, and they sure are beautiful. They’ve splendid horns!
The emus, the Australian Love Birds, the really huge elephants, and the white tigers were among the best in the zoo. Never imagined I would enjoy animals so much, but I did. Not a bad experience at all.

Writing as therapy

Some of us go to the shrink to deal with our emotional and mental distress, and there are the few of us who take to the written word to stay sane in our own way. And yet there are still more of us who resort to other acts to keep going in life — like a good cry or just sporting the damn-all attitude.

Writing is cathartic — that is emotionally purging. When we are distressed or have something weighing on our mind, sometimes we just pick up a pen and scribble on a notepad. This simple act, which we indulge in without much thought, is a form of therapy. What you do when you visit a shrink is you tell the person your deepest, most personal stories — things you refrain from even sharing with your friends or family. Talking becomes an emotional outlet, a valve that releases all the tensions wired in your brain. You feel good and "light" after such sessions. Writing works almost the same way. When you pour out word after word onto a white, all-absorbing page that never questions, never gives a frown, or is never shocked of your ways, you feel a load has just been unburdened. All your problems don't go away, but you definitely get a breather —  it is like giving an exhausted boxer a few seconds of rest so he can continue fighting. I guess this is how most of us deal with life. A little research on the Internet on writing as a form of therapy showed up a good number of results. Wikipedia explains it as a form of "expressive therapy" that not only eases pain but "strengthens the immune system." Writing as a therapy is practiced in a group and even administered by a therapist. "Assignments may include writing unsent letters to selected individuals, alive or dead, followed by imagined replies from the recipient or parts of the patient's body, or a dialogue with the recovering alcoholic's bottle of alcohol."

So give in to writing. There is nothing to fear. Your notepad doesn't judge.

Another Visit to the Oracle: Atwood

I've taken up aphorism. Cryptic, they say.
Soon I'll get everything down to one word.
All crammed in there, very
condensed you understand, like an
extremely small black star. Like a
black hole. Like a dense potential.
Like the letter A.

A shotgun for a bunch of words

A crow came calling yesterday. I woke up yesterday morning to find an unlikely visitor perched upon the curtain rod, nervous and clearly out of its comfort zone. It has been ages since I last saw a crow, and it gave me a start to see the black poor jittery creature all bundled up in the corner. It was clearly disoriented and looking for a way to get off the room. It even got a couple of its feathers clipped in its attempt to find an escape route. After 10 to 20 minutes of fumbling and chasing around, my brother finally got hold of it, took it to the terrace, and set it free. Quite the opposite of Ted Hughes' crow, but nevertheless, I was reminded of his poem. Love this poem.

Crow Goes Hunting
Crow
Decided to try words.

He imagined some words for the job, a lovely pack-
Clear-eyed, resounding, well-trained,
With strong teeth.
You could not find a better bred lot.

He pointed out the hare and away went the words
Resounding.
Crow was Crow without fail, but what is a hare?

It converted itself to a concrete bunker.
The words circled protesting, resounding.

Crow turned the words into bombs-they blasted the bunker.
The bits of bunker flew up-a flock of starlings.

Crow turned the words into shotguns, they shot down the starlings.
The falling starlings turned to a cloudburst.

Crow turned the words into a reservoir, collecting the water.
The water turned into an earthquake, swallowing the reservoir.

The earthquake turned into a hare and leaped for the hill
Having eaten Crow's words.
Crow gazed after the bounding hare
Speechless with admiration.

Queer, queer world: Becoming Alice

I would like to be Alice for a while. Ophelia has become too gloomy, and I know she will be the death of me someday. Her madness only smothers my heart. So for now, I choose Alice over Ophelia. I need her. I need her stories to shake me up and spice my world — madness that promises adventure. I need her rabbit hole to hide me from the world. I need her potions and cakes to grow short, tall, fat, or any other shape I want to be. I would like to smoke hashish with the wriggly worm Absolem and get real stoned. I would like to float mid-air like the smug Cheshire cat, fleet in like a trail of smoke, and vanish like nebulous clouds. I would like to slay dragons with magical swords and be the champion of the repressed. I would like to rewrite the Oraculum. Have a madder tea party with the hare and the hatter. Marry the hatter. Have little Hatter children. Grow a bulbous head for a day and see what it's like. Slay more dragons of the fiercer sort. Bring in more chaos, disarray, and anarchy — a world of topsy-turvydom, where there isn't a moment to think. For it is thought, and having the time for it, that kills. So, I choose Alice and her mad world that spares no time for thought — a world that moves like a whirlwind.

Dinner talk

Recently, I had an old friend over for dinner. I had always thought of him as the cranky "not too open," rather difficult chap, although he is a nice person and all that. It appears he thinks worse of me. He told me I'm at least 10% weirder than him. This got me thinking, and in retrospect I get this odd good feeling coz I was right he is weird, after all who can dispute his own admission. But seriously, how do one measure out weirdness and to such foregone conclusion as to deduce it to "10% weirder" and the sort. Eliot did measure out his life with coffee spoons but I think that’s lame compared with such mathematical deductions that go down to numbers and percentages. Perhaps I'm weirder than him. Or maybe not. We've just got to figure out a way of measuring weirdness.

Of flowers and dreams

Red posies with a splotch of yellow in the middle. It doesn't stand out, yet it has an "in your face" look to it, with the power to excite the perverse feeling of repulsion and attraction. Loud, garish, yet possessing the allure of a black nylon stocking–clad hooker. You look at me as if you would swallow me whole. Thank god I'm not on drugs — as much as I love Rimbaud, I haven't yet gotten to the "complete derangement of all senses" part. I would like to someday — completely fuck my mind and see the white light or the blue … whatever. I'm not going mental here, I'm only staring at my bedcover — enthralled, possessed, completely ravished by these gigantic, gaping flowers.

Hubris ... and well some truth!

Dostoyevsky: Notes From the Underground

It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.
But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure?
Answer: Of himself.
Well, so I will talk about myself.
I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness — a real thoroughgoing illness.

Just my thought!

Night: Neruda
I want neither to know nor to dream.
Who can teach me not be,
To live without going on living?
…
At some point to be invisible,
To speak without words, to hear
Only certain raindrops falling,
Only the flight of a certain shadow.

Nil

Not having anything to say is frustrating. I sit empty, with restless fingers tapping on the keyboards. And to fill this void, I eat chocolate. And more potato chips. And everything else I can find in the house. It is strange that I have nothing to say but inside I feel a terrible weight. I'm going deaf with the sound of silence. Punch through, break a glass, shatter a heart. Fill my ears with your wailings and moans.
I don't understand how I feel about him. I almost see myself in him, yet he is so much more than I'm. I'm not dying of an old passion, never really had one for him; only may be a passing one or a momentary self-induced longing, which now mean little to me. But I miss the comfort of our conversations — the total abandon of guardedness, of being comfortable in each other's silence , him understanding my mad ramblings — I miss the assurance that once I'm through with my shitty job, he would be there to listen to all that I have to say. I could communicate. I had a secret hole to whisper to all my crazy thoughts. At the same time, I knew at the back of my mind that this would end someday but could never picture it. I could never imagine a tomorrow without us talking about everything under the sun. He is my alter ego and he's gone.

The "Supraman"

He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees. He was the miracle ingredient Z-147. He was—
"Crazy!" Clevinger interrupted, shrieking. "That's what you are! Crazy!"
"—immense. I'm a real, slam-bang, honest-to-goodness, three-fisted humdinger. I'm a bona fide supraman."

Silence falls on me. Dull, quiet silence — powerless in its muteness. It almost borders on boredom. And resignation. I'm never going to wake up one day and find myself the way I want to be, in a place and with the people I dream of. Neither am I going to metamorphose into an insect or a dog — I'm quite intact with "reality," regardless of my many magical dreams and fantasies and numerous crazy thoughts. I know I live right here right now and can feel the sting when I pinch myself. My point is I'm just what I'm. I can never teleport. Or be invisible.
I'm sleepy. I'm yawning for the third time now. The "supraman" is ready for bed. Goodnight.

Just so you know...

You
Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head,
so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,
like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables
like a charm, like a spell. — Carol Ann Duffy

Open Spaces

The first thing that strikes me when I think of the words "open spaces" is freedom.
I have a few recurrent dreams that keep coming back from time to time. They aren't the real sort of dreams that we dream while we are asleep; they are more like reveries that have taken root in my mind so deep that I'm no longer certain of their birth. I don't know how I dreamed them up and why.
In one, I see myself fall off a cliff in an endless plunge, a deep void that pulls me in without annihilating or consuming the whole of me. And there is no fear, of death or of pain. It is an escape, an alternate world where I'm suspended in a state without fear, pain, thought, or memories. It is a moment of bliss, in which fear, failure, shame, cowardice, disease, death … none of these have a place. Freedom because even when trapped in that endless fall that suspends me in a state of "numbness," I experience the most exhilarating feeling of being free and happy.

In the other, I see myself walk down a wide straight road that stretches in between two vast green fields. Just alone, silent with nobody in sight. I walk and never stop, and I feel completely free and happy.

When in despair, I close my eyes and transport myself to one of these worlds. It's so easy.

Catharsis and the written word

I love the written word. Whether I can write them well or not is another question all together. And I always mean to write “meaningful” stuffs (whatever that is) … things that are not limited to my world and me.
Each time I make this effort, I find myself staring at a blank screen, completely clueless as to what I should write. I’m not self-obsessed; I’m not a megalomaniac. There is nothing really about me that gives me a high.
Yet, I scribble on like a bloody narcissist who can think of no one but herself.
But I guess it's alright --- it is the only thing that keeps me from going insane.

Gumboots on sunny days: recalling school life

The dormitory was lined with tiny green double-decker beds. So tiny that if you move around too much,  you would invariably find yourself on the floor the next morning. Some were bigger beds, in which two to three kids slept together. The dormitory walls were fitted with shelves, where we kept clothes and shoes. Water was scarce. We would bathe twice a week and were given two full mugs of water twice a day to brush and wash. It was cold throughout the year.

We would get up every day at 5 in the morning and get ready for our Karate classes, a painful, torturous exercise I loathed. I was pathetic at it. I couldn’t even stretch my limbs forget about a decent kick. If we were caught being negligent, the regular punishment was to frog jump at least 30 to 40 rounds of the playground. I know the feeling; your knees become loose, they bend on their own, and you can’t walk for at least half the day.

Throughout the year, the chilly wind lashed against our bare limbs. Our regular uniform was a tee-shirt and a knee-length pinafore. When it got really cold during the winter, we wore track suits to shield ourselves from the cold.

The playground was the only open space we had, where we would sit, play, talk, or eat our “tucks”. On one side, the playground was surrounded by an open gutter with black stinky slimy water. Nobody bothered; kids would drop their playthings into it and pick them up without even bothering to wash. The playground would be as big as what we would consider a big living room. It had an antique merry-go-round and, at one corner, a caged monkey called Cindy who was our school owner’s pet. Cindy was excellent at picking lice off kids’ heads.

Everyday before dinner, we would get in line in the small playground. The house captains would count heads and make sure everyone in their team was present. We had very little chances for doing mischief. The rules were strict and if we were found wanting in anything --- for example, dirty or improperly made beds (yes, we made our own beds), untidy shelves, long or dirty nails, torn shirts, unpolished shoes, and so forth --- we were disciplined with the cane. I got my fair share of it too. We were marked/graded for all these tasks and anyone who got more than 3 minuses was banned from the eagerly awaited Friday TV night.

Friday was eagerly looked forward to. I remember watching Grease, John Travolta dancing his ass off to Grease lightning.

We would walk in pairs on the way to school. It was a walk of about 5 to 10 minutes from the hostel. It would rain most days during the rainy season. We always prepared for the worst, being the disciplined, responsible kids that we were, and wore gumboots to school if the weather was cloudy. On such days, the sun would come out smiling at our silliness. So, very often we walked the sun-drenched road in knee-length gumboots, with passersby giving us the funny look.

I loved it. I loathed it.

Throwing out the junk

Despicable Brain

Yeah I hate it finally. It doesn’t work.

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I'm going back to the hills after more than a decade. I hope the place does me good and shake me out of my dispassionate existence. I could spend the rest of my life lying on my stomach, thinking nothing.

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"Out of the ash, I rise with my red hair
and eat man like air"

Sylvia Plath

The words keep coming back.

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To a dear friend who's a jerk and a snob

Don't be cranky. Your age shows ... and there's no end.

Avatar

I’m really not a movie freak but once in a while I do enjoy watching a couple of good films. Last year, one of the most hyped Hollywood movies was Avatar. Colleagues talked about it, friends argued and fought over it, and even the newspaper constantly nagged me every morning with a splash of the alien-looking figure. From mild irritation, it ultimately became nerve wrecking to even hear about Avatar. I even got into an argument with a friend (who became a big Avatar fan even before watching the movie) over the movie. Sometimes, my stubbornness makes me do things that are beyond the realm of logic or sense, and this was one of the times. But I did see the movie and boy am I glad! I came out of the movie theatre feeling good and smiling like the Cheshire Cat. Yes, Pandora was awesome and Jake Sully even better! My friend had a very ingenious reason for not liking Jake. He said Jake didn’t give a hoot about Pandora or the people living in it; he only wanted to be a part of it because in that world, as one of the Na’vis, he is liberated from his handicapped self. This, however, is a flawed reasoning, not to mention a childish argument. If it was only a question of Jake wanting his legs back, he could have simply accepted Colonel Miles Quaritch’s offer and got himself a pair of brand new legs! The year’s 2154 after all! Arguments aside, and dismissing all initial misgivings, Avatar has proved to be one of the best movies on my list of favorites. James Cameron’s decades of hard work has finally paid off (He had been working on the movie since 1994; I was in school then …jeez!).
The concept of Pandora, in which the inhabitants live in harmony with nature, appeals to our modern, displaced sense of being. It reminds us of a place and time that we’ve lost to “civilization.” The story of the movie may not be out of the world, but it succeeds in connecting with the audience.
Avatar can be seen from many perspectives. Colonialism and its ugly claws are seen in the invasion of Pandora by the humans. There are many dimensions to the movie and Cameron fits them all together in such way that their subtlety is captured without losing any of their essence or displaying the obvious.
Some people find the story of the movie “simplistic” and so may you. But the visual accomplishment of the movie is unquestionable. If not for anything else, go watch the movie for its awesome visuals. You won’t regret it!

Questions

I'm a quiet girl
Never mind my soliloquies
I do it alone
Like mad Ophelia; muted
Shrieks that wring these purple veins
Into a splinter of wild pink poppies
Swaying, teasing, blinding: I float in ecstasy.

You baulk at my idiosyncrasies
Mad, you call me
Let me tell you
It is as good or bad as Hamlet's antics
Hear me out
This mad girl knows the rules of the game.

So
Don't question me again
My friends
Don't make a liar out of me.
All I want is
To lie face down
On this dew-drenched morning grass
And sing my swan-song.