Pas de dix mots

Des jours où tous les cieux, l’un dedans, l’un au-dessus,

Pensent au même,

Nous y te voyons, souriant, aux cieux du Nord-Est,

Souriant, faisant la pluie.

(Penned Wedn, Feb 29, 2012)

Image source is here 

Aye

What lies ahead

So there is this little child, a rather modest small town girl. She keeps to herself, does her work most earnestly, as best she can. Her father, now retired, used to work at the steel plant in Jamshedpur. They are the kind of family for whom the things they have always aspired to have, have always been two steps ahead of their capacity to afford. They are the kind of family, always righteous and morally upright, who have had to save penny by penny, actually evaluate the cost of each item on their monthly shopping list and try and save as much as they can. With a lifetime of such economy, they have managed to educate their daughter first in architecture, then in design from the premier institutions in the country. This child, unlike most other children of this day and age, understands the value of this economy and of the sacrifices her parents have made. She works in another city, away from her parents, saves as much as she can and enjoys the simple pleasures of life, like strolling away in the company of close friends in a highly alluring shopping area, content with what she has, knowing that she is well provided for.

She is ambitious and wants to study further, so on the sly, she applies for entrance exams on her own steam and clears a few of them. Going through a most long drawn process, she balances work, sourcing education loans, liaising with the international college of her choice, patiently networking with professionals the other side of the world, to try and find the confidence to go so far away from the warmth of the familiar. The fees cost her what nothing has ever cost her before. Her parents feel the strain of the expenses however they know that with this child of theirs, they have done something right. They approach their relatives, ex-colleagues, pull every string, reach out to every contact, manage every loan organized or unorganized that they can, to add to the child’s education loan, possibly mortgage their house to put together the money for the fees in an economy of the ever weakening rupee. The child runs pillar to post, from city to city, tracing back every college in the journey of her education to get her transcripts in order, one sheet of paper, one certificate at a time. The visa process is strenuous, riddled with bureaucratic norms and amidst much uncertainty and anxiety, she finally gets her study visa.

She is running late for her classes which have begun already. She will join the term delayed by a month. The time in between, finally one of some sort of rest, she will use to go and spend time with all her friends and family. That is her story so far.

Why do I write about it? I have lived in my life, quite a few stories of this sort, where people I know have flown away in pursuit of higher education. Not one of them has been as hard, earnest or persistent an effort, one made possible by the collective commitment and belief of so many people coming together. Of course, there will be several families in this country who go through this kind of angst. I know of the anxieties of her parents of the well-being and righteousness of their only child. To me what matters, is how this small town girl with ambition and merit has managed to take matters forward for herself. It is progressive, one that can change the course of her life, add to her employability, undo all loans, uplift the finances of her family, take her parents places they always aspired to go, that were always two steps ahead of their capacity to afford.

It takes three generations to change the fortunes of a family. She is the third generation and her triumph is one of values, grit and sheer belief. Which is why I write about it.

Life's Little Instructions (William Snell, 1993)

Sing in the shower.
Treat everyone you meet like you want to be treated.
Watch the sunrise at least once a year.
Never refuse homemade brownies.
Strive for excellence not perfection.
Plant a tree on your birthday.
Learn three clean jokes.
Return borrowed vehicles with the gas tank full.
Never waste an opportunity to tell someone you love them.
Leave everything a little better than you found them.
Keep it simple.
Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.
Become the most positive and enthusiastic person you know.
Be forgiving of yourself and others.
Say “thank you” a lot.
Say “please” a lot.
Avoid negative people.
Wear polished shoes.
Remember other peoples' birthdays.
Commit yourself to constant improvement.
Have a firm handshake.
Send lots of Valentine cards, sign them.
Look people in the eye.
Be the first to say “hello”
Return all things you borrow.
Make new friends but cherish old ones.
Keep secrets.
Plant flowers every spring.
Have a dog.
Always accept an outstretched hand.
Stop blaming others.
Take responsibility for every area of your life.
Wave at kids on school buses.
Be there when people need you.
Don’t expect life to be fair.
Never underestimate the power of love.
Drink champagne for no reason at all.
Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation.
Don’t be afraid to say “I made a mistake.”
Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know.”
Compliment even small improvements.
Keep your promises no matter what.
Marry only for love.
Rekindle old friendships.
Count your blessings.
Call your mother.
And your dad too, if they happen to be alive.

Source is here

Of poetry and love

What words of mine, will suffice, over-used, commonplace, falling short, I call upon, those men and women, now captive to the embrace of weeds, of moss, the occasional rose, and borrow, their words forgotten except for when remembered, woven impossibly, yet here, to be read apart, or better yet, strung together.

"We live in a world of motion and distance.”

“The covers of this book are too far apart.”

“The heart flies from tree to bird, from bird to distant star, from star to love; and love grows in the quiet house, turning and working, servant of thought, a lamp held in one hand."

"I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me."

"The act of writing defies all distance."

"Where do the words go when we have said them?"

"Do words outlast the world they describe?"

"The immense space suddenly becomes vacant: then illuminated."

"In which way are stars brighter than they are. When we have come to this decision. We mention many thousands of buds. And when I close my eyes I see them."

“I am being eaten away by light"

"I don’t know where I end and the world begins. My best guess? Skin. It’s the only actual boundary between the body and the world, between a body and any other body.”

“Simultaneously, and without pity, the natural world and its physical laws restrict the human form and its capacities. All of us are trapped in our skins and drowning in gravity. Physics is unforgiving. Nature is predatory. We do not walk through a passive landscape."

"This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my rolling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh. Always it’s morning, afternoon or evening - the loot of hours - a magic sack grasping vacuum but heavy in the hand, and from which, together, we pull a swarm of telepathic bees, melons beached in a green bin, a lithograph of the city from its crumbling ramparts, crackled pitchers and the mouth of a cave. Perhaps this is my open weave, my phantom rialto or plume of light. We bow to each other in the mash of flicking things. We are completely surrounded."

“Still, what I want in my life is to be willing, to be dazzled, to cast aside the weight of facts, and maybe even, to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing - that the light is everything - that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and fading."

"We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary. I have thought of that and I can feel what is coming. But I rather like it. This swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and experience… in life, too, changes and transitions flash before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane.”

"I think of you often. Especially in the evenings, when I am on the balcony and it’s too dark to write or to do anything but wait for the stars. A time I love. One feels half disembodied, sitting like a shadow at the door of one’s being while the dark tide rises.”

"Love is a thought, hidden in the darkness of the world."

"You exhale a fist of memory. I love you like weathering wood in a room of empty pianos.”

“Then comes the moon, marvelously serene, and small stars, very merry for some reason of their own. It is so easy to forget, in a worldly life, to attend to these miracles."

"Our love moved with the slowness of an object… Blueshifted as sitting for a portrait where you can’t grudge time. It awakened fingers at the tip of our words, chambers in the heart. Then suddenly everything too close, a splinter under the skin… Vertigo of reflections, the smooth surface lost in eddies and currents."

"What is this desire that nothing can change or deflect when everything changes? The lack of forgetting is the same thing as the lack in being, since being is nothing other than forgetting. The love of truth is the love of this weakness whose veil we have lifted, it’s the love of what truth hides…"

"That is why the better part of our memory exists outside ourselves, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source can make us weep again. Outside ourselves, did I say; rather within ourselves, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged."

"There is always somebody, when we come together, and the edges of meeting are still sharp, who refuses to be submerged; whose identity therefore one wishes to make crouch beneath one’s own."

"His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer, or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other."

“I want to know my own will and to move with it. And I want, in the hushed moments when the nameless draws near, to be among the wise ones - or alone. I want to mirror your immensity. I want never to be too weak or too old to bear the heavy, lurching image of you. I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false. I want to stay clear in your sight. I would describe myself like a landscape I’ve studied at length, in detail; like a word I’m coming to understand; like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime; like my mother’s face; like a ship that carried me when the waters raged.”

"You sent for me to talk to you of art; and I have obeyed you in coming. But the main thing I have to tell you is,—that art must not be talked about."

"In the poem, on the page, as you are for me, not a shadow, but a shade whose darkness drops from no object

but is itself yourself, a form of time, spanning nothing, never is your name."

"I don’t think writers are supposed to give answers."

"He is exactly the poem I wanted to write."

"The terrible fidelity the sculptor shows, refusing all. A blind man couldn’t, fumbling with his fingertips, discover: the eye within the eye."

-

Image source is here 

ABC (Wislawa Szymborska)

 

    I’ll never find out now
    What A. thought of me.
    If B. ever forgave me in the end.
    Why C. pretended everything was fine.
    What part D. played in E.’s silence.
    What F. had been expecting, if anything.
    Why G. forgot when she knew perfectly well.
    What H. had to hide.
    What I. wanted to add.
    If my being around
    meant anything
    to J. and K. and the rest of the alphabet.

-

Source is here

My world is too small; no paths brought me to you until it was late; late is better than never; and here we are; in time good enough and not, but nevertheless time.

Mumbai transit

Two years ago,

On my commute to the work-place, I would switch into a cab midway. There was this gentleman - about 70, skeletal and very frail with a long flowing beard whom everyone called ‘Chachaji’. He waited for me with his rickety Fiat at the same spot every morning and all the other cabbies knew that he ferried me to office. On days that he was delayed, I waited and out of respect for him, no other cabbie offered to sneak away his fare.

Now Chachaji was a chatty one and I always thought that given his health, it took quite some effort on his part. He told me about his home town, his farms and fields, his family and his life in Mumbai. I knew his daughter kept ill-health and he checked with me about medical terms the medics confounded him with which I explained to him after detailed Google searches. The rains would do in his cab, but he risked the water-logging to still ferry me to work.

And one day, Chachaji disappeared. The other cabbies told me it was the strenuousness of all-day cab driving and his ailing health that made him go back home. Over the months, I kept up my inquiry about Chachaji but there did not seem to be any more news about him.

Nothing out of the ordinary, I happened to change my route, lived for a while in another city and life went about as usual.

This morning,

I switched midway into a cab on another route. It was Chachaji in a brand new Santro. While I silently noted that his health had a bit of sheen, we both could not get over how we came upon each other once again, after two long years.

He told me that he had gone home for about 7 months. His daughter was now better but he was operated for a heart condition. He asked about how my parents were doing and he told me that today was the first Anniversary of his new cab for which I congratulated him. He told me that on returning to the city, he had inquired with the other cabbies about me, and that he remembered me every time he crossed my workplace. He dropped me to work once again this morning and we parted without ceremony with warm wishes for the other.

-

We live in the age of Suhel Seth, of power familiarities, name-flashing and power connections. It passes by many without a sense of alarm, or with nonchalance how friendships and acquaintances can be commoditized, or perhaps conveniently traded.

On days that we are alone in a room in the solitary company of our thoughts - the tv shut, the laptop off, the phone on silent, it would do us well to reflect upon the simplicity and humility of these ties – ones that have neither benefit nor tangible implications in the real world.

The closer, the warmer and receptive we remain to cherishing them, the more morally alive we are.

-

Image source is here

The alchemy of autumn

We will bring you together

Each and every one of you

And heap you into a pile

We will hide you, in plain sight

And with time, you will crumble

Break down, your bests and worsts

Intermingling, coalescing

Till so blended that we cannot tell

One from the other

The seasons will weather

Their rages upon you

Wind strewn, rain soaked

We will gather you in your pieces

Dried crisp or frozen to the vein

The soil will nourish you

And you will root, your spirit

Piercing forth, with the willful defiance

Of the left for dead, when in the silence

Of the unseen, all your hearts

Thudding, like the ground trembling

At its cracks, life will surge through

Your formlessness, your gentle breath,

Finding rhythm, will permeate the air

Bursting forth with a fragrance

Unfamiliar, yet compelling

We will see you find your feet

Unfurl your spine and look at the sun

Resplendent, in its sheen and glory.

We will bring you together

Each and every one of you

And we will will you to rise. 

(Penned, Friday, Feb 3, 2012)

Image source is here 

The Barking Dogs Have all Gone (Maarten Inghels)

Boy, I’d like to know: what makes it worthwhile,
the navel-gazing quiet by the pilot light of your bathroom heater,
preaching love at every sneeze, fretting over the absurdity of
first names because today I spoke a baying albino dog in the street
that read the warts on its balls as braille and then still didn’t know
whether we were allowed to write poems about the moon.

Boy, I’d like to know: what makes it worthwhile to keep living
this life, to persist in anger and keep on writing;
letters, essays, poems, in which you recommend yourself and
revile the world, combat indifference, the days of faits divers.

Boy, I’d like to know: what makes it worthwhile to keep on
writing till people forget your debut when
our finger no longer serves to point at the moon but your four
readers would rather google huggable junkies.

All hope is in vain when from the farmette you warble chatter verses
into the world, compress your thoughts into a couple of status bars,
write an essay in one-hundred-and-forty characters. (I know a poet
who braids his beard into a noose – the barking dogs have all gone.)

Boy, my dream is both impossible and baleful, all the windbags are at it
in this feck-to-feck race and what remains is a ream of paper
with all that hopeless angling, but I promise:

I’ll lift up head from chest, to give the ribs some space and keep on
writing: letters, essays, poems etcetera.

That dog: do not forgive him.
-

About Maarten Inghels (Belgium, 1988) 

Maarten Inghels lives in Antwerp’s Schipperskwartier, the red light district near the port. He grew up in the city, where he studied Dutch language and theatre, film and literary sciences. He coordinates the Eenzame Uitvaart (Lonely Funeral) project, which provides poets to speak at the funerals of those without relatives and friends. He is currently working on a novel.

What immediately strikes you about Inghel’s poetry is the loathing for all things false and deceitful. With the skill of a pathologist, in Waakzaam (Vigilant; 2011), he dissects the ugliness of hedonism and the aberration of egotism using drawn-out tirades in which the metre jerks and judders, and in which he makes a conscious choice to use ugly, often composite words full of hard consonants, like something posted by a spammer on an Internet forum. In Waakzaam, Inghels rifles through the rubbish bins of language, barking in powerful sound-clashes. Angry and disillusioned, he unmasks the world around him as a “false and forged pursuit” populated by flat characters such as “the flirting toyboy and the end result of a botox accident”. The characters appear to be out for no more than “to lick their own heavenly body” against the background of “photoshopped breakers”. But that cold war can also break out in the domain of friendship and love – then love becomes a “repeating rifle”, or “offal”.

Even the ‘I’ proves suspicious: “[I] practise my face in front of the mirror”. The greatest anxiety comes from the realisation that the I will prove unscrupulous: “One’s own rigorous love as retort.” That is la condition moderne according to Inghels, who specifically asks for “new lies” to enable the triggering of a gag reflex. This society and this mentality are destined for the drains.

At the same time, in Waakzaam, behind that fury and fear of the false lurks a longing for what is genuine. Interestingly, Inghels describes that craving for clarity the most lucidly in his debut collection, Tumult. Despite the painful images that crop up there, too, the book is about seeking true love to alleviate the insecurity and ineptitude of the I. In an interview, Inghels once said, “To me, indifference is an alarming condition.” In his eyes, people should be ‘different’ – identifying with the other, acknowledging the other as equally valuable, possibly even more valuable than the I.

The new modus vivendi Inghels seeks (“a horizon of voices” or “a skeleton key for resting, long”) has no foothold in the already too rotten reality. It is, however, rooted in man’s ability to invent a reality: “In the back of your hut you had a mosque / Perhaps in the evenings you prayed there with the king”. The human imagination plays a crucial role in moral reconstruction. Exchanging reality for a radically personal imaginary world is not an option, though. For Inghels, reaching and touching others is too important for that. At an existential level, the flight into dreams is too easy for him, so he continues to poetically lash out against “bourgeois emotion”, “anecdotia”, “warble chatter verses” and “aesthetic recreation”.

The new world will not arrive all by itself. A new awareness has to be built. And that is both a linguistic and a physical process. In Maarten Inghels’ poetry, language acts as the creative force uniting language and the physical in an intimate relationship: “I will crawl inside you, close your mouth / behind me. I will kneed your lung and fade into the rest”. Or: “Even for braille I am too blind”. Noise, the most unformed of sound bites, binds the fumbling man and the desired woman: “May I be noise in your ear, my love, mount / the stairs, knock on your door, cough, ask: / Did you hear me?”

In Inghels’ new world, insecurity and suppleness are positive characteristics. Only in insecurity can one be tender, only “muscles made supple by jazz” can lose their rigidity. Music plays a key role, but so do the the striking images of water Inghels uses to describe the object of desire. The swimmer is a recurring metaphor that focuses the tensions in this poetry. Unfortunately, we are “swimmers on the beach, / while alertly shielding our eyes we / see the sad-eyed seals wash up” and the poet himself is “a dead blackfish”. But “that is what / a person wants; / a moment of clarity, / calm and a green flag on the pier. / Saying you may swim now / here.”

In this respect, Inghels shows himself to be an heir to Paul Van Ostaijen, who wrote in Bezette Stad (Occupied City) of “nil in all directions” and, at the same time, of the “simple stuttering of a soul for love”.

Source is here

Image source is here 

Into infinite space

Image source here

O Captain! My Captain!

I had heard him say this out loud to me every time I asked him to tell me a poem. Back then, a child, I understood little what it meant. The one thing I never forget was his diction and intonation, as he narrated this with great emotion, stressing on 'O Captain! My Captain!'

I wondered over the years as to what could have made an ailing man of 75 narrate something like this to his grandchild. There were pastorals, green meadows, dandelions and daffodils but for me, it was always, 'O Captain! My Captain!'

He would be 89 today. 

Here's to you grand-père, for always being the angel to your wildly capricious grand-child!

-

O Captain! My Captain!
Walt Whitman 
     
O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead. 

-

As I learnt, much later, (Wiki Link)

Walt Whitman wrote the poem after Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Repeated metaphorical reference is made to this issue throughout the verse. The "ship" spoken of is intended to represent the United States of America, while its "fearful trip" recalls the troubles of the American Civil War. The titular "Captain" is Lincoln himself. With a conventional meter and rhyme scheme that is unusual for Whitman, it was the only poem anthologized during Whitman's lifetime. Image source here.