Chittoh jetha bhoy shunno

...uccho jetha sheer. Gyan jetha mukto, jetha griher prachir...

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action -
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore. 

A minute for the basics

Stoicism (Greek Στοά) was a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early 3rd century BC. The Stoics considered destructive emotions to be the result of errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions.^[1]

Stoics were concerned with the active relationship between cosmic determinism and human freedom, and the belief that it is virtuous to maintain a will (called prohairesis) that is in accord with nature. Because of this, the Stoics presented their philosophy as a way of life, and they thought that the best indication of an individual's philosophy was not what a person said but how he behaved.^[2]

Basic tenets

“	Philosophy does not promise to secure anything external for man, otherwise it would be admitting something that lies beyond its proper subject-matter. For as the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of statuary bronze, so the subject-matter of the art of living is each person's own life.	”
—Epictetus[5]

The Stoics provided a unified account of the world, consisting of formal logic, non-dualistic physics and naturalistic ethics. Of these, they emphasized ethics as the main focus of human knowledge, though their logical theories were to be of more interest for many later philosophers.

Stoicism teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions; the philosophy holds that becoming a clear and unbiased thinker allows one to understand the universal reason (logos). A primary aspect of Stoicism involves improving the individual’s ethical and moral well-being: "Virtuewill which is in agreement with Nature."^[6] This principle also applies to the realm of interpersonal relationships; "to be free from anger, envy, and jealousy,"^[7] and to accept even slaves as "equals of other men, because all alike are sons of God."^[8] 

The Stoic ethic espouses a deterministic perspective; in regards to those who lack Stoic virtue, Cleanthes once opined that the wicked man is "like a dog tied to a cart, and compelled to go wherever it goes."^[6] A Stoic of virtue, by contrast, would amend his will to suit the world and remain, in the words of Epictetus, "sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy,"^[7] thus positing a "completely autonomous" individual will, and at the same time a universe that is "a rigidly deterministic single whole."

Stoicism became the foremost popular philosophy among the educated elite in the Hellenistic world and the Roman Empire,^[9] to the point where, in the words of Gilbert Murray "nearly all the successors of Alexander^[10] [...] professed themselves Stoics."

The Categories

The Stoics held that all being (ὄντα) -- though not all things (τινά) -- are corporeal. They accepted the distinction between concrete bodies and abstract ones, but rejected Aristotle's teaching that purely incorporeal being exists. Thus, they accepted Anaxagoras' idea (as did Aristotle) that if an object is hot, it is because some part of a universal heat body had entered the object. But, unlike Aristotle, they extended the idea to cover all accidents. Thus if an object is red, it would be because some part of a universal red body had entered the object.

They held that there were four Categories.

• substance (ὑποκείμενον)
  • The primary matter, formless substance, (ousia) which makes up things.
• quality (ποιόν)
  • The way in which matter is organized to form an individual object. In Stoic physics, a physical ingredient (pneuma: air or breath) which informs the matter.
• somehow disposed (πως ἔχον)
  • Particular characteristics, not present within the object, such as size, shape, action, and posture.
• somehow disposed in relation to something (πρός τί πως ἔχον)
  • Characteristics which are related to other phenomena, such as the position of an object within time and space relative to other objects.

Epistemology

The Stoics believed in the certainty that knowledge can be attained through the use of reason. Truth can be distinguished from fallacy; even if, in practice, only an approximation can be made. According to the Stoics, the senses are constantly receiving sensations: pulsations which pass from objects through the senses to the mind, where they leave behind an impression in the imagination (phantasia). (An impression arising from the mind was called a phantasma.)^[15]

The mind has the ability to judge (sunkatathesis)—approve or reject—an impression, enabling it to distinguish a true representation of reality from one which is false. Some impressions can be assented to immediately, but others can only achieve varying degrees of hesitant approval which can be labeled belief or opinion (doxa). It is only through the use of reason that we can achieve clear comprehension and conviction (katalepsis). Certain and true knowledge (episteme), achievable by the Stoic sage, can be attained only by verifying the conviction with the expertise of one's peers and the collective judgment of humankind.

Make for yourself a definition or description of the thing which is presented to you, so as to see distinctly what kind of a thing it is in its substance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety, and tell yourself its proper name, and the names of the things of which it has been compounded, and into which it will be resolved. For nothing is so productive of elevation of mind as to be able to examine methodically and truly every object which is presented to you in life, and always to look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use everything performs in it, and what value everything has with reference to the whole.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, iii. 11.

 ...

Source and more on this topic is here 

Home Improvement

Beaded curtains.

Glimmery. Shiny. Bright.

A little wild. Untethered.

They jangle.

They catch the light.

They tug at you.

Declawed crabs.

They tangle you up.

They make a lot of noise.

They never stick.

They’re not really curtains.

They’re not

What they’re meant to be.

Quite a nuisance

Such things are. 

(Penned April 8, 2011)  

Only babble

It is happening again.

Every time I break a snooze regime that never existed, I suffer this very same wakefulness.

It’s not easy being an insomniac. Not even for a sorry-excuse-for-a-partly-reformed-one either.

It was many years ago when I heard a little story. Well actually, it was quite an elaborate, well etched story. It was like almost a moving picture, in words. (More of a bane of the mind sort of a matter to see things narrated come alive in that manner. Sorry. Diversion.) It was not exactly an easy story to hear. I had to keep a straight face. I could not reflect the inside on the outside. It wasn’t advisable. It was quite a dilemma. Almost a moral one.  This chortling of self-expression. However, it was accomplished. And just as gently that a golden bronze maple leaf drifts off the tree in autumn, something snapped ever so imperceptibly. It was almost an epiphany. A gentle one in passing.  Something that does not ruffle things but simply flows by. Much like the maple leaf. 

Many people keep maple leaves, ok leaves inside books till they dry. As a child I was told, “Look at the dried veins of the leaf. There’s really nothing to them. But they keep together. And they will. Till the time you want to keep them.” It made me wonder then, why would a dried leaf be more fascinating than a living one? And that of course, would qualify for a rhetoric question as I learnt much later.

Am I trying to get to a point? Well after all, that’s what readers are interested in.

Maybe.

But mostly, I am writing this since as is obvious, I’m still waking.

And maybe because it might just be something to read.

Now. Or at a later point in time. 

Theories of the Soul (Karen An-hwei Lee)

Kant says, transcendental

    idealism. In Aquinas,

we exist apart from bodies

    but only on Thursdays

when his famous ox

    flies by the window

wiser at Cologne

    where Albertus Magnus,

his real name, appoints

    Aquinas to magister studentium,

master of students. Aquinas

    is petrified but says yes.

He feels his soul

    sailing out of his head

floating near the roof

    where a blue ox wings by.

On Wednesday, two bodies

    are one soul

waking at sunrise

    thanks to the pineal gland

of Descartes, who thinks

    this node in the brain

is a tiny sugar cone

    or salted peanut,

the seat of the soul

    while Aristotle points

to the chopping

    ax as a teleology

as if the ax were a living,

    breathing person

which it isn’t.

    Heraclitus, air and fire

while Aquinas objects, no

    not an ax but ox.

If you’re a bird or soul

    I am only one mile

from the sea. If you

    are a soul in two bodies

life is more complex

    and we must labor

twice the field of sorrow

    after sleep, bath, and a glass

as Aquinas whispers, the things

    we love tell us who we are.

 

 

Source: Is here 

In the quiet

It is fashionable

this derision

we entertain.

Rising tides

need no invitation.

Those seven bones

can only extend

so much.

So learn

the impervious.

The ways of the whirled

bobbing planes

the physics of inertia

the harmonics

of everything

to find

to rest

to cut through

to the centre

of everything.

(Penned April 7, 2011) 

Basho

"In this mortal frame of mine which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to  drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over the others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another, At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly."

Excerpt, The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel, Matsuo Basho

 

Measure for measure

The concern is ample.

The light lingering touch

of fleeting feathers.

The words are kind.

They drift from where

the lungs are longing.

The glances are glowing.

Tender embers, the promise

of distant warmth.

The questions are sated.

As much ease

as intent.

It registers.

Shallow waters

only yield so much.

It takes another make

to grate nails to gravel

to bleed soil to life.

It is not a bad place, shallows.

Where minnows school

to the sunlight.

Befitting, to receive

only what is sought.

And no more. 

(Penned March 11, 2011)

A certain Ms. Atwood

For not ebbing on being graphic.

For calling a spade a shovel. 

For saying it like it is.

For not the faint of heart.

A favourite of all time.

Brother likes Lady Lazarus by Plath. 

_
 

Half Hanged Mary 

by Margaret Atwood
 

7 p.m.
 

Rumour was loose in the air,
hunting for some neck to land on.
I was milking the cow,
the barn door open to the sunset.

I didn’t feel the aimed word hit
and go on in like a soft bullet.
I didn’t feel the smashed flesh
closing over it like water
over a thrown stone.

I was hanged for living alone,
for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin,
tattered skirts, few buttons,
a weedy farm in my own name,
and a surefire cure for warts.

Oh yes, and breasts,
and a sweet pear hidden in my body.
Whenever there’s talk of demons
these come in handy.

8 p.m.

The rope was an improvisation.
With time they’d have thought of axes.

Up I go like a windfall in reverse,
a blackened apple stuck back onto the tree.

Trussed hands, rag in my mouth,
a flag raised to salute the moon,

old bone-faced goddess, old original,
who once took blood in return for food.

The men of the town stalk homeward,
excited by their show of hate,
their own evil turned inside out like a glove,
and me wearing it.

9 p.m.

The bonnets come to stare,
the dark skirts also,
the upturned faces in between,
mouths closed so tight they’re lipless.
I can see down into their eyeholes
and nostrils. I can see their fear.

You were my friend, you too,
I cured your baby, Mrs.,
and flushed yours out of you,
Non-wife, to save your life.

Help me down? You don’t dare.
I might rub off on you,
like soot or gossip. Birds
of a feather burn together,
though as a rule ravens are singular.

In a gathering like this one
the safe place is the background,
pretending you can’t dance,
the safe stance pointing a finger.

I understand. You can’t spare
anything, a hand, a piece of bread, a shawl
against the cold,
a good word. Lord
knows there isn’t much
to go around. You need it all.

10 p.m.

Well God, now that I’m up here,
with maybe some time to kill,
away from the daily
fingerwork, legwork, work
at the hen level,
we can continue our quarrel,
the one about free will.

Is it my choice that I’m dangling
like a turkey’s wattle from this
more than indifferent tree?
If Nature is Your alphabet,
what letter is this rope?

Does my twisting body spell out Grace?
I hurt, therefore I am.
Faith, Charity, and Hope
are three dead angels
falling like meteors or
burning owls across
the profound blank sky of Your face.

12 midnight

My throat is taut against the rope
choking off words and air;
I’m reduced to knotted muscle.
Blood bulges in my skull,
my clenched teeth hold it in;
I bite down on despair.

Death sits on my shoulder like a crow
waiting for my squeezed beet
of a heart to burst
so he can eat my eyes

or like a judge
muttering about sluts and punishment
and licking his lips

or like a dark angel
insidious in his glossy feathers
whispering to me to be easy
on myself. To breathe out finally.
Trust me, he says, caressing
me. Why suffer?

A temptation, to sink down
onto these definitions.
To become a martyr in reverse,
or food, or trash.

To give up my own words for myself,
my own refusals.
To give up knowing.
To give up pain.
To let go.

2 a.m.

Out of my mouths is coming, at some
distance from me, a thin gnawing sound
which you could confuse with prayer except that
praying is not constrained.

Or is it, Lord?
Maybe it’s more like being strangled
than I once thought. Maybe it’s
a gasp for air, prayer.
Did those men at Pentecost
want flames to shoot out of their heads?
Did they ask to be tossed
on the ground, gabbling like holy poultry,
eyeballs bulging?

As mine are, as mine are.
There is only one prayer; it is not
the knees in the clean nightgown
on the hooked rug.
I want this, I want that.
Oh far beyond.
Call it Please. Call it Mercy.
Call it Not yet, not yet,
as Heaven threatens to explode
inwards in fire and shredded flesh, and the angels caw.

3 a.m.

wind seethes in the leaves around
me the trees exude night
birds night birds yell inside
my ears like stabbed hearts my heart
stutters in my fluttering cloth
body I dangle with strength
going out of the wind seethes
in my body tattering
the words I clench
my fists hold No
talisman or silver disc my lungs
flail as if drowning I call
on you as witness I did
no crime I was born I have borne I
bear I will be born this is
a crime I will not
acknowledge leaves and wind
hold on to me
I will not give in

6 a.m.

Sun comes up, huge and blaring,
no longer a simile for God.
Wrong address. I’ve been out there.

Time is relative, let me tell you
I have lived a millennium.

I would like to say my hair turned white
overnight, but it didn’t.
Instead it was my heart;
bleached out like meat in water.

Also, I’m about three inches taller.
This is what happens when you drift in space
listening to the gospel
of the red hot stars.
Pinpoints of infinity riddle my brain,
a revelation of deafness.

At the end of my rope
I testify to silence.
Don’t say I’m not grateful.

Most will only have one death.
I will have two.

8 a.m.

When they came to harvest my corpse
(open your mouth, close your eyes)
cut my body from the rope,
surprise, surprise,
I was still alive.

Tough luck, folks,
I know the law:
you can’t execute me twice
for the same thing. How nice.

I fell to the clover, breathed it in,
and bared my teeth at them
in a filthy grin.
You can imagine how that went over.

Now I only need to look
out at them through my sky-blue eyes.
They see their own ill will
staring them in the forehead
and turn tail.

Before, I was not a witch.
But now I am one.

Later

My body of skin waxes and wanes
around my true body,
a tender nimbus.
I skitter over the paths and fields,
mumbling to myself like crazy,
mouth full of juicy adjectives
and purple berries.
The townsfolk dive headfirst into the bushes
to get out of my way.

My first death orbits my head,
an ambiguous nimbus,
medallion of my ordeal.
No one crosses that circle.

Having been hanged for something
I never said,
I can now say anything I can say.

Holiness gleams on my dirty fingers,
I eat flowers and dung,,
two forms of the same thing, I eat mice
and give thanks, blasphemies
gleam and burst in my wake
like lovely bubbles.
I speak in tongues,
my audience is owls.

My audience is God,
because who the hell else could understand me?

The words boil out of me,
coil after coil of sinuous possibility.
The cosmos unravels from my mouth,
all fullness, all vacancy. 

Always, the us

You know, on dank cold nights, like someplace faraway, someplace where it always rains, someplace there is always this moisture hanging in the air, from where you just cannot wring it out like water from fresh washing, the place where we then huddle and pool out centre all our piles of dry twigs, humble fruits of our toil, where we inspect them for the driest ones and we chuck the not so dry ones out, and where we then look around for who might have the splint that evening, and we find that someone does, and we huddle closer at the fireplace, and watch with a pang of craving that splint being struck, we see the pithy sparks birth, like the false, debased child of lightening, and we gouge with hungry eyes the sight of the tiniest flicker of orange-red glow and how it latches onto the twigs, the flame racing for their time-frozen hearts, and the gentle cackle, oh the gentlest of all cackles that ruptures into the night, like the pattering feet of rats scurrying under the floorboards.

You know, on dank cold nights, the solace of that cackle of splinters at that heart of the huddle, that cherished memory of times overcome, would be just as nought as either of us, if there wasn’t an us in the first place, sticking it with that gleaming dank demon of the night.

(Penned March 7, 2011)