M&L

Here's the music...

And here are the lyrics...

I walk in stride with people
much taller than me
and partly it's the boots but
mostly it's my chi
and I'm becoming transfixed
with nature and my part in it
which I believe just signifies
I'm finally waking up

and there's this moth outside my kitchen door
she's bonkers for that bare bulb
flying round in circles
bashing in her exoskull
and out in the woods she navigates fine by the moon
but get her around a light bulb and she's doomed

she is trying to evolve
she's just trying to evolve

now let's get talking reefer madness
like some arrogant government can't
by any stretch of the imagination
outlaw a plant
yes, their supposed authority over nature
is a dream
c'mon people
we've got to come clean

cuz they are locking our sons
and our daughters in cages
they are taking by the thousands
our lives from under us
it's a crash course in religious fundamentals
now let's all go to war
get some bang for our buck

I am trying to evolve
I'm just trying to evolve

gunnin for high score in the land of dreams
morbid bluish-white consumers ogling luminous screens
on the trail of forgetting
cruising without a care
the jet set won't abide by that pesky jet lag
and our lives boil down to an hour or two
when someone pulls a camera out of a bag

and I am trying to evolve
I'm just trying to evolve

so I walk like I'm on a mission
cuz that's the way I groove
I got more and more to do
I got less and less to prove
it took me too long to realize
that I don't take good pictures
cuz I have the kind of beauty
that moves

and I am trying to evolve
and I am trying to evolve

-

Immortel

Il y a ni portes ni fenêtres pour aller où c’est toujours parfait. Celui qui est né là-bas, vit éternellement jusqu'à la fin du monde.

Penned Nov 17, 2011.

Image source here 

Serendipity

"To live a dispassionate and cultured life in the open air of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking of writing--a life so slow it constantly verges on tedium, but pondered enough never to find itself there. To live this life far from emotions and thought, living it only in the thought of emotions and in the emotion of thoughts. To goldenly stagnate in the sun, like a murky pond surrounded by flowers. To possess, in the shade, that nobility of spirit that makes no demands on life. To be in the whirl of the worlds like dust of flowers, sailing through the afternoon air on an unknown wind and falling, in the torpor of dusk, wherever it falls, lost among larger things. To be this with a sure understanding, neither happy nor sad, grateful to the sun for its brilliance and to the stars for their remoteness. To be no more, have no more, want no more...."

The Big Apple

  

 Source here

God Speaks (Rainer Maria Rilke)

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

What this is not about. Or is it.

There are those who live by the map. And drive by it. Those who are humble. And uncertain. Some with the half-life of an elephant's memory. Some who choose to live there. For some, every milestone is a trigger. An echo their sound bird, their word carrier across chasms. Of space and time. To some, this life holds no enticement. To some, the only fear of loss, is death. Some wait for forests to move. Some toil in silhouettes to cave out barks of trees to make them. There are also those whose lives are as fickle to chance as the paths they take. Random. With no design. Then there are those who want nothing. They simply exist in flame or ash. Like air.

Penned June 22, 2011. 

Letter to a young poet (C.K. Williams)

Pulitzer Prize winning poet, C.K. Williams, gives his advice for a poet starting out.

I’ll begin by promising that there’ll be times in your life as a poet when the problems that are a part of trying to live that life will make the whole undertaking seem a terrible mistake, and you’ll find yourself thinking there must be something else to do that might better reward your labor.  And indeed some poets do release themselves from poetry; they become novelists, or teachers, or accountants, (happy accountants!) and this can happen to poets who are still surprisingly young.

I should also say though that I don’t think the decision to abandon poetry has to do with how much talent one believes one has or doesn’t have, or how much dedication, or confidence; it’s rather more a spiritual crisis, a loss of faith in the conviction that poetry has a value beyond the doing of it.  Surely the pleasures of that doing are undeniable; the making of something from nothing is a delight unlike anything else.

So the conviction that poetry has significance beyond its practice becomes absolutely essential, yet it isn’t at all self-evident.  Finally, at some point we have to ask what it is that draws us to poetry in the first place? It seems to me that the essential function of poetry is to unify.

Human beings experience ourselves as assemblages, almost collages, of the passional, the sensual, the intellectual and the spiritual. We are at once philosophers, aestheticians, social and political theorists; we are lovers and haters, children and parents, we lie, we tell the truth, we make myths and stories; there is violence in us, but there is also the unlikely charity which illuminates our spiritual history.  And what’s more, we are both participants and observers of all these portions of ourselves, these selves.   Poetry’s real greatness is that it is the most effective means we have of bringing together these apparently disparate parts of ourselves.  Because to be real poetry must be true, and  because it must deal unconditionally with the reality of a single person’s existence, by its definition it entails a bringing together of selves within the self.  Poetry makes us more whole than we thought we could be.

And for a poem to do this, in some strange way it doesn’t matter what it is about, what its subject is.  Poems can be self-consciously dedicated to the moral adventures of our lives; they can delve into that complex swarm of emotions and thoughts out of which our ethical sensibilities and obligations arise, and this will give them a certain admirable weight, like the poems of Dante, or Milton, or Baudelaire, but whether poems do this or not doesn’t determine their ultimate merit.  All poems exist in the tension between the immateriality of consciousness and language and the brute physical facts of reality, and so all poems, or all poems that are not empty drums banged to garner the applause of others, poets or critics, resolve this tension in ways that make them speak both to and out of the self.  A poem can seem to be about nothing at all – a clever conceit about lost love in a sonnet by Ronsard, a meditation on a moment of sensual delight in an ode of Keats – and yet, if a poem is authentic, if it is true, it will still evoke this essential unity in us, and will help us understand that we are not the poor fragmented things we can seem to be, and that our social organizations aren’t merely groupings of other fractured beings.  Because poetry demonstrates that the plural is merely a convention for the human spirit. The truth is that we are born and live and die one by one, and poetry, because it speaks at once to the poet and the reader, links the experience of one single soul to another and by doing so it exalts both.  That, finally, is what poetry is about, it is what allows us to be able to sit in a room by ourselves and do battle with language and form and with the pain of being able to do so little about human pain, and still feel we are doing what we know is the right thing.

Pulitzer Prize winning poet C.K. Williams has published numerous books of poetry, including Wait: Poems (2010); Collected Poems (2006); The Singing (2003), Repair (1999), The Vigil (1997); A Dream of Mind (1992); Flesh and Blood (1987); Tar (1983); With Ignorance (1997); I Am the Bitter Name (1992); and Lies (1969). He has also published five works of translation.

Among his many awards and honours are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. He has served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Currently Williams teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University and lives part of each year in Paris

C.K. Williams has travelled to the UK to give the Poetry Society’s Annual Lecture “On Being Old.” He will also read a selection of his poetry at the lectures which will take place on:

• Wednesday 25 May at Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, Newcastle University
• Thursday 26 May at Senate House University College London
• Thursday 13 October at the Kenneth Allott Lecture  at Liverpool University

In C.K. Williams’ Letter To A Younger Poet, he emphasises the need to keep faith in poetry. If you had a time machine and could send a letter back to yourself when you first started writing poetry, what would you say? Do you have questions you would like to ask your future self?

Source is here

Starting with the bitters, ending with the sweet.

Try them!

I started with the bitters today.

The gnarly, near unpalatable, dreaded green of the bitter gourd or the ‘ucche’.

It’s an acquired taste, the bitters. I always wondered why Bengali meals began with it.

Living in Delhi’s heart of Bengali-land, Chitaranjan Park for over three months now, I have had my fill of butter chicken, paneer and butter laden ‘aloo parathas’. Of course, I did get around to sampling the fare from the localities’ several ‘Bengali’ restaurants and take-aways. To every aficionado who would zealously advocate this fare, I would say, it ain’t the real thing; especially the non-vegetarian, which is well, much like Delhi-Chinese, the Delhified version of authentic Bengali grub.

Which made me venture into the kitchen myself. For a taste of home. Home, which is my inheritance, the comforting salve which I carry with me wherever I go, the memory of my grandmother and mother, garrulously toiling away over the kadhai, never running out of complaints, “When my child, will you ever learn?”

I of course, never learnt. I could never learn how to measure when it came to cooking. Things continue to be flung in at random. This of course makes the Man Friday, the guest-house keeper here jump out of his skin to see the amount of chillies I flung into the pan every time. Perhaps in fear of indigestion, curiosity or general well-being that I not burn down the house, he stands in vigil, as I cook amidst the fumes.

“This is burning,” he says. No, it is not, let it cook. “Are you sure about this?” he adds suspiciously and I tell him ever so gently, you really don’t have to eat this you know. Which works; well, for the time being.

So after the fish and the meat over past weekends, I came upon the bitters today.

They can be overcome, the bitters, with tempering.

“Why does Bengali food have to be sweet?” I’m asked ever so often. Most people not accustomed to the taste, cringe a little to spot the sweet taste in the dishes, sweet – something often reserved only for the last course, dessert.  

It’s all in the balance.

Sour, pungent or bitter, everything can be overcome, tempered, countered with its opposite taste. It is an inheritance, the kitchen’s chemistry of a handful spices, blending, searing, raging, bursting with their personalities, waging their own humble battle in the pan, plunged into scorching oil.

How much to extract of every flavor, how and exactly when… just like life, so in the kitchen. And it is toil. It takes patience. Time. And a little faith.

There are no masters, nor wretches who cannot go right, or wrong all the time. It is all a matter of acquired taste.

Today I broke them, the bitters. Gently seared it out of them, with the melting of starch in potatoes and acrid egg-plant. Sprinkled with swift rushes of pungent and sweet, it blended into the ever, ever so humble ‘sukto’.

Temperance, or moderation, to achieve which there are neither masters nor wretches who can inch towards it without the trying or the effort.

Life’s lessons need not always be in fancy places, high-profile meetings or boardrooms.

They begin, like you and me, in our own humble roots.

The place we must never forget, to keep forever close to heart.

Bien fait

I have said everything.

I have written down everything

You’d like to have ever known.

About anything. Or everything.

I have written it on butter paper.

Strung it across a shell of twigs

Set it alight

And let it afloat

Into the night sky.

How you read it now

Is to your devices.

And to none

Of mine. 

(Penned May 6, 2011)

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.