Chronicles

Frozen Space

2011-07-17T20:40:00.007-04:00

My recent short visit to Kochi convinced me of one thing – that in my mind I am returning to a space and time, frozen when I left the shores more than a decade ago. Even when I can acknowledge the reminders of time's passage, I am looking for the remains of a frozen time. It is heart breaking to see that the remnants are withering fast. How long would the debris remain, before I will have nothing left to go back to?

While this narrative is unfair to the people living their unfrozen lives yonder, long distance travel can afford a few thoughts on the dynamic between space and memory. On the flight heading back to New York, Georges Perec (*Species of Spaces) offered a little more to the thought. I will leave you with Perec to mull over a bit more:

I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep-rooted; places that might be points of reference, of departure, of origin:

My birthplace, the cradle of my family, the house where I may have been born, the tree I may have seen grow, the attic of my childhood filled with intact memories...

Such places don't exist, and it's because they don't exist that space becomes a question, ceases to be self-evident, ceases to be incorporated, ceases to appropriated. Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It's never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.

My spaces are fragile: time is going to wear them away, to destroy them. Nothing will any longer resemble what was, my memories will betray me, oblivion will infiltrate my memory, I shall look at a few old yellowing photographs with broken edges without recognizing them.

Space melts like sand running through one's fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds:

To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive, to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.

* Species of Spaces and Other Pieces: Georges Perec

Mubarak in his Labyrinth

2011-02-10T23:01:00.002-05:00

Egypt is uneasily waiting for her moment in history. The faceless crowd thronging the squares cannot have what they wanted - not yet. The fear of reprisal is at the back of everyone’s mind, that nobody knows the price of freedom for now. Mubarak is holding out, chiding his stubborn subjects to go home and resume their lives, sending policemen in plainclothes and reminding them of evil designs of the west, all the while reminding foreign diplomats of the Islamic terror waiting to pounce at the slightest pretext. Military who has a lot to lose in the bargain is waiting in the middle for the endgame to begin.

A few days in Cairo broke age old stereotypes of irrational Arab rage boys and the West’s criminal excuses to legitimize dictators of choice. The few Islamic bogeymen from these unjust lands were enough for American governments of both varieties to scare its citizens to look away from the misery of the people who had oppression written in their DNA. Perhaps for the first time the world has seen humanity in Arab lands beyond the threat of Islamic caliphate.

Then there is the story of Iran where a revolution was hijacked by clerics and the West got it all wrong with their misplaced priorities and policies. But that was in the era of cold war and bounty hunt was on for oil. You have the example of Pakistan where an entire citizenry has been radicalized to self-destruct, to achieve meaningless territorial ambitions. These two models have been discredited by the wave of terrorism and oppression by clerics in the last decade. Egypt has to find a model of its own device.

What began in Tunisia, caught fire in Egypt where political elites and their cronies took the wealth and dignity away from their countrymen with impunity. You can see the same scenario in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Yemen. Most of their leaders are best buddies of the presidents and prime ministers of hypocrite democracies from Europe and United States. The collective consciousness of population around the world has connected through the neural nodes of internet.

Mubarak is stuck in a bygone time warp. His paternal pronouncements and invocation of self-serving constitution had only enraged and insulted the intelligence of his countrymen. Even Muslim Brotherhood took several steps back having seen the force of human craving for freedom and justice beyond the realms of their brand of religion. People seem to have a collective vision of clarity. Long back I remember reading novelist Naguib Mahfouz’s idea of Egyptians looking for Zaabalawi, the mythical inner persona, in his story Zaabalawi:

“It was easy enough with him in the old days when his place of abode was known. Today, though, the world has changed and after having enjoyed a position attained only by potentates, he is now pursued by the police on a charge of false pretences. It is therefore no longer an easy matter to reach him, but have patience and be sure that you will do so.”

In a way the revolution having no face is what this is all about. Common people who have been oppressed from the time of Pharaohs found their voice. Voice calling out to be free. They can’t let that go, and Tahrir Square would not stop at Tianenmen square. World is waiting.

Litanies of Dutch Battery

2010-10-25T22:12:00.020-04:00

Book in the rack!

For reasons seemed obvious to me, writing a book was an ostentatious indulgence. Translating another had to be an impossibility. Yet it happened, thanks to an improbable sequence of events and to internet.

P.K. had given a recco on account of our shared heritage of Kochi nativity. Sreekumar brought the book on a return trip from India. Upon reading the article here, Sunil asked about the English version, prompting a few exchange of emails between myself and N.S. Madhavan's friend Rizio. Fortunately Madhavan was visiting a writers' haunt in Ghent, New York. We spoke about Kochi and other things during the long ride to Philly. I played Billy Joel's New York state of mind in the car, which could as well have been Kochi state of mind!

Kochi has a much shorter and recent history, unlike the narrative of ancient India. The ports of Kochi have always welcomed visitors from distant shores and made them her own. The human landscape around the small town of Kochi showed a microcosm of the world. You could travel a few miles to see Jews, descendants of the Dutch, French, Portuguese, the English and Central Asians moving about in their own natural habitats. Hindus who fled from persecution by the Portuguese in Goa and tradesmen from north, as far as Kutch have added to the texture.

The fast pace of turns in history have given them the gift of endearing ideosyncracy, all the while being ruthless observors of life - this is on show with full force in their language, which has a unique rhythm and cadence.

Translating that is a hard act to follow. Nevertheless, here it is.

N.S. Madhavan is a significant writer from India with an uncanny sense of history whose genius will guide you to rare insights into the Indian mind.

Arundhati's Choice

2010-06-08T15:05:00.000-04:00

The Maoist insurgency has been able to wake their comrades out of deep slumber in Urban India. The intensity of attacks on police and civil society in the name of revolution demanded an unambiguous stand. It’s not just the tribals, who are hostages to the Maoists, society at large had been affected and watch the events with apprehension. That is where the political stance of the vocal champions among erstwhile human rights activists and socialites seizing the moment are viewed with a lot of scrutiny and cynicism. They do not have many admirers anymore as the collective consciousness of Indian body politic has become much more complex and stakeholders from multiple strata of society are actively engaged in their response.

For many the insurgency is an Indian version of a socio-political theater from the late sixties. Wayward violence and anarchic lifestyle then put off their sympathizers among the middleclass communities everywhere. The appeal they had among the Sixties and Seventies youth had vanished gradually as governments in Europe began to shed its fascist vestiges, co-opted socialist principles into democracy and became more inclusive. It also helped that the political issues they championed went out of intelligentsia's radar geopolitically and nationally. Most of them met with individual dead-ends, disillusioned or compromised. The prominence of Absurd Theater and writers like Sartre and Camus signified the dynamic of personal dysfunction and flawed political consciousness of the time.

The mayhem caused by the Weatherman in USA, RZ and RAF (Red Army Faction) in Germany is a forerunner of the terrorist methodology now. However it was interesting to see their relationship with the PLO with whom they got trained to wield arms and participated in multiple plane hijacks. In a way, there was a time when the paths of extreme ideologues from the Left, Islamic Jihadists and liberation theologians’ have crossed purely on the basis of their views of social issues of poverty, depravation and justice. Their cooperation was that of mutual convenience too, as the true nature of their ideologies were glossed over by the heady allure of socialist ideals. Occupations of Vietnam and Israel, compulsive hatred towards the perceived or otherwise fascist disposition of authority, prolific academic (Gramsci, Althuser etc) and underground literature provided the impetus to take charge.

Revolution is being used interchangeably for the Maoist violence in India, which has Germany, Vietnam and Israel rolled into one. International outlets for liberal left (Universities, BBC, NewYork Times, NPR etc) have given succor and much coveted recognition to the activists to carry out their anti-government propaganda. Suddenly encounter deaths, Gujarat, Kashmir independence movement and minority persecution are not that important anymore. Narratives have begun to pour in print, television and internet about the murky world of big corporate, looting politicians and colluding media barons. Marxian polemic is replaced with human rights harangue while unapologetically blinkered about the objectives of Maoist and Islamic fundamentalists. It’s rather easy to say that if either of these militant group had their way, the first casualty would be secular democracy and the subsequent liquidation of Left activists for who they are – Infidel or rotten elite. V.S.Naipaul (Among the Believers) observed in the aftermath of Iranian Revolution - Ayatollah Khomeini, having hoodwinked left wing activists in the west during his exile in France, pulled the fundamentalist curtain on his communist backers right after Shah was overthrown. Similarly Maoists might not be able to resist an urge to cleanse the country of class enemies even if they belong to the radical chic.

The spectacle of conflict is played out in Indian homes through television and internet. Here is where people like Arundhati Roy, Vijay Prasad, Gautam Navlakha et al who have embedded themselves in academies and highbrow careers, target specific political entities and espouse chosen ideology to paint everything in black and white. In the end infintely complex issues get reduced to empty rhetoric on identity versus class conflict. But unlike Eighties and Nineties, when Marxist comrades controlled the print media and universities, internet age liberated a different variety of literate middleclass who grew up to call their bluff, challenge their ideology and more importantly recognize them for who they are – pompous elites with a rigid sense of social hierarchy and territory.

Home minister Chidambaram recognizes this. His pointing to the Left Activists as the reason for his inaction is a tactic to discredit the government’s most shrill critics who are diplomatic liability having access to international opinion space. While this is shrewd in its quest for public opinion, it is dangerous too, as more and more civilians and Police personnel get killed. Both sides are imposing intellectual dhimmitude on public discourse instead of full disclosure and understanding.

In the film Baader-Meinholf complex (2008), the hyper-activist Gudrun Ensslin accused the Marxist polemicist Ulrike that she had theorized too much to evade real action. Ulrike Meinholf, a popular journalist too, presented the introspective voice which acknowledged the darker shades of means and motives of revolutionaries. Ulrike was challenged to make a crossover to become a guerilla. She eventually did exactly that, for which she ultimately paid by taking her own life.

When I learn that Ms. Roy has moved to the other side to report, eulogize and now daring the government to arrest her, the natural question is would Ms. Roy do an Ulrike redux? Or is there too much at stake not to cross that threshold?

Note: Among the Believers, an islamic journey (V.S. Naipaul),Film - Baader-Meinholf complex

Danton's Vigil

2009-07-03T00:08:00.000-04:00

The romance of revolution is nothing but a camouflage for the fear of great turmoil and the beginning of tyranny in another name. The history of revolutions taught us at least as much. French, Russian and countless other revolutions - big and small trampled on humanity in general in their sway. Some say what’s happening in Iran is nothing short of a revolution. But you can feel the apprehensions of mutineers palpable in the million tweets and blogs as they go wave after wave against the children of Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah.

Watching Danton (Andrej Wajda, 1983) once again convinced me of the power of cinema - how it lends clarity to viewers' vague apprehensions and insights into the shifting sands of human frailty and lessons in history. I watched it late at night fighting sleepy eyes and thunderous rain drumming away on the roof. I remember power going off before and after Danton's ominous speech on how revolution devours its own children.

It wasn't that difficult to lay doubt on the evil lurking behind best of the goodwill in even among the finest of political systems. When I watched the movie in late 1989, Indian political arena too was undergoing unprecedented upheavals with the right wing BJP making strides in the electorate, V.P Singh introducing caste inspired identity politics and a more than jaded congress delved in open communal politics throwing the country into greater turmoil.

The world too was in the throes of change. Berlin wall was torn down. Soviet Union abandoned Afghanistan. Pakistan cashed in on its mercenary bounty as it kicked the aggro on India by several notches. East Europe unwound from the communist dictators. Prague spring culminated in the winter of Moscow.

Danton was still laughing - pulling down the delectable dinner from the table which he arranged so carefully for Robespierre. Yet you could see the earnestness in his eyes, almost pleading with his friend for justice with whom he wrote the cornerstone of French revolution - Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Danton arrived in Paris to convince Robespierre of the perilous path he had set the country into. Liberator has turned into another dictator in the name of humanity. Having recognized the monster, Danton allowed himself to be caught and tried in the tribunal in order to address the people of France on the nemesis of modern times - dictatorships and the tyranny of the "righteous".

Gerard Depardieu, who played Danton leaves a long shadow over everyone in the movie including the viewers who are caught up in the drama - just like the desperate Desmoulins raging at his own ideals, scared of the guillotine and longing for a life with his newborn baby and distraught wife. He forewarned each one of us to be on constant vigil for our own sake - so that you and I may not become a tyrant or a victim of our own devices.

Mathrubhumi

2009-06-21T23:25:00.000-04:00

A few months back, a dear friend subscribed Mathrubhumi magazine in my name. After a gap of more than ten years the magazines sealed carelessly in plastic covers had begun to sail towards me crossing oceans.

It wasn't dejavu this time, even as I opened the first magazine in exhilaration trying to reach across the other side of a reader's memory. I can recall the places I'd been when I read some of the landmarks printed in Malayalam. More than the reference-worthiness, what fascinated me was its ability to provoke curiosity and earnestness to causes bigger than oneself without being elitist.

M.T. Vasudevan Nair used to write editor's note for a while. He wrote about child labor and how Chekhov's Vanka pained his conscience. Another note quoted the Indian chief's profound and poetic letter to the great white chiefs in Washington of his fears for the fragile ecosystem and the dying earth's providence. That was when O.V. Vijayan's eco-fiction Madhuram Gayati had begun serializing in Mathrubhumi.

Earlier, scholar and poet N.V. Krishna Warrier led the editorial team. I could sense their quite confidence and brilliance in the way they put out the magazine and paved way for intelligent and insightful discourses. I couldn't have known Nitya or Octavia Paz or Brodsky the way I did had it not been the space given to independent thinkers in the pages of the magazine.

Another major attraction was the illutrations of A.S and Nampoothiri who complemented writers' imagination and more often than not surpassed readers' mental image of the landscapes and characters.

Somehow the magazine managed to complement my eclectic and random reading delightfully. I still remember reading Kamala Das's childhood memoir and V.K.N's inimitable Payyan tales. Same pages had varied and unique voices of the world - Axel Munthe, V.S Khandekar, Sunil Gangopadhyaya, Bhishma Sahni and Marquez who romanticized his own private cinema paradiso in the rickety movie halls in Bogota.

The reappearance of this magazine in another shore isn't connecting with me. May be I am left behind. Or I am more into connecting the dots between NPR radio and nytimes.com now. Since the primary readers of Mathrubhumi live faraway, their perception of reality and worldview is now circumstantially remote.

Yet I am indebted to my friend who cared way more than I ever did to do this for me. Thank you P.K.

The Path of the Prophet: Triumph of defeat

2009-02-04T21:26:00.000-05:00

Charioteer from the epic - charioteer, the Prophet spoke to the brokenhearted traveler: “Kurukshethra was never finished.”

Traveler asked: “When does Kurukshethra become complete?”

Charioteer smiled. He said: “We have learnt that when you take absolute away from itself, absolute remains. However when you stack absolute over absolute, it transcends itself.” Charioteer continued: “absolute is nothing but a dimension involving space and time. Human spirit cannot traverse the transcendental . Even their quantum mathematics is scared of accepting the challenge. However the "transcendental absolute", in times of great uncertainty becomes one of us - it takes birth and dies. Look…

Auschwitz, the city of gas chambers where tens of thousands of Jews were charred to death. In the gloom of human sacrifices, Christ’s newly weds, nuns knelt down in the glimmer of a lone candle light and chanted:

“O Virgin Mary, O Mother of god
Pray for us sinners, now and all the time.”

Piercing through the blinding walls, the Prayer in the face of evil became the prayer of all human tribes. The candle light flickered on the walls. The seeker was aghast at the nail marks left behind by Jews as they wrote the last musical notes of mortal pain as they died exhaling the gas. The king with the crown of thorn wailed from his cross: “My brothers! Would I ask my maker to punish you for the guilt of not recognizing me? Why do my priests allege the guilt of vengeance on me? My lord! But the cup of accusation is more unbearable. “

The chants of nuns became mourning: “O Virgin Mary, the most merciful, let this prayer be with the testament written in the agony of your son.”

The flame of love - presence of a martyr. The atom of love cleanses the sins of a world bent on destroying, and lends freedom to the galaxy of stars. The chariot rolled on. Presently it finds itself in the valley of golden apples. Charioteer asked the traveler: “Do you remember these trees?”

“I do. The forbidden fruit of knowledge.”

“With all due respect, you didn’t get it right! Sin and punishment are nothing but a fiction of make-believe fear. By eating these fruits you cannot get knowledge but learn all the tricks to create toys and weapons. In His creation there is only love, no schemes to punish.”

The children of humans who ate the fruits of tricks built up empires. They erected fortresses of technology, architected toy houses to fornicate and giant armories to wage wars. The competed among themselves to grab the lion share. The footprints of the Prophet who walked away unnoticeably from their insatiable lust were upturned.

Traveler asked the man clad in nothing but a loin cloth who waited alongside the highway to freedom: “why are you eating nothing but leaves.?”

“This is my food - fallen leaves. I walk by the benevolent avatar Kali without troubling vegetation or animals.”

The seeker asked: “You walk in loin clothes, sustain life with leaves - aren’t you losing it all?”

“Yes”

“Why?”

“Look yonder…”

Tribes and castes clamored to fight each other! Kurukshethra is replete with apocalyptic arsenals. Gita author confesses at the end of each cycle of Kurukshethra. The final stanzas of the prophecy were silenced to obscurity by the roar that rose from the parade for weapons of mass destruction: Maa Nishada! Do not kill! Isn’t the defeat of a loin clothed fakir preferable?

* * *

"an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind" - Gandhi spoke as he squatted in Naokhali, he knew he was confronting the medieval monster. Anybody who took him for a fool underestimated his awareness of the epic sweep of subcontinental history . He demanded a secular fiber from the Jehadi, called his attention to non violence and co-existence. He knew he was waging a lone campaign against a million revolts in the name of Gods strewn across centuries.

Martin Luther King made a choice. Nelson Mandela couldn't have taken another path to freedom. Gandhi's one man act reminded Indians to choose life over death. Didn't we know that already?

The Path of the Prophet: the revelations

2009-02-04T12:50:00.000-05:00

Reading O.V. Vijayan prompted me to pick up on the theme of India as an Idea. I keep going back to random pages of his “The Path of the Prophet (1992)” and marvel at the insights on offer. And I have not been reading much of late.

Vijayan was a unique voice you wouldn’t find clamoring for attention, especially among the mountain of schmaltzy Diasporas, or post colonial master servant dichotomies or countless other broadsides heaped on India. His career as a cartoonist and having lived in Delhi during the tumultuous decades of Indian experiment of democracy and nationhood elicited quite a number of stand out observations from him.

Vijayan saw India essentially as a conflation of many ideas left behind by millennial prophets from the Vedic period, the Buddha, Nabi, Christ, Nanak, Marx and Gandhi. Their ancient and modern manifestations are alive in unexpected corners in violent and sometimes harmonious fashion. As you travel in time through centuries long strife you sense the kind of dejavu that accompanies a fatalistic realization of this land’s survival from invasions. Vijayan set the backdrop of the book a few years and days into the murder of Indira Gandhi and the subsequent butchering of Sikhs in Delhi.

Narayanan - Vijayan’s alter ego in the book narrates the story of his father who imparted the wisdom of Gita, which he acquired from the world war I as a soldier when he lay down under the benevolence of small pox bacteria.

“First world war - In the sand dunes of Mesopotamia and in the legendary banks of Tigris and Euphrates, my father fought. Narayanan listened to the story snuggling in the lap of his father. The soldiers squatted in the trenches they dug in the dirt and sand and meditated on the love they left behind. Meanwhile a procession of another tribe was crossing their path - an exodus in search of Promised Land.

“Do you know who were they, Nanoo?” Asked his father and he answered himself: “they were bacteria on their journey from another battlefield, to get some rest.” Father contracted the pox bacteria. Fellow soldiers insisted that their ill compatriot couldn’t be allowed to stay inside the trench in order not to spread the disease. They wanted him shot and thrown into the cauldron of summer fire. Their commander, Capt. Gurmit Singh stopped them. He took father over to a tin shed and kept a leather pouch-full of water in it. On his way back to the trench, he was shot and killed by enemy fire.

In a soldier’s language, father explained the stories of the battles and retreats of bacteria as if they were yet another enunciation of Gita: Mankind is the disease of this earth - just like them, bacteria the micro mankind - they travel, discover, migrate - make tribal empires, civilizations, literature, art and entertainment. That indeed becomes our disease.”

* * *

Josef, Narayanan’s friend bemoans the fate of his former communist radical friends in prison who are awaiting death sentence: “They will come out. Staring death in its face and building the mystery of an exotic death have nothing in common. I can‘t really imagine what will they become at the very last moment!”

Martyrdom is only for those who accept God as their father. Like the crucifixion of Christ, only a soul can claim real martyrdom. How can enzymes and proteins claim martyrdom? When communists die, it will be reported in pamphlets and notices as mere deaths - meaningless deaths! A few things disintegrate and vanish around you - dreams, truth, periods of history, masteries sewn up in fat leather jackets. In the end, what left would be a glimmer of one’s own solitude and a short distance across. The human, bereft of civility and compassion stands alone, crumbles apart into minerals and chemicals, becomes one’s own prophet and speaks gibberish… Bhagat Singh was reading Lenin’s autobiography into the last few days of his life. What would an individual sentenced to death, pick up from such a book? Bhagat Singh and his comrades were moving towards a grand boundary. What was that lay beyond the fence? Each one of the prophets passed by, asking the same question.

* * *

While Sikh uprising troubled northern India, Narayanan met with Sujan Singh, a world war veteran and a taxi driver in Delhi - with whom he shared some of his thoughts and fears. During one of the rides, Sujan Singh as he takes the Journalist Narayanan to Rasuyi where a roadside death needed to be reported decides to call on Indian democracy:

Sujan Singh said: “this is just a beginning, Saab. Mark my word. Soon the country will fall into the hands of lawless goons. One of them has been shot dead in the middle of the road, in Rasuyi.”

Thugs have grabbed a nation of majestic lineage. People cheer on as triumphant plunderers flaunt their crowns, while the thief finds himself in the palace, feasts on left over from the empire, stands tall on the empire’s stilts and advice its simple subjects.

“The ruling class in India” Sujan Singh continued: “what they need is short respites, for that they will sacrifice Punjab.”

“Remember, we do not have an enemy to fight anymore. There won’t be another Bangladesh, most likely another nuclear test.”

“Or else a genocide!”

Note: The text in Italics is original translation by me. To keep the discussion on track, I 've selected the pieces randomly from the book. Another part to follow...

India's unfinished business with Pakistan

2008-12-05T23:42:00.000-05:00

India was supposed to be an idea - a final destination for many a weary traveler seeking an enlightening unknown and for many others a final frontier queer enough to conquer, loot and crush. To think about the world's most populous democracy and emerging economy in medieval light seemed totally out of place in times of globalization, until a week ago.

Terrorists emerged from the gateway of India to inflict untold pain on the psyche of an ancient India decked in new age garb. It could've been Ghazni's mercenaries cutting through Khyber pass on their way to a million savageries no matter how many times they had been rebuffed and magnanimously offered their lives back. They return with greater brutality, wilier deception and a malicious smile at the weakness of their opponent.

Centuries have hard wired the orgasmic passion for violence on the wild things and their offspring who lived westwards of Khyber. Ever since Genghis Khan legitimized the philosophy of kill to live, central Asia was nothing but killing fields for the organized mercenaries. Islam has tagged itself on to it later as merely a context to vanquish the other a.k.a infidels. India was always the final frontier for the motivated. Unfortunately it still is the same.

Even after repeated defeats in wars and proxy wars at the hands of a democratic India, even after the country had been split into two, even after world's rapt attention on the failure of their own state, Pakistanis are in a perpetual denial of reality. The abyss shown by Pakistan's forerunner, Afghanistan was never enough for the plotters in that country to doubt what destiny has in store. For them this is supposed to be a small phase, in fact an insignificant price to pay for the greater and purer Pakistan notwithstanding what they are up against. During nineties they were executing their plans meticulously with an insipid secular Congress government in power, belligerent but wayward right wingers in opposition, China in tow, splintered Soviet union and an indifferent U.S.A run by big mouth liberals from the left.

Kargil war was supposed to be the beginning of the end. It was, but in a direction that wasn’t anticipated. World events, pivoting around America's war on terror, realignment of "rogue" elements with Al-Qaeda and Palestine's political obliteration led the international attention eventually towards Pakistan. Iraq war has been nothing but Bush's miscalculation and a distraction.

The raison de'etre for Pakistani Army is its unfinished business with India. They antagonized and bled India in every available opportunity. They experimented with democracy and international institutions (major supplier of soldiers to U.N peace keeping missions) to thwart Indian diplomatic efforts, aligned military institutions including ISI with Jehadists who had no regional ambitions to challenge India with frugal resources. However the global war on terror, while Jehadis looking to usurp power and Taliban on the run complicated the equations.

Thus it's become an unfinished business of India to dismantle Pakistani terror camps, cut down the Pakistani monolith - Armed forces and destroy their borrowed/stolen nukes.

Free falling free market and McCain's message

2008-09-28T01:29:00.000-04:00

When I looked around to buy a house in the land of opportunities during the last quarter of year 2005, I couldn’t help wondering about the apparent but glossed over disconnect between real estate prices and real buying power of average Americans. House prices spiked dramatically at the rate of 200 percent in less than a year. Mortgage lenders and developers sprang up everywhere. Having exhausted those with a credit history, they turned their attention towards the softer underbelly of the population - barely legal immigrants and job hopping victims of credit card vultures. To grant them entry into the brave new American dream, their benefactors provided an opening in the name of deferred principle and interest rates a.k.a sub-prime mortgage. In time reality set in - bills began to show up with their true numbers. Occupiers of the houses fled abandoning their unsolicited dreams.

The word spread rapidly. Foreclosure signs began to appear in neighborhoods. Soon everyone understood what Katrina had forewarned. Once the canopy of denial is flung open, you know the dweller of the pretty home across the street was a poor man made homeless by greed.

But what I didn’t realize like everyone else then was the depth to which housing speculators had dug their hands to fund the project to build a home for every decent and hard working American. Insurance companies, mutual funds, investment bankers had all diverted funds into the project to make some fast buck. Its unreal to think that companies like Lehman Brothers and Investment banks like Washington Mutual which survived the great depression of 1930s would go belly up with a day’s notice. Insurance giant AIG is propped up by the Federal government for now. So are Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. Retirement funds and other savings are at risk to send shivers through many an aging bones.

Most significant fallout of all this is its worldwide impact. China made major investment in U.S market. So are the Japanese, Germans and Oil barons in the middle east. Even ICICI bank in India had a major investment in Lehman Brothers. Stock markets around the world have been shaken by this quake which may not have reached its highest point yet.

At the core of this problem is the sustained implementation of Republicans’ conservative ideologies on government’s role in capital market and legitimization of corporate greed. Reagonomics of deregulation and huge tax cuts and credits to big corporations were continued for the past two decades with republican dominated senate and congress even though Clinton, a conservative liberal was president during its time of bliss. Another aspect of republican politics is its clever and tactical use of wedge issues such as abortion and gay rights with biblical references to undercut criticisms from the left on its economic policies, especially during elections. Clearly, the Republicans favor rich folks who need geopolitical and logistical opportunities to make their billions since we now know a lot more about Enron adventures in third world countries, tax credits for self-serving Oil corporations and how Iraq became a goldmine for Halliburton. Deregulation is the toast of the time and yet the number of career politicians accused of corruption and behind bars are increasing.

There is a significant section of Americans who are blissfully unaware of world’s perception of themselves. They fear change and embrace status-quo. For them there is no creature more disgusting and revolting than a liberal democrat who is out to increase tax and unleash gays into their private Christian lives. They do not care a fig about the world and they truly believe that the war in Iraq is convenient and after all things considered Pakistan is still an ally. Drop names like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid - they’ll run to polling booth to vote for a serial killer under republican column.

It is important to note that the sternest opposition to W. Bush‘s $700 billion bail-out plan has come from the Republicans and not Democrats. They are worried about facing impending senatorial and congressional elections and the real possibility of owning up a greater depression if things took a turn for the worse. No wonder Republican presidential hopeful McCain is doing everything he can to usurp the message of change from Obama. He lived most of his life during the cold war era and appears to be cruising in a time machine inexorably into the past. He admitted several times that he has no clue on economy and he would rather spend his time on foreign policy. Engaging in geopolitical conflict a.k.a war economics is after all a Republican contribution to humanity. Given that depression is unofficially declared, McCain’s military Keynesianism is just what the doctor order to secure this damn world.

Celebrating Folk Art

2008-03-28T23:52:00.000-04:00

It seemed like a long time ago when time was still timeless, I had an affliction of color and sound. My mind for the first time, was registering the overwhelming play of bright colors and engrossing sounds of yearly festival at the temple in our neighborhood. Even the color of candies which the seasonal peddlers stacked upon their makeshift stalls added an ethereal sheen on the phantasmal vision unfolded in front of my eyes.

The soothsayer song in praise of snake deities, loud and stout looking actors on stage enacting extra-terrestrial battles from Ramayana and Mahabharata , the balloon man with his mobile paraphernalia - those were the early connectors to the heritage of the land and expressions of a world order that defied the onslaught of time as long as they did.

It was much later when I began to notice earthier and rather primordial forms of folk art such as Ayyappan Paattu, songs in praise of Dravidian gods (Muthappan, Vishnumaya) along the sidelines of flashier performing arts. In them, deep down I could sense a sort of cathartic realization of individual and collective dreams and fears which otherwise would have never ever made it out of the subconscious domain or exploded into something sinister and dark.

The national festival of Kerala - Onam was borne out of a folk legend and an occasion to celebrate all sorts of folk arts - ritualistic and secular (such as Tiger dance, Kummatti Kali etc). More than its significance as an age-old tradition, Onam brought up a grand setting for people to celebrate life and revel in others' joy.

Some of the shapes and forms I have seen in the traditional settings of Kerala were intense enough to let go on my growing apprehensions of the general lack of development and modernity in the state's social life. The richness of the folk art easily filled the wide gaps of general deprivation and the prevalence of snobbery among the audience and practitioners of classical arts. Often I have marveled at the striking similarity of Theyyam and Kathakali in their costumes and how Theyyam invariably breaks into bouts of cries as opposed to the finesse of aural and literary tradition of Kathakali. The social dynamic at work here was too stark to pass up.

The dialectics in folk art has been cleverly adopted and manipulated by political strategists, especially the communists who engrained their ideology in seemingly innocuous and subtle variations of folk music practiced and enjoyed by workers in the fields. Later on popular poets used the structure and sounds of folk music to lend an exciting latitude of folk imagery and unexpected dimension to their art. Listening to such poems in their native languages like Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali etc have become a unique experience. Translating them would not have made any sense at all.

However the most impressive of all folk arts has always been music. The rhythm and sounds of folk music have a rare ability to cut through the carefully manicured fences of culture and language. The aspirations of common folks rising in unison resonate naturally with their ilk around the world and touch hearts in a unique way - whether it is a group of Moravian gypsies assembled in a tavern, a Texan singing Americana, a Baul singer walking down the beaten fields or a bunch of farmers somehwere in a nondescript islet in Kuttanad, rhapsodizing the season of harvest and pleasures of simple unhurried life of yore.

Living in a time when Hypermodernity and globalization are often confused and utterly inadequate terms to describe human and to a great extend mother earth’s conditions, folk art may be able to offer much needed healing for our electrocuted humanity. Although we will never return to the refuge of rural and agrarian setting, there can be only simple solutions for our complicated problems.

I remember reading Milan Kundera as he spent an entire chapter to discuss folk music and modern society. He spoke about men being weary under the weight of their own ego and mistrust of their identity:

...and I felt happy within these songs, in which sorrow is not reckless, laughter is not crooked, love is not ridiculous and hate is not apprehensive, where people love with their bodies and souls, where they draw knives or sabres in hatred, dance in joy, throw themselves into the Danube in despair, where, for that matter, love is still love and pain is still pain, where the original emotion is not yet devoid of itself and where values are still unravaged; and it seemed to me that within these songs I was at home, that I had my roots in there. That their world was my primal point of reference... (from Joke)

* * *

Notes:

Some of the most evocative use of audio and visual expositions of folk arts have been employed in popular and offbeat Indian movies - Aravindan's Kummatty comes to my mind. The entire film was based on a folk tale with a rousing treat of folk music. Nokkukuthi (scarecrow) was another experimental effort based on M. Govindan's poem depicting a ballad. Other folk arts like the popular Theyyam, Kalam paattu have always had their place in popular movies. Mani Kaul did a documentary on Rajasthani puppetry and a film Duvidha, based on a folk tale.

Info on Kummatti here

In Light Of India

2007-12-16T00:24:00.000-05:00

A review on In Light of India: Octavio Paz.

It rained.
The hour is an enormous eye.
Inside it, we come and go like reflections.
The river of music
Enters my blood.
If I say body, it answers wind.
If I say earth, it answers where?

The world, a double blossom, opens:
Sadness of having come,
Joy of being here.

I walk lost in my own center.

As a reader I couldn’t help but notice Paz’s polemics on existential and reflective differences between civilizations and how oriental was time as a concept in his poems and other writings. His inimical vision of history as an imagination of time had had its parallel in ancient Indian philosophies. Isn’t he now being rediscovered for his scathing criticism of modern democracies for their development model and establishments of greed?

Having seen him establish how *Mexican civilization has come to a stasis, forgo a glorious culture to withdraw into oneself and self-deprecatingly look up to its neighbor in the north, it was fairly easy to recognize Octavio Paz’ affinities and opinions on India in his book – In Light of India. (* from Labyrinth of Solitude)

As anyone who visited India would vouch, India gets through your senses much before brain begins to register all your pre-conceived notions of her. You will realize that the teeming reality around you will soon blur its contour to leave you in daze. Paz spoke about the India he encountered in the bustling streets of Bombay of yore:

“I put my things in the closet (at Hotel Taj Mahal), bathed quickly, and put on a white shirt. I ran down the stairs and plunged into the streets. There, awaiting me, was an unimagined reality:

Waves of heat; huge grey and red buildings, a Victorean London growing among palm trees and banyans like a recurrent nightmare, leprous walls, wide and beautiful avenues, huge unfamiliar trees, stinking alleyways,

Torrents of cars, people coming and going, rivers of bicycles,

in the doorway of a shack, watching everyone with indifference an old man with a noble face,

Another beggar, four half-naked would-be saints daubed with paint, red beetel saints on the side walk,

Turning the corner, the apparition of a girl like a half opened flower,

Stalls selling coconuts and slices of pineapple, ragged vagrants with no job and no luck, a gang of adolescents like an escaping herd of deer,

A magnificent eucalyptus in the desolation of a garbage dump, an enormous billboard in an empty lot with a picture of a movie star,

More decrepit walls, whitewashed walls covered with political slogans written in red and black letters I couldn’t read,

As night fell I returned to my hotel, exhausted…but my curiosity was greater than my fatigue. I went out again into the city. I found many white bundles lying on the side walks: men and women who had no home…I saw monsters and was blinded by the flashes of beauty. I strolled through infamous alleyways and stared at the bordellos and little shops: painted prostitutes and transvestites with glass beads and loud skirts. I wandered toward Malabar Hill and its serene gardens.

Paz goes back to his hotel, but decides to take another walk towards the coast and there he tries to take inventory of all that he had seen, heard, smelled and felt. He thought of dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea and an inescapable attraction to explain his state of mind as a young barbarian poet.

If we chop and change some images here and there, I guess the contemporary India despite the double digit economic growth would not be too far away. Paz gets down parsing his newly found exhilaration in the rest of the book which took decades to complete. You don’t read Octavio Paz for your academic exercise, do you? You read for his insights and sometimes opinions which you may or may not agree.

Even in the opening chapter we can see Paz’s sense of history and his uncanny ability to glean valid archetypes. According to him, wandering in New Delhi is like passing through the pages of Victor Hugo, Walter Scott or Alexander Dumas and that it was the most ancient of cities - Indraprastha of the epic Mahabharatha where legendary battles of power and ethics played out; and also of the serene Muslim mausoleums. He writes about the unforgettable moment when he wandered into a tiny empty mosque whose walls were made of marble and inscribed with passages from the Qur’an. Above, the blue of an impassive and benevolent sky, only interrupted, from time to time, by a flock of green parakeets. He stayed there for hours. According to him it was a vision of the infinite in the blue rectangle of an unbroken sky.

Paz returns as an ambassador to India when he would travel around the country and write East Slope, a collection of poems on Indian themes. He would also talk about his experiments in collaborative poetry with Agyey and Shrikant Verma on Friendship. He gave Lecture on India upon Rajiv Gandhi’s behest and eight years later he would revisit the paper to write In Light of India although he makes no claim of anything in particular. And yet the book is a treasure for its insights and tenacity to seek answers in an unfinished quest.

Rama and Allah

Paz is incisive when he speaks about the coexistence of the two religions that are strikingly at extremes as one being the richest and most varied form of polytheism and other, the strictest and most extreme form of monotheism. He observes how the two communities retained their identities without any fusion and that the Muslim invasion happened in India long after the decline of Islamic civilization. He further observes that Sufi mysticism triggered a literary tradition in northern India. Similarly there was a Bhakti movement which sought to imbibe some of the radical patterns from Sufism and anti-orthodox Hindus.

Kabir is the son of Allah and Rama. He is my Guru, he is my pir…Tagore translated Kabir’s poems because in Kabir’s Unitarian vision he had seen a failed promise of what India could have become.

Paz doesn’t miss out on the contributions of Akbar and Dara Shikoh, especially to think that Darah Shikoh’s translation of Upanishads into Persian eventually ended up in Schopenhauer’s desk which in turn sparked the evolved minds of Nietzsche and Emerson! However the period of enlightenment was followed by dark years of Aurangzeb who single-handedly was responsible for the fault lines between Hindus and Muslims which had repercussions for ages and still echoing. Paz had noticed that the East India Company had never interfered with the social fabric or religious identities of Indians, they in fact exploited the conditions to their advantage. However the notion of nationhood was an idea given to the Indians by their former rulers.

Another aspect of the book is Paz’s interesting take on Caste system in India. This much derided Indian artefact and often times confused with racism is seen in a different light. Paz uses it to understand the social fabric of Hindu community in tune with their philosophy based on Karma. He acknowledges the critics of caste system in India and the dogma of untouchablity, but he warns the gentle souls out there who are horror-stricken by the word caste to not to miss the ancient hypotheses of cosmic order and how time is an illusion (maya) that eventually delivers those suffering in the cycles of birth and death.

Modern Indian History

Paz pays attention to all the regular names from the recent history of India: Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Subhash Bose, Gandhi, Nehru, V.K.Krishna Menon, M.N. Roy. Of these V.K.Krishna Menon and M.N.Roy need special mention. V.K. Krishna Menon, according to Paz was a malignant influence on Nehru who ultimately proved to be a fatal union for Nehru.

Menon was an arrogant and intelligent man, but, as so often happens with the proud, he was not the master of his own ideas: he was possessed by them. Nehru was never able to recuperate from the disaster of his foreign policy.

Reading Paz’s chronological account of M.N. Roy’s many political volte-face especially with the benefit of hindsight that we have when seen from this far in time, I couldn’t but be spellbound by Paz’s understanding of political history and ability to recognize probably the only genuine political mind to have emerged from India ever to make any impact on International political history.

M.N. Roy, an extreme nationalist inspired by Marx, was pursued closely by the British Intelligence, traveled to Chicago and later during First World War sought asylum in Mexica where he was instrumental in founding the communist party. Impressed by Roy’s activities and skill, Lenin invited him to participate in the third International and made him its agent in Central Asia and China. He broke up with Comintern and Marxism itself. He returned to India and fought for Indeopendence, spent years in Jail, however during Second World War supported allied force having realized the threat Nazism posed rather than being a cohort of Gandhi or Subhash Bose. After the war, convinced that the totalitarian system founded by Lenin and Bolsheviks was a disaster, he invented Radical humanism as a revolutionary response to the crisis of socialism.

M.N. Roy’s philosophy may have been inadequate, yet Paz’s brilliant sketch of his political genius in a few strokes might not be found in Kosambi’s tomes.

The project of nationhood

You can also find that Paz is aware of the emergence of right wing Hindu nationalist party B.J.P and the re-ignition of Hindu-Muslim divide. Although Paz acknowledges the inherent secular and moderate nature of Hindus, he observes how the radicalization of Hidnus started with Tilak and later consolidated by Savarkar which resulted in the bye-product of neo-Hinduism (Hinduthva) that envisions a monolithic concept of Hinduism united territorially and devoid of caste barriers hitherto unknown to the history-less Hindu culture. Drawing from his own history of Mexican nationalism, Paz has words of caution for the nationalists for their penchant for straight jacketing the identity of the acceptable and the abominable:

All this would be funny were it not frightening. Nationalism is not a jovial god: it is Moloch drunk with blood…In India many nationalisms live together and they are all fighting with one another. One of them, Hindu nationalism, wants to dominate the others and subject them to its law – like an aurengazeb in reverse. Another, in Kashmir wants the state to unite with a hostile nation, Pakistan – thus ignoring the lesson of Bangladesh.

Citing Shabano case to describe the weakness of secular politics when when Rajiv Gandhi overturned court order to defy constitution and earlier when Indira Gandhi showed how excessive polarization of power at the center could corrupt, Paz believes that the quest for Indian political and national identity should still be that of secularism and democracy with a constant vigil against disruptive tendencies and political expediency. Having seen the disasters of socialists’ totalitarian regimes in South America and the fate of nations built on military triumphs, Paz could not have suggested otherwise.

Contraptions of Time

Paz delves into the medieval and Vedic literature at length to point out the extent of erotic art, its strict adherence to structure (meter) and the absence of the notions of sin unlike their western equivalents. He ponders on the four branches of Vedic thoughts and attempts to find parallels in western thoughts and traditions. For e.g Genesis and the Rig Vedic postulation on the origin of the world and of humanity, or like the stanza from Atharva Veda which said: “Time Created the Lord of Creatures, Parajapati.” Further from Atharva Veda: “Desire (Kama) was the first to be born. Desire arose in the beginning which was the first seed of thought.” Sex is regarded as a vital force in Indian thought which looks at Life as energy which possessed the power to regenerate (a major school of ritual oriented vision of life – Tantric philosophy). However the enlightened man understands that while pleasure is a goal, is finite and it does not save us from death or free us from future incarnations. He seeks the path of abstinence and solitary meditation. Chastity gives strength for the great battle: breaking the chain of rebirths.

Paz expounds the teachings of Bhagavat Gita and Buddha in order to explain the two differing yet eventually unifying concepts on purpose of Life and living. However I was looking forward to the last segment of the chapter patently titled: Contraptions of time where he famously stated (from Nobel lecture): Every Civilization is a vision of time. Consequently the seeming staticity of Indian life is explained by the concept of time where it rejects the linear reality as Maya and the real reality is Brahman (Absolute Being) and at its depth, Atman (Self). Thus man is simultaneously impermanent as cosmos and unreal as an apparition. Paz looks at this as a metaphysical and social negation of time. According to him the first prevented the birth of literary, scientific and philosophical genre we call history, while the second gave birth to the institution of castes, immobilized society. He extends this theory to reason why the Hindu societies have viewed the European invasions as mere dissonances in the larger scheme of cyclical passage of time. However this century old equilibrium has been disturbed with the advent of modernity among the elites and now the ever pervasive middleclass in India.

Paz ends his book with his quest of answers for the questions India posed to him, midway with a scathing attack on the capitalist’s model of development and the now forgotten solution put forward by Gandhi. Gandhi’s Gram Swaraj envisioned a billion small villages of farmers and artisans armed with non-violence and Dharma as the contract between civilizations. But population explosion had long thwarted the dream. Every village became a pit of misery and despair. Paz is now seeking a new politics and suggests that the reformation of our civilization must begin with a reflection on time.

I would have never known how personal India been for Paz and how she inspired the finest thinker and writer of our time to tell us what we, the people of India clearly and seemed to me, irrevocably lost!

On Writing

2007-11-10T00:38:00.000-05:00

Ironically words are the last thing that comes to mind when thought happens to be on writing. I’ll end up thinking about everything but how it was written. May be this explains why books originally written in languages I can’t hope to learn in a lifetime have a fascination for me.

How can Borges speak through a language he didn’t write while lending that eye to see the constructs of mind of matter in a new light? How about reading Calvino leave a half-begun chuckle on me as I attempt to surmise my own impressions of the cities I thought I’ve lived? How much Russian was Fyodor’s English which I read and found myself aghast at the ways of human mind? How about V.K.N who wrote about contemporary decadent living and politics in India steeped in dynasty and feudal order in the subtext of linguistic and culture setting similar to the baroque of seventeenth century?

Writer as a reader

Derrida while speaking about the analogy between structuralist obsession and the anxiety of language not being accidental, unleashed the force within the act of reading a book. The anxiety of writer is recreated as an event every time when his or her book is read, which is why the readership of creative writers and their take on others’ writings reveal very special and unique sensibilities. Calvino’s ‘Literature machine’ and ‘Why read classics’? come to mind. M.T.Vasudevan Nair’s literary jottings on writers reveal an acquired sensibility that are out there waiting for the seeker. A well read writer carries the spirit of past, present and future, notwithstanding the clever ones who have their hands and designs on the forces of market and socialites.

Insights

“But there is more to Art than the straightness of lines and the perfection of surfaces. Plasticity of style is as large as the entire idea… we have too many things and not enough forms.” – Flaubert.

The most important thing for a writer is to have something to write. Cliched as it sounds, there are any number of us simply love the idea of being a writer. Sometimes one may even find what he could write in the process. But we are talking about the intangible in the act of writing. We’ve had too many instances of losing it in style and pop genres while the most unconventional writer who is the toast of the time being forgotten in a few years. James Joyce and Faulkner infuriated unsuspecting readers no end, yet those who persisted with them had their personal epiphanies. Hermann Hesse’s prose was simple and as clear as a flowing stream, yet he made deep impact on readers world over. Mobydick and Don Quixote were discovered in a new light much later. What makes the books and their writers matter and alive, long after they were all gone?

The stylists among writers may enjoy immediate success. But time will test the real worth of their work eventually. The ones that stood the test underline the fact that craft would be invariably get dated, but not the insights.

Vision

Vision is that rare occurrence in writing. However the visionary writer is not an anomaly or an accident. He or she is but an inheritor of his ancestors’ collective consciousness and pointer to the direction of our future. One can easily delineate the thoughts of Thoreau taking shape in Lawrence Durrell’s art which is outgrown by the Indian writer O.V. Vijayan to write his eco-science fiction ‘Madhuram Gayati’.

Durrell wrote - "Hellenic worlds are replaced here by something different, something subtly androgynous, inverted upon itself. The Orient cannot rejoice in the sweet anarchy of the body - for it has outstripped the body. I remember Nessim once saying - I think he was quoting - that Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets - I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex."
(from Justine, part one of the Alexandria Quartet)”

Written during the fag end of eighties, Madhuram Gayati’s germinal could be unmistakably found in Durrell. Vijayan’s book spoke about the earth in an apocalyptical conflict between a submissive feminine hemisphere and a predatory androgynous hemisphere . The references of multinational companies as the only functioning entities, while states were all withered and the greed and fatal spasms of the northern hemisphere seething in unbearable hot weather resonated on many levels as some of them have become much more obvious to us than it was in ealry nineties.

True visionaries are those who care and fear for us, the thoughtless lot.

Writer’s contrivances

If Derrida’s biggest contribution was extending the writer’s paradigm in interpretational and philosophical reading of the text, the next big thing was OULIPO writers’ foray into forms that were nothing but a literary response to the google world of our times. They tore into the everyday and exotic realms alike - architecture, cosmology, word plays (lipograms, crosswords, anagrams, travel notes etc) statistical physics, tarot card reading etc while acutely aware of the vocation of literature. The wild successes of George Perec and Italo Calvino as the rightful inheritors of Borges underline the fact that being clever could never be an option but be and that the knowledgebase of humankind has exploded the average reader’s sensibilities. These new writers have waded in and out of genre writing and experimenation with gay abandon as they mischievously led the unsuspecting readers into grander spectacles. The façade of adapting constraints to build their artifacts didn’t faze their readers’ from recognizing their value.

Perec wrote an 300 page novel devoid of the letter 'e'. His magnum opus, Life A users's manual adapted the literary form's equivalent of the art and science of creating and solving jigsaw puzzles. Italo Calvino wrote If On a Winter's nithgt a traveller artfully crushed and recast the very structure of novel where plot, style, author, ambience, tone and even the reader undergo several mutations that one could easily see that this single book was out to trigger multiple neural response from its reader.

Any or a combination or all of the above strengths may be found in a writer. I would however think that the real strength of a writer shows when he or she stays away while his or her book is read. And When as a writer, you've shed your inhibitions and the clever, egotist and erudite 'You' break the flimsy coordinates of your time and space and appeal to the universal sensibility of a reader, then you will have exercised your strength as a writer.

* On a prod by Amit, I ended up writing a bit of haphazard thoughts. Now, I would hope to see Sunil's take :)

On heart's call

2007-10-25T23:27:00.000-04:00

“None of my family members ever had the ability to speak from their heart. The dwellers of that home were like Chinese jars the lids of which were shut tight – they lived without ever letting the other know of their scent or taste”
- Kamala Das (Memoirs)

Women writers in India usually are generally treated as a work in progress or agents-provocateur for things unpopular. They don’t count unless their sexuality is out in the open and its salacity is ridiculed in public and enjoyed in private. The writers’ gender creates an instant compromise of “aesthetic” setting for their readers.

Arundhathi Roy is an unwelcome name in many literary and other quarters. Although there are tons of left leaning activists like her, she invites special attention for having been a writer of semi-autobiographical fiction. Her predecessor, Kamala Das is another writer who courted controversies like night gowns and scythed the vulnerable gender sensitivity of Indian readers. Besides selective residue of her writings in public memory, her public and private uttering blitzed media and social circles.

That her private life being debated threadbare even after she had turned seventy three should give us enough insight into the iron cast template for an Indian writer who happens to be a woman. However if you stick to her writings, especially her poems, short stories and the memoirs from Childhood and later, you would be amazed at her uncanny ability to capture the subtle and nuanced social hierarchy and personal relationships among women and the disarming honesty in portraying human condition in general.

“When we returned from the royal palace, Ammamma (grand mother) told me, that we didn’t have the right to touch any of the residents over there. Ammamma explained to me that their caste and ours were different.

‘What will happen if I touch her highness?’

‘If you did, she would have to undergo ablutions. Aren’t we Nair? Folks belonging to the caste Nair can’t touch them’

Ammamma explained to me about the differences in Hindu castes. Most prominent in the pantheon are Nampoothiri, followed by Thamburan; under them Nair, Thiya, Vettuvar, Pariah, Nayadi (tribes). Poor Nayadi, they could only address us from far away across the rice field without ever making themselves seen: ‘Oh! Her Highness from Nalappat!’

Nayadi were like those unseen birds singing among the wide branches of tall trees. I wanted to see them. However our maidservant of the Thiya caste wouldn’t take me to them as she walked out to dole out rice for charity on our behalf.

‘Little mistress, you’ll shriek in terror if you see them. They look like the crow pheasant, the one that cries out loud all the time. Little mistress, Atiyan (me-the-lowly-one) would never do that.’

Once while serving dinner, when Ammamma leaned over to put poppadum in my plate, I said: ‘Atiyan doesn’t need poppadum.’

Ammamma broke into laughter.

‘Kamala, why do you say Atiyan? You should say ‘I’’

‘But didn’t Valli call herself Atiyan?’

‘Isn’t she of Thiya caste? Kamala is not a Thiya girl.’

‘What is Kamala’s caste?’

‘Haven’t you learned what your caste yet? Well, if you haven’t understood what your caste is, no one would ever be able to make you aware of it.’

I do realize the meaning of her statement now.”

- A childhood in Malabar – A Memoir.

Anyone who could write about untouchables and yet let one’s craft and humanity shine through deserves serious reading. Although Kamala Das has been writing a lot of poems and short stories mostly in English, it was her provoking and controversial autobiography ‘My Story’ took the reading public by storm and probably for the first time, Indian consciousness was needled by feminine assertiveness. Gender politics began to color perception and writer’s personal trivia and utterances took center stage.

That she shocked readers with her bare-it-all amorous adventures and went on to write fiction on lesbian lovers, parallels had been drawn from Kate Chopin to Anais Nin. Kamala Das herself made much of her personal account of own life fictional that it was difficult for a layman to notice the disconnect between a volatile and smoldering personality and the jigsaw of the same writer as a lady of aristocratic and literary lineage, wife of a high official and mother of accomplished professionals. It is also worth knowing that her great uncle Nalappattu Narayana Menon was a renowned Malayalam poet who happened to write a well researched book on sex. Another usual folly is to have been misjudged her to be a feminist writer. It’s rather easy to find how she ingenuously picked her genre and succeeded. Given how fragmented and localized feminism as a movement, imposing activism on gender-specific writing on Kamala Das is missing her sources of creativity and spontaneity of her responses.

Kamala’s memoir on her childhood spent in Calcutta and the traditional and idyllic ancestral home in Malabar – A childhood in Malabar was a book that revealed a rare voice. It spoke about adults’ world through the eyes of a child as it retained the magical frills around the everyday reality of life and living in rural and urban India. One could almost feel the palpable warmth and anxiety of a troubled mind exploring channels to communicate. In that sense, Das wrote with a lot of heart and never shied away from being heart-broken.

She is a rare breed of writer who rode on her heart’s call and boy! weren’t the risks worth taking for the sake of her readers!

Philosophizing Faces

2007-08-12T15:32:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I have this intense yearning for a time when I had a vision of things. I could feel that I took off from a certain mental stimulus created in empty space without even a gentle prod. The power of cinema and its instant gratification of such serendipities have given great joy and fortitude to bide the pettiness of everyday life.

The news of Bergman and Antonioni passing away had me thinking about the times when I’d watched their movies and the impact they had on me. And I wondered how many other directors wielded such magic? Tarkovsky, Aravindan..? Incidentally they are all dead. They took high risks for unknown returns, hesitantly like Van Gogh did when he approached color in fear and respect, to discover the splendor of creation, one’s own absorption in what he created; the absorption of his being and of his reason.

As directors, Bergman and Antonioni established communication with the audience not with any sleight of hand with preconceived notions of their forte or market (so to speak), but it happened while they were responding to their own inspiring as well as discouraging stimuli.

Antonioni’s treatment of color and space to push the limits and his accent towards the de-peopled empty shot provided us a glimpse into his penchant for abstraction where he obliterates his characters and eclipses their faces. Or his vision of poetic consciousness revealed through the characters who watch themselves in detachment to sustain a free indirect discourse, or the ‘low language’ of the present day world. Even a non-neurotic character like the director in “Beyond the clouds” was created in a similar cast. The free indirect discourse is the essential form of literature, which Antonioni had successfully achieved through his constructs of cinematographic images.

In Blow Up, Antonioni toyed with viewers and scholars of semiotic studies as he constructed a heavily interpretational and subjective value of reality and how camera is essentially a sensory tool which in the end makes Thomas, the camera wielder and our interpreter of perceived reality to disappear and ends up in the closer still of the corpse. Art of Illusion, as any magician would call it.

Bergman’s obsessive framing of faces is well known. He spoke of Close-Up and human face thus: “Our work begins with human face...The possibility of drawing near to the human face is the primary originality and the distinctive quality of the cinema.”

The visages linger in the ambit of camera to a point where they lose their individual sense of being and begin to resemble the other – resemble by default or by the absence of perceived qualities. Such acts of dissolution and disappearance invariably remind us of Bergman. The incessant train of human faces in Silence, Persona, Autumn Sonata, Cries and Whispers and many other films pass us and vanish into the void where the photogram burns with fear as its only effect. The facial close-up is about both the face and its effacement. Bergman has pushed the nihilism of the face the furthest, which is its relationship in fear to the void or the absence, the fear of the face confronted with its nothingness ala Beckett.

Antonioni and Bergman were the original thinkers who processed and exhibited their thoughts through the medium of cinema. They had more than their fair share of hurdles, baiters and failures – personal and professional. Yet their works had unprecedented impact on philosophical thought and made us aware of the power of cinema. Perhaps what we yearn ever more and in nostalgia would be for a time which allowed such genius to be among us - the living dead.

Note: I have used Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 1 - the movement images freely to drive home my pointless point. Since this is "just" a blog and me being lazy, I have not annotated the text - with all due respect to Deleuze.

Sven Nykvist

2006-11-14T10:23:00.000-05:00

A perennial late Latif that I am, a visit to doctor’s office would not normally permit me to leaf through the magazines neatly stacked on the table in the middle of the visitors’ waiting room. However this time I picked up a magazine though I knew the nurse would walk in anytime, had time to turn to page three and read an obituary in the obscure corner of news round up. It read – Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist died (Dec, 1922 – Sept, 2006).

It took a while to infer what it meant to me. It certainly was not about personal bereavement, but something relatively abstract, more personal than a bio and literally about seeing inner and outer worlds from the vantage point of the lens underneath the iris.

Sven knew where and when to look through his darkly lens. Of course you would know that more than anyone else when you have Bergman and Tarkovsky in company. How do visuals make you forget the composition, the chromo metrics of lighting and the whirring descends and ascends of tripods, to lead you to an atmosphere ethereal and tactile and you are weary that the dream you conjure up with eyes wide open is about to vanish? How much do we miss out on this world of its blinding beauty and the color of people’s minds? Sven’s art made me visceral about the crushing beauty of everything that he captured on camera, including tragedy.

I watched Cries and Whispers (1973) in an auditorium for a makeshift theatre on top of Ernakulam public library. The rental chairs and the projector were disconcertingly rickety. But that didn’t stop me from being absorbed in the majestic denouement of crimson red on the screen. I was lost. I began to think in color. If soul had color, it had to be a dragon’s red. The tortured, poignant and sometimes wailing relationships were portrayed in color. Though Bergman cleverly sketched the backdrop in fleeting beauty of fall and traditional European set and period, Sven’s art stood out. The last scene where after her funeral Karin read to the audience from her diary about a charmed moment when the three sisters clothed in silken white, strolled about in a sunlit park. They sat beside each other on a swing. Karin reminisced that as a perfect moment of anguish and happiness, and how she cherished its perfection.

Sven made the scene absolutely out of this world. I took the last bus home that night as a believer.

Bergman’s trilogy of faith was another astonishing feat of Sven. Those who watched Winter Light cannot forget the frigid winter in the exterior and interior of pastor Tomas, and the longest close up on Ingrid Thulin as she waded into their soulless existence with her monologue. Who will forget the pointless meanderings of Johann along the hotel’s labyrinthine corridors and the echoes of God’s silence in The Silence? In passion of Anna, Sven deconstructed the colors and eventually the coherence of visuals and senses to portray the emotional isolation of Andreas and his violent resistance to Anna’s efforts to break ice. Sven’s provoking use of deconstructionist contrivances of post modern art and the incredible of implosion of visuals to its photonic sources in the end were unparalleled in their originality and creativity.

Human face was as wide a canvass for as the landscape of Gotland overlooking the Baltic Sea. Persona (1966) was a case in point and a consummation of Bergman’s idea of movie camera as ‘an incredible instrument for recording human soul as captured in the human face’. Despite the open ended plot of the movie, Sven’s camera displays great control and simultaneous sweep of Brechtian alienation techniques, deconstructionist devices and sensitive portrayal of the Nurse and the Patient in a seemingly linear and natural narrative. The movie is one of the post modern marvels.

Fanny and Alexander (1982) was a retreat for Bergman and Sven to the common sources of their shared fascination. The magical world unleashed from the perspective of a child showed an unbridled curiosity to go beyond the limits of memory and perceptivity of adulthood. Child’s amazement at the wonders of everyday discovery, a home theatre which was the playground of dreams, the lantern lit nights in the dormitory where children peeped into the kaleidoscope, the fun and frolic of festive times at the family dinner, the sudden demise of the children’s father marking the end of an era, escapades into the ghostly fantasy world, the defiant confrontation of authority in step father, the terror of growing up, the realization of anguish in wisdom were all taken part while observed through the eyes of a child. Childhood could never be dull. Sven captured the ephemeral world of a child’s life with all its incomprehensibilities, delights, pain and wisdom.

Sacrifice (1986) was Tarkovsky’s final film. In many ways Sven lived the grandeur and abomination of living a camera man’s life during Sacrifice’s shoot. The long shots which were Tarkovsky’s wont, achieved grace in Sven’s camera, even when the Alexander burned down his house as a sacrifice to redeem the world out of nuclear holocaust. That was when the single camera Sven had at his disposal jammed while the house was being charred. And when the rebuilt house was burnt again, midway the blaze, camera had run through an entire reel breaking down the crew into tears. Sven gave Tarkovsky his meditating lens to draw the twilight zone where human kind’s loss of spirituality was acknowledged leading to the repentance and ultimate offer of sacrifice. The wide landscape, Bach’s music, the Japanese flute, Leanordo Davinci’s chiaroscuro painting of the Adoration of the Magi were all pointers to the creative sources of this astonishing and grandiloquently flawed masterpiece made for posterity.

Sven, like Tarkovsky should be known for his spectacular failure as well as many stellar accomplishments which came just as easy.

Ophelia - death by water

2006-09-12T14:43:00.000-04:00

One of the most tragic and haunting images from Shakespeare plays that you ever read would be that of Ophelia lying drowned in the still water. She lay in the glassy stream weighed down by the viscous gravity of her tunic and unable to wade through the whirlpool of worldly woes. An image that is so earthy, erotic, deathly and saintly gleaned effortlessly from Gertrude’s soliloquy (from Act 4 Scene 7):

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;

There with fantastic garlands did she come

Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:

There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds

Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook.

Her clothes spread wide;

And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:

Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;

As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indued

Unto that element: but long it could not be

Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death.

She is the alter life of Hamlet and a possibility of the other side of the reluctant nihilist. She died opening her arms and gazing upwards as if she sought redemption for the lives ravaged by revenges. The flowers floating about the stream and leaning on the bank garlanded the shining body of Ophelia. The symbol of death by water has never looked as enchanting anywhere in literature ever.

Water symbolizes the cauldron where human propensities for passion, envy, love, hate and revenge submerge, drown and flow far and wide into a timeless insignificance. Hamlet’s spiritual agony and his quarrel with the ghost of his father (an archetype for mankind’s alter ego and hunger for legacy that go beyond physical death), preponderances on existential values and the eventual gory end inexorably gravitate towards the lyrical and unforgettable image of Ophelia’s death by water.

In the world of Nietzsche, triumphs were nothing but a series of fratricides where Claudius kills his brother, King Hamlet; Hamlet kills his school mates and Ophelia’s brother Laertus. Nietzsche marked the similarities between his Dionysian man and Hamlet as those who have a real glimpse of the essence of things:

“They have understood, and it now disgusts them to act, for their actions can change nothing in the eternal nature of things. They perceive as ridiculous or humiliating the fact that it is expected of them that they should set right a world turned upside down. The knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion.”

“In the consciousness of once having glimpsed the truth, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of being; now he understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia. It disgusts him.”

Nietzsche held out a remedy for this.

“Here the will is in the highest danger. Thus, to be saved, it comes close to the healing magician, art. Art alone can turn those thoughts of disgust at the horror or absurdity of existence into imaginary constructs, which permit living to continue.”

The madness that Hamlet dallied with takes a grandiloquent expression in Ophelia’s death by water. Though she appears only for brief period in the play, the torments and fragility of Ophelia are the perpetual source for art and redemption.

Notes:

The metaphor of Ophelia also provided a psychoanalytical artifact to analyze and represent adolescent girls’ state of mind for right or wrong reasons. Link

T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land which has a well known section titled Death by Water. Nonchalantly it points to the Upanishad-ic references of elemental water carrying death even in the throes of regeneration.

Nietzche Text. Link

A beautiful confusion

2006-08-18T11:21:00.000-04:00

There are a few artistes who have this uncanny ability to disarm you of your ever conscious egotistic self. You are instantly drawn right into the whirlpool of their craft while you are not given anytime to conjure up your defenses, intellectual or visceral.

The absurdist and obscurantist among modernist writers though sincere in their efforts, used their craft to communicate their primarily reductionist and nihilist philosophies, albeit with world wars in the background. They managed to drive away vast sections of readers. That was when a few post modern writers and artists unveiled a middle stage where they sought to push the contexts of art to the backdrop and engaged the reader directly.

The result has been a delightful entrée of literature and art bringing in the full force of physical, philosophical and life sciences to the table. Anything that a symbol, alphabet or word can construct are adapted to create a context for the dialogue between the writer (artist) and the reader (viewer). The historical aberrations from painting schools such as Cubism, Surrealism and Dadaism etc where formalists applied their reductionist view of structuralism where considered by these writers to enfranchise the readers by providing resources to catch up or ride past.

The master craftsmen:

Italo Calvino addresses “you” the reader in his book “If on a winters night a traveler...”. He engages you straightaway, cleverly suggests the circumstances in which you picked up this fashionable book to flaunt an image you have given yourself or you’ve just found it from the chaotic township library. What follows is Calvino’s craftsmanship of story telling while revealing a delightful discourse about the semantics of reading, author-reader relationship and deconstruction of social and political dynamics of reading and eventually a realization of what’s important in everyone’s life. The tone of the book is satire.

His experiments took him to write another book titled The Castle of crossed destinies. It is a semiotic fantasy novel where you find the characters attempting to communicate through tarot cards. A narrator is interpreting them since the characters have become mutes due to past traumas. The structure of the book is laid out after crossword puzzles with horizontal and vertical progressions while any given order of the tarot cards defy the patterns you think you understood. The gimmicks Calvino employs go beyond its natural confines.

George Perec is another wonderful writer who messed with structure and content like Calvino. He wrote a fiction titled “A void” that spanned about 300 pages celebrates the banishment of the alphabet “e”. His magnum opus Life: A user’s manual is a visual and conventional literary master class built around the physical and narrative probabilities of written forms. If you read the book you would know that the book is not just clever but a deeper attempt to quantify the history of literary forms and genres while revealing a beguiling charm of whimsical life.

Predecessors:

Luigi Pirandello’s play “Six characters in Search of an Author” was the prototype for all the meta-fictions to come. Borges is another meta-fiction powerhouse who took on and toyed with readers’ comprehension of reality and fiction. He brought forth the concept of collaborative reading and equipped readers to learn the rules of engagement as the act of reading progresses. He adapted all kinds of structural inventions at the time and beyond.

Fellini’s craft:

There is no better practitioner of post-modernism than Federico Fellini. His absolute command of the medium led him to deconstruct the creative and thought processes in making cinema while establishing a parallel channel of communication with the viewer.

His 8½, originally titled as “A beautiful confusion” is a riot where he peels off each layer in the process of movie making while unreservedly displaying the other side of self indulgence and dysfunctional routines of an artiste who at the moment is in a creative crisis after past successes.

Camera is an active member of his films. It hovers right above the shoulder of the protagonist’s (Guido - Marcello Mastroinni) to signify his point of view in no uncertain terms. Guido’s dreams, inspirations, infidelity, fantasies, debauchery, self promotion, vision, confusion and eventual reconciliation to be among his actors/characters for redemption are perhaps just the threadbare view of his art. Fellini is ever aware of viewer’s presence. He unveils not just the ambience of film making but idiosyncrasies and ego of actors, producer and critic.

In the film, Once the French (of course) critic savaged Fellini on his bid on catholic theme as naïve and inadequate attempt to counter the cultural apparatus of Catholicism with childhood memories and unintelligible dreams. Another instance when the critic began his monologue, Guido nodded his crew to hang him.

Fellini like Calvino, Perec, Borges and others wanted share his beautiful confusion with the viewer, no holds barred.

Notes:

Italo Calvino: Italian Writer
George Perec: French Writer
Federico Fellini: Italian director
Links: Metafiction primer , 81/2 Review in Guardian

Kochi Chronicles

2006-08-04T10:15:00.000-04:00

N.S. Madhavan had been away from his habitat. He did not write or publish anything for the longest time ever since he won a major literary award for up and coming writers. Then one day he half-heartedly sent a short story from his IAS hideout in Patna with a stamped envelope to M.T.Vasudevan Nair tantalizingly titled Higuita. The rousing reception of this story was legendary. Higuita was the measured metaphor for Father Geevarghese who in order to save Lucy faced the pimp bully Jabbar. He re-enacted the karma of an erstwhile sevens soccer player when he landed goals with an uncanny array of scorpion kicks on Jabber's bleeding snout to the thunderous applause from gallery. Fr. Varghese emulated the famed Colombian soccer player Rene Higuita who broke all conventional coordinates of his position with flair and take the attack to the opponent to etch a spectacular moment in time while bordering on absurd risks.

Readers too woke up to the unprecedented sensibility that Madhavan unleashed. He wrote quite a number of remarkable short stories since then. He was born and spent most of his early life in Kochi. But curiously Kochi never featured in any of his stories. He preserved it for his first fiction.

Madhavan reminisced on the Kochi beneath his times. In it subconsciously he unearthed bits of conversation, faces, friendships, missed schedules and reunions, news of birth and deaths, tapered monsoon rains at night and the rides on bare-boned suburb roads in the city of Kochi. Everything went away in a series of montage and I was slowly beginning to comprehend the pattern of things to come. When you see things this close, judging them would be an utterly wasteful affair.

Reading N.S. Madhavan's "Litanies of Dutch Battery" (in Malayalam: Lanthan Batheriyile Luthiniyakal) leaves you in one such corridor of existence and time. It is a fiction that attempts to weave a short period from the life of Edvina Jessica. She was born and lived as an islander who watched the victories, failures and redemptions of mainland occupants.

Madhavan suggests the make belief constructs of Kochiites history and their idiosyncratic yet disarmingly self-deprecating view of living while sliding in layers of legends, fantasies, myths, facts and images. Latin Catholics in Kochi live by the sea. They derive their biblical identity from carpentry and fishing just like Jesus and Peter were believed to have been doing. Jessica's great grandfather Louis stole the calculus of ship building from a British architect Cornelius Gusler. Her uncle learned the art of making Biriyani from his father who learnt it from a Persian chef from Shiraz. Her neighbor Santiago was on a mission to resurrect the now defunct Christian musical drama known as "Chavittu Natakam" (Tap Dance Musical Drama)1. There are any numbers of keepsakes that sea and wind brought to Kochi.

Native Christians with the advent of Portuguese filled their cultural void by adopting the troubradors songs, European costumes and eastern theatre formats like Kathakali. The long and winding songs were created in pidgin mix of Tamil and Malayalam and orally passed through generations. It carried the ethos of native Christian identity and its ironic disposition of middle age crusades' scrambled history.

Madhavan weaves a shiny yarn of 50s political history of Kerala as it unfurls some of the major events in Kochi - Christian and Nair communities’ struggle for redemption from “regressive” communist government who were in fact democratically elected being the most important. The religious and community leaders organized massive rallies to thwart the education bill intended to disengage the influence of religious institutions on education. The unrest ended with congress party’s federal government dismissing communist state rule. Ironically the communist government in the state is doing a phase II with their current education bill being challenged in the courts all over the country.

Jessica and many others were influenced by Father Vadakkan, padre and influential leader of the struggle and his placement of himself as the true Marxian proponent to counter the ideological warfare. She enacted Father Vadakkan’s fiery speech when she played with her cousins and defecated in the church premise to protest against the punishment meted out to her by the catechism teacher who took exception of her impertinence to question him.

The general deprivation and rebellious nature of Kochiites have had channels to express their self. They have this streak of flaunting their artistic indulgence in music, painting, carpentry, murals, drama, cooking etc. You have the singer Peter inspired by Saigal and his alter ego Mehbub from Mattanchery began Kundan Music club, Santiago egging on the septuagenarians to reinvent Chavittu Nadakam and lament that Communist party lost its innocence that inspired the downtrodden, carpenter Mathaeus cherishing his reputation and sleight of hand in boat building while readapting himself after he was saved from deep sea and taken to Nigeria, Edwin uncle’s measure and feel of recipes, Pushpangadan master’s unrelenting tug at Fermat’s last theorem on prime numbers and then most of all their naïve but endearing acceptance of conflicted identities (Santiago assures Shenoy not to reveal his commie identity while Shenoy himself ruminates on his cultural identity of a south west (Konkan) migrant who is ridiculed and rendered insignificant) and camaraderie would impart a lightness of your being in Kochi and more so at Lanthan Batheri.

There is an interesting school of art in Kochi, called Orthic. The word is derived from the Malayalam equivalent for memory, Orma and glass as the medium to paint. Consequently the artist has to paint in reverse since it’s going to be the reflection of the image he conjured up in his mind. This recollection of artist’s Orma and his stand point on the other side of viewers is unique and reveals a mirthful flamboyance. Jessica remains a non-intrusive observer and let the awareness come to her and reflects back to the reader when it does. Her litanies2 for the necessities of the island and redemption from minor calamities have been chronicled with a microcosmic vision of life and times in Kochi.

The mosaic Madhavan created when he inversed Jessica’s itsy bitsy memories through a glass has been a joy. I have traveled the places he narrated. I have studied in the school where Raghavan and Pushpangadan master taught in the book, I have watched the orange sunsets beyond the slender strip of Vypin behind Lanthan Batheri and I think I have met all the characters in person if I let go on this anachronistic time, really!

Notes:
1. Chavittu Natakam featured a native reproduction of western European legends of romanticized crusades with peculiar tamil-malayalam equivalent names for characters. The most important drama was known to be “Karalmann Charitham” (Karalmann’s legends) which was nothing but a collage of history and fantasy where Charlemagne’s Basque opponents were replaced by Muslims and his crusades to win the love of his lady. Troubadors created these romanticized legends with historical aberrations to fill in religious undertones where possible.

2. Litanies: A litany is a well-known and much appreciated form of responsive petition, used in public liturgical services, and in private devotions, for common necessities of the Church, or in calamities — to implore god's aid or to appease His just wrath. (from catholic encyclopedia)

Listening to Salilda

2006-06-20T15:06:00.000-04:00

Salilda descended along the shores of Kerala when Chemmeen (The wrath of the sea, literally The shrimp) was released in 1965. The heart rending ditties in the movie caught the imagination of an entire generation and many that followed. Ramu Kariat took quite a risk bringing Salilda over, however I guess the shared love for music, spirit of Spartan life and ackowledgement of genius brought them close. The songs from Chemmeen is now an acquired heritage of keralites.

That was when a few of us realized that there was more to him that met the eyes and ears. His music spoke more than just the notes. It pervaded the artist's state of mind and the process of creativity in the most effortless of means while looking to sublimate awareness of lives around oneself. That was when we learnt about his father who whacked the white colonialist when the latter addressed him "dirty nigger", the large collection of western classical music and folk songs gathered from Bengal and Assam, we learnt further how IPTA (Indian People's Theatre Association) and Indian communist party provided the right backdrop for an evolving artist, harmonizing the wave of turmoil Bengal and the rest of the nation was going through with his songs of social consciousness and awakening and the last phase that began when Salilda traveled to Bombay to remake his story Rikshawalla in Hindi (Do Bigha Zameen). His work in Madhumati was the high point in popularity.

However a lot of us were attracted to his creativity and the traits of possibly the last of renaissance men from Bengal. Aravindan invited da to compose music for his final film Vaasthuhaara, another non-descript director had a call from olden days to invite Da which was to be Da's final film as well. Besides late eighties and early nineties had a lot of meaningful television films and serials blessed with his title and background scores. You may recall the title and background music for Darpan, Alag, Charitraheen and a few others. Long after the half hour magic was over, the music lingered and it still does. Who would agree now that television could be that good!

Salilda's music has a haunting quality. It opens up an ethereal vision painted with elusive colors gleaned from a dying twilight and all that was good from Victorian and Tagore era. The prelude of his songs engulfs your being momentarily and the poetry is given a chance to catch up the lofty skies of imagination and then the interludes build a bridge between vision and memory. More often than not you recognize the musical notes transcending the mortality of lyrics and elevate aficionados to another plane.

Sometimes his music stood out to the discomfort of lesser artists who happened to be the directors and writers. We don't have too many outstanding musical films from Salilda because there were not too many to exploit his core genius. Instead it appears that he was given a free hand to fill the gaps with compositions that were apparently not really appropriate or relevant. His music rendered every other expression redundant: the longings of a lover, dance of monsoon rains, grief of a Vasthuhaara (dispossessed), introspecting on life and renunciation, freedom of a Baul singer on a distant country road, riding boat on a bending river...

His legacy is golden treasure of images drawn in musical notes.

Traveling in Time's Labyrinth

2006-05-18T14:02:00.000-04:00

Octavio Paz was a traveler. He knew quite a bit about mankind's solitary voyage in time's labyrinth and the many struggles to defy it. Legends, rituals, myths and sometimes even history are contrivances devised to counter the onslaught.

His impressions as an urbanite traveling across cities that endure afflictions of memory have a deeper and personal resonance with a displaced reader like me. The poem "Last Dawn" says more than the few words it ever needed to take shape, with its interludes of broken images from the elements of nature and an imaginary alter life into the loveless entanglement of urban living. It draws a starkly surreal but evocative and intimate visual. The personal rituals and myths in cities germinate and perish momentarily leaving the quest for another day:

Last Dawn

Your hair lost in the forest
your feet touching mine.
Asleep you are bigger than the night
but your dream fits within this room.

How much we are who are so little!
Outside a taxi passes
with its load of ghosts.
The river that runs by
is always
running back.

Will tomorrow be another day?

________________________________________

Cochin is a port where distant seafarers could get a short respite. St.Thomas came, and then came Nestorians from the east, Jews, Portuguese and then the colonial buccaneers - a microcosm of genome trails traveled by the sea and lagoons.

Paz trekked in Travancore as a poet and a heretic who happened to be the ambassador of the Aztecs (Mexico) to India. Notice Paz's sketch of Syrian Christian ladies decked in ancient splendor shuffle down the street to 6 o' clock mass when his heretic heart beat furiously and Shivaite cows seemed to take it in their stride:

Cochin

Standing on tiptoe
to watch us go by,
among the coco-palms
tiny and white,
the Portugues church

Cinnamon-colored sails.
The wind picks up:
breasts in breath.

With shawls of foam,
jasmine in their hair
and earrings of gold,
they go off to six o'clock mass
not in Mexico City or Cadiz:
in Travancore.

Beating more furiously
before the Nestorean patriarch
my heretical heart.

In the Christian cemetery graze
dogmatic
probably Shivaite
cows.

Note:
Octavio Paz: Mexican Poet and Nobel prize winner. Two of his poems featured.

Art of Cinema: Beyond plotlines

2006-05-12T14:58:00.000-04:00

Near the end of his writings on the cinema, *Gilles Deleuze almost regresses from his intellectual rigor over the new cinema of time, and mourns the passing of the silent cinema. He saw that, with the emergence of the talkie, we lost a kind of naturalness . . . the secret and beauty of the silent image, which presented us with the natural being of man in history or society.¹

Towards the end of his book Our Films, Their Films Satyajit Ray dedicates an entire chapter to share a few thoughts with his reader on Silent Films and dynamics of film art. He remembers how powerful was the single scene of Chaplin eating a Shoe for Thanksgiving dinner in his film, The Gold Rush (1925). Deprived of human voice, Chaplin brought out the visual and aural rendition of classic comedy out of a rank absurd situation with Big Mac in ensemble.

Another instance of metaphorical indulgence in the power of silent film was Luis Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) which was adapted from Pierre Louys novel. Bunuel interspersed the confrontational sequences between Mathieu and Conchita with the parallel scenes from the silent version filmed four decades ago. The narrative possibilities of Conchita's playful but bordering on brutal denying of Mathieu's pleas to consummate his desire never troubled Bunuel. He was reminding the viewer that cinema is not an act of reading a book or listening to a narration on the radio - that words have replaced the real need to create cinema in a native language that was evolved during the silent film era.

Ray wrote about his epiphany when he watched Bicycle Thief, not just for its neorealist attributes of amateur actors, simplistic plot and the overarching humanist vision, but the manner in which De Sica treated the space, concept of time, actors, shot selection and angles and the process of building up of an experience that can be delivered only in the medium of cinema. In the penultimate scene in Bicycle Thief Antonio stood outside the soccer stadium, torn between his helplessness at the treachery of the thief and the partisan mob and the ethical battle inside his mind whether to steal a bicycle. His son who accompanied him through out the tragicomic chase could read his twitching mind while the noise from the stadium rose to a crescendo and finally the crowd disbursed into a thousand bicycle riders.

Similarly Satyajit Ray displayed equally accomplished skill and sleight of hand when he portrayed the meanderings of Apu and Durga to the outskirts of village and watch the train go by and Apu drowning the stolen necklace after Durga's death in Pather Panchali. The innumerable sketches Ray made while preparing for his first movie was in a sense his intrinsic affinity for the idiom and an understanding of the language of cinema. Any lesser gifted director's attempts would be to dramatize the poverty and displacement of Harihar's family instead of bringing the entire gamut of Apu's non-descript village and the lives around it. Ray's genius found its pinnacle in Aparajito when he portrayed the death of Harihar with superimposed images from the ghat's of the quiet flowing Ganga. Ray drew his inspiration from the visual challenges of silent film to unravel the layers that would have been otherwise lost in mere linear narrative schemes.

Malayalam director Aravindan made notable contributions to the creative process of movie making while breaking the common narrative patterns. His Pokkuveyil(Twilight, 1981) was a major experiment to manifest music into visual experience and open the possibilities of unraveling deeper visions to the audience. The story of a sensitive artist's (poet) view of the world and his mental disintegration were composed in music (Rajeev Taranath and Hariprasad Chaurasia), without a script.

Aravindan further experimented on his craft in another film Marattam (Changing acts) which has a distant resemblance of Kurosava's Rashomon. Marattam stands for rendering multiple acts by an actor. Based on Kavalam Narayanapanickar's² play the film features the murder of the lead actor towards the end of the play. Three different versions of the same event would be played and the mystery relating to the death remains unresolved, even though we seem to gain better understanding of the people and their environment. Each version adopted different classical art forms in Kerala which has distinct and interesting insights to share with us. Another level the film engages us in a deeper and frank discussion of Indian aesthetics (Rasa, Aharya, Aangika, Vachika etc) and the identification of actors with their roles and the relationship with the audience, patron of art and the regenerative aspects and angst of community living in general.

The movie was a tour de force and unprecedented act of experimenting Indian classical art forms within the ambit of cinema. It was done without ever being didactic or following a formal script. That we don't find anymore Godards amongst us is hopefully a passing phase and there will soon be more original thinkers of the moving image...

1 Gilles Deleuze: French Philosopher and thinker of Cinema. Quote taken from here

2 Kavalam Narayanapanicker: Noted malayalam playright and poet. Known for his pathbreaking adaptation of native art forms into theatre.

Remembering John - Adoor Gopalakrishnan

2006-04-22T12:53:00.000-04:00

A memoir on late *John Abraham, malayalam movie director by another renowned director, *Adoor Gopalakrishnan in his book Cinema, Literature and Life.

It's been a long while since our beloved John Abraham left all of us. Any attempts to confine his exceptional genius, who left us in unusual circumstance in adjectives or clichés are bound to fail. John never had friends or foes in the extremes. If anyone claims otherwise, it would have to be treated with suspicion. If someone describes him as a prophet who belonged to an extraordinarily lofty plane, I would tend to agree.

Though older, he was three years junior to me at Pune Film Institute which he joined after resigning his job in L.I.C at Kumbhakonam, Tamil Nadu. Typically, first year students would be ignored as novices by their seniors in any educational institution. However, probably for his captivating personality, John attracted our attention and affection. There would always be a bunch of mates around the articulate John. Drama, Painting, Music, literature - be it anything, he had an uncommon grasp and enthusiasm. Sporting a playful smile he was a natural hitting punch line in any debate.

This was a period when all the students at the Institute were struck by the magical spell of Ritwik Ghatak, who was the vice-principal and Professor of Direction. I remember John's arrival at the institute with some fascination for the period. Naturally they got along quite well. I've heard people say Ghatak expected John to have the brightest future of all his students.

If anyone asks for the most important aspect of John's cinema, I would have to mention at the outset, their engrossing black humor. The protagonist riding a motorcycle by pedaling on the starter (Students, this way, 1972), milkman attempting to fool the cow to yield milk by propping up a calf with straws (Donkey in the Brahmin ghetto, 1977), towards the end in the movie, Cruelties of Cheriyachan (1979) the scene is titled "Ascent" with a long shot of the actor perched on top of a coconut tree, and in the same movie you might as well remember Cheriachan's mother narrate her story in monologue in the burial ground right after her death - like soul inside a body all these stood for a universal vision embodied in unique narrative techniques. Artists who cherished the dead and the living, the exciting and the lifeless with the same intensity of indulgence and affection are not to be found anywhere except John. The scene in the Brahmin Ghetto where the lid of a coffin is opened repeatedly revealing the dead body in a mortuary and the still born child in "To Mother" (1986) clearly underline the above.

His unbridled and uninhibited lifestyle and the art that sucked its blood and sweat were merged irretrievably and inevitably by destiny for sure. His life was like a puzzle in a surreal scenario where a theatrical enactment of tragedy rumored, forewarned, accepted and inexorably took place in the end. We realize that with a jolt now. How can we ever say that the scenes from his own life when he lay unrecognized in the Calicut medical college mortuary like a vagabond for days were not adapted by John as he did in "To Mother"? The intellect that distilled the puzzles of life into art and then life itself and even death left a lot of unknowns in the dark.

John was a compulsive traveler, without any belongings, mostly without even another pair of clothing. John can be anywhere-in conscious or unconscious state; inebriate or sober; in groups or alone. We were together when the only time John traveled abroad, to Italy for Pessaro film festival.

The new pair of shoes that *Odessa organizers bought for him did not fit his feet. Nevertheless he was wearing it in the Bombay airport. It was only a few minutes for the flight to depart before we realized John had not done emigration clearance and he was disheartened to be retreating and finally higher authorities intervened to walk alongside to help him fly are not quite the scenes to forget. When everyone took refuge in woolen clothes from the bone chilling cold in Pessaro, John wore cotton clothing on top of another refusing the sweater I offered. After the shows and dinner when everyone else withdrew back into the warmth of their bedrooms, this man was wide awake and walked along the city to conjure the rhythm, sound and material from its nightlife. While our stay in Pessaro was for seven days, John had spent almost fourteen days. Within a few days
We were convinced that John was the most popular, famous and liked participant among us in this Italian city. He did not need to speak Italian to achieve this.

Italy is known for the numerous film festivals conducted every year. Every city conducts one more festivals. As far I know John was invited for at least a dozen of them. The youthful and enthusiastic organizers wanted John to attend them even if his films were not available. The picture of the radiant face of a middle aged bartender who tucked his hand upon his chest and held his breath and deep admiration for John who was stepping on to the stage to answer cineastes’ questions after Brahmin's Ghetto was screened in Pessaro was incredible. I can never forget or erase the magical moment.

We were given a car to visit Rome on the last day of the festival. I had obtained permission to keep the car for the whole day so that I could show the city to John. I took this responsibility upon myself since I had been there three times already. I kept the following vignette in memory. Inside St.Peter's Basilica in Vatican and inhaling the enchanting, resplendent and holy majesty that condensed over centuries, John confessed with pride and a mischievous tinkle in his eyes:

"Standing here if a Christian bloke felt a bit cocky, you can't really blame him".

The journey's triumph and the serene hallow of fulfillment and satisfaction passed on his smile to me.

I understood later that Pessaro was a major reinforcement for John. He afterwards completed "To Mother". He spoke of each step in production with a lot of excitement. How many of them including Rossellini’s son Jill, John promised to come back with the new film? Everyone who cared for him including myself truly believed he had just entered a new phase of artistic endeavor. Unfortunately for Malayalam films, the thing called fate that some believe and others don’t did not let it happen.

Once after a long interval, John visited my home. He asked my daughter:
"Who asked you to grow up?"

I would like to ask him in return:
"Dear John, who asked you to die?"

* * *

* Adoor Gopalakrsihnan: One of the major malayalam movie directors. This is an excerpt from his book Cinema, Literature and Life written in Malayalam. I did the translation of a small segment from the book.

* John Abraham: John was one of the major avant-garde directors in Malayalam cinema. With only four films to his credit he had a major impact on the medium. He had an enigmatic persona who defied all the conventional norms of social codes. Even his death had a stamp of his world vision and seemed to invoke a black humor on society's conducts upon celebrity death. He fell off a multi-storey building and was kept in the mortuary for days before being identified. You can find more about John here.

* Odessa: Odessa was an avant-garde movement who organized resources for meaningful cinema and spread film societies across the country.

Kunhunni maash

2006-03-27T12:12:00.000-05:00

Kunhunni maash was an archetypal teacher of children and adults who have an open and earnest mind of a child to learn. No one has distilled knowledge and enlightenment to the degree of simplicity that he so effortlessly achieved. It spread like sunshine for decades over many generations of young kids who not only soared in their imagination about the open sky he unleashed, but learned the secrets of goodness and being kind and appreciative of mother earth.

For the twenty years I who read his(Kuttettan) editorial notes and advice to budding writers in the Children's Section (Baala-Pankthi) of Mathrubhumi magazine and having met him under a tree along with other students at school, felt the irrevocable loss of his long shadow. It's not just the charm of old world that is lost; I believe it is more than that. I doubt if we can ever find such fine folks anymore who can clear the gloom and guide your spirit to all that is worthy of life and living.

He was a short man. His poems were short. It took the world quite a while to read through the silly word play in his poems to understand the genius. The big and tall truths in small and short words, the nimble sketches of native life in Kerala and the gentle social and political satire have found their way through his poems which bordered on absurdism thematically and a distant similarity on Haiku in style. It is impossible to translate his poems since he used the oral and traditional words and expressions quite liberally. Once taken out of context, they simply wither away. You would feel like you have uprooted a healthy tree. However here is a sample, with due apologies to maash:

"Read or not
You will grow up.
You will reap
If you do,
You will trip
If you don't"

- as an ardent campaigner for library and reading, he has words of wisdom for children and adults.

"I am kunhunni.
My mother? Narayani.
Grand mother? Parukkutti.
Grand mother's mother?
That is the limit of my grasp."

- reveals his humble self even though he is a scholar in Malayalam literature and linguistics besides an accomplished teacher.

"My son must learn English
from the moment he is born.
Hence I had my wife
deliver in England"

- a taunt on the craze of English that began to threaten the existence of Malayalam.

I wish all my readers know how to read Malayalam so that Kunhunni maash could unveil the verdant language and the sprightly spirit of rural Kerala.

He called himself children's poet. There had been numerous child prodigies he nurtured through his writings and otherwise. He traveled for a long time campaigning for the need of libraries and literary activities. The throngs of children visiting his house and playing in the yard must have recognized maash and hopefully one of them would go on to lead his kindly light.

Note: maash is the endearing way of addressing a (school) Teacher.

A case for Portrait - Revisiting James Joyce Part 2

2006-03-16T14:12:00.000-05:00

Continued from Part 1 ...

Stephen grows restless with his decadent life. Father Arnall's hellfire sermon draws his sensibilities on the incursions into the realms of sin and redemption. The contemplations on sin, death, confession and deliverance reveal a quest for a personal god who can restore the beauty and purity of his world. Here he is ruminating on God's majesty and its manifestation in the imagery of Emma, his partner in sin and a vision of biblical deluge:

"-- Take hands, Stephen and Emma. It is a beautiful evening now in heaven. You have erred but you are always my children. It is one heart that loves another heart. Take hands together, my dear children, and you will be happy together and your hearts will love each other.

The chapel was flooded by the dull scarlet light that filtered through the lowered blinds; and through the fissure between the last blind and the sash a shaft of wan light entered like a spear and touched the embossed brasses of the candlesticks upon the altar that gleamed like the battle-worn mail armor of angels.

Rain was falling on the chapel, on the garden, on the college. It would rain for ever, noiselessly. The water would rise inch by inch, covering the grass and shrubs, covering the trees and houses, covering the monuments and the mountain tops. All life would be choked off, noiselessly: birds, men, elephants, pigs, and children: noiselessly floating corpses amid the litter of the wreckage of the world. Forty days and forty nights the rain would fall till the waters covered the face of the earth."

The prose unleashes scores of images as if they were musical notes with spatial awareness of the landscape, chapel's damp light, clouds that gathered above and the rain. I read somewhere that Joyce was a tenor of rare talent.

Noticing the piety and talents in Stephen, the director of the school suggests him to take up priesthood. Caught between the choice and a growing awareness of his true self, Stephen begins to recognise his desire for freedom and the craving for aesthetics of life. He recollects how repulsive the stale odor in the corridors of Clongowes for him and unbearable, the unyielding and obscure questions of catholic doctrines. He accepts the life of imperfection and the smaller joys that are denied in the rigors of religious regimen and canonical penances.

"The faint dour stink of rotted cabbages came towards him from the kitchen gardens on the rising ground above the river. He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father's house and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul."

Stephen passes a turning point a little while before joining the university. He sets off to the seashore and witnesses the mirth of school chums swimming and then the vision of the winged Greek god Dedalus escaping from his prison island. His imagination soared at the spectacular sight of a girl wading in the ocean and his soul cried in an outburst of "profane" joy. For a moment he defied the strangleholds of faith and touched the freedom of spirit. He acquires great faith in the power of creativity and the eternal beauty of seemingly ephemeral objects.

"Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How far had he walked? What hour was it?

There was no human figure near him nor any sound borne to him over the air. But the tide was near the turn and already the day was on the wane. He turned landward and ran towards the shore and, running up the sloping beach, reckless of the sharp shingle, found a sandy nook amid a ring of tufted sandknolls and lay down there that the peace and silence of the evening might still the riot of his blood.

He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast.

He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep..."

Joyce introduced the imagery of Greek myth to suggest Stephen’s premonitions of Ireland as the Prison Island and exile. This is followed by the revelation of his artistic self and the freedom that came along with it when he felt the exhilaration of watching the girl swim and being engrossed in the beauty and harmony of the moment. He is no longer holding back on the profanity of such joys anymore

We will see a sober and determined Stephen later on. He does not let himself hurt when his father refers to him as "lazy bitch of a brother”. He would not be cowed down by McCann over his petition or swayed by Irish nationalism and politics. He finds college insipid and uninspiring. He explains his theory on the aesthetics that delineates some of the major thoughts in the modern age such as definitions of Kinetic and static arts; lyrical, epic and dramatic forms of art and his views on dramatic art as the most uplifting, rhythm of beauty etc. It is not just Lynch who benefited; it must be the reader who is following Stephen’s intellectual tour-de-force avidly.
The consummation of Stephen's persona and self-expression soon follows when he meets Emma and settles down to write the poem that he couldn't write ten years ago. But he never shows it to anyone. Stephen develops friendship with Cranley and confides everything to him and asks Cranly's advice. Stephen and Cranly have a long conversation about religion, politics, family, and Ireland. Stephen admits, under Cranly's intelligent questioning, that sometimes he fears that the Catholic Church is right and he'll be damned and sent to hell. But he still must choose as he will choose. He realizes with sadness that after he leaves Ireland his friendship with Cranly will come to an end; he accepts that he may be alone. He must be independent. He is not afraid to be alone. He is not afraid of making a mistake, even if that mistake sends him to hell.

We follow Stephen in exile through his diary:

"April 15. Met her today point blank in Grafton Street. The crowd brought us together. We both stopped. She asked me why I never came, said she had heard all sorts of stories about me. This was only to gain time. Asked me was I writing poems? About whom? I asked her. This confused her more and I felt sorry and mean. Turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri. Talked rapidly of myself and my plans. In the midst of it unluckily I made a sudden gesture of a revolutionary nature. I must have looked like a fellow throwing a handful of peas into the air. People began to look at us. She shook hands a moment after and, in going away, said she hoped I would do what I said.

...

April 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

Dublin, 1904

Trieste, 1914"

You cannot read the book in one go, even though it is relatively skinny. You would have to revisit midway or on a random imagery or a composition that Joyce indulged you in. In all these you would realize the brave and firm convictions of Stephen Dedalus who grew up to become James Joyce. He lived in exile somewhere in Trieste which is no more than a windswept crossroad in Europe.

I chanced upon this book and the charmed world of Stephen. Revisiting after so long is like recreating the life and times with hope and innocence.

A case for Portrait – Revisiting James Joyce Part 1

2006-03-16T12:13:00.000-05:00

Reading Portrait while I'd just begun hobnobbing with literature left me with vague stirrings of the inner workings of a mind. A mind flourished in the throes of awakening into the grace of wisdom and anguish.

I remember the sunshine in those evenings and creaky window of my cousin’s attic overlooking the cemetery of the church sharing the fence. I was captivated by some of those dreamy passages in the book and I knew Stephen Dedalus was here to stay. The seductive power of Joycean language weaved a bit of magic tangle for me, even when I wasn't aware or never curious for Irish politics, his specifics of catholic dogmas and the morals of the Irish society in general.

However what was palpable at the time was an instant recognition of Joyce's genius and how tactile was Stephen Dedalus' mind that worked its way through an evolving awareness from his childhood. The autobiographical signposts in the book were as misleading as seemingly direct and simple literary techniques employed. Stephen narrated his own life in various phases and evolution of his consciousness built up on a masterful control of words. What set Joyce apart from most was the unprecedented ability to combine his rebellious experiments in form and content.

Joyce lived in exile and in attempts to ward off impoverishment. In many ways the self imposed exile left him living on the edge. The crossroads in Trieste where he stayed, inhabited by people of multiple nationalities provided him a linguistic melting pot and the psyche of an exile. The Portrait to Ulysses and culminating in Finnegan’s Wake provide ample evidences of this progression.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914) is special not in the least it pioneered stream of consciousness form, not even the brilliance of language but the fact the book has a lot of heart in it. You would find the spirit and its mellowing of consciousness in the transitory stages of childhood, adolescence and youth. You would imbibe as much as you revel in the sensitivity applied in his imageries and the narrative.

Stephen's childhood goes through the bittersweet experiences surrounding his parents, governess Dante, Catholicism and Conglowes School. His impressionable mind responded to the seemingly overwhelming and insecure life and times. His fascination for the innocence of Eileen who is a protestant is disapproved, the induction of church, nationalism and politics at the dinner table with him as witness, his sense of punishment and justice when he complains to the rector about Father Dolan as the latter pandied him for the broken glasses which he was falsely accused for having done it deliberately - You could find Stephen grow up fast and developing a sensitive but tenacious mind. This evolution is drawn in a metaphor as given below:

"He (Stephen) turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.

Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe"

Stephen's run-ins into the charms of romanticism and sexuality are the next phase of his life. He would be on a journey to come into terms with his perceptions which are in conflict with his immediate world. The reveries about the girl in the tram and his urges to talk to her, his amorous melancholic visions of Mercedes from Count of Monte Cristo, the unconventional views of writers (the boys attacked him for defending the heretic poet, Byron), his dispassionate realization of his father's failures, his longings and first sexual encounter with a prostitute reveal the growth of an artist's psyche. Joyce employs the metaphor of walking to imply Stephen’s awakenings and you would see him do at different stages of narrative:

"He had wandered into a maze of narrow and dirty streets. From the foul laneways he heard bursts of hoarse riot and wrangling and the drawling of drunken singers. He walked onward, dismayed, wondering whether he had strayed into the quarter of the Jews. Women and girls dressed in long vivid gowns traversed the street from house to house. They were leisurely and perfumed. A trembling seized him and his eyes grew dim. The yellow gas-flames arose before his troubled vision against the vapory sky, burning as if before an altar. Before the doors and in the lighted halls groups were gathered arrayed as for some rite. He was in another world: he had awakened from a slumber of centuries."

The torments of Stephen walking alongside the vagaries of lust and loss of innocence after the brief spells of romance, and the burgeoning of his artistic self finds expression in Joyce's imageries and word play.

Continued...

Chronicling Travels

2006-01-26T12:24:00.000-05:00

I have been thinking about travels. The journeys mapped in physical and metaphysical coordinates of my own life as I know them. There is no blinking of the eye, no claim of righteousness and an awareness of the triviality of it all - of ignorance and of wisdom against the abyss of time.

One travels through his age, through relationships and through one's own egocentric paths. His inability to relate and establish channels of communication leads him to a state of pervasive conflict. This holds true when the search for self-identity is constrained and defined by external objects and ideas. The inverse of this defines another state of suffocation by one’s own unnamable and unborn identity too.

Irishman ¹Becket's seekers found Raison d'etre in the act of waiting or electing not to wait endlessly for a certain Godot. In Unnamable, Becket described a state long before the search for identity when a fetus goes through suffocation and suffering in the womb:

I of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly. I know I am seated, by hands on my knees, because of the pressure against my rump, against the soles of my feet? I don't know. My spine is not supported. I mention these details to make sure I am not lying on my back, my legs raised and bent, my eyes closed. (the UnNameable)

Becket reminds the reader all the while that man is an isolated, decaying, self-deluding, un-self-knowing, death-sentenced, rotting, body and mind.

Becket meant to understate a whole bunch of things.

I turn back to ²Vijayan and the travels he chronicled in his Legends of Kazakh. Ravi, the traveller in his book took a ride in the last bus to Kazakh. He left a whole lot of identity symbols behind to take up the job of a single instructor school in this forgotten hamlet.

Ravi once retold the story of karmic travels to his students:

Once upon a time, before reptiles and long before dinosaurs, two cells went for a walk in an evening. They came upon a sunlit valley.

Wonder what lies beyond this? Younger cell asked the bigger one.
This is an emerald valley. Let me linger in here.
I want to go. Younger sister insisted. She looked at the galactic paths that lay ahead.
Will you forget me? Elder sister asked.
I won't. She said.

You will. Elder sister said.
This is a loveless story of karmic cycles. This has separation and grief, nothing else.

I will conclude this with a montage from the same book.

Ravi is alone in the evening at his barn house. He would look through the window...there are no cows grazing outside. Night fell like grief and consolation. Fire flies wafted in the darkness. The shimmering lights along the country roads appeared like distant travelers. The house is now a coach on a railway track. Suddenly he remembered the gloom outside. Where am I? Lamps sped past and vanished on the two sides across the crystalline night. Another train flashed in. Yet another transit. A moment's acquaintance of karma, only for a moment between the wheels. Again it whistled by.

Becket and Vijayan must have been kindred spirits except perhaps for their faith in karma.

Note:
1. Samuel Becket: Irish Writer. Books referred to here are Waiting for Godot and the UnNameable.
2. O.V.Vijayan: Indian/Malayalam Writer. Book referred to here is Legends of Kazakh.

Aparajito and Ray's craft

2005-10-01T13:42:00.000-04:00

Aparajito (The unvanquished, 1957) is perhaps the most accomplished of all Ray movies. The screen play, shot selections, techniques, characters and above all the specters of life and death are interwoven to create this timeless piece of art. It’s amazing to find Ray's precision of frame, space, speed, shot selection and the composition of individual scenes and how eventually they sequence themselves to perfection. In many ways this is a student's bible for film craft while establishing an august presence in the world of cinema.

“One must face the reality of life. The point in life is to live it.”
- Apu in Apur Sansar

The movie is the second part of Apu trilogy after Pather Panchali. In it Harihar arrives with his family in Benares after the death of his daughter and when the dilapidated house is ruined by rain. He ekes out a living at the banks of river Ganga as a priest where birth and death have an intermingled existence. Harihar's wife Sarbajaya continues to struggle in domesticity and to complete her misery, Harihar dies. She is forced to work as a part time maid. Fortunately she meets with a distant relative who invites her to his village where he trains Apu to become a priest. Apu joins the local school and turns out to be an outstanding student who would leave his mother for higher studies at Calcutta. His mother becomes increasingly isolated and falls sick. Apu returns home to learn that his mother is no more. Finally he packs his belongings to take the fight back at life.

Ray’s adaptation of Bibhuti Bhushan Bandhopadhyay's novel was very specific in recreating its intrinsic qualities with a firm grasp on the Indian vision of life, death and the state of continuous flux where the human actors are seen in the middle of traveling. Rather than dwelling on the entirety, let me talk about three scenes that Ray composed to drive the point home.

Scene 1: Apu prances about at the ghat (river bank) among the teeming populace who came in to take a holy dip in the moving water and first hand brush with karmic cycles of life, death and penances in between. The camera slowly moves away from the family and languorously widens the scope of the frame to people indulged in various activities such as funeral rites and dips and then on to exercising wrestlers, static boats etc in medium shots. Camera then pans along ghat across and beyond the actions progressing in the foreground. You learn the concepts of the passage of time symbolized by the river, the montage of the discreteness of birth and death and their quantum effect in the grand scheme of life. All in a masterful composition created in the medium of cinema, besides the essentials of Hindu thought.

Scene 2: Harihar is dying. He asks for gangajal (holy water from the river Ganga). Apu is sent to the Ghat. He scampers through the alleys of Benares and before he runs back home, pauses a few moments to watch the wrestler exercising nearby. Cut to a shot where a dome hanging onto the edge of river with a large flock of pigeons gather and you sense the impending event. Sarbajaya lifts Harihar's head for Apu to pour water from the pail into his mouth. Harihar inhales the last breath and drops back on the pillow. Cuts back to the pigeons fly away in a sudden swirl and stir while the background score evoke an exact same effect. You learn that the death is but an infinitesimally momentary disturbance in the eternal flow of time. Also you sense the moral and political stance of his camera that stays engaged as a keen observer.

“Mother, do not call me from behind
Don’t let your tear fibrils tie my legs.

Tread back after the half shut door
These teary eyes don’t see any path.
These cursed times never end.”
- Balachandran Chullikad¹, Yathramozhi (Farewell)

Scene 3: Apu leaves home for Calcutta to discover the world beyond the rail tracks along the boundaries of village. He must tear himself from the old world and go through the painful process of transition which meant his mother once again is left behind. Even though she sports a brave face while preparing for Apu’s departure she is shaken by the impending desolation and solitude. Her health deteriorates even as a determined Apu labors through his night shift job at the printing press and intermediate course at the university. Apu stays back in Calcutta during a short recess and a haggardly Sarbajaya hovers by the door at the quadrangle of house, hoping her son would arrive.

The last train is seen whistling past from a distance. In her delirium she hears Apu’s voice. The camera stays still at a medium shot and then moves in for a close up of her expressionless face. Now she has a vision of her own death when the night at the front yard is set alight by a swarm of fireflies.

Ray gave us a classic and he kept the pedestal very high.

Note: 1. Noted Malayalam Poet.

Padmarajan: A Loss in January

2005-09-18T01:34:00.000-04:00

[Malayalam Movie director and writer 1945 - 1991]

Padmarajan died in a cold January, untimely. He was in a hotel at calicut, in the middle of a celebration of his latest film Njaan Gandharvan (I, the celestial enchanter), in 1991. It was as if audience of the show was subjected to a dismayed silence, and the show was stalled. I for one who had just begun waking upto adolescence and the charm of his creative genius, felt the void, instantly.

Padmarajan started his career as a writer. Unfortunately I have not read any of his books. I know him from his films. If the literary quality of his films is anything to go by, they must be a world to discover. In fact like most of the films, his first film was based on his own novel Peruvazhiyambalam (The grand roadway Inn, 1979). The movie tore down the mythical fence between popular and art house movies. He pioneered the middle of the road solution for commercially succesfull good films and began a short lived golden period of malayalam films alongside Bharathan, Aravindan and M.T. Vasudevan Nair.

The plot of Peruvazhiyambalam was set in a non-descript village somewhere in kerala. It revolved around Raman, an adolescent who inadvertantly killed Prabhakaran Pillai in a scuffle. Pillai, a local bully persecuted him and coveted his sister. After the incident Raman lived in hiding with the help of a truck driver and a prostitute. The movie ended with Raman's realization of his persona as a ravager of Pillai's hapless family. We find the extra-ordinary circumstances in the lives of ordinary people and the choices they made to deal with them.

However the movie was a riot in a deeper sense when Padmarajan ever so subtly slipped in the psychoanalytical threads to metatag the life of Raman in lieu of his insecurities as a teenager, his perceptions of sexuality and growth in a seemingly hostile world. Another aspect of the movie was the use of violence as a leitmotif, which later became an identity of his oeu·vre. He was perhaps the only indian director to deal with psychosis and clinical psychology with some competence. Its interesting to watch him map the animalistic psychological behaviour of his characters to the spatial fields of social consciousness, with an amazing flair for story telling.

Padmarajan is known for his native and localized plots and characters. It is a little unfair on the non-native viewer to pick up on the nuances, but then so was Faulkner's art and so was Ozu's art. I have marvelled at this comparison for sometime. Faulkner's southerner retard Benjy imparted a shock to the readers and similarly viewers were shaken by Padmarajan's blend of anarchist and sexually challenged protagonists.

He made Oridathu Oru Phayalvaan (There lived a wrestler, 1982), a folk parable about the success and failure in the life of a wrestler whose successes in the wrestling arena were starkly contrasted with his sexual impotency. This film portrayed the marginal characters (like the frog catchers) with such brilliance that the movie had an organic existence delineated in a multi dimensional narrative. It provoked an urgent and instant response from the audience. Kallan Pavithran (Pavithran, the thief, 1981) and Arappatta kettiya gramathil (The village with a waist band, 1986) - the story of a bunch of prostitutes and pimps in a village) had the stamp of his magic with precision, warmth and an empathy devoid of prejudice. It was life unclassified.

Like Ozu, Padmarajan was a story teller and relied on the total impact rather than partial brilliance. Philosophically he seemed to share Ozu's social conservatism and perennially interested in the concepts of epic and lyrical times. He even made a movie similar to Ozu's Tokyo Story, Thinkalazcha, Nalla Divasam (Monday, the Good Day).

He went on to make major movies such as Namukku Parkan Munthiri Thoppukal (1986) (Vineyards for us to live), Thoovanathumpikal (1987), Moonnaam Pakkam (The third day) (1988), Aparan (1988), Innale (1989) and finally Njan Gandharvan - 1991 (The Celestial Lover). Each movie followed a different genre in themes, techniques and plots. If the movie, Vineyards to live was an inspired take off on Solomon's song and a beautifull thought on the biblical promise of vineyard for each other by lovers, The Celestial lover was about the phantasmagoric life of a nubile where she found her heavenly lover out of the blue sky, only to be punished by higher powers.

Ironically Padmarajan vanished abruptly, amid life's celebration and at the peak of his almost ethereal creative powers. His films spanned a little over a decade. In the first half he displayed an exceptional ability to bring raw power and subliminal nature of human relationships and the next half lingered more on his liking for variety and experimentation. He endeared most of the viewers like myself with his earlier movies. I was hoping to watch him cover unchartered waters, with the unprecedented support from almost all sections of movie goers. Everything looked perfectly set. But then there was this intervention of death.

Life: A User's manual

2005-09-11T19:15:00.000-04:00

I read Georges Perec's book Life: A User's manual when I was a master's student of physics. I toiled and floundered about the books and lectures on classical and quantum mechanics, basically for a degree. The LaGrangian and Hamiltonian equations, the particle theories, its graduation to quantum physics and further, Schrödinger and Heisenberg's equations went past me in a haze.

I was grappling with the concept of constraints in LaGrangian Mechanics when I read the preface of Perec's book which forewarned the reader of the games and artifacts he employed in his novel. Perec although wrote the book to be eminently readable, made no bones about the underlying vehemence of his forays into constraints and order in its construction - the sequence of chapters to follow the algorithm of a chess game, jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, complex mathematical probabilistic algorithms to organize the literary elements (objects, characters, situations, literary allusions and quotations, etc) in a certain order and even the indexing of the ninety nine chapters modeled after Dewey: all would give you a glimpse of an architect's mind focused at work. He was non-committal on its grandeur and stoic about its futility, acutely aware of the opus of life and immeasurably dispassionate observant of its goings on, so that he had another way of explaining the inexplicable.

La Grange essentially said, imposing constraints on a system is simply another way of stating that there are forces present in the (physical) problem that cannot be specified directly, but are known in terms of their effect on the motion of the system - Perec adopted this application of constraints as an empirical approach to the process of writing and its eventual reading.

Perec was part of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo) group, devoted to the study of literary form. Under the benevolent leadership of Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, the Oulipo worked--and works still, today--to identify and re-invigorate forms that literary history had cast aside. With equal fervor, they postulated new ones, based on systems of rigorous formal constraint, leading one member of the group to propose a definition, tongue firmly in cheek: "Oulipians: Rats who must build the labyrinth from which they propose to escape." Georges Perec found a home in the Oulipo, in the company of other writers such as Jacques Roubaud, Harry Mathews, Italo Calvino, and Marcel Bénabou.

Life A User's Manual tells the story of a ten storied building, in the fictional 11, rue Simon-Crubellier, in Paris, minutely describing its interior and how it relates to the lives of those who lived there, but most of all it tells the stories, 179 in total, of its inhabitants. The order, in which the different stories are told, is determined by a famous chess problem: how to visit every spot on the board using only the knight’s move. Once the constraints are set, you would find Perec as anybody but a formalist. His deep affection and feel for the characters and their lives, with all its idiosyncrasies and synchronicities. Each of the stories would make you react in different ways and in many ways brings forth one's own personal history of reading and literary forms ever known. You wonder, laugh, ponder, worry and mystify over those stories just like any other book. However they are all told in reinvented genres: romance, drama, detective, adventure and murder mystery about what is experienced, read about or dreamed up by an array of restaurateurs, mediums, cyclists, antique dealers and pious widows. Here is the summary of some of the stories:

A trapeze artist's swansong at the circus to execute the perfect and impossible feat that led to his death.
An Archeologist at the Nile tries to rescue a beautiful German girl from a harem.
A judge's wife, whose sexually thrilling thefts result in a sentence of hard labor, ends as a bag lady on a park bench.
A murder mystery where the protagonist seeks to avenge the unknown and obscure person for the murder of his wife and daughter. Having lost all hopes to solve the mystery, he adopts the Monte Carlo theory of probability to find the perpetrator at an arbitrary location, i.e. the opera house. Finally you get a suggested account of the perpetrator's efforts to dodge him and the eventual acknowledgement after he realized that they barely missed each other.
Story of a tragedy stricken family for generations and a prophecy on the fate of the present inheritor in near future. All you find is a slice of time when she visits the empty apartment, in the book.

The stories hardly leave a doubt in one's mind on the amazing story telling ability of Perec while he negotiates the premises with the reader, thereby keeping the big picture firmly in the backdrop and establishes multiple channels of communication with the reader. That is where Perec brings in his central character Bartlebooth, the millionaire maverick painter, Gaspard Winckler, his cohort and Valene, the concierge of the apartment complex and narrator of the crosswords of stories.

Bartlebooth sets out on a journey around the world to paint watercolors of 500 different harbors and seaports, a journey which would take him another 20 years. Every other week he visits another town and every other week he sends a watercolor to his assistant Gaspard Winckler, who glues the paintings on a wooden board and makes them into a jigsaw puzzle of 750 pieces each. In 1955, having finished all 500 watercolors, Bartlebooth returns home and begins to solve the puzzles. Once put together the puzzles are to be resolved from their backing and taken to where they were painted, where they are to be erased with some detergent. Bartlebooth will thus be left with what he started with, an empty sheet of paper. Beginning and end would coincide. But things don’t go as planned.

To revenge himself for 20 years of pointless work, Gaspard Winckler has made the jigsaw puzzles ever more difficult. Almost blind Bartlebooth dies as he haphazardly attempts to finish the 439th puzzle. As Perec writes in the last paragraph of the 99th chapter:

"It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and it is eight o'clock in the evening. Seated at his jigsaw puzzle, Bartlebooth has just died. On the tablecloth, somewhere in the crepuscular sky of the four hundred and thirty-ninth puzzle, the black hole of the sole piece not yet filled in has the almost perfect shape of an X. But the ironical thing, which could have been foreseen long ago, is that the piece the dead man holds between his fingers is shaped like a W."

Gaspard Winckler who died two years earlier has triumphed, but it has been a meaningless triumph.

In a paragraph, Perec described the grand project of life, the inherent meaninglessness and latency of human efforts to circumvent the inevitable realization and finally the intervention of chances to thwart every scheme ever to be conceived. Our lives are built around innumerable social, ethical, moral, physical, biological and other constraints. Some we accept and some we don’t, hardly ever noticing the perceived chaos and order influenced by how those constraints are applied. For someone who wrote a novel devoid of the letter "e" and the frontrunner of literature forms and OULIPO movement, this is the summit, where you ride past the literary subcultures of such writers as Joyce, Borges, Calvino, Flaubert and Kafka.

For now I am speechless to say anything more. Go read it, because the book belongs to you, my dear reader.

A song for seasons

2005-08-30T11:32:00.000-04:00

May:
The Country road lay like a tamed snake, brown and parched, heaving and teary eyed. Sunshine raced to distant fields like wildfire and bounced off broken heaps of images. The waste land subsisted on dried tuber and the wisdom of defiant dry bones of the river bed. The fire sermon was delivered in may.

The ceiling fan in your room is a bit of schizophrenic, besides being old and cranky, and you lie in your bed, etherised; while the vagaries of Summer and memories melted in crimson flames. ¹

June:
Monsoon arrived when the dark clouds with streaks of lightning broke the boundary of skies. The air grew dense. It wafted the scent of impregnated soil. Trade winds came and then came meghmalhar. An alaap began in vilambit interval swelled on to madhyam and culminated in an endless dhrut khayaal. A million drops of rain fell on the remains of life on earth. The puddles, rivulets, streams, rivers, lagoons and the whirlpools flowed, swollen by a mass of turbid waters rushed with impetuous haste towards the seas, felling trees and deluge-struck mortals all around on their banks and washed them to a timeless shore.²

November:
Autumn is too short to pause and ruminate over the blinding beauty of orange evenings and golden yellow leaves. And yet one ruminates, invariably. In one of these autumns Lorca³ moved to Newyork while it ushered in the great depression. The autumnal marvels of his Granada, its solitary rose breath and its leaves, reflections of pillars and arabesques in the pools, the splashing fountains and the profusion of myrtle and pomegranate - were all estranged, now. The loss of November!

January:
Winter can wreck your senses, nudge them into frigidity, remind you that you are living in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice. The cold winds blowing across the snowy landscape can bring in the visage of death and a possibility of enlightenment. You may even gain the courage to glance at the white emptiness that lay beyond the limits of your eyes and the moonbeam's icy glitter. The winter in your sense organs would tell you that you were always been a snow country, alone and unable to speak.⁴

September:
A sudden light shower in the morning, left the yard exhilerated and let it regain composure. The laughter and mirth from the living room grew with sunshine. Today is Onam. There is a weightlessness in reunion and barricading time to slip any further. Spring is now and hope is in the moment.

Note: The color and sound of seasons in the blog have been inspired by the following writers.

1. Thomas Stearns Eliot (The Wasteland) 2. Mahakavi Kalidasan (Ritusamharam) 3. Federico Garcia Lorca (Poems in Newyork) 4. Yasunari Kawabata (Snow Country)

Tokyo Story

2005-08-23T15:41:00.000-04:00

When you watch movies of Ozu, you learn about tatami(straw floor mat), you know about Noh and Kabuki(native drama forms), you realize the philosophy of non-intrusion and kindness and finally you understand the self-same humanity from a million images of everyday life. You pay attention and respect what is beneath the prosaic and mundane. Ozu unwinds his zen spell on us audience unhurriedly and irreversably like his sagacious camera on a tatami in dry sunlights.

Tokyo Story(1953) could arguably be the most deceptively simple movie that you'd ever watch. Such is the storyline and the familial faces about the living spaces in Japan, you no longer realize that you are shaken out of your lethargy to participate in the deeper discourses on life, death, people, relationships and vicissititudes of time. The concept of action is arrested and film techniques are given a chance to catch up with life and learning.

The movie has an oft-repeated story. In it an old couple visits their kids in Tokyo with a lot of hopes and affection to spend a few days of the autumn of their lives, only to be disappointed by their indifferent offsprings who had their own separate lives to worry about. The son and daughter put them up in noisy spa resort to continue with their busy lives. By this time the parents realize that they are burden and decide to return to Tokyo to their chidren's discomfort. The old woman spends the night at the one room apartment of their dead son's widow(Setsuko Hara) who treats them kindly, while the old man gets drunk with his old friends who in the grip of alcohol confess their disappointments with life and children and changes of time.

Upon return from Tokyo, everyone realizes the estrangement and tries to smooth over as best they can. Mother becomes ill and dies prompting her children to come to the small town where they grew up. The death, memories or the impending loneliness of the old man do not seem to affect anyone. They go back to their lives that never give them respite from themselves, while the old man watches the boats sail on and trains whistle past among the rooftops. The young teacher who witnessed the funeral and family gathering exasperatingly says: "Isn't life disappointing!", and to which Setsuko Hara affirms, "Yes, life is disappointing indeed".

Ozu defies almost all conventional film concepts to bring in the Japanese aesthetic values. He breaks the common narrative pattern with his ellipsis technique, when he prepares the viewer for an impending scene and then skips it to pan you into subsequent scenes that portray the after effect. The attentive viewer is now led into understanding the subtle cues and messages Ozu tries to convey. Once you are into a scene the camera almost never moves and stays at medium shot distance. When action at home is shown, he uses 360 degree instead of the conventional 180 to draw the camera on the abstract nature of the space around the characters. In one shot its interesting to watch him cover the Tokyo house of the old man's son following his wife cleaning the house in anticipation of the guests.

Ozu dedramatises and employs experiential narrative and distances himself emotionally. His compositions would have images that even though complete in themselves, blend and stays in the continuum of film experience. All theses seemingly facile scenes, frames, images and montage will grow on you to have a cumulative and deeper emotional impact to help you be perceptive and see beyond the ordinary.

Towards the end of the film, there is a scene when in the morning after the funeral, Setsuko Hara finds the Old man watching the sunrise. He tells her that it is a glorious morning today. She says nothing and it seemed, in that very moment they knew exactly what was in each other's mind.

The Book World

2005-08-09T14:53:00.000-04:00

Now that Yosso marked me to write about books, I have been trying to round up quite a bit of my dishevelled and disordered memory of books, having read and wanting to read. The result is the following jumble of thoughts and I own up the good and bad books and time gained and wasted. After all it is still the chaotic me and the books.

Books have always brought a host of allusions and images for me, foremost of them would probably be Journeys. other times, it would be a bygone moment with the personal coordinates of my life or juvenile discoveries in the attic or faces in close up or even a byline of a dead writer among other news...and yet other times they were the monikers of those days of rendezvous among friends who burnt down words, ideas and dreams together and now to be seen trudging the labyrinths of time, among strangers.

Yeah, Books were about the journeys. I used to wait beside my mother until midnight for my father's arrival after his short trips from lesser duties of a part-time politician. I was looking forward to the color and characters of Amar Chithra Katha he brought then. That was my first memory of anticipation and reading any book. It invariably related to homecoming. A decade later, I would go to Aunt's house for a long summer vacation, who after her husband retired from Labour department in the city retreated to this sultry hilly expanse. He died the year I went to stay with them. In those old oak furniture, I found the books he collected for a lifetime and I found that the original collecter was his younger brother who died an untimely death. Some of the books were already ravaged by termites. The hardcover of Greek tales had pale yellow pages and I remember illustrations of Pandora, Helen, Eurydice, Persephone, Hera and countless other goddesses. I found uncle's unfinished poems, bad and decent tries in one of the chests, beside Treasure Island and other assorted poetry of shelley, Byron and Browning. I also found a lot of children's books in malayalam.

For the next few years I travelled every summer vacations with a bag full of books and its amazing to think that every year the sets of books were getting radicalized and reflected more of external validations and less of the exhileration of discoveries. I read Maxim Gorky's Mother and I let Pavel Vlasov to put the entire world around me on trial. I read The Germinal of Emile Zola and I didn't know it was supposed to be naturalism. I tried to read George Elliot's Silas Marner, hardly follwed the dialects and slangs thrown all over the book, valiantly trod the winding passages of Tolstoy's War and Peace and Pasternack's Dr. Zhivago. I remember those walks in the country roads after reading passages in Zhivago ruminating over the torments of Lara and then the monstrosity of revolution consuming its own children in The Tale of Two Cities. I imagined and suffered hardships of David Copperfield and every simple human beings in Chekhov's short stories.

My Mother's house was another favourite destination which overlooked an estuary and the billowing Arabian Sea behind. I read about Santiago in Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea and I could see his seemingly resigned but determined countenance on the those fishermen, or may be I just placed them in the backdrop of my imagination. Another journey I associate with reading a book was Doestoyevsky's Crime and Punishment when I travelled by train to Bangalore. I was unemployed and felt an inexplicable helplessness and seething anger inside me: I shared it with Raskolnikov although I smiled when I had seen a pawn shop on my way to K.R. Market.

My major source for books for a long time had been malayalam weekly Mathrubhumi and Hindu Sunday supplement. Once in a while Times Literary Review, Granta and Illustrated weekly at Ernakulam public library. That basically unfolded an entire world infront of me, constantly contradicted the best and the right and I learned the politically incorrect and use of media to celeberate and destroy icons and sycophants of power and ideology. My readings turned political, even of it was shakespeare's sonnet. But then I read a lot of malayalam writers: O.V.Viajayan (the Guru), V.K.N (the grandiloquent jester), Vaikom Muhammad Bhashir(the modern fabler) led the riot. I still keep going back to all of their books. There were a few poets who caught my attention like Balachandran Chullikkad, Idasseri Govindan Nair and Vailoppilli to name a few.

College introduced me to Albert Camus, Sartre, Herman Hesse and T.S.Eliot. I graduated from Camus to Samuel Becket and a whole lot of absurdists including Luigi Pirandello and Edward Albee. T.S.Eliot was a stand out and the images from his book Waste Land and other Poems still a bench mark of a swansong for me. I found Nietzche from Will Durant's Story of Philosophy and the fascination lingered ever since. The library of my College had a decent collection of plays by Bertolt Brecht, Henrik Ibsen and Eugene Oneil. Notably, Oneil's long day's Journey into night held the spirit of mankind among the ruins of dysfunctional families for me. Besides the juvenile fascination for Robert Pirsig (I thought Lila was a better existential american novel) and Somerset Maugham, friends amongst us found Fritjof Capra and his books The Tao of Physics, The Turning Point and Uncommon Wisdom. He seemed to offer a middle path and a reason to think that everything in the universe and the traditional wisdom of human race after all but a spark in the path of the blinding light. But then, what do you expect from a fidgety science student?

I have an old cupboard at home In India, filled with books I bought with the pocket money I've got. I am hoping to bring them from India sometime. Here is a list, hope you won't find it too overbearing: Gabriel Garcia Marquez (almost all major works), Milan Kundera (Immortality and Life is else where), Octavia Paz (Sunstone and Collected poems), Elias Canetti (Auto DaFe), Italo Calvino(Invisible Cities, If On a winter's night a traveller, Castle of Crossed destinies), George Perec(Life, a user's manual), Primo Levi (The Wrench, The periodic table), Borges (Short Stories), Franz Kafka (The Trial, Metamorphosis, Amerika), Mario Varga Llosa, Nikos Kazantzakis (Last Temptation of Christ, Zorba the Greek), James Joyce(Portrait of an artist as a young man), Kawabata, Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon), Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrel(Alexandria Quartet)....

The books that I began but never finished were Ulysses(James Jayce), Remembrance of things past(Marcel Proust), Man without qualities(Robert Musil) and Sound and Fury(William Faulkner). Swann and Benjy are very much in my mind. Someday I will!

The reading followed metareading on Michel Foucoult, Derrida, Barthes and Wittgenstein: mostly excerpts of their books and articles from magazines. Although I was wallowing in their wordy worlds, I could see the written word being deconstructed to a more discreet set of ideas. Another area of interest has been books on movies and those by movie folks. Andrei Tarkovsky's Sculpting in Time, Bergman's Magic Lantern, Chaplin's My Autobiography were no less than a consummate book on life. I am looking forward to buy Gilles Delueze' Cinema: Time and Movement -Images (1 & 2). He is fast becoming my favourite.

There are atleast a hundred obvious names I either forgot or missed at this point in time and a million I wish to read or in the least feel the dust jacket and read the blurb. They can probably wait and the love affair with the printed word is still on although the youthful abandon and degree of excitement varied a lot when glanced from this far, I am glad that I am still smitten and thankfull for a lifetime of memories and insights.

Now that it is done, let me pass on the malady to Booky, CEC or anyone else who wants to record their retreats to the world of books.

A house in dreams

2005-07-21T11:47:00.000-04:00

Father of the family had already travelled a million miles and he thought about the house he was going to build:

The house is where I would find the moorings at the end of a hard day. At nights, it takes the form of a ship anchored alongside the wharf and leans on to the expanding shine of ocean. The balmy breeze across the yard would unfurl the mast's sails to go for a few more knots.

I want the entrance of the house to have cathedral ceiling, glass windows abound and a den in front to get a peek into the storms and lightning passing by. The dwellers of my Ark would hold onto each other until the morning breaks and then I can let them fly away in the bluest sky. I think I need a longer vision glass to see far enough.

Shrugging away the captain's apprehensions, daughter was thinking:

My house begins from the attic where I have a bird's eye view of the landscape beyond the fence, where I can listen to the rain rattling on the roof and then feel the moist nights ticking away with water dripping from the drain and then let the sunshine flutter its mosaic over the slanted windows. I want to walk down the stairs to the living room where the family is assembled. This house of my dream is grand old and I can sense a dejavu of being transported to a timeless time.

Son loathed his sister's morbid optimism and thought to himself:

The idea of basement came from human fear of death and an expectation for bad things to happen. A dingy crawl space would have been preferable. I always felt the house is like a mausoleum built upon a basement like this. I know the trusses and the walls are going to crumble some day and there would be an onslaught of dust and everyone in the house would turn ghostly. The laughters, sobs and voices trapped in the air columns would die a natural death and I want to go far away. I want to smudge every trace of my foot prints too.

Mother thought of her dream of constancy every time she packed their belongings from rented apartments and hit the road:

This house is a refuge and a boundary drawn for the melancholic world. A refuge for a displaced and broken human spirit to restore its body, mind and soul. The house should have a dining area adjacent to the living room to welcome and nourish those who come home battered and bruised and then the soft light in the bedrooms would heal them.

war against terrorism: the frontlines

2005-07-12T16:15:00.000-04:00

Your walk along the sidewalks of Manhattan with a camera, your patient pointless stare at the door in the tube midway to destination London, your ricochets and vaults in a hurtling train in Mumbai and a countless other insignificant political moments in time have been called the frontline of a war now: the war against terror.

You feel feverish, angry and powerless at the cold silence of the unseen predator and revulsed at the swearing lords of the land. Didn't they know, those dead were just passing a momentary crosswalk of their lives as they did the day before. They had plans, bills to pay, kids to come back home, trivial and personal fights to continue ...Yet painfully, this was not a surprise.

You registered the metaphors from the eve of terror and the voice of Christian Amanpour to your collective psyche. The drizzle and dim lights, the police lines, the emergency vehicles, the silent passers by and the muted TV screen reeling off gore and blood - It has become all too familiar for you now and you are not surprised anymore, and hopefully you won't be afraid anymore as well.

**********
I remember Luis Bunuel's last *film about a woman who drives a man to distractions of frustrated desire and portrayal of his preoccupation with the connection between lust and violence. The film secretly pursued another obscure object of desire: the terrorism which surfaces in various forms (moral, social, cultural, economic, psychological, and political), ranging from the bomb outrages that accompany the protagonist in his sexual odyssey down to the financial pressures he exerts in order to have his way.

The fits of callous cowards find expression in terrorism. They use their neurotic hate and fear to gain control. I reject them, am on my way to work and they will never have their way as I step into the subway train.

* That Obscure Object of Desire

A Poet in exile

2005-06-21T22:25:00.000-04:00

Joseph Brodsky was a poet in exile far away from his mental space and homeland. He herded his soul through untold suffering just to write what he had to. The stalinist Russia hounded him all his life, branded a social parasite and sentenced to many years in labour prison. Even after he fled the country, the propagandist maze and treachery continued when they never let his parents to leave Leningrad. These excruciating experiences were like million merciless rays cutting through his soul to introspect and inhale the rarified air beyond the mortal realms of suffering.

From March 1964 until November 1965, Brodsky lived in exile in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia. On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky became an involuntary exile from his native country. After brief stays in Vienna and London, he came to the United States. His contemplations on the adopted language again shows the literary persona built around the concept of exile, loss and freedom.

On the essays about his parents in Less Than One (1986), he said - "I write this in English because I want to grant them a margin of freedom: the margin whose width depends on the number of those who may be willing to read this. I want Maria Volpert and Alexander Brodsky (poet) to acquire reality under a foreign code of conscience, I want English verbs of motion to describe their movements. This won't resurrect them, but English grammar may at least prove to be a better escape route from the chimneys of the state crematorium than the Russian." He was reinventing a language to breathe in the spirit of creative freedom and insisted that language needed poetry not because it can outlive the poet, but it can mutate unlike the rigid and unkind human monoliths that attempted to judge, filter, manipulate and smother dissenting and differing voices.

Reading Brodsky is a personal experience, even when his poetry stays within the traditional and classical perimeters. He recounts the reflection on history, religion and personal life with an intimacy that gives you the reader a unique opportunity to view the dynamics of an artist's mind. The words laid out are so palpable, that you can fell the warmth and depth of his creative genius.

Reading Brodsky is deliberating on the concept of time and the language as a tool to sculpt on it. According to him, Time is the enemy of man and everything man has created and holds dear: "Ruins are the triumph of oxygen and time. Time clings to man, who grows older, dies and turns into "dust" – "time's flesh", as Brodsky calls it. One of his books of poetry is called A Part of Speech. Man – in particular, a poet – is a part of a language that is older than he and will live on after time has settled the account with language's servant.

*Man is attacked both by the past and the future. What we experience as unpleasant and negative in life is, as a matter of fact, a cry from the future, which is trying to break ground in the present. The only thing that prevents the future and the past from merging is the short period constituted by the present, symbolised by man and his body in "Eclogue IV: Winter" (1977):

… What sets them apart is onlya warm body.
Mule-like, stubborn creature,
it stands firmly between them,
ratherlike a border guard: stiffened, sternly
preventing the wandering of the future
into the past. …

I read him in 1992, before he died in his Brooklyn Apartment. I could read only a few of his works: Urania(1987), Watermark(1992) and Selected Poems (1973). But they left some indelible impression on me and a belief in the transcendence of poetry, after all that I mistrusted. Here is a poem from Urania where Brodsky mulled over death as space created by the absence of body, but still limited by memories and images that carry them. Notice the wide sweep of imagery and private but empathetic tone.

To Urania:
Everything has its limit, including sorrow.
A windowpane stalls a stare. Nor does a grill abandon
a leaf. One may rattle the keys, gurgle down a swallow.
Loneless cubes a man at random.
A camel sniffs at the rail with a resentful nostril;
a perspective cuts emptiness deep and even.
And what is space anyway if not the
body's absence at every given
point? That's why Urania's older sister Clio!
in daylight or with the soot-rich lantern,
you see the globe's pate free of any bio,
you see she hides nothing, unlike the latter.
There they are, blueberry-laden forests,
rivers where the folk with bare hands catch sturgeon
or the towns in whose soggy phone books
you are starring no longer; father eastward surge on
brown mountain ranges; wild mares carousing
in tall sedge; the cheeckbones get yellower
as they turn numerous. And still farther east, steam dreadnoughts
or cruisers,
and the expanse grows blue like lace underwear.

Brodsky was a person who you would hug before you bid adieu in silence to feel the warmth in the air around.

Rain is not just a metaphor

2005-06-10T11:34:00.000-04:00

The elements of nature and human lives have an intricate and symbiotic relationship. The endless cycles of birth and death, day and night, rain and sunshine, meteors and bursting stars in the galaxy have a benevolent scheme of karmic existence. The creation and destruction we percieve as mere mortals might just be an infinitesimally insignificant plot, however nature, humans and their astral destinies are inextricably intertwined.

Watching Indian-malayalam movie Piravi(1988) presents a realization of this cosmic vision. The director, Shaji Karun perhaps made the most stunning debut with this film after Ray's Pather Panchali. His experience behind the camera with the charismatic Aravindan often reminded another great swedish director-cinematographer duo Bergman and Sven Nykvist. His works for Kanchanaseetha, Oridathu, Chidambaram were stunning.

Piravi(Birth) is based on the real life incident of a missing architecture engineering student and the travails of his grieving family coming into terms with its social and spiritual aftermath. The plot revolves around the engrossing presence of his airy spirit in and around the house and almost kafkaesque disposition of the political and bureaucratic systems. What endears the viewer is however the dense and sensitive portrayal of rain in its contemplative moods juxtaposed alongside the characters. Treating rain beyond the limits of a metaphor enables the movie take on the eclectic questions of life and death in an intimately personal setting.

At the beginning of the movie, you find Raghava Chakiar starting his endless repetitive wait at the bus station for his son, Raghu who failed to come for his sister's engagement. Raghava Chakiar comes to know from newspapers that Raghu was taken into custody by the Police for political reasons. He travels to the capital and meets the higher Police officials. But they feigned helplessness as there is no proof that Raghu was taken into custody. Raghu's sister realizes that he probably would have died in police custody after being tortured, but cannot bear to tell this to her father. The old man's grip on reality slowly slips and he starts dreaming that his son is with him.

The movie embellished this linear tragic story with an outpouring of blissful cinematic expressions on deliberations on the karmic cycles of father and son, sibling relationships, longing for the lost, organic symbiosis of nature and human, the house as a refuge and a haven for concepts of architecture and dreams... Everything unreels for the viewer in a quiet relentless flow of images, voices and silences piling on each other: boatman and the river, last bus arrivals, lightning, thunderstorm, the rain drenched landscape, the wintergreen and the different moods of rain underneath the sky and the conversations between Raghu and his sister. Such is the mastery of Shaji on the medium that each image, nuances of cinematic technique would grow on you in silence taking its time.

Raghu never appears in the movie except for a brief flashback when he was very young. His presence looms large in the movie and the hearts of his grieving family, like the rain that loomed over the horizon in the beginning, drizzled for a little bit and steadily became the downpour of pain and memory, and still reminds you that life still holds key to the crossed destinies of nature and humankind.

At a different level, Piravi strikes at the core of state oppression and the indifference and cruelty of its various manifestations, especially police brutality. The ominous presence of Orwel's big brother amongst the life of ordinary folks is prevalent. Yet another level, the movie has a lot in common to Gabriel Garcia Marquez' No One Writes to the Colonel (1961). The images of the Colonel's endless waiting at the post office for his pension to arrive, losing son during the time of volatile political uprising and the ship that brings mail across the river evoke a similar perspective on the vicissitudes of the world.

Shaji, trained in the school of Aravindan inherited his deep understanding of indian philosophy went beyond the premises of Marquez to etch the poignant story of an old man in search of his missing son. I must mention about the actor, Premji who was 80 when he portrayed the father responded with a preformance that was brilliant and astonishing. He internalised the elements of the movie in total and pushed the limits to perfection.

Watching Piravi is a timeless affair, and you know that rain is not just a metaphor.

Atlantis, the lost continent of my childhood

2005-05-18T16:02:00.000-04:00

In the beginning as far I can remember, the lush green strip of land was ensconced by the Arabian Sea and a thin river line that was lost into an estuary. A billion species of life thrived in the tiny whirlpools. Sunshine fell on the flowing waters in every fissure.

When it rained, the natives who lived in the shanty could see the silver lines of thunder afar and scampered to bring the cows and kids home from the field and the wantons of country roads. The wind wove a symphony across the countless coconut trees that arched over the white and golden sand dunes. Folks called the place as island, with no name, perhaps to remind the sovereignty of the land that leant over the timeless ebb and flow of the ocean.

That was when I used to visit my grandparents' house during our summer vacations. We, the boys from city found our space and deflated the overcrowded time from our senses in the island. The travel included trekking by bus and ferry boats. The folks in the house had to paddle across the stream for everything that they ever needed, and every household had their own boats. The nights were dense and we could see each others faces in sepia sitting across the kerosene lamps for dinner. Eight siblings and dozens of grand kids thronged the spacious and benevolent home during those unforgettable times. If I close my eyes, I could still see the shimmering torch lights of solitary pedestrians on those rugged paths by the river and fisher folks rowing by.

It must be right after the famine, my grandfather and his brothers left their misery to follow a dream of a piece of land to call their own. I never asked him to chronicle the events or timeline. The state of their lives was similar to that of during the great depression in America. They had nothing and everything to fight for. The island was waiting for them to build the Promised Land, and the earth was nubile and feisty. He ploughed his way and unleashed raw power of farmer and fisherman to build the house, cultivate the land and build boats to fish with a lot of camaraderie with his brothers and natives.

As kids, we spent the summer vacations in exhilaration, playing on top of the piles of coconuts and grains; canoeing up and down streams; gathering around the table where everyone assembles for the dinner. My grandfather looked like Odysseus who just came home to Ithaca, having done his journey.

I spent a lot of time with him listening to his monologues on movies he watched from the country movie theatre or the quality of carpenters who worked on his many boats. He also spoke about the murderous sea storms and fights among fisher folks who haunted the evening taverns with nonchalance. He was the Santiago from Old man and the sea who came from the sea with the biggest fish I could ever imagine sculling the boat from the horizon. He was not weary.

I imagined his journey to the island was similar to the great farmer’s walk along route 66 to California during the great depression. Their subsequent rise and fall were beautifully captured in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath(1939). The novel began with the description of the conditions in Dust Bowl Oklahoma that ruined the crops and instigated massive foreclosures on farmland. Steinbeck did not introduce any character in the outset, a technique that he employs to juxtapose descriptions of events in a larger social context, with those specific to the Joad family. Tom Joad hitched a ride on his way to California and the many hardships and travails to survive. It captured the essence of human struggles and the promise of the mother earth and eventual alienation while in pursuit of common ground.

It’s not that the life in the wild west in Americas and that in the Indian tropical lands were same, but at a deeper level, they all had everything in common - the prototypes of life and the living.

I never asked my grandfather about his journey, rather I was basking in his days of glory then. But then things took a different course ever since he folded his self into retirement. My aunts were all married off and had bigger issues in life and kids to gather around, my uncles vanished into the crowds in different parts of country and outside in search of jobs.

The society itself was undergoing the customary changes as always has been. The deluge of foreign money and pomp of gulf country residents rolled over the spirit of the land. The old house was abandoned and the grandparents were transplanted to the new house built near the freeway and surrounded by walls. The rain, the wind and the waves from the ocean were shut out for the rest of their lives.

Grandma died first and grandfather followed her soon. Even the new house looks so old now, occupied now by one of my uncles. He might probably visit once in a while from Dubai where he found a job. The dilapidated and moth ridden old house is probably biding the last moments of its existence before it is smashed down, probably to build a concrete warehouse for fertilizers. Now that the island has been named and electrified.

Atlantis, the lost continent is considered to be the source of all Religion, all Science and all races and civilizations. As we enter the third millennium, the Age of Aquarius its discovery is deemed to cause a major revolution in our view of the world and of both our future and past. I found my Atlantis in that island a while ago when I was a kid. The hearts and minds of the dwellers who built a brave new world over there, though lost would still speak to you if you listen. That this world can still be mysterious and beautiful if you can spare a moment to grasp.

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

- Ulysses, Alfred Tennysson

Love in Chicago

2005-05-06T10:32:00.000-04:00

Evening drifted alongside my meanderings in downtown chicago. The dusk kept the city in an imaginary scaffolding and I listened to the voice from across the seven seas. The voice lingered long after the beer froth and the frolic were over in wacker dr and Clark n Lake street, and still it lingered.

The house of blues was bracing up for another friday night.

Poplars sprang at the other end of city. They were looking upwards for starlings and in midway of the ascent. Lake michigan was like a huge drop of tear that fell ever so slowly as if time was suspended for a while...

The last train was rattled out of its torpor at Howard. Evanston was still a few miles away. I slumped back to my seat, tried to remember the subway singer's song... It must be Gibran who walked past the door to the adjacent car. He seemed to be returning home to May Ziadeh. She could be Hannah or S, waiting for the prophet.

The breeze from Lake michigan began to stir the night.

Back in my studio apartment phone calls, emails and messages buzzed. It rained here. She said it rained over there too. The night and day were strangely enigmatic to let ourselves pass it over.

Here is to the walks in soliloquy and the love of my life (S, now my wife), the five disjunct stanzas:

Hannah loved her prophet
from a distance so far that
her love was a kind that
propped the stairway to heaven.

Poplars remember our love
sometimes cut between
weed grown fences and the backyard
time wept and rotted.

My desire has the wings of a sad albatross
on its solitary flight across
windswept islands and seven seas.

Your love makes this life lighter
so light that things stay afloat
about me and this world.

You and me - the space in between,
thinking of life. love is like night rain
we pass over it by sleep.

- Spring 2000

The comical unfunniness of being

2005-05-02T12:03:00.000-04:00

In one of those epiphanies in my life, I was struck by this vision: the vision of an almost comical inevitability of the tragedy of our everyday lives. We wallow in the instant need of responding to external and internal stimuli, that the response itself takes a tangential ride from the original stimulus. Attempts to gain a supposedly broader and deeper perspective to evaluate and approximate are fraught with a curious mix of the sublime and the ridiculous. You may think of this whole affair of living life as something which is fundamentally funny.

This reminds me of a book I've read sometime back, when towards the end the protagonist of the story looses his weight totally, stays suspended upon the sky of his hometown. From that vantage point he could watch the town unfolding its vignettes of human follies and cruelties afflicted upon themselves and others. The behavior patterns have become so predictable, that the more he watched, the less he became amused and he started losing the point of it all. The reality of it all became surreal or meta-real (if there is such a word).

Alain Resnais' movie, My American uncle (1980) is a celebration of this vision. Probably, the best commentary movie ever made. It does not delve deep into the human psyche or questions of the soul, it simply juxtaposes a few scenes and conversations from the everyday lives of three highly motivated and extremely mixed-up persons.

They are René Ragueneau (Gérard Depardieu), a successful textile company executive who is suddenly faced with the loss of his career; Jean Le Gall (Roger Pierre), an ambitious politician with a desire for total power, both private and public; and Janine Garnier (Nicole Garcia), Jean's mistress and a would-be actress who makes a noble sacrifice only to find that, like most noble sacrifices, it's a self-defeating gesture. While their actions and motives are being commented in the background, parallely a discussion on human behavior and the functioning of brain is going on with Dr. Henri Laborit, a bona fide behavioural scientist, who formulated his theories of biological and emotional triggers. You could find Alain Resnais himself, interviewing the doctor.

While the characters in the movie are going about living their lives, Dr. Laborit is the author. The doctor, one of the people responsible for the development of drugs to control the emotions, is the wise, literate, unflappable host, and My American Uncle is the show. (Remember the Ed Harris' role of director in The Truman Show?). Of major concern to Dr. Laborit is the manner in which people inhibit their primal urges to dominate their landscapes and everyone around them.

Gerard Depardieu portrays René, a good, practicing Catholic, a stalwart fellow who has left the family farm to make a career in industry, who has a decent wife and family and an unquestioned faith in the future, a fellow who is, in short, totally unprepared for the stresses and strains when they come. Being a civilized man, René doesn't fight back. He develops ulcers, a perfect disability for a man whose hobby is haute cuisine.

Jean, the politician, doesn't hesitate to leave his wife and children when he falls in love with Janine, but all the time he's living with Janine he is plagued by kidney stones. When Jean's wife comes to Janine and says she's dying of cancer, Janine sends Jean back to his wife, only to learn later that she's been tricked. Emotional blackmail is the common currency of their lives.

Miss Garcia is charming as the spunky, seemingly independent Janine, whose finally acknowledged fury with her lover brings the movie to a liberating conclusion. Even Roger Pierre's Jean, the only character in the film who is essentially nasty, is comic in the righteous way he attempts to justify self-absorption.

While the motives and behaviors of the characters are being mercileslly dissected, Resnais romps home the poignancy of his futile findings when towards the end. Dr. Laborit demostrates his theory on behavioral patterns on Laboratory mice followed by the violent transgressions between Rene, Jean and Janine into the physical and mental boundaries of each other. The experiment may be summarised as the following: Consider two mice in a cage separated by a wall and subject them to electric shock seperately and then take the wall off. In the first instance, the mice fought against the contours of the cage and finally resign to their fate, but when they were left together, they invariably ended up hurting each other.

Dr. Laborit contended, that the stress and strain can elicit such behavior in humans as well and we find the fictional characters in the movie obliging. Amidst all these Resnais toys with the concept of "life is elsewhere" with the mythical character of american uncle who is as elusive and hopeless as any other symbol of redemption.

This is not a fact finding film, but a deeply involved, comically empathetic narration on the pathos and bathos of human lives. Resnais has achieved such mastery over the medium that his freehanded use of soap opera, docudrama, personal reflections, dreams, commentary and sometimes flooding surrealistic thought processes unleashed on the engaged and involved audience make a powerful statement:

- that after all human behavior isn't quite as mysterious as we like to pretend it is and that, most of the terrible things that happen to us need not be inevitable and eminently avoidable. Alas! if only we knew how blind sighted we have been.

*Note: I watched this movie nearly about 12 years ago. So I had to rely heavily on NY Times review of the movie for the plot and other details. However the views are entirely mine and also the fact that Resnais had made such an unforgettable impact on my movie sensibilities that I feel relieved to be able to unburden my thoughts now. If and when I watch it again, I might want to revisit this review, but so far unsuccesfull. The movie is a must watch.

A baby girl it is

2005-04-28T20:33:00.000-04:00

I never had a baby sister. Never did I have a cousin younger to me and in the proximity of my life. I would probably never know what it would be like. However I know how much fun it could be if you have a sibling. I count my brother as one of my best friends and I figured you could be the best friend even if you share none of his interests or passion when you grow up together. Growing alone could probably beckon you to unknown charters of life. But I would give it a pass now.

Because today my wife has delivered a baby girl and she is going to be the baby sister of my two and a half year old son. He was making faces and singing his own version of twinkle twinkle when I drove him to the hospital. Though we were lost in the labyrinthine alleys of this huge hospital complex, he did not like to be carried in my arms. Did he sense that he is a big boy now? He did not pester his tired mother today.

He might go into bouts of sibling jealousy and learn to share the hard way. But its an experience that he is going to cherish and love. I watched him calling her baby and planting a kiss on her forehead.

She is beautiful. Her face is serene. She doesn't seem to mind the howling wind outside, that has been out there since morning. I don't know how worthy would I be as a father and what future holds in store for her. I remember Yeat's great gloom; I remember John Mayer's song for Daughters; I remember Johnny Cash and his daughter's song "September when it comes" and I imagine countless post cards, handwritten.

I wish her all the best to live her life to the fullest in this world at her own terms.

Philadelphia

2005-04-21T19:18:00.000-04:00

Philadelphia is a city where you find the dwellers gripped by a recurring sense of having lived the exact moment a while back in their life. The same conversation, same person with a smirk on his face, same weather and precisely when your neighbour locked his apartment to leave and the mayor was having a nightmare of his house being bugged by the FBI. Or you could listen to the jumbled voices from radio discussing Dali and the death of a Jazz singer in your car while a black man walked across the street with a beer bottle in hand.

It's a city that has been aging ever since Ben Franklin had a dream that on the day of his funeral leaders, 34 ministers, preachers, priests & at least one rabbi marching arm in arm behind his casket as it was being carried to the gravesite. He further had another dream of Liberty Bell crumbling.

If you sit in one of the chairs in the old assembly hall of the constituion house, after climbing up the sturdy wooden stairs you could still sense the rustle of tunic and sombreros worn by your fellow legislators. Perhaps you could still argue with them to make Gujarat the 51st federal state.

If you walk down the center city streets along the sun soaked brick buildings, you could meet the travellers from neighbour cities who were afflicted by a bout of insomnia, lost in the constitutional walking tour of philadelphia. Or if you cruise down to the inner city via delaware river, you could find Lila, the aging and desperate wharf-bar pickup and hone your skills on ruminations of life and civilization to something understandable and real before you sail back out of the outer seas again.

Going further back out to the north of the city, you would find Mr. George Tharakan getting out of his Mercedes Benz in suit into his four bedroom house and later coming out in lungie to inspect his fence he shared with his fellow native. If you glance through his family album, you would find him wearing the exact same lungie inspecting his fence on a similar sunny evening in Thiruvalla, Kerala.

A Mirror held against the soul

2005-04-17T21:25:00.000-04:00

We celebrated every moment
Of our meetings as epiphanies,
Just we two in all the world.
Bolder, lighter than a bird's wing,
You hurtled like vertigo
Down the stairs, leading
Through moist lilac to your realm
Beyond the mirror.

Andrei Tarkovsky posited the Mirror(1975) onto his life. A life that he knew about his family glinted by sepia tainted memories, winter green deaths and rainswept conflagerations. It reflected off the contours of imperfect lives and their spiritual innards around him, unrelenting and unflinching. That the montage of art, history and spirituality went right through the soul as if a million rays converge to immortalize a human being.

When the movie begins to unreel, we find an adolescent overcoming his stutter under a spell of hypnosis. That is where Andrei wanted us to let the magical hold of "Mirror" to unwind ourselves. You let go of your fears and handicaps of inert words for your soul to begin a journey of self expression. When you do, you become kind and empathize, you sense the flow of time, you feel the pangs of waiting and despair and then you just be.

Word is the last to die.
When the drill of water pushes up
Through the subsoil's tough integument,
Sky will stir

There are references of two russians in the movie: Pushkin and Chekov. At the beginning of the movie we see a doctor passer-by who strikes a conversation with Andrei's mother (Maria) who is waiting by the fence of their house. When the doctor contrasts plants and trees to humans, who rush about and speak in platitudes, Maria mentions Ward #6, Chekov's short story (that dealt with the issues of conformism and the perils of sane/insane duality), implying that the doctor is insane. He says, don't worry, he is immune to all that (insanity); "Chekhov invented it all". Another reference is on Pushkin who in a letter wrote to a friend mentions the cultural and spiritual contexts of Russia being distinctly different and alienated from that of Europe by the invasions of Mangols and Tartars. Andrei is prodding us to look at the russian landscape with another eye.

The narrative of the movie is cyclic. You keep coming back to the same windswept green fields over Andrei's childhood home, you find Maria sitting by the edge of fence waiting for her husband and then years later, death; the walls made of logs, sudden cuts to fire burning at middle distance in field and the dark green woods behind.

We were led to who knows where.
Before us opened up, in mirage,
Towns constructed out of wonder,
Mint leaves spread themselves beneath our feet,
Birds came on the journey with us,
Fish leapt in greeting from the river,
And the sky unfurled above...

While behind us all the time went fate,
A madman brandishing a razor.

Andrei's memory of his childhood and troubled marriage is a blend of impressionistic paintings and profound photographic interpretation of dreams:
. Night, interior of Dacha (country house): Maria walks by the door and towards the window. unnoticeable freeze of the frame, the color of which turns into sepia. child in bed, sits up. Maria is washing her hair with help of husband. she goes towards a mirror and sees herself as an old woman. The house crumbles down in slow motion. Later on, Maria lay suspended over the bed, in black and white.

Dreams are given expression. You are awe-struck by the sheer contemplative detachment of the narrator on events. The music and poetry have evoked such depth that the nature with its elements of fire, rain and wind brought the organic evolvement of this miracle movie. The usual autobiographical ingrediants are seen in this movie as well. The scenes of childhood memory with newsreel footage and contemporary scenes examining the narrator's relationships with his mother, his ex-wife and his son, child custodial arguments, and those from history of the period (Prague spring, Mao, border disputes with china, holocaust, Leningrad blockade etc). The imperfect lives of Andrei, his parents and people around them have been a given an ethereal expression.

The last scene shows us camera panning down on Maria Maria leaning on husband's chest. she sits up, Husband asks "Do you want a boy or a girl?" She reacts by looking down, smiles, then tears cross her face; she looks away. The camera cuts to woods and pans left across garden, mother (Maria as old) and then pans left across the river bank under trees, insects, fallen trees, rotting trunks; mother walking to right, meets child, takes hand and walks on; cut back to Maria, still mingled joy and sadness on her face; then back to mother, still walking across field with two children; pan back as mother and children walking, sound of bird that boy was imitating; through trees, fade to dark.

...and that beauty I witnessed in Mirror shattered me.

A man has just one body a solitary shell
The soul thinks it quite shoddy
as many know so well
With ears and eyes outfitted
to cover bones and loins
So fly out through the cornea
into the vaulted sky
Up to those ice cold wheel spokes
where bird like chariots fly
And listen from the shackles
of your living prison room

Note: All the poems are by Arseny Trakovsky, Andrei's father.

Andrei's sense of time

2005-04-15T21:24:00.000-04:00

"There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions"
--T.S.Eliot (Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

Andrei Tarkovsky was a poet. But he chose cinema for his medium. Every cinema of his had been a quest for Andrei's identity as an artist. He believed no true artist had ever lived in an ideal world and the issues of real world were the very impurity for the chemistry of creativity. He further believed that the same artist was challenged by the concept of time, more so for a cinema director.

The director is at pains to capture the fleeting moments of vision and sculpt them with structure, images and metaphors. The linear narrative is an impediment to poetic expression and the shining metaphors and visions that Andrei so dearly wanted us to see might just vanish. He is also worried about characters and their experience in the movie, taking over the experience of cinema and channels of communication between the connoisseur-audience and the artist.

I revisited Andrei's Andrei Rublev(1966) last week, one of the best films ever. It recounts the struggles of Andrei Rublev, a 14th century fresco painter in Russia who lived through a brutal and volatile period of history with marauding Tartars and treacherous princedom. The film is divided into seven chapters. Each chapter is preceded by a prologue and followed by an epilogue, revealing a deep rumination over the moral, ethical and artisitic dilemmas faced by Rublev and they are narrated in a heap of metaphors, conversations, incomplete montage of ideas, fragmented memories and images conjured up from the landscape. There is no one point of view, but an orchestration of everything mentioned above. I just want to discuss briefly the last chapter which I felt singularly represented the cosmic-onomics of Tarkovsky's world.

It is titled "The Bell". Andrei Rublev, under a vow of silence and overwhelmed by his self-doubts as an artist and atonement as human being comes upon the casting of a great bell. The bellmaker has died, but his son, Boriska, claims his father 'passed on' the secret of the bell to him alone. He has inherited his father's work. He was threatened of grave consequence should he fail. Amid confusion, rain and treachery the bell is finally cast and raised.

During this cacophony, the monk Kirill, Rublev's envious peer has a reckoning with him, accusing him of wasteful inactivity, of 'taking his great talent to the grave'. As the bell at last rings out, Boriska, hysterical and exhausted, collapses, confessing that his father had not passed on his secret after all. The son had proceeded on faith, feeling and madness alone.

This is the revelation Rublev was looking for. He tells Boriska that they should go to the Trinity monastery (the fresco project which Rublev earlier abandoned) together where Rublev will paint and Boriska will cast bells. The two men embrace as the camera pans past them over burning logs and dying embers, as the black and white images slowly dissolve into color fragments of Rublev's frescoes.

Out of the ash-nothingness arises a poetic vision. A deep meditation on the significance of inner conflicts, realization and triumph of an artist's will over the senseless flight of time.

Andrei, was the true poet of cinema who had a great sense of time.

The dreamcatchers

2005-04-11T21:22:00.000-04:00

We were a bunch. The students from colleges in the neighbourhood. We were unbridled and impetuous as we could be. There were student union activists who set many a tranquil days into raging conflageration. There were brooding loners who would walk by the din as if the world had never been a spectacle. There were loiterers simple and vain. There were kiddos destined for greater futures that had been mapped out and choreographed by their parents. And then there were us, who just happened to be there for no apparent reason. Sure there were thousand other students who looked just like us: in those over crowded buses, "bootilicious" noon shows, among the clamour in mess halls, hostel and along the periphery of life itself.

We ran into each other in some of those happenstances. We met again at Kerala Kalapeetam, a tiny 1200 sq. ft. rendezvous for writers, artists, oglers, pretenders and movie buffs. It used to be a major haunt for the arty intelligentsia in the sleepy town of cochin. Some of the folks I met in that mosquito infested cusbah were Kamala Das, Balachandran Chullikad, his wife Vijayalakshmi (both poets), Ayyapa Panickar and a few other names I don't remember. The enterprise was held together by Kaladharan - he looked like santa and lived in the haunt. Two other art endeavours from Kalapeetam were Cochin Film Society and Little Theatre. Little Theatre later split into too little theatres though. One delved into the Indian aesthetics (Karnabhaaram and other heavy epic based scripts) and other went after woody allen and low-brow enactments of shakespeare plays. Film Society however had more followers, partly due to the fact that local media gave it serious backing and the voluntary efforts of people who had steady job.

Cochin Film society brought a lot movies from all over the world into the town. Sometimes they showed them in theatres, other times they showed them in the public library auditorium. We had Italian film festivel that showcased the neorealists (Desica, Rosellini), Antonioni. We had Hungarian films (Jancso, Istavan Szabo, Gall, Zoltan Fabri), Iranian (French Avante-Garde cinema (Renoir, Godard, Resnais), Polish new-wave cinema (Andrej Wajda, Krystoff Zanussi, Kieslowski), Indian (Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul) and the retrospectives: Bergman, Ghatak, Bimal Roy, Satyajit Rai, John Abraham, Thomas Alia (Cuba), Kurosava, Misoguchi and countless others.

They also let the screening of independent movies by fledgling directors from inside and outside the country, even though the audience could turn hostile sometime. We have seen a girl who showed her longish arty movie getting grilled and booed by the hostile audience who watched it for free. We have seen the unusually huge turn out for Milos Forman's movie Hair. Then there were plenty of short film screenings. Once after the screening of a short film, Kaladharan introduced the director as
Fellini's prodigy and asst. director. He asked for a write-up for press release. I did that with another mate of mine, Rajeev Ravi. He was a generally a mute spectator and together we collected all the brochures and write-up on all the movies ever screened in Film Society. The synopsis had enough sound bytes for us to explore the inner workings of cinema and together we shared this wonderful fascination.

He and I applied for FTII (Film and Television Institute, Pune) after bachelors. Cinematography was his passion and I wanted audiography. However the day we supposed to leave for Pune, I had some serious talk with my parents and realized my journey might just not start then. I bade him farewell and came back with a heavy heart. My path then digressed quite a bit.

Rajeev had his ups and downs. Second year he had an aggravated chemical reaction and spent almost a year in medication at home. But he'd overcome that and on his way to become one of the best cinematographers in India. He did Chandni Bar, Sesham, The Bypass and many more projects on his resume.

I must mention one more dude who made a difference and perhaps threw in a little light. His name is Anup Kurian. Though I have not met or even heard of him before, I felt I know him more than I think I do. He had his school in FTII, but took up a job in IT and later came to US to hunt for the bounty. A short visit of Syamaprasad (renowned malayalam director) to the west coast gave him the nudge he desperately needed. The money that he made in US was enough for a shoestring project and he made Manasarovar. Critic Derek Malcolm after having seen the movie, sought Anup to talk about his movie. In a rare honour to Indian independent movies, `Manasarovar’, a 90-minute feature film in English had been selected to be screened across 35 theatres in UK, starting January 2005, ahead of its India release. He is living up his dream and has done enough to bring a smile on dreamers among us. Let me wind up this meandering of a blog with a few lines from an obscure poet:

It's easy, perhaps to die for a dream
With banners unfurled - and be forgiving!
It's the hardest part to follow the gleam
When scorned by the world - and go on living!
--Myra Brooks Welch

I am the only one who leaves

2005-04-07T21:21:00.000-04:00

Have you ever thought of life as an interminate state of leaving and arriving? The familiar anchors of your daily life: the comforter on your bed, double doors of your apartment, pavements, traffic lights, the coffee room at work and the faces around you.
You may as well think about it as an incessant spell of leaving: You leave from childhood, teenage, youth and the rest of your life as up to the hour, minute and second. If one's life has a defining moment, yet he/she is floating away from the defined moment to many a cursed ones too. The "I" in me is in a state of infinite flux. And I might lose it at some point in time.

Consider this poem from the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo. He is one good poet you want to read even if you don't like poetry and hate one time communists.

Paris, October 1936

From all of this I am the only one who leaves.
From this bench I go away, from my pants,
from my great situation, from my actions,
from my number split side to side,
from all of this I am the only one who leaves.

From the Champs Elysées or as the strange
alley of the Moon makes a turn,
my death goes away, my cradle leaves,
and, surrounded by people, alone, cut loose,
my human resemblance turns around
and dispatches its shadows one by one.

And I move away from everything, since everything
remains to create my alibi:
my shoe, its eyelet, as well as its mud
and even the bend in the elbow
of my own buttoned shirt.

The greenhouse effect of Indian writing

2005-04-04T21:19:00.000-04:00

Indians have learned nothing but Western science and philosophy from their reading and academics, the basis of which is mostly European christianity. We deluded ourselves imagining their issues as our own, debated their debates, fought their fights and created snooty socialite circles. The modern and post modern culture elites and well read intellectuals stayed clear of Indian realities and interpreted issues with their western peer's yardsticks. While I agree on the revolutionary aspect of western methodology and its use in Indian context to a great extent, I equally resent and condemn these folk's authoritarian attitude towards Indian ethos and the "traditional" wisdom. I also understand that the native culture fanatics do not make their job easier either. Indian thought which is based on texts from vedas, upanishads and other oral intelligence and written scripts are dismissed and ridiculed as religious artefacts.

The post-war europe taught us the absurdity of life and futility of man's destiny. I read a lot of these guys. Though I trusted the integrity and honesty of all these thinkers and writers, my parched self craved for a meaningful something that tells me that there is a reason, however ambiguos and obtrusive it may be. I needed to break the cycle of validating my ignorence and despondency. Then I read O.V.Vijayan (Legends of Khazak), Anand(How deserts originate), U.R. Anathamurthy (Samskara), Srikrishna Alanahally (Kadu), Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee (Pather Panchali, Aranyak), Tarashankar Bhandopadhyay (Arogya Niketan, Jalsaghar) and a few others. They wrote about their inspiration from Indian Philosophy that had its roots deep in nature. The same nature that was kind, generous and grand, that facilitates the cycles of life and death. The western books we read defeated this sense of union from nature.

You will not find this subtext from Thoreau or Wordsworth. They were still responding to their existential angst and that was nothing but naturalism. The western analysts trying to procrastinate and box Indian thoughts as polytheism and freakish religious ramblings never understood that it did not place the selfish man at the center of the universe, that it allowed for a benign symbiosis of man, nature and the universe in an unending cycle of karmic existence. The freaks in London and hippies in united states never assimilated this. Instead their dysfunctional subculture and those horny Gurus proved to be a bad advertisement for anything remotely related to Indian philosophy.

With this backdrop, to find genuine thinking and writing from India had been hard to come by. However if you look, you will find them. The Indian English writers generally sell the western concepts of India and you learn nothing from them in terms of Indian thought. I would like to quote an excerpt from the malayalam writer O.V.Vijayan from his autobiographical notes (on his book "Legends of Khazak) to give glimpse of real Indian writing.

He(Vijayan) spent his childhood in Police quarters where his father worked as an officer. He was not a healthy child and was bedridden for quite a long time. Here (in the excerpt) he is talking about his vision of nature and the complex interrelated life abound on a serene evening. He is trying to imbibe the grandeur of nature and exults in the vision of his existence as one of the cosmically countless forms of life: (I hope my translation did justice to Vijayan)

Nature yonder the meadow was nubile. Amid her nubility, our little houses leant over and hid without ever rejecting it; the trees, vegetation, birds, hemipterous insects and spiders that wove across trees; the tiny flowers of grass, microscopic sun buds, bluish hydrangeas. Neatly cut sedimentary rocks and the expanse of meadows spaced out the landscape where there were no plants. After the rains, ditches became reservoirs of clear water to turn into ponds. They might last for months unmuddied before they get dried up. The green frogs who migrated would swim about and lie underneath the crystal layers of those reservoirs. When they did, the bubbles on top of their skin would shine like emeralds. The hill was surrounded by valleys and extended to more hills. I could see the sanguine facade of Chekkunnu mountain from the patio of my house. Watching its breathtaking face I would daze back to my lethargy..."

That lethargy was a metaphor for the spectacular vision he had. I would re-enter into my life as an Indian reader when I read him and I'd say, truly I am one of those cosmic millions.

The infinte grace of Vijayan

2005-03-31T21:17:00.000-05:00

You might probably know that the malayalam writer O.V.Vijayan is no more. Please read Dev's blog to know more about him.

I am feeling weighed down by my own expectations to write about O.V.Vijayan, the writer who died this week. I would not add anymore adjective to his name. I would not.

I found Vijayan from Mathrubhumi, the equivalent of Times Litt Journal for a Malayali and I thank my father for subscribing the weekly. Vijayan was writing an epilogue series for his magnum opus Khazakinte Ithihaasam (Legends of Khazak). I had not read him before nor I had heard of him and I must confess that I was not really excited by malayalam writing till then. But a casual glance on one of the pieces transformed me as a reader and I felt an unseen presence of a benevolent Guru who provoked and inspired to think originally and honestly.

Vijayan started writing in English. He infact finished his first fiction and then began the phase of questioning the book and himself. He finally figured he was not going to wallow in the cosmopolitan dynamics of Indian English Writing. Knowing him as I do now, I sense the grace of a great mind and am grateful. I am grateful to this writer who shattered my pride in knowing the angst of life from Kafka, the surreality of life from Gabriel Marquez, the absurdity of life from Samuel Beckett, the lyrical sadness of life from Milan Kundera and the architectural constructs of life from Italo Calvino. He replaced everything with an infinite grace of life and the words he jotted down would sit beside me in silence, pointing to the far end of this life and beyond ever so gently.

Vijayan took twelve long years to complete his first novel in malayalam. He was patient and he knew he had to bide his time. When it came, it took the literary world by storm. The book was titled "The Legends of Khazak" - the story of Ravi, a teacher in an informal education centre in Khazak and his existential crises. His forlorn meanderings and visions took him from the Christian College in Thambaram to the ashram of Bhodhananda and finally to the dilapidated rickety pre-school in Khazak. The novel ends when Ravi provokes a snake to bite on his feet and gradually begins his journey to the unending realms of karmic existence.

The linear exterior of this quaint story was nothing but deceptive. The language, the visions and the few characters would get inside your senses before you realize. Invariably it would set you off to a journey that will liberate your imagination as a reader. You could set existential angst of Ravi, the lyrical eroticism of Maimuna and the human prototype of Appukili (the retard) with the backdrop of wind blown palm trees and dense nights of Khazak anywhere in the world. He differed from other writers the way he integrated everything to look at the commonplace life with the grace of a visionary. Vijayan himself acknowledged his affinity for Lawrence Durrel's Alexandria Quartet that looked at life with an integrated vision.

Please get a peek on this great work here:

http://www.hackorama.com/malayalam/ovvijayan/

The next book from Vijayan was Dharmapuranam (The saga of Dharmapuri). If you want to relate to the satire and black comedy genius of Vijayan, this is the one for you. The book lampooned political monkeys who are sitting at the helm of Indian democracy and shreds every bit of its sense to pieces. The cartoonist that you have seen in NY Times and other publications at his riotous best. If you have read P.J.O'Rourke's satire, you would know what I am talking about.

His third book is the personal best and the object of hatred for so many at the same time. The book is titled "Gurusaagaram" (The infinity of Grace). Here is a writer who is speaking to you the reader one-on-one as a Guru to the seeker. He showed us the hidden truth in lost battles of ego and the fatigue of wisdom. The novel talks about Kunjunny, a journalist from Kerala after his long and winding physical and spiritual journey finds his way to the Infinite Grace of life. Finally we find the seeker partaking the Guru in attaining awareness of self. His language is deep and the style is tantalizingly elusive for the conventional readers of fiction, but plenty of food for thought for his followers.

Each book from then onwards underlined his growth as a thinker than a popular writer. "Madhuram Gayathi"(I am not going to translate the title:) ) dealt with the awareness of man, environment and the universe with an integral vision. This has some profound and almost prophetic utterings on the ecosystem, man's greed and cycle of life and death.

The power of his language is such that no one dared to translate them. Finally Vijayan had to be persuaded to do it. There are folks who cannot even think of translation, such was the raw power and alchemy of his words when it happened. Viajayan had to transcreate the book in English.

I have not read his last two books but I am sure I will not be disappointed, neither will you.

epilogue:

Besides novels and cartoons Vijayan wrote a lot of short stories that will stand the test of time. Notably "Kadaltheerathu" that distantly evokes similarities to malayalam movie "Piravi" and Alan Patten's book, "Cry my beloved country".

True to his philosophical self, he was never found compromising his values or pandering to the obnoxious award committees. He was just beyond all that, way above.

He also wrote several articles and books on politics and humanities that stand so mcuh apart from the regular pastiche from the columnists in Delhi. He was a colossal presence for the enlightened readers. I for one with all the triviality of my existence would devour everything that he ever wrote. Please go here to get a peek of his political acumen. I am sure you would feel the presence of a Guru who is relentless in his pursuit of truth and meaning of life.

http://www.india-seminar.com/2001/500/500%20o.v.%20vijayan.htm

Theory of Chaos

2005-03-27T18:03:00.000-05:00

I was a misfit as a masters student of physics. The wordy books of thermodynamics and classical mechanics doused what little fire for physics I had in the first year. I was not surprised when the examiner who came from a distant university appropriately identified me during viva-voce. But I did not read Milan Kundera that night. I had my dinner and slept like yesterday.
After masters, one of my options was to do research. I went to the university. The department head told me that they had just one vacancy for research associate and that too in theoretical physics. Nothing was going to make much difference to me anyway. I said I would take it.

He spoke a little bit about the scope, stuff that needs to be done for a prelim thesis and that the topic was called theory of chaos. Theory of Chaos - The title impressed me. I needed to pick one of the mathematical problems that he was trying to solve, distantly related to photonics. I was impressed with the title. More like my life then. If I could extrapolate a little bit on it, who knows...

Mathematicians have known about nonlinearity (a characteristic of discontinuous events) since the work of Henri Poincaré, at the turn of this century. Most equations that attempt to predict the actions of nature or natural materials are close approximations rather than exact. They contain one or more factors of nonlinearity; which are approximated by using constants (in the engineering community, such constants are sometimes called fudge factors). Think about your simple newtonian
equation. The constant that you add has in it the seed of unpredictability that can grow upto very large proportions and the system eventually would look like it has lost its "memory" of what were the initial conditions.

Much like most of our life where the simple equations of life go down off an unpredictable tangent when the deemed constant factors plunge into patterns that we don't understand.

Have you watched "A Hill on the Dark Side of the Moon"? a swedish movie on Sonia Kovalevskaya. She was the first woman mathematician to recieve a Ph.D and made major contributions besides working on the intial formulations of Theory of chaos. The movie had a fascinating account of the disintegration of her personal life into chaos in parallel to her research on quasi-linear differential equation.

My research was gone for a toast in a few months and I took up software for a living. I thought I was done with chaos. It was only a beginning. The bigger the application; longer the code; bigger the team; deeper grew the chaos and eventual lead up to the great american way of problem solving!!!

The seminar I attended the other day discussed adapting the principles of theory of chaos into project management practices and reduce risk factors. Infact every enterprise individual, family or business is living with the possibility of failure.

You cannot wish the angst away. Even after many an implementation of complex projects, sometimes I am still haunted by the lingering question of being a misfit among the go-getters.

Zarathushtra, the final war and sacrifice

2005-03-26T20:49:00.000-05:00

I asked my manager to repeat what he just said. It came too fast to comprehend the exact sense of his statement. He repeated:

"If war breaks out Pakistan will nuke you (india) even before you think about it".
We were silent for sometime. I listened to the rattling of wheels and ruminated. Could it be the edginess of this navy vet or the war-sense of an american? We did not discuss the indian response.

We were on one of our long overnight drives to client site through the grayed undulating interstate roads in Pennsylvania. The news of one of the biggest indian and pakistani army deployment has been the talking point.

And we drove into the loneliness of evening fog...

I pondered over the imminence of devastation and the visage of scarred earth. I thought about the egalitarian - death. I thought about the good and evil, perfect and the imperfect, beautiful and the ugly. I thought about the folks who are living their lives and waiting forsomething else...
I remembered Alexander from Tarkovsky's Sacrifice and his solitary trails. His prayer to god to make everything as before in return of the sacrifice of his family, possessions and silence, when the nuclear disaster was announced. I tried to visualize the stunning visions and landscapes that Sven Nykvist showed ever so magnanimously. It was called a flawed masterpiece of a dying man(Tarkovsky was diagnosed with terminal cancer then).

Not the wisdom of death but the earnestness to find conscious life saved from death will define and atone for human. And thus spake Zarathushtra:I come again with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, withthis serpent- not to a new life, or a better life, or a similar life:-I come again eternally to this identical and selfsame life, inits greatest and its smallest, to teach again the eternal return ofall things

Tarkovsky engaged Nietzschean doctrine of eternal return to delineate the need of waking upto life as it is. The last scene where Alexander sets fire on his house as sacrifice had to be retaken because Sven's camera was jammed. On watching the conflageration, as I read somewhere - "One wonders if, on that second occasion, Tarkovsky was inwardly gnashing his teeth or mentally smiling at the cosmic irony and repeating, together with Zarathustra: "Was that life. Well then, once again!".

***Notes:
*Andrei Tarkovsky: Late Russian cinema director
**Sven Nykvist : Legendary Cinematographer. Known for hisassociation with Ingmar Bergman. Worked with Tarkovsky for the movie referred to in the blog, The Sacrifice.
***Zarathushtra: Generally known as the prophet and founder of Zorastrianism. But the blog refers to the Nietzsche's philosophy from his book Thus spake Zarathustra.

Invisible Cities - II

2005-02-21T19:52:00.000-05:00

Calvino's fictional cities delve into the mind of each city that you and I have known or could have known from our personal view of immediate outside world. The personal account of your life could exactly sound like someone else'. Or the kind of experience and people that you met at first job that you had done in city C would sound agonizingly similar to some one else, if you shift the time a little bit. There must always be someone who fought your fights, cried your cries, dreamt your dreams and lived your life in some city that you think you lived and known for a lifetime.

I remember watching the movie American Beauty starting with a flickering mosaic image of the city populated by the affluent and the succesfull before it begins to tear down the beauty apart to reveal the ugly, it reminded me that it could have been another city I knew. Alright. Let's have Italo calvino's account of a few more cities:

...In Olinda, if you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find somewhere a point no bigger than the head of a pin which, if you look at it slightly enlarged, reveals within itself the roofs, the antennas, the skylights, the gardens, the pools, the streamers across the streets, the kiosks in the squares, the horse-racing track. That point does not remain there: a year later you will find it the size of half a lemon, then as large as a mushroom, then a soup plate. And then it becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier city: a new city that forces its way ahead in the earlier city and presses its way toward the outside.

If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. . . . "You can resume your flight whenever you like," they said to me, "but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes."

Eutropia (a "trading city") is made up of many cities, all but one of them empty, and that its inhabitants periodically tire of their lives, their spouses, their work, and then move en masse to the next city, where they will have new mates, new houses, new jobs, new views from their windows, new friends, pastimes, and subjects of gossip. We learn further that, in spite of all this moving, nothing changes since, although different people are doing them, the same jobs are being done and, though new people are talking, the same things are being gossiped about.

From their conversations which began from sign and sounds unintelligible to both, to perfecting each other's language, to the numbness of understanding through silence, Marco Polo the traveller and Kublai Khan the Emperor have sailed through a lot of cities.

Kublai asked Marco: "You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us." Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylong, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.

He continued: "It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us."And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

Here is my take on the cities I visited, the quality of which has nothing to do with Italo Calvino's class though:

I have had my fair share of cities. You leave a part of you everytime you move on to new destination, hoping you would find what you think you need! eventually. You might visit these cities at some point in time, hoping again to relive the life and time for a moment with a sense of detachment. But you find noone and the city which you thought you knew looks strange to you. Finally you come back to the last city on the stack to carry on with your life...Perhaps the city existed in your dreams or the people might be dreaming about you having a dream of this city the way it existed once...

Looking back I can see the trail I trod from the adolescent walkways in Cochin, to bangalore where the job hunters hopes, despair and celebrations were drenched in rum, to the long and sweltering bus trips to work in Chennai, to Chicago where everyone read something in the commuter trains and fridays were an onslaught of adrenaline, to NewYork where you find countless people and cars travel all over you and yet you can listen to the tireless voice of subway singer with his violin, to the laid back life in small town Pennsylavania and now in this aged, withering city of philadelphia.

This is the last part of my blog on Invisible cities, masterpiece by a writer called Italo Calvino. Please read the other part for a better start, if you have not done already: Invisible Cities - 1

Invisible Cities - I

2005-02-10T19:43:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you get hold of a book in one of those rare triumphs of neural probabilistic chances. Memory of the reading would make you realize the existence of a whole different set of tools to sculpt your concepts of this world and beyond, upon opening page after page. I have been haunted by the memory of such a book I read a long while back. It is titled Invisible Cities, written by Italo Calvino. A skinny book which condensed the experience of living in and sensing cities in abstract and revealing ways.

Since I am as fascinated by the metaphysics and architectures of cities equally or more as the nocturnal rodent, the cab fellows and the hitchhiking executives, I got hooked with the matter-of-fact, almost parable evoking but incisive visions set ablaze in the book. Each chapter unveils a different city as narrated in the conversation between Kublai Khan, the tartar emperor and Marco Polo, the traveller. Marco talks about the cities with such great tangents that would leave you gasp in delightful insights.

Here are excerpts of some of the "invisible" cities in the book:

The city of Armilla has weathered earthquakes, catastrophe, corroded by termites, once deserted and re-inhabited. It cannot be called deserted since you are likely to glimpse a young woman, or many young women, slender, not tall of stature, luxuriating in the bathtubs or arching their backs under the showers suspended in the void, washing or drying or perfuming themselves, or combing their long hair at a mirror.

The city of Zobedei has a tale of its foundation - men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. After the dream, they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. The city's streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten. New men arrived from other lands, having had a dream like theirs. The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.

Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city, beyond the plank fences, the sackcloth screens, the scaffoldings, the metal armatures, the wooden catwalks hanging from ropes or supported by sawhorses, the ladders, the trestles. If you ask "Why is Thekla's construction taking such a long time?" the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long bruses up and down, as they answer "So that it's destruction cannot begin."

All I could do has been to feature the excerpts from his book. Each chapter is extremely short and the brevity of which demands the reader's involvement to such an extent that you end up adding on to your own meta-city to the reading which I will attempt in the next blog.

*Calvino belongs to the OULIPO(Ouvroir de Littérature Informatique Potentielle) genre. It is a group of writers, logicians and mathematicians whose primary objective is the systematic and formal innovation of constraints in the production and adaptation of literature (they also define themselves as rats who themselves build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape). The Oulipo believe that all literature is governed by constraints, be it a sonnet, a detective novel, or anything else. By formulating new contraints, the Oulipo is thus contributing to creating new forms of literature. What more noble cause in the art of writing?

You would find adaptations and assimilation of engineering, mathematics, tarot card reading, astrophysics, computing concepts and anything that lends cognitive appreciation of structures, mental and physical in the ambit of these writers. George Perec and Raymond Queneau are other major writers of this genre.

I would have to mention about two more cities and the final conversation between Marco and Kublai in the second and last part of this blog.

Note:
This is repost with some edits.
* Official explanation for the OULIPO movement.

first rain

2005-02-10T19:40:00.000-05:00

It rained in the morning
clouds stay dark still
I breathe the damp air.

Oh! how it reminds me
the scent of soil after first rain
from my tropical land.

The short lasting moments in life

2005-02-05T19:37:00.000-05:00

Watched the movie Raincoat the other day. The twist at the end owed it to O.Henry's "The Gift of Magi" - the endearing story of Della and Jim who were in an exalted state of affection for each other, set out in their own selfless ways to make each other happy. Della Counted her dollar and dimes again and again to think of the right gift for Jim. She finally settled for a platinum chain for his watch he inherited from his father. How would she buy it? She sold her long cascading hair. When Jim came he popped his little present - a Comb Set for her hair which he bought in exchange of his gold watch!

It is a simple plot and an emotion captured in a single twist. To carry that the spark to a full length movie would be too much to ask. However Raincoat is exploring a much more delicate and deeper sense of life in a familiar situation. Manu (Ajay Devgan), still grappling with the reality of his shattered dreams, hopes and desires afetr the love of his life married to another and left his small town. He is making a trip to the city to seek help from his friends and old class mates to find a steady income. While visiting the benefactors on a rainy day he finds his way to his lost lover with a borrowed raincoat.

Thats where the story is paused and the viewers are given a closer look at Manu going through the lingering grief and despair. The narration is woven back and forth to portray his state of mind. Neither he, nor she expressed their true feelings for each other. Instead they kept lying about their misfortunes. Like the blurb of the CD says, to love is to lie. At the end they part realizing how much they care for each other. O.Henry twist is helping Rituparno (the director) to provide a logical end for the movie.

Losing one's love is painful. Revisiting it will be excruciatingly painful. Rituparno tried to capture the emotion close to the heart and the translation for the most part came through. The fact that he used the old fade-in fade-out technique tells me he narrates the story on another plain besides progressing with the story.

The movie for some reason reminded me of one of the stories in Primo Levi's book "The Periodic Table". The book has chapters titled after 21 chemical elements. Primo himself was a holocaust survivor owed his life to his university credentials in Chemistry. This chapter titled Zinc he spoke about his times when Germany was at the threshold of the worst crime against humanity. But I am digressing here. The story is about Rita his class mate who he wanted to get close but never dared to yet. She was plain and mysterious and the mix attracted him. He prepared brilliant conversational openings mentally and at the decisive moment put it off the next day. Partly because of lack of confidence and deep-rooted shyness. He tried to sit right next to her but she would never notice him. He felt frustrated and challenged. At that period he was desperate and thought of himself condemned to perpetual masculine solitude, denied a woman's smile forever which he needed as much as fresh air.

One day during the laboratory class, he found her working on Zinc Sulphate, the same as his assignment. The opportunity presented itself to take the first step. He noticed the book Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann in her bag. He asked about the book on tenterhooks to hear her opinion. Contrary to his expectation she was more interested to know how far the romance between Hans, the protagonist and madam Chauchat would go and she skipped the theological and political discussions in the book which was so fascinating for him. But he nevertheless got a start and learned a lot about her. That her father was poor sickly store keeper and she worked part time and went on a bicycle to deliver and collect payments, the thorny and difficult path to university degree was the only way to get out of her misery from childhood.

His zinc sulphate ended up in bad shape, but he did not care. It was late and he asked her to let him walk her home. It was dark and her house was not near. The goal he set for himself was objectively and incomparably audacious. He hesitated and felt like standing on burning coals. Finally, trembling with emotion he slipped his arm into hers. She did not resist, nor did she return the pressure, or pull away. He felt exhilarated and victorious. It seemed for him that he won a small but decisive battle against the darkness, emptiness and the hostile years that lay ahead.

A long time back I remember walking my class mate to the bus station from college which was a mile away. I was in a similar state of mind when I thought of "brilliant conversational openings", the books, songs, movies that she was interested in, to talk to her. But most of the time, we spoke only a few things, mostly on exam dates or missed assignments. Did I like her? Yes. Did she like me? I don't know. Should I have talked to her what I felt? How would I tell her if I wasn't sure exactly what I felt? Looking back it was an enchanting age to cherish.
In sum the short moments in life can have a lasting impression like in Primo Levi's case and short revisit can be even more poignant and compelling as shown in Raincoat.

Torments of writers

2005-01-30T19:34:00.000-05:00

Its about a blank paper and a mind - the scratch pad that has been written and wiped clean the umpteenth time. How do you know what you wanted to write was what you have just written? If you did agree, for the most part, are you sure you have written it right? Or how about the reader? How do you deal with your angst when it is laid out in front of a reader who matters to you?

Or what is it you want to write about? Its not just the inspiration that nudges you into writing. So many a time, you simply could not write because you captured the thought, idea in half-flight and there you lost again. Or you are mad at something, which you need a vent for, that can be channel led in so many different ways. But how does a writer converge his energy and conflicted mind to produce a work of art?

How did Dostoevsky sketch the pangs and torments of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment while he was braving terminal diseases, deaths, debt, and deadlines to finish his promised novels? How could writing be his leisure when he dodged death sentence by a whisker and was shunned as a low-brow writer by every critic of his time. Dosteyevsky wrote passages of Raskolnikov's long walk while his troubled mind battled self-loathing and alienation, to the murder of pawn broker. Was it cathartic for Fyodor? I hope it was.

Samuel Beckett was inspired by the vibrant Parisian literary circle. He began writing and found his books were not selling and publishers refusing his works. He spent most of his life in penury. He sat on his such books as Waiting for Godot for years to find if any one was interested at all. After his late success that ended with Nobel prize, raving readers, critics and play afficianados, he was uncomfortable with public attention. He spoke or wrote almost nothing about the monumental works that he did. Instead his life looked more of a brooding over words and its conflicted forms that may be mapped out to our commonplace lives. He used words to fill the gap made by words themselves. Here is an excerpt that probably attempts reasonably well to describe what he thought about life behind the words:"… you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery. " -- from his book Molloy.

Yukio Mishima actually believed in the strength of his writing that he thought he was going to change the society for good. When failed( he tried to possess control of Military Headquarters), he committed hara-kiri like any other samurai in Japan.

William Sidney Porter wrote what looked like short stories when he was housed in Ohio Jail. He was found guilty of banking charges. He fled initially but came back for his dying wife. She died soon after. He found an alias to shield his tainted name - O.Henry. Next ten years he wrote relentlessly, showed how beautiful the life of ordinary people were. He died as an alcoholic, penniless and alone leaving the treasure behind for readers.

W.H.Auden once visited T.S.Eliot in his bank where he worked as clerk. He waited in the Manager's room until Eliot could finish the day's work. The manager asked Auden haphazardly - " do you think he is a good poet?" Auden replied - "Yes. Very."

During my university days my pals asked me to write a one-act play for the annual celebration, spoofing a few characters around. I stared at the blank a paper a few days and finally I dared to ask the million dollar question to my professor - How do I start? What do I write? Do I plan the events? plot? Do I note the pivotal dialog/monologue? He said positively - "These are the questions all writers face every time they looked at rest of the blank paper. Its you and nothing else matters".

The meaning of a poem

2005-01-09T19:25:00.000-05:00

Have you ever read a poem? If you did, wondered if it ever made sense to spend time to figure the "supposed meaning" out? felt out of place and remembered the torture you had to go through when you were to memorize the poems for school exams? well. you were not the only one.

I was one of those too who realized that many of us can't paint or dance or sing including myself. Poetry then was not even an option to think of. That would make me look even more ridiculous, I thought. But then I happened to watch a Satyajit Ray movie and it had Tagore's poem recited in the background. The poem recital, its meaning, images on the screen, the sound stirred something in me.

It was a revelation to me- that you could express yourself with words - as the vehicle to communicate an image, metaphor or a simile that can transport to extraordinary from a seemingly ordinary jumble of words and phrases. Poetry belongs to everyone. It builds a bridge between you and the unknown (not the poet who wrote) - That poetry should not mean but be.

It is like a shimmering lantern for you to look inwards as much as it shows the landscape outside. So an aesthete or a poetry reader like you and I should stop worrying if we ever understood what we just read, instead let the words lead us to the inevitable. In defence I am going to quote Archibald MacLiesh's Arts Poetica here:
Arts Poetica
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit
DumbAs old medallions to the thumb
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
A poem should be equal to:Not true
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -
A poem should not mean
But be
-- Archibald MacLeish