The infinte grace of Vijayan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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