Ides of March - 1

At a once-upon-a-time family gathering, youngsters huddled up to discuss our latest fads - the recent Aamir/ Shahrukh blockbuster that hit the screens (Indian superstars they are, but to death-do-us-apart fans, they are heart-throbs over whom there could be unto-death-of-the-vocal-chords debates!); or, the most recent 'hobbies' ... Which brings us to the point where the blogger can finally begin this blog post- phew!

There was a kid who had gained an interest in palm-reading. The blogger put forward her palm to be inspected and the kid-astrologer said - 'You act like a spring. Sometimes you are bugged down so much that you can crumble to dust, and the next day you can be jumping out of the pandora's box'. The blogger remained unimpressed since the kid was a cousin who knew her well enough to make such observations.

The blogger continues to remain unimpressed about the expression of the kid-astrologer till date. However, she has been intrigued by this peculiar springy character of hers. Like the millions of people across the globe, like you, my dear friend, she wanted to know herself better. But there was no light at the end of the tunnel as such. The truth is, there was no tunnel as such either.

Colours (the concluding part)

Another dream it was in a series. On the plain black screen figures appeared. The language was unknown. It meant "Mount Fuji in Red". 

Since the geography project in which the nine year old had presented the 'land of the rising sun' as best as a nine-year old could, Japan became the land of dreams. Internet was still a few years away. Scourging through books in libraries, Japan unfolded in its mystic charm. The kimono, the island country that feels the sun first - so to say - every day of the nine-year old's life, the eyes like little arcs on the face, and Mount Fuji, the dormant volcano, pristine in its silence, against the backdrop of the aqua sky - enchanted the mind.

Mount Fuji as the nine-year old found it

Ah! It was a land of dreams; it was a dream in which the music from the string instruments always flowed on, as can only happen in dreams.

  

Mount Fuji was standing tall. It was changing hues - red, orange, blood red. There were a series of explosions behind Fuji. There was a mad rush of people. The middle-aged man in black and white formals mused : "Japan is so small, there is no escape." The woman, holding on to the hand of a child, another child secured on her back, spoke as a living being speaks till s/he is dead. She said, "We all know that! No way out! But still we have to try. No other way! " 

Akira Kurosawa stepped into the world of coloured films towards the end of his directorial life. After directing films in the black/white medium for about twenty-five years, he used colour for the first time in Dodesukaden in 1970. The film was a financial disaster possibly because it was unlike any film that Kurosawa had done. Along with the explosion of colours in every frame, the camera was used almost as a detached observer, with no desire to create a causal narrative. It was simply watching things, people, places. 

It is truly an experience to observe the use of colours by a director who has worked for long in black/white. 

Dreams (1990) (accompanied by Ishiro Honda in direction) presents eight 'dreams', that, critics argue are Kurosawa's own. However, it seems that Kurosawa travels from the personal to the universal in them; as dreams usually do. 

Dreams are never what they seem. They never tell the whole story. They hold un-uttered fortunes in them. It is here that the psychoanalyst and the viewer of Dreams gain a space of existence in disturbance, like volcanic islands in placid lives.

Mount Fuji, the landscape from the land of dreams, appeared in a macabre splendour in Dreams. In spite of the fact that it was still dormant, there was absolute chaos. Something tells you that the scene is progressing to absolute annihilation. This dream titled "Mount Fuji in Red" is actually a nightmare of a nuclear meltdown. 

On the morning of the festival of colours, a peculiar scene from this 'dream' kept coming back amidst the waking life: the scene of the coloured clouds gradually shrouding Mount Fuji as the middle aged man in formals explained 

Radioactivity was invisible. And because of its danger, they coloured it. But that only lets you know which kind kills you. Death's calling card.

The different radioactive elements had been coloured so as to identify them. The man in formals, a man who had worked at the nuclear plants that were exploding, named one radioactive element after another, specifying how it affects human beings. The woman with two kids was increasingly becoming horrified. Her words seemed to come from beyond the cultural calm that Japan was showing in the waking life, faced with the possibility of a nuclear meltdown. She screamed as she held her kids to her bosom: 

They told us that nuclear plants were safe. Human accident is the danger, not the nuclear plant itself. No accidents, no danger. That's what they told us. 

As I remembered all the clouds of colours that we created on Holi, a prickly sensation passed through the body. As I remembered how we used to run after anyone who wanted to stay away from colours on Holi, I shivered. The memory of faces smeared in red, in yellow, in purple made me feel weak in the knee. The stomach curled up, trying to expunge the nightmare of the dreams that can be tangible and real in the crudest manner possible. How horrific it seemed, that, on a day celebrating the vigour of life, the terror of colours was engulfing the mind.

Mount Fuji looked as if it was a glowing hot iron. And then, there was no one around except the woman with her kids, the middle aged man in formals and a young man in jacket. And then, there were only the woman with her kids and the young man frantically waving his jacket at the coloured clouds - red, yellow, purple engulfing them. 

I do not know what numbed the mind more - the possibility of a nuclear meltdown or the truth that human beings, like you and me, had chosen to develop this power on which they truly have no control.

You can watch "Mount Fuji in Red" from Kurosawa's Dreams here.

(Special thanks to Arijit for discussing the films and enriching my understanding of them) 

Colours

Waiting is ennui, it is patience. Both being true simultaneously tumbles the logic gates of either/or, still in use in computers and human brains. As science creeps and crawls and suddenly stands up to barge into a hitherto not-chosen path, it will perhaps become less weird and more normal to have simultaneity in existence. Waiting will then be both ennui and patience, without the need to explain why it is so.

The laptop screen is covered by leaves - yellow and green. Beyond the glass windows, the trees sobered by winter chills are yet to see the leaves return to life. The leaves on the screen are yellow and green all through the winter. The thin light brown stems that hold them to the branches, are tinged with a dull red, the colour of blood. Blood is never the gorgeous red of vitality. It is always a few shades deep, a few shades dull. Almost as if, it doesn't care to live up to the attribute of vitality that we have endowed on the colour red. To us red is the vital colour of all things passionate and fierce. To blood, red is a colour it happens to have, mixed with a tinge of brown, a little bit of dull black too.

As the old laptop slowly comes to life, stretching its limbs, waking from a night of closure, the leaves look at me. Often, I watch one leaf, its curve, its colours blending into different shades, the angle at which it hangs; I breathe in a leaf at the beginning of a day. 

No mornings are really different from the last. Each has its own taste and texture. It is new altogether, not different in degrees of how much less similar it is from the last. You can not compare the sky and the buildings that seem to touch the sky, can you? They are unique; not merely different from each other. So are the mornings in the laptop screen covered with leaves in yellow and green.

It was Holi, the festival of colours, a week ago. The mythology behind the festival is varied. Simply put, it is the day celebrating the vitality of spring, in all its denotative and connotative meanings. The onslaught of colours that ambush you, smearing you with the different hues, is like a celebration of revitalisation. A promise of another exuberant beginning after the winters slide by. Red and pink; yellow and green; blue and black. It is a carnival, a unrestrained day lived in vigour. On the morning of the festival, I woke up, waiting for the yellow and the green of the screen to smear me. In a land where abir (the colour used to play Holi) is nowhere to be found, the imagination creates the carnivalesque. 

The earthquake, followed by the devastating tsunami had visited the shores of Japan on 11th March 2011, a week before Holi. A natural disaster, that no man could have averted. News of the stoic Japanese people, news of the devastated towns and cities, news of people dead, injured and lost, news of the shift of the tectonic plates thousands of meters deep in the sea flooded the internet. And still, life moved on. The nuclear plants in Japan were affected. People were evacuated from the nuclear plants. A handful of people stayed on at the sites, trying to prevent a nuclear meltdown. In lands as distant as this, we watched in horror, in pain, in anguish, hoping, praying, believing that all will be well. And then there was the news that blasts in the Fukushima Nuclear plants have been reported. Till before this, nature was the undeniable wrecker of havoc. The blasts at the nuclear plants signified the possibility of a nuclear meltdown. 

On the morning of the Holi, as I browsed the news bulletins to check out the latest condition of the nuclear plants in Japan, a memory of a dream came back to me. 

To be contd.

On why all things change and yet none do

There is nothing that is the absolute truth in this temporal world of ours. When you and I hold a day old baby in our arms, and touch its soft, smooth skin, you and I are in the here, in the now. You and I do not think of the bruises and the wrinkles that time will bring upon it, though time will, in its own sweet pace. The truth of the child is in the now. No other truth exists at this point. 

Often we meet people, in social gatherings and in mirrors, who feel their lives are a lost cause. They think their dreams are too late to be awake. Sixteen, twenty, forty years have passed since they had this dream. It is not sympathy when you and I say, under our breaths, that we know how they feel. We really do, because you and I have felt like this, at some point.

You and I may have walked through those stormy zones of the mind. You and I may have been drenched and left dripping like a crow in the storm. You and I really know the weight of wet straw and the eventual loss of it. One of us may have picked up fresh, dry straws and stuffed the scarecrows with them, creating them anew. The possibility of another rain and another storm washing it away didn't stay longer than a breath in the mind. It is at this point in our lives, you and I were there and then. You and I were in the here and the now. 

Life rarely lives up to the blueprints we create at the beginning of our lives. At the beginning, you and I were childish, full of dreams, full of confidence that all those seemingly absurd dreams could be made true. As we walk down the road, the blueprint doesn't seem to match the route. You and I still hold on to it, for some time more. We still have some hope left in our youths. We take a few risks here and there, make a few abrupt jump cuts. For one, maybe, the blueprint now seems visible in the road that lies ahead. For the other, the blueprint seems to be a distant truth, as distant as the truth that years ago, the mature body was a lump floating in amniotic fluid. The blueprint ends up in the dustbin by the road if we can retain our composure. If we are struck by rage, the roads are strewn with bits and pieces of something that you and I once called a dream that we believed in. 

As the pebbles and the boulders seem to lie right at the place where you and I intend to place our singular foot, we laugh at the childishness of those dreams. You and I share the joke all along the way. Our laugh thunders through the journey, maybe. And yet, something within feels like the empty place left by the oil drilled out from the earth's core. A collapsing empty space, away from the eyes. You and I are nowhere. We are not in the here, we are not in the now. 

Are our blueprints of dreams truly an outcome of a child's play? What about the potential you and I felt as we tapped our earths? Was it a dream, a fantasy of the child who can create universes out of nothing? But, was life not born from nothing that can be tangibly called 'living'? Our dreams, dreams that you and I nourished, can not simply be a passing toy! Even as you and I tear it apart, from our bodies, they stick to our souls. You and I can't find anything to loosen the adhesive.

Dreams are relative as is the truth about them. They transform as caterpillars do to butterflies or tadpoles to frogs. Yet, they retain the quality of dreams - that which can be a truth - may be in a different time; but truth it is nonetheless.

As you and I meet such individuals again, in conversations or in mirrors, let us remember to share this little joke of relative dreaming.


Image/s: Same tree, same time, just with two different application modes. In Lund, Sweden. By self.

Dreamscapes

Her white sari is swollen with the wind. Her small round face moves towards you. The carvings on her face sit benignly together with her twinkling eyes. Her eyes are shining and yet seemed to hide some thing. You look into her eyes. Her glance is moulded in love. You feel that her love is different from all that you have ever experienced before. Her love causes a strange burning sensation. It is like the way you feel when the empty stomach experiences the acids - acids which feeds on food and gnaws into the walls in their absence. They are not angry when they hurt you. They merely live the way they are supposed to. By feeding on others.

You feel her love is not only like this.

Her love seems to create the same tickling of the senses as the fluttering of a mosquito on an open wound. Her love is sensational. It envelopes you like the fire that welcomes your body, retracing its origins among the elements in an old burning ghat of an ancient city. Nothing much has changed since the time Marquez first saw the girl rising with the clothes, flying in the wind, and then, vanishing into the elements. You feel comfortable and calm as she looks at you. To disappear is but a natural phenomenon, she says. Her lips move and you hear her, but nothing is audible yet. A few faces float by, chanting the song of inevitability. You can feel the glistening drops trickling down their faces. As her smile blends with the nowhere, like the smile of the Chesire cat, the last link becomes a myth.

It is now free and floating in the cauldron from which the visions of history arise.

 

 Image: a bird in flight and a sun in the clouds, on way to Helsingor, Sweden. by self. 

From : "Starbook" by Ben Okri ... an interlude on love

p.267


All love must lead to death. And out of this death a new man or woman is born. But ... also love does not lead to only one death, but to several deaths; and that because of love one must keep dying and being reborn, from time to time. And ... love dies only when you resist another death which love brings upon you, in order that you be reborn, and grow. That is why there are few real loves in the world, because people fear yet another death that they must endure. They count the deaths and rebirths they have undergone and say 'so many and no more, so far but no further; I will not die again for you, but intend to stay here where I am, how I am now, and here in this fixed place. I intend to build the castle of myself on this rock.' 


...[T]here was no end to the deaths that love brings about, and no end to the rebirths either. Each death making us lighter, freer, simpler, more human, more vulnerable, more strong, more spiritual, more tender, and more universal. Till we become unrepresentative of our clan, tribe, country, sex, religion, or any other classification; but just a beautifully  dying  living  being, dying and being reborn, regenerated, refined, for ever, till we become a kind of dream of light, ....

Reading it for the second time ... an essay on love is happening ... now ... in the eve of the day designed for love in this world of ours ...

                          With

                                                                             :)

History, Text and Imagination

Walking through stories, walking through tales is like a dream. It is like living multiple lives in this finite life. As I walked into the historic Kronborg castle, the literary castle of  Hamlet, a strange gush of wordless-ness flowed through the mind. It was amazement, not at the stately structure of the palace alone; it was amazement at the fact that, William Shakespeare never visited Denmark and yet, it is through his work that I have visited this castle several times for a character that was and was-not at the same time. A thread of continuity  seemed to tie us: three entities in three different centuries. 

As I walk through the first gate, sound boxes positioned around the gates bring alive the sounds of the past. The sound of the dragging of the chains to lift the wooden spiked gate, the sound of the horses hooves galloping into the castle - transposed me into a fictional space that I had imagined several times while reading Shakespeare's texts. Standing on the grounds of history and of imagination, I was filled with silence and humility.

The history of the human civilisation is long compared to the life of a single individual. Compared to the history of the world, that of the human civilisation is but a spec of dust. Compared to the history of the universe, that of the world is that infinitesimally small era and that of the human kind is but an abstraction of the idea of history and existence. And yet, there was an Amleth, challenged by the royal need to defend the righteousness of the crown; and, there was a Shakespeare, challenged either by the financial need to write plays that are theatre-box-office hits or  by the universal, era-transcending need of mankind to probe deeper into things of being. Shakespeare based his play on the character of Amleth.  The characters of Amleth, Shakespeare and Hamlet are, thus, an amalgamation of facts, figures and fiction. The imagination of the human mind has kept these characters alive, beyond the boundaries of perceived time. As I step out of the castle of literature and history,  I feel a throbbing in my head, and my heart - I love to believe that that is the pulse of continuity in me. It is the potential of the human mind to traverse beyond the cordoned off impossibilities in life

Image: The historic Kronborg castle, the castle of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark at Helsingør, Denmark. Photo by self. 2010.

Postscript to 'Thanksgiving Prayer'

It has happened after a patch of sunshine and rains. Words had twittered down the sky or crept along with the sun these last few days, weeks, months. And today it happened. It slipped out of the fingers as if they are the drops of blood from the accidentally tampered artery. It settled on the page, the page blotting with those words. And as soon as they are no more but a blot or a patch on that now non-blank page, you realize, they are the impure blood drops. They needed to be exhumed so that you redeem them and free their dead spirits. but you are no Christ or Rama. Your touch can not undo and redo. Yours is not 'The Word'. Yours is but the words that flow. Like the blood in your veins. Sometimes they spill on your neat blank pages. Darkening the under-eyes with a gross soot that you call the past. Level the dust. Pave a road. Make another scratch. And then leave it to the winds to blow them away this Fall.

Reminiscence and Reality

Ominous presence is what most would call it. The gruff silence could only be interpreted as haughtiness… a certain element that took away the youthfulness of the age. Only at unguarded moments there would be spurts of the self. A certain surrender of guard. But they were so sparsely scattered during the tenure of 12 years of inhibition that nobody really noticed.


***

In the silence of the room the only desire was to communicate … to look for a meaning in all the commotion. Believing things are not what they seem … trying hard to gel in. And yet something held back … maybe the arrogance of self-respect. Changing beyond it seemed humiliating.

***

The inward drive didn't harm anyone … just as a snail secure in its shell, or a worm in its cocoon. Yet the dream was to flutter … to be a butterfly … radiant colours … smiles … rainbows of friends. So colours spilled into words ... into the paint brushes ... into the rhythms. An occasional gesture of plentitude flooded the soul. And then there was the sky.

 ***

Sunset on the Ganges © Subhragshu S. Chattopadhyay

During the winter solstice, the sun is dimmed. There are a few prisms of dew on the grass, making rainbows on the glass of Glenfiddich. Star-gazing, the desire to have had more rainbows rushes back like gusts of old wind…

Remembering Birth

I ask my mother,

As I count to three:

“Did you find me

Under a tree?”

She stooped across the sea

To light the waves, and

Whispered in my ears:

“I found you in dew, floating

On the waves at my door!”

I grasped her aanchal and

Let out a glee -

“I knew! I knew!

I came from the sea!”

I ask my mother,

As I sit on the swing:

“Did you find me

Blowing in the wind?”

She cuddled the trees,

Kissed the moon, and

Whispered in my ears:

“I found you in

The sun’s womb!”

I grasped her aanchal and

Broke into laughter-

“I knew! I knew!

I came from the sky!”

I ask my mother,

As I hear the bee:

“Did you find me

Floating in the sea?”

She blended the mud

With a drop of ray,

Touched it with passion,

And set it free:-

She took me in her soul

And whispered in my heart:

You are the dream that

I always have had.

You touch my feet

As I stand in the ocean,

And run across the earth

As fast as you can...

I reach out my hand-

You smile at me,

Clicking the leaves

You climb up a tree...

You hide in the sun

As I wait an era,

And the next,

And a few more,

Till you blow

Down the sky

As dew on my shore …

Note:

aanchal means

the flowing end of Saree,

an Indian dress for women

Postscript:

written when suddenly felt

the onslaught of images from

Rabindranth Tagore’s Shishu

Nandini ...

There are faces
that shine in the moon,
translucent in peace
with stars on their lips
and flights in their eyes

Some dreams
trickle down
the palm of the soil...
and bring the gurgles near
tumbling over
the conch shell's sphere ...

As honour sheds its darkness
and lust spreads its doom,
As hope springs in flowers
and boats in rainy streams
cross the oceans of silence:
the little beam of soul
steer us back to the moon

... the translucent robes of peace
with tenderness in eyes
a silent hymn they sing ...

can you hear the song?
can you feel it clear?

Image:
Photo of The Divine Comedy - Paradise
Canto 8 The Highest Beauty of Beatrice
by Salvador Dali
Wood-cut 1960

odd flights...

...

sometimes the old wind catches up pretty fast,
no matter if I am riding the rocking horse
that gives me visions.

On such days,
above the clouds,
the planets hang out
the sun takes a nap, and,
the holy cow flies across the moon.

And then, the pegasus of my vision
shrinks to the rocking horse,
that once gave me dreams ...

image: detail of a bird, medium: porcelain, @ Szentendre, Hungary

I hope there's a fairy tale in her...

My vision stuck to a face that was constantly peeping from behind an ambush of grown-ups. Those glittering eyes with a hint of "kajal", the flowery hair-band on an almost barren head, the streak of lip-colour on those kiddy lips reminded me of something. Someone, to be precise. Me, in my pristine childhood days.

It was an unpleasant bi-yearly event which I resented for the utter humiliating effect it had on my sense of prestige. Yet, I remained silent for the promise of a future that would undo all the suffering. Those were the ignominious visits to the hairdresser. My grandma was of the opinion that shaving the head bi-yearly (if not yearly) will produce a Rapunzelesque cascade of tresses; my mother abided by her word and cajoled me into this routine with the assurance of being Rapunzelesque one day. I put on the I-don't-care-about-your-laughs attitude with a peculiar choice of appearance. I insisted that the hair-band be put on my shaved head. As I imagine myself gliding through the bewildered looks of my batch mates, I break into splits of laughter. Gosh!!! What did I think when I did that??? Several psychological ideas flash through this grown-up brain of mine none of which bears any connection with this article whatsoever. And that brings me back to that little girl who had braced herself up to face all the jeering eyes of her contemporaries. As I saw her, picture postcards of my fairy tale dream rushed back to me. It reminded me of the choice that I had made. It was a choice of forgetfulness. The dream was THE absolute truth. It was the 'real' for me.

As I look at today's little girls, I see in their not-so-twinkling eyes the dreams of Bollywood actresses and fashonistas. They look into the mirror never imagining it to be the magic mirror that would start speaking in this moment. They are independent and mature in the choices they make. But, what are childhoods for if not for the natural ability to create perpetually unreal worlds and accept their existence with nonchalance? There are a hundred thousand reasons, from globalisation to genes which can justify the behaviour of these little girls of today. But, one thing that I know in my heart of hearts, is, if these pretty junior fashonistas do not have their own kiddy worlds today, they will lose a smile in their future. The not-so-perfect choices of childhood give a reason to smile in the not-so-perfect futures. As I caught that little girl's eyes I hoped dearly, that, she has her fairy tale dream too...