Ides of March - 2

When his friend met him after years, the friend observed with a smile, "You look sukhi". He was scandalised. Sukhi is a Bengali term that has no English equivalent, according to me. It is an adjective to define a settled-into-life state of mind and being. The comfort of having a pattern of life that one is well-accustomed to creates a sense of security and safety. When used to this state of being, a small attempt to step out of this zone of comfort (for instance, when the brand of shampoo that you use is no longer available in the market) appears to be very unsettling. There is nothing criminal in being sukhi; just that there is a little less opportunity to live vibrantly.

rumbling crumbling concluded : heal

"And die of nothing but a rage to live."

From: "Epistle II: To a Lady: Of the Characters of Women" by Alexander Pope

Innocence in its purity is powerful, only when it is aware of itself. Anger is the weapon of the calm. Silence can be the choice of the weak out of the fear of speech. Silence can be the virtue of the strong who would conserve it and use it for the best purpose defined to the self. Silence can be an awareness of where I invest my anger. Each moment  when energy gets wasted in the form of destructive anger, the possibilities of the moment dies. Conserving anger to direct it at the more powerful 'wrongs' can be a healing process. Anger is like fire. If we can direct the flames in the proper manner, it can create beautiful glassware. It also has the power to ravage and destroy, all for nothing that can be valued.


Does this mean, destruction is a non-natural process? Is it something that should never have been? Funnily, I don't think so. Destruction is as natural as construction. Death is as natural as life. Rage is as natural as love. The question is not to to 'decide' and to 'decree' what should be. The question is what you and I choose to do with all the "combustibles" in our lives.

*******

The previous section of the post was written before the previous post  was published. At first I thought of deleting it , or, adding it as a postscript to this post. But then, the responses of Somdatta and Shiuli, made me think otherwise. 

Somdatta's response is worthy to be noted since it perceives anger as a very personal emotion. I am angry when things pertaining to me are not as I had expected them to be. I am angry when the bed is dirty. I am angry when the dishes are not washed. Ask yourself, and you will find a thousand reasons for being angry. Anger IS a very subjective experience. And that is the reason I decided to shift its approach from the literature of Blake to the literature of common lives. I believe strongly, there is magic in each of us. There is magic around us. But all of that is waiting for the magician to surface. All I wish to share with you is my encounter with magicians like that ... What these magicians do, I wasn't doing when I was writing the first post on rumbling crumbling ... I was objectively talking about it, from the armchair of a thinker. And that the reader in this blogger didn't like ... she had made a choice of 'proactive living' a few posts back ... and all that she was hell bent on doing was mincing words! That is when I stopped writing a moment, took a break from thinking about things in abstract terms and started experiencing the magic ...  and here I share with you some of those ...

Magic of dance...

A beautiful woman, in her middle ages, at the peak of her performative years in dance realises she has cancer. She breaks down. She is afraid. That is the nature of her anger- her fear that she is actually walking towards the end. And then she chooses. She chooses to dance like 'magic'. She believes her dance IS magic ... and here she is  ... not a survivor of cancer ... in her own words ... "a cancer conqueror" ... She is Ananda Shankar Jayant ...

Listen to her story here.

Magic of courage...

As a teenager she was gang-raped by eight men.  From that episode of her life,  she remembers the "anger part of it". She was, is and continues to fight the outrageous dissociation that we attest to survivors of rape victims. She didn't sulk and let that single chapter of her life take over her entire life. she did not end her life in despair. Instead, she fights the odds with that anger that is still oozing out of her ostracised self. She doesn't believe the merit of a woman is her meekness. She believes the merit of her pain is her anger. And she helps directing that anger in all such survivors and yes ... i will say conquerors of societal stigmatisation ... by channelling their anger in performing tasks of heavy physical labour in industries which categorically ward women off by virtue of being women. She is Dr. Sunitha Krishnan.

Listen to her story here.

Magic I touched   

A beauty with a smile. Back at home she was fighting the world for her angel, who is very special. And yet, every time I met her, every day I met her, she was smiling that angelic mesmerising smile. She still does. Her skin shows signs of the waves that lashed out at her. It may have eroded the glow of the skin, but her eyes are still bright and her smile still warm. She is the only magician in this list whom I saw ... who touched my life with a magic spell ... The power of her magic is so strong ... that all who have been touched by her, will know her, when he/she reads this ... Her story we carry in our hearts ... her story is that of life ...

*******

Blake's world of creation is that world of magic, where the magic is not in any pockets of existence. It is everywhere - from the mild green meadows of the lamb to the pitch black forests of the tiger - magic is everywhere, only in the need to be harnessed. When our professors said, the poems 'the Lamb' and 'The Tyger' are about the creator instead of the creation, all that the academic mind saw was the answer to an academic question where one has to take pains to tell how the One who created the lamb can create a tiger. Now, when the degrees are at a distance, the academic shroud is shed. And with unclouded eyes, all that this blogger realises is that. Blake's poems are not about a distant unknowable god. It is about the power that lies in each of us. It is about us -about you and me. Yes, we have the playful innocent child in us. Yes, we have the fierce rage of the superman/the tornado/the tiger. All that we need to do is CHOOSE. We can choose to let that rage run over all that is good in us. We can choose to let that rage consume us in a split second of cosmic time. We can choose to use that rage to nurture all that is playful and creative in us. We can choose to be the magic.

the road's within ...

The choice is essentially ours. I made one today as I write this post. Did you?

Concluded

Image Courtesy: Macwallpapers @ web

Puja Chronicles : To continue or not ...

Now that the festival is over, it seems appropriate to conclude the series 'Puja Chronicles'. That time has passed.But does any time really 'end' ?

The smell of the slightly chilly morning wind, that of the incense sticks; the sounds of the dhak and the repeated-forever selection of songs in the para (neigbourhood) pandal (the structure which houses the deities for the festival); the illegible mantras (Sanskrit slokas used in the process of praying to the deity) of the mumbling priests; the sight of the strangely blue sky of shorot (a month in the Bengali calendar in which the Durga Puja takes place) - do they not leave behind traces of life in our beings? A friend and a reader of this creative blabbering, Supratikda, commented on a previous post, asking whether the pain of an ending can be mellowed by the resurgent nature of hope. That made me think. Do we really want to mellow down an experience that is rich and trying? I, for one, wouldn't want to do so. But yes, hope is the elixir of life. It does not only signify the possibility of a better tomorrow, but, to this hopelessly optimist soul, it also keeps alive, and burning, the possibility of miracles. Or, to use a more candid expression - the possibility of the absolutely unexpected awesome happenings. This brings us to another bend in the road of thought. What defines and measures the awesomeness of a happening? Well, I am sorry to confide that I can not help in your understanding of the element of 'awesomeness' in a concrete manner. But I can, and will, share with you my experiences of the 'awesomeness' of life which happened in strange corners of the busy-dom in which we live.

P.S. I choose to continue the series 'Puja Chronicles' not because they have some connection to the event of the puja itself (well, it may, at times), but because life is possibly the greatest puja (prayer) that any being can perform. 'Puja Chronicles' henceforth will celebrate life with its resplendent awesomeness.         

resplendent in its awesomeness

Image: An Evening Sky in Lund, Sweden.

           © 2010 Susmita Paul

love actually ...

"...love is a doing word..."

It undoes the rumours

I have heard about myself,

and, engages them with a vice

called action-

It lets the world unfurl,

to be ruffled

by the petty, uncertain onslaughts...

....

Love is a doing word ... it kills for a prize...





p.s. quote from "Teardrop" by Massive Attack & picture: at Salzburg, Austria by self.