CATS!

"Narayani, inga va!" (Narayani, come here), called out my grandma when we visited her at Aurangabad. Assuming it was the maid she was addressing, I peered into the kitchen. The said Na-ra-ya-ni had four paws and a mew. Surprise. As she slurped a dishful of milk, a laughing cousin informed me that her daughter was called 'Kalyani'. The names, courtesy our dear granny of course.

Granny wasn't really an animal lover, but somehow she seemed to have taken to Mrs. Narayani and her offspring. Nevertheless, she warned us against getting too close to furs. To add emphasis to her point, she told us the story of a man in the neighbourhood whose cat one day suddenly decided to claw his face and draw blood.

When I was a toddler, I once visited Mysore with my parents. We stayed with my father's aunt, a sprightly woman in her seventies whose ancient widow's costume and shaven head teased my curiosity even as they gave her a formidable appearance. In her backyard was a litter of kittens. She would put out milk for them every morning. Now and then I would steal quick glances at them till one of them mewed at me, sending me scampering into the house. As a child I was scared of cats and terrified of dogs.

Some very weird people like cats. Like T.S. Eliot and Roger Maioli.

Must admit people think up great names for pets when they use their imagination. Tanmay is certain the decentest pet's name would be 'Newton'. Then there is Rog's imaginary future cat called 'Shmul' (never asked him where he got that name from or if he made it up) which will keep him company as he pores over tomes of hard-bound, gold-embossed books and sips steaming coffee.

My granny used to tell me when cats shut their eyes they assume the world disappears. Whoosh!

To Marguerite -- Continued

          Matthew Arnold

Yes! In the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollows light,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour—

Oh! Then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain—
Oh might our marges meet again!

Who ordered that their longing’s fire
Should be as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire?
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed salt, estranging sea.

Round and round I turn...
will I never reach?

Why such restless wandering
to reach what lies so near?

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
-- Jalaluddin Rumi

"Who never spoke before his spirit moved"

Crises come unannounced. Do they give us a glimpse of the deep aquamarine layers within our selves or create a fleeting illusion of there being more to us than the shimmer and go of our daily existence? If it be the former, why doesn't the experience stay? The spirit moves so seldom and so subtly that it is gone before you capture it. And then it wanes and wanes into a figment of the imagination that seems all too unreal after a few days.

If the artist spoke only when his spirit moved (and in the fortunate event that paper-n-pen or mouse-n-keyboard were at hand), how plentiful would his output be? Philip Larkin's average of nine poems a year seems daunting enough, even for a poet who confessed to writing of banalities and the 'decisions of the flesh' rather than anything as intangible as the spirit. Quantity doesn't matter, one might say. But I suspect meagreness of output also reflects the poverty of these intense moments in our small lives. Else there are sparse pinpricks of diamonds among heaps of coal!

Perhaps the roots are yet too far out of my reach, perhaps this is one of those times when I manage to keep doubts at bay to believe in virtual reality. Am I being guided or teased?

 "My heart leaps up when I behold/ A rainbow in the sky."
-- William Wordsworth

Doubtless, the universe is immeasurably beautiful. But are we capable of apprehending this beauty? A disillusioned heart is not proof of the absence of birdsong.

The moon, they say, causes tidal waves, both in the oceans and in the unknown depths of our oceanic selves.

But today the full moon, an awesome floodlight in the sky, brought peace to me at last. When I stop asking, you give of all your tender care, all the more mysterious for your fearful immensity.

Osho again

"Sometimes it happens that you become one, in some rare moment. Watch the ocean, the tremendous wildness of it--and suddenly you forget your split, your schizophrenia; you relax. Or, moving in the Himalayas, seeing the virgin snow on the Himalayan peaks, suddenly a coolness surrounds you and you need not be false because there is no other human being to be false to. You fall together. Or, listening to beautiful music, you fall together. Whenever, in whatsoever situation, you become one, a peace, a happiness, a bliss, surrounds you, arises in you. You feel fulfilled. There is no need to wait for these moments--these moments can become your natural life. These extraordinary moments can become ordinary moments - that is the whole effort of Zen. You can live an extraordinary life in a very ordinary life: cutting wood, chopping wood, carrying water from the well, you can be tremendously at ease with yourself. Cleaning the floor, cooking food, washing the clothes, you can be perfectly at ease--because the whole question is of you doing your action totally, enjoying, delighting in it."

On Goodness

From Khalil Gibran's The Prophet:

You are good when you are one with yourself.
Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.
For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house.
And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among perilous isles yet sink not to the bottom...

You are good in countless ways, and you are not evil when you are not good,
You are only loitering and sluggard.
Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the turtles.
In your longing for your giant self lies your goodness: and that longing is in all of you.
But in some of you that longing is a torrent rushing with might to the sea, carrying the secrets of the hillsides and the songs of the forest.
And in others it is a flat stream that loses itself in angles and bends and lingers before it reaches the shore.
But let not him who longs much say to him who longs little, "Wherefore are you slow and halting?" 
For the truly good ask not the naked, "Where is your garment?" nor the houseless, "What has befallen your house?"

The Ball Poem

 (John Berryman, on "the epistemology of loss")

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do?  I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over—there it is in the water!
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball went.  I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless.  Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions.  People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back.  Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up
And gradually light returns to the street
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour... I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

Still more Osho

We have forgotten how to wait; it is almost an abandoned space. And it is our greatest treasure to be able to wait for the right moment. The whole existence waits for the right moment. Even trees know it--when it is time to bring the flowers and when it is time to let go of all the leaves and stand naked against the sky. They are still beautiful in that nakedness, waiting for the new foliage with a great trust that the old has gone, and the new will soon be coming, and the new leaves will start growing. We have forgotten to wait, we want everything in a hurry. It is a great loss to humanity.... In silence and waiting something inside you goes on growing--your authentic being. And one day it jumps and becomes a flame, and your whole personality is shattered; you are a new man.

Dangerous Idiots: Lessons in desensitising through the new age media

----------------


A classroom discussion today became almost cathartic, recall as it did some real-life blues. In an impressively perceptive essay, literary critic Christian Bok talks of the aestheticisation of violence in Michael Ondaatje's works. There is a conflict in Ondaatje, he says, between the withdrawal of the writer from society on the one hand and his social commitment on the other.

The argument made me turn to the glorification of violence in films, all the more pernicious for their immediate and overwhelming impact. You step out of the theatre after three hours of 'Three Idiots'. Your friend is visibly relieved the film is over -- the delivery scene nearly made her puke. Another friend is all praise for the film and the sound drubbing it issued to a competition-driven academia. You thought it was good in parts, but could have surely spared you some nauseating melodrama.

Twenty days later... what do you retain? The criticism, the 'message', the breathtaking shots of Shimla or a scene where students are lined up to submit to a most humiliating form of punishment that passes off as ragging? Add to the list recurrent motifs of literal pant-pulling and a funky brainer about putting the properties of salt water to good use. Remember Fungsuk Wangdu's school? This time around, it is children who display their precocious knowledge that salt water is a good conductor of electricity. But hey, wasn't this supposed to be a teach-those-cruel-seniors-a-lesson stunt? Those who have read Golding's Lord of the Flies would notice a similarity with Roger aiming a stone at the littluns.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned...

(Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi)

Blake's "To see a world..."

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour.

A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.
A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus’d upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fiber from the Brain does tear.

He who shall train the Horse to War
Shall never pass the Polar Bar.
The Beggar’s Dog and Widow’s Cat,
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.
The Gnat that sings his Summer song 
Poison gets from Slander’s tongue.
The poison of the Snake and Newt
Is the sweat of Envy’s Foot.

A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent.
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for Joy and Woe;
And when this we rightly know
Thro’ the World we safely go.

Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight.
Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night. 

-- William Blake

I want to be free of these clouds.
They rain and they dry up,
then I am parched.

I want to be free of clouds,
free of their their playful colours
and their fluffy lightness in the air.

I want a sky empty of shapes. I want
the stillness of lasting night, I want
to be lost amongst quiet stars.

A beautiful truth

"This is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering."

-- Gautama Buddha


"Beauty is truth, truth beauty."

-- John Keats

More metaphors of light

Looking for your light,
I went out:

it was like the sudden dawn 
of a million million suns,

a ganglion of lightnings
for my wonder.

O Lord of Caves,
if you are light,
there can be no metaphor.

[Virasaiva saint Allama Prabhu, translated by A.K. Ramanujan]

Tejaswini Niranjana's political critique apart, this is a striking translation that captures the sheer spirit of an inspired moment.

The drop hangs
from the tip of the leaf
lit transparent gold.

The note hovers there,
fills deep as easy as light.
This moment is all.

Song in Des

one moment of flute song,
of fathomless nothing and all of all,
why doesn't it stay
with me forever?

dance on my feet as I walk,
sing in me as I laugh,
sooth the storms that consume me,
slip into silence as I sleep --

one moment of flute song
returning as suddenly as it stops,
fathomless nothing and all of all,
everywhere here and everything now.

I sing myself, I celebrate myself

For the love of the skies,
the louring clouds,
starlit nights and lunar rings

For the love of mellow winds,
and swirling storms,
for sunny noons and alluring dusks,

For the love of silent singing things
and the smell of distant lands,
can I not break these tenuous bonds,
can I not grow so many wings?

“Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you.”

"There is something to laugh about everyday, even if it is only about yourself."

Why not me?

"Why me?" I cry,
and it echoes all about.
"Why not?" you ask.

Why not me, couched in joys,
so snug I forgot?
Why not me, when far and wide
a cold night sheathes
trembling limbs, alone as
naked stones in the wind?

Why not mine this pain
of a glitter glimpsed and denied?
Why the searing hurt when sorrow
is the ocean and I have only
a cupful to taste?
_____________________________________

Lessons at a price, resolutions to be wise!

Lessons:

1) The grass is always greener on the other side. Live in the here and the now.
2) Learn to let go.
3) Cherish what's best in oneself and in others, forget all else.
4) Trust, trust, trust -- even when all seems unfair.
5) Focus on what is -- do not despair for what doesn't seem to be.
6) Peace can't come from the outside, so just be at peace.

Resolutions:

1) Be optimistic!
2) Dream on, but don't get desperate!
3) No anger, no blame. No matter what.
4) Take one day at a time.
5) Don't be restless! Enjoy the rocking boat.

The universe is full of stars. I am only one among them. When I shine, I rejoice with the others; when I don't, I am alone in the dark.