Sunday, May 30, 2010

"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

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

"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?