"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.