Yes.
Cinematic.
Nice soft music.
I suck at verse,
But here goes...
Blistering hot sand,
The waves a mess inside my head.
Salt water.
Stand right in the face of the wave,
And let it bend your knee.
Let it wash away your spectacles,
If you've forgotten to take them off.
And breath all you can,
While the tide recedes.
Imagine,
A black saint bowed,
(With his furrowed leonine brow,
Beetling above his eyes).
The air,
Chants through his teeth.
The air,
The sick sea breeze,
That murders fishermen's wives with longing,
Balloons his cassock,
Singes his dry salt-bitter throat,
Ruffles-Unsettles his mangy salt-pepper beard,
Drowns out his Amens...
Imagine further,
A mobile phone,
Half sunk in the sand.
Squeaking out...
The last "Out of Battery" squeak it ever gave.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Friday, January 7, 2011
The Nature of the dream
“And I was free like the wolf I dreamed of, had lost all memory of men, was licking my wounds tenderly. Softly treading on the Siberian snow, I slipped in among the pines. My sweet shadow and I are one now. “
-From Badbaksh Miyan's diary of his Russian journey
Up late. Woke to dark cold surroundings,cuddled up in a soft blanket. Someone came up and drew back the curtains. Light from the street, an unnatural amber glow. A moment or two later, the shriek call of a cat in the distance. Or maybe cats. Two cats.
And the crickets. Why do they always chirp only when it’s dark?
Here,in a boy’s room,a man sits hunched up on the side of a bed, undersized, the bedsheet with its wicked greedy Bugs Bunny faces all over, crying out in angry undertones, Where's my carrot,Doc? Yet he feels so well-fed, so content, so blissfully sleepy.
And as I get out of bed, I step on one of those pencil crayons we no longer get in the market. How I lovingly scrawled all over the walls of our rented apartment with just such a crayon,( how I drew a princess with a sweet smile, and a pretty hat, and a sympathetic uncle came up and told me it looked like a hairy baboon)
I held the stick against the light, and sighed. Even in the amber light, it glowed a magical blue.
I flashed it about, and saw to my utter surprise, a ten key toy synthesizer I’d long given up for lost, lying safely on the glass top table. Almost out of breath,I played the only song I’d ever learnt, a four note wonder that always filled me with a sad joy.
“Silent night,Holy night”,wept my toy.
Yet,even as I played, I discovered that the chair I was sitting on was a bit too small for me, it almost broke under my weight. And my fingers. Oh they’d grown fat and clumsy! (In another world, I would be this long haired, sad-faced pianist-(Felix Mendelssohn?Not Chopin!), staring deep into the void, while made-up women danced to his dark melancholic waltzes, and a certain red-haired countess kept time with her left foot.)
A sudden urge overtook me to look for my collection of toys, all those little men I’d made friends with, and fought battles with. There were the evil Doctor X, whose arm had been broken in a skirmish with the Bowman, and Skeletor, whose head was turned the other side and wouldn’t straighten up no matter how hard you’d try.Maybe I might give it a go tonight, ease things for the poor ugly slob.
Yet of course, there are somethings you arent allowed even in your dreams. Like playing with toys in the deep of the night.
Ghosts arose from the past, as they always do at that hour of the night. A boy servant who had taught me how to draw a deer. And who was too much of a free spirit to clean the toilets. And when he did run away, I had made a resolve to seek him out. For he had taught me all but how to draw the ears and the nose! And I had soon filled out notebooks with portraits of faceless deer, on the run from hunters who looked like schoolteachers. I imagined just such a creature arising from the shadows around me, deer-faced men, but the buzzing of the mosquitoes kept me from getting too scared.
As they bit at my ankles, I noticed my body after a very long time. Of course, I had grown over the years, but yet it all felt so same from within. One tug at my socks. Still, the gaping holes at the ankles. As always. One finger across my hair. As unkempt as ever. One hand over my heart. Still, like the swallow’s heart in winter, aching for love and warmth.
And reluctantly, I drew myself outside my dream and looked out the window. In the distance, the moths flocked to the streetlights, and a dumb silence kept everything still. Even the crickets seemed to have dozed off.
And I tried to wake up. And I tried to escape the body of this “rational” adult, this pretentious fool who knew his algebra and geometry, who knew how to make things work, and who could kill a man with his formidable frown.
With great reluctance, I walked over to the wall with the crayon in my hand.
-From Badbaksh Miyan's diary of his Russian journey
Up late. Woke to dark cold surroundings,cuddled up in a soft blanket. Someone came up and drew back the curtains. Light from the street, an unnatural amber glow. A moment or two later, the shriek call of a cat in the distance. Or maybe cats. Two cats.
And the crickets. Why do they always chirp only when it’s dark?
Here,in a boy’s room,a man sits hunched up on the side of a bed, undersized, the bedsheet with its wicked greedy Bugs Bunny faces all over, crying out in angry undertones, Where's my carrot,Doc? Yet he feels so well-fed, so content, so blissfully sleepy.
And as I get out of bed, I step on one of those pencil crayons we no longer get in the market. How I lovingly scrawled all over the walls of our rented apartment with just such a crayon,( how I drew a princess with a sweet smile, and a pretty hat, and a sympathetic uncle came up and told me it looked like a hairy baboon)
I held the stick against the light, and sighed. Even in the amber light, it glowed a magical blue.
I flashed it about, and saw to my utter surprise, a ten key toy synthesizer I’d long given up for lost, lying safely on the glass top table. Almost out of breath,I played the only song I’d ever learnt, a four note wonder that always filled me with a sad joy.
“Silent night,Holy night”,wept my toy.
Yet,even as I played, I discovered that the chair I was sitting on was a bit too small for me, it almost broke under my weight. And my fingers. Oh they’d grown fat and clumsy! (In another world, I would be this long haired, sad-faced pianist-(Felix Mendelssohn?Not Chopin!), staring deep into the void, while made-up women danced to his dark melancholic waltzes, and a certain red-haired countess kept time with her left foot.)
A sudden urge overtook me to look for my collection of toys, all those little men I’d made friends with, and fought battles with. There were the evil Doctor X, whose arm had been broken in a skirmish with the Bowman, and Skeletor, whose head was turned the other side and wouldn’t straighten up no matter how hard you’d try.Maybe I might give it a go tonight, ease things for the poor ugly slob.
Yet of course, there are somethings you arent allowed even in your dreams. Like playing with toys in the deep of the night.
Ghosts arose from the past, as they always do at that hour of the night. A boy servant who had taught me how to draw a deer. And who was too much of a free spirit to clean the toilets. And when he did run away, I had made a resolve to seek him out. For he had taught me all but how to draw the ears and the nose! And I had soon filled out notebooks with portraits of faceless deer, on the run from hunters who looked like schoolteachers. I imagined just such a creature arising from the shadows around me, deer-faced men, but the buzzing of the mosquitoes kept me from getting too scared.
As they bit at my ankles, I noticed my body after a very long time. Of course, I had grown over the years, but yet it all felt so same from within. One tug at my socks. Still, the gaping holes at the ankles. As always. One finger across my hair. As unkempt as ever. One hand over my heart. Still, like the swallow’s heart in winter, aching for love and warmth.
And reluctantly, I drew myself outside my dream and looked out the window. In the distance, the moths flocked to the streetlights, and a dumb silence kept everything still. Even the crickets seemed to have dozed off.
And I tried to wake up. And I tried to escape the body of this “rational” adult, this pretentious fool who knew his algebra and geometry, who knew how to make things work, and who could kill a man with his formidable frown.
With great reluctance, I walked over to the wall with the crayon in my hand.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
What I wake up to
Pardon the egghead vocab :-)
Always been a sucker for love songs.But honestly, this song holds a special meaning for me, in times as these, when every song on air stinks of love and hope. We so love to kid ourselves with false hopes.This one bridges that chasm of despair, with it's innocence.
Came across this gem of a lyric, quite by chance. Composed by an anonymous Elizabethan gentleman(or knave or spymaster or essayist or glass grinder or chambermaid, who knows) and set to music by John Dowland.
My favorite fantasy is to recreate some moments of his life just after he's come up with the song. A close guess would be- He'd be so amused with himself, that he'd forget himself, and the next moment, drown his sorrows in a pint of sickly yellow Elizabethan beer, smash to death a fly with his coarse palm, yell his heart out, lose a few teeth in a brawl with the chairs and the glasses, mumble some Greek, invent a few abuse words, and wish he'd never loved. But that sounds melodramatic. It could be a nasty schoolboy who'd fallen for his chambermaid, and while poring over some books he was forbidden to read, a folio of Shakespeare's bawd lyrics...Hell!
All the song needs is a lute or viol, a sweet mezzo voice, and of course, a muse. Since I have none(ahem,ahem), I get by with a '03 version by "The Dowlands", which I have set as my alarm clock tune. And rightly so, my neighbors get up before I do.
John Dowland's music animates the song, brings it to life, adds strains of sweet despair to the haunting lyric. Who knows? Maybe Shakespeare lent him a hand!
Here's the song.
"Awake, sweet love! Thou art return'd,
My heart, which long in absence mourn'd,
Lives now in perfect joy.
Let love, which never absent dies,
Now live forever in her eyes,
Whence came my first annoy.
Only herself hath seemed fair,
She only I could love,
She only drove me to despair,
When she unkind did prove.
Despair did make me wish to die,
That I my griefs might end,
She only which did make me fly,
My state may now amend.
If she esteem thee, now aught worth,
She will not grieve thy love henceforth,
Which so despair hath prov'd.
Despair hath proved now in me,
That love will not inconstant be,
Though long in vain I lov'd.
If she at last reward thy love,
And all thy harm repair,
Thy happiness will sweeter prove,
Rais'd up from deep despair.
And if that now thou welcome be
When though with her dost meet,
She, all the while, but play'd with thee,
To make thy joys more sweet."
Always been a sucker for love songs.But honestly, this song holds a special meaning for me, in times as these, when every song on air stinks of love and hope. We so love to kid ourselves with false hopes.This one bridges that chasm of despair, with it's innocence.
Came across this gem of a lyric, quite by chance. Composed by an anonymous Elizabethan gentleman(or knave or spymaster or essayist or glass grinder or chambermaid, who knows) and set to music by John Dowland.
My favorite fantasy is to recreate some moments of his life just after he's come up with the song. A close guess would be- He'd be so amused with himself, that he'd forget himself, and the next moment, drown his sorrows in a pint of sickly yellow Elizabethan beer, smash to death a fly with his coarse palm, yell his heart out, lose a few teeth in a brawl with the chairs and the glasses, mumble some Greek, invent a few abuse words, and wish he'd never loved. But that sounds melodramatic. It could be a nasty schoolboy who'd fallen for his chambermaid, and while poring over some books he was forbidden to read, a folio of Shakespeare's bawd lyrics...Hell!
All the song needs is a lute or viol, a sweet mezzo voice, and of course, a muse. Since I have none(ahem,ahem), I get by with a '03 version by "The Dowlands", which I have set as my alarm clock tune. And rightly so, my neighbors get up before I do.
John Dowland's music animates the song, brings it to life, adds strains of sweet despair to the haunting lyric. Who knows? Maybe Shakespeare lent him a hand!
Here's the song.
"Awake, sweet love! Thou art return'd,
My heart, which long in absence mourn'd,
Lives now in perfect joy.
Let love, which never absent dies,
Now live forever in her eyes,
Whence came my first annoy.
Only herself hath seemed fair,
She only I could love,
She only drove me to despair,
When she unkind did prove.
Despair did make me wish to die,
That I my griefs might end,
She only which did make me fly,
My state may now amend.
If she esteem thee, now aught worth,
She will not grieve thy love henceforth,
Which so despair hath prov'd.
Despair hath proved now in me,
That love will not inconstant be,
Though long in vain I lov'd.
If she at last reward thy love,
And all thy harm repair,
Thy happiness will sweeter prove,
Rais'd up from deep despair.
And if that now thou welcome be
When though with her dost meet,
She, all the while, but play'd with thee,
To make thy joys more sweet."
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