They promised us rain today. The 27th of May they said. And here I find myself, on the terrace, before and beyond the sunset, awaiting it like a lover.
The clouds came in as I watched, a thunderclap or two, I thought I felt a drop on my knee... no rain. The breeze is heavier as it brushes past my brow, colours thicker, the sounds stiller surely?Where is the rain?
Oh to be in a rainy mood with no rain!
I read to myself poetry as all good lovers do, with half a good mind.
A few of centuries ago George Berkeley told us that “to be is to be perceived.”Roughly he meant that nothing existed independent of the consciousness that perceived it. As a very young child, I remember thinking that I was that consciousness. This childhood solipsism was a distinctly uncomfortable frame of mind to live in and thankfully I grew out of it. But I remember the intuitive concept very vividly and it has been a recurring theme with me. I am always interested in consciousness-centric views of reality and I find that I constantly scan for them across religion, science and the arts.There are usually quite a few instances to be found across theologies and the arts (poetry especially) but science is usually more commitment-shy. So, I was quite thrilled when I found this (via 3qaurksdaily) and I’ve just spent another of those obsessive days.
-In daily life, space and time are harmless illusions. A problem arises only because, by treating these as fundamental and independent things, science picks a completely wrong starting point for investigations into the nature of reality. Most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical, without the other side, the living. By inclination and training these scientists are obsessed with mathematical descriptions of the world. If only, after leaving work, they would look out with equal seriousness over a pond and watch the schools of minnows rise to the surface. The fish, the ducks, and the cormorants, paddling out beyond the pads and the cattails, are all part of the greater answer.
But then, what the scientist feels compelled to prove, the poet states with fantastic insouciance.
Tattoo
The light is like a spider.
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there--
Its two webs.
The webs of your eyes
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters of grass.
There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow.
The past week has had me feeling a greater degree of morbidity and pertabation than I am comfortable with.The whole nation has been in a self-conscious state of appraisal and introspection. Swaying between decision-indecisionbetween cynicism and optimism, public sentiment has been a palpable thing. Past horrors have loomed afresh placing us yet again on the fear-hope rack. I too have been infected by it all and it has led to a bit of ineffectual what’s-my-dharma induced hand-wringing . Kya karoon? - has been the refrain that has been ringing in my head. It is also the radeef of particularly dear ghazal. Since it seemed that a few hours of syllable-crunching is better anytime than fultile jaw-grinding , this got written.
Main akela jal ke bhi zulmat-e-dahar ka kya karoon
Bhuje lau khoon se jahan us rehguzar ka kya karoon
Kor-e-azaabse kuch pare simat ke par baitha hun main
Kaan-o-aankh tho moond loon mauj-e-bahar ka kya karoon
Aaqoot-e-khoon bikhere huye sameta woh chowk par
Ibn-e-khizaan se aabshaarhota gauhar ka kya karoon
Nigahbaani-e-ghamse fursat shab bhar ki hai mohlat
Aankh bhar ke nijaat li fugaan-e-sahar kya kya karoon
*Waqt-e-khiraam ki har adaa yaad mein apne taraash loon
Tez fizaaon mein bahega hi ilm-e-nahar ka kya karoon
*God mein khet ke let kar main ek saans le bhi loon
Gaun mein bahut sukoon magar soz-e-shahar ka kya karoon
Umr bhar ke uthe huyein hai dast-e-duaa zoya tere
Katne ke baad jo haat ho aise mehar ka kya karoon
*These were written a long time ago, which is why they are different in character from the rest, which have almost a common thread of thought.But high and low alts in the same ghazal I find interesting.
I am puffy-eyed this morning. I usually get like that if I’ve tried to squeeze my eyes shut for half the night. You see, sometime during my second REM cycle the moon woke me up. It was the full moon, and of the particular potency of Guru Purnima.Beyond the blue barring of the summer screens outside the window, the moon was a diffused ball of incandescence. Moonlight streamed in on fairy feet. It was pretty. The correct thing to have done would have been to have admired all this prettiness for about five minutes, drawn the blinds and curled back to sleep. A lifetime’s experience has taught me that I cannot get a wink of sleep with light on my face. But of course I did not do that. There is something incredibly romantic about being swathed in moonlight. Of course, in the ideal scenario the subject is sweetly oblivious, instead of in a desperate determination to be oblivious. It was, I realised, a case of that Schrödinger man’s cat. But it wasn’t the time to think about semi-dead cats.
I turned my thoughts instead to Vikram aur Betaal. At least, I mean, to one of the princesses in the ‘sabse komal kyon?’ episode. She was one of the three princesses in a competition for their unsurpassed fragility. This one gets a moon burn from talking a turn in the balcony on a full-moon night. This feat has been indelibly etched in my mind as the height of cool. Of the other two, one develops a blinding headache from construction activity in the next town and the other (the ultimate winner) can smell a goat from someone’s childhood.
Of course, I have always thought, if Vikram had been doing his rightful duty, my moon-shy princess should have been pronounced the victor. But I suspect both he and Betaal knew that ‘komal’ was just a euphemism for ‘darned useful’. The whole point was to provide the pernickety prince with the most useful spouse.
This is how I have worked it out. Being burned by moonlight is not a particularly useful quality, that is to say, can you imagine what would happen if the said princess was to attend some royal coronation or public rally or somesuch? A broiled aubergine is not a pretty sight, even for a princess. Then consider, what’s the use of a wife with a perennial headache?
But a consort, who can smell better than your average Golden retriever, must be an asset to any ambitious young prince. A royal repast need only be scanned by her royal nose for untoward handling and oriental substances. Spies could be sniffed out in a jiffy by way of some regional dietary peculiarity or suchlike. Vishkanyas are no threat to a man with such a wife. There could be no end to her usefulness in smelling a rat, scenting and intrigue, whiffing a deception, or nosing out a mystery.
Therefore I have long since concluded that it is usefulness that decided Vikram and the Betaal in her favour and it had nothing whatsoever to do with her ‘komalness’. I also think it is a shocking thing to spin children such yarns and let them work out their disillusionment at leisure in later years.
Iterating to myself this theory was the work of about a couple of hours. By which time, my father who has the habits of an owl was bustling about the house with about half the household lights on. The romanticism of the moon had waned with all these quotidian lights and sounds splintering in from under the door. I got up and drew the curtains resolutely.
On waking up, I inspected my face as the first thing. Apart from the aforementioned puffy eyes there was nothing distinctive about my face. No moon marks, no nothing.
Susan Sontag made her case against interpretation in her titular essay in a 1965 book on art.
Billy Collins has this to say about interpretation in poetry.
Gulzar, talking of love, so similar to art, urges us not to name it.
Kabir goes further to say that it simply cannot be talked about.
- Akath kahani prem ki, kuch kahi na jaaye Goonga keri sarkara, baithe muskaye
Wittgenstein said as much and foreclosed philosophy.
But we cannot resist it, can we? We will try and hold that moonbeam in our hand. It is a pathological urge with humankind, especially so of our age, to try and demystify the sublime. In the forty odd years since Sontag wrote her piece we have only learnt to talk more; dissect, evaluate, codify. A sportsman can no longer aspire to the “zone” without the cacophony of flashbulbs blinding him out of it. An artist lumbered with weight of prospective interpretations can hardly ever manage to keep his inspiration unsullied by second-guessing. Pure thought has to battle pure ambition.
But like all good paradoxes the solutions are not simple. While it is somewhat easy to be introverted and silent about love and god, because they are inherently personal tools of transcendence, Sport, Art, Thought, on the other hand face a tricky dilemma. Each of these is an instrument of transcendence that engages with the world. They are by their nature, social; they deal at the very foundation, with ‘the other’.
An artist job, or a thinker’s job, or a sportsman’s job is tougher by far than a lover’s job or the believer’s job. The former set has to maintain eye-contact with the world while simultaneously attempting to break free of its limitations. Resist the attempts that the very same world makes, to lump you with identity via opinion, classification and interpretation.
Resisting identity is the fundamental problem of transcendence. It seems a particularly tall order in a postmodern world of splintered identities, a world whose workings are characterised by a near-constant evaluation of status and identity. The artist who second-guesses his critics, the sportperson who internalises the post-mortem, the scientist who scopes out trends - these are people deserving of our pity and our guilt, not our contempt.
It makes me infinitely more grateful now than ever before for the kind of genius that strives and wins this battle against our adulation, our contempt, our gross codifications, our interpretation. The kind of genius that soars free of articulation and identity, even as it ungrudgingly turns back to the world that attempted to bind it down and generously shares with it moments of real art, real spirit and real inspiration.
I say, did you know Mirka Vavrinec was a professional poker player? I am saying, no bloody wonder!! What would one do without the Hyderabad Chronicle in-house magpie?
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Tchah! Cheeh@! Bah! Gah! All rubbish of course! For a few delicious minutes I had begun imagining a lesser known alternate life for Mirka in which she is this kick-ass poker player. Turns out the silly Asian Age walas made a mistake and our sillier DC walas CPed it.
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But atleast now that the idea is in my head I don't need to dislodge it in a hurry. Might as well have some fun with it.
