The sun's birthday

Today is the Sun’s birthday, when we worship him in his chariot of seven colors. His chariot had this guy driving, who has no feet. But the seven horses shall move on towards the equinox, when day and night are of the same length, on our little leaves taken out fresh from our vegetable creeper. There is the spring dew, bird calls of morning and a few caterpillars yet to turn butterflies. Touch the morning leaves of the bean plant on its underside. It tingles with dew.

We burn dung cakes and in their smoke we cook milk and rice. The sweet rice shall smell of smoke. We love our sun that we shall not see with our naked eyes. Only when he gets eaten up by our earth shall we open our eyes to him.

Teaching history

A point is made why history as it is taught in schools and colleges concerns itself with only remote history,not about what had happened in the recent past before our very eyes.

Interesting question,the answer to which lies perhaps in the distance from which we observe the past events and put them in a linear perspective,one leading causally to others. The remote events are remote enough to yield their outlines to us against other events in their outlines and give us an idea of how one has led to the other,or rather flowed out of the other.

In the case of the recent events we take enough time to understand them as events that have relevance to the course of history, in the way other things flowed out of them,yet other things in time and space. Their hazy outlines are not visible until enough time has lapsed in human memory ,i.e.generations have gone on with the memory of the events embedded in their conscious.

Experience

I prefer watching the animals on television
A mind says, to watching them live in the zoo
Because animals in the zoo smell really bad.

You are analogizing a whole experience
With a copy of its part, says other mind.

Television animals do not smell bad
But are animals that please the eye
Mind explains, minus the real mind.

But are they cuddly, surrogate children?
Asks the scintillating mind, raising a stink.

You feel it sounds woolly but mind cares.
Mind loves animals, not their body smells.
Seeing is not smelling, not as off-putting
An experience, as the whole of experience.

But a mere copy? How can any one be in love?
With a mere copy? Says the scintillating mind.

Seeing a copy is experience too, says mind.

Agreed it is an experience but the analogy?
Why analogizing a whole with a mere part?
This is not even analogizing whole with part
But a whole with a copy of a part, says mind.

And why not? Mind asks but mind is quiet.

Writing prose

I suppose one could write prose ,that sounds almost like poetry. Not prose poetry but prose without the inherent music of the words ,but still retaining the large gaps in understanding that take you to the clouds as in poetry.

In poetry the mystery is deepened by a lack of understanding on the part of the poet himself, the yawning gaps between material facts that the poet tries to bridge in words. The poet sort of leap-frogs between clouds of understanding. The gaps are further deepened by the shadows of the present, deep reflections of the poet's own perceptions.

The prose writer should perhaps write as though the words do not belong to him. The words are neither his nor the reader's but are autonomous, growing by themselves like mushrooms in the unfrequented backyards of decrepit buildings. And mushrooms have a way of living and dying. Their umbrellas look so much like clouds as they happen in a destructive nuclear war. Such prose does not belong to the writer. He distances himself from it. Its origin lay with him but not its growth.

And like in poetry there will remain large gaps in his understanding, which will challenge the reader's own understanding.

Afternoon nap

The best thing to do is a nap, minus its horror dreams on some afternoons. Some times, you are aware of being in a dream.Like for instance you are wading through waters, endlessly,reaching nowhere,not even a tree in the middle of nowhere.You are aware of being in the dream, your head softly floating on your pillow, your saliva drooling on it.

In the Ted Talk the lady talked about being aware ,in the right hemisphere of the brain,of what is happening in the left one. It is even calling for help from a colleague,when she becomes aware of the stroke that struck her left hemisphere.The brain is kindly jelly but think of the enemy bodies it is sometimes hosting like tennis ball sized tumors that make you behave funnily ,as though you are somebody else.

Metaphor

Shorn of metaphor would poetry be poetry? I doubt it. The silken robes in which our poetic words are clothed disappear if we do not substitute realities by likenesses. Analogies become essential to create mysticism, a kind of delightful ambiguity,a linkage to the other things of life, a sharing of the light of things, the essential sameness of all.

The assumption is that the nature of things is the same, their essentiality running through objects apparently dissimilar.

One step at a time

Q. If it is very warm ,what will you do?

A. I go and sit near the air-conditioner.

Q. If it is still warm, what will you do?

A. I shall switch on the air-conditioner.

Wonder if this is a mere joke or it is fairly illustrative of a structured thinking,which leads the mind though a carefully constructed logical sequence proceeding , one step at a time.If one has to achieve a "jump" in the steps,i.e.skipping the intermediate step ,one must have the freedom in the mind derived from an intellectual exercise usually possible in a thinking mode freed from structures. The mind must have the capacity to judge the inconsequentialness of the intermediate step and take steps in advance to get on to the significant next step,a cognitive skill the lack or inadequacy of which produces hilarious outcomes such as the one in the above dialogue.

Houses protect us from tigers

"One day Sophie sat down beside me and asked with great earnestness, “Daddy, would you like to know how I get to Teddy Bear Land?”
“I'd love to.”
”Sometimes I take the Sun Gate. Sometimes I take the Moon Gate. Sometimes I take the Tree Gate. Sometimes I take the Rainbow Bridge. And sometimes I just punch a hole in the world.”

I've never heard anyone say it better. To live the larger life, we need to punch a hole in the world. This is what dreaming — sleeping or waking or hyper-awake — is really all about. On our roads to adulthood, we sometimes forget how to do it, just as older children in the Chronicles of Narnia cease to be able to see Aslan as they approach adolescence and become more and more burdened by the reality definitions of the grown-ups around them."

http://www.wildriverreview.com/essay/punch-a-hole/robert-moss

Children know how to punch a hole in the hole in the world. We want to punch similar holes too but unluckily we cannot reach out to punch the holes in the space around us,where everything has its clear definition, a definitive borders, horizons that move away as we approach them, trains that chase telephone poles but cannot catch them with the birds on them.

When we asked the kid years ago what a house protected us from ,he instantly replied "tigers".He was punching a hole in the world.I could not puncture my space.The house protected me from cold, rain, thieves etc but never from tigers which were,for me, only in the jungles of Ranthambore.

The whistle

At midnight , 2 0'clock, the search for the day's poem began .Ideas had to start somewhere, before they flowed. It is these little nudges that begin the process. Others' stray writings like a scrap of poetry or an interesting quote present possibilities, a vast canvas for the wanderings of the mind.

Sometimes the nudges are a scattered sound or a creature of the night. Like for example , the gurkha watchman who paces up and down in the vast wastes of the night, tapping his stick on the earth.Alerting about possible intruders, cat burglars.

Here it is, yesterday's temporary poem, a poem that began in temporary origins but threatened to become a fixture of the web spaces.Not permanent because the subject is so ephemeral, like a whiff of wind at midnight. Things will not remain the same. I am not there tomorrow, my poem shall disappear as anonymous googledygeek.( A cross between google- geek and gobbledycock).

The whistle

The whistle blares it is the inky night of 2 O 'clock
Marked by feet in old boots, in a Himalayan walk,

With their stick tapping the earth to warn thieves.
Another whistle, man and boy blew this morning
Whose shrillness of blowing sounded quite hollow
Across the bare earth and houses to friends down
All in mirth, the boy in a snigger after the whistle.
Their whistle is mere surrogate for night’s cricket
Since the latter has taken short leave from bushes.

When our rice is ready for meal in pressure cooker
The whistle sounds blowing the lid off afternoon nap.
The pressure rises in vapor, pressing down the valve,
A short whistle-blower on hunger pangs in our belly.

Revolutions

In the park I do one revolution in two minutes. Which means I do ten revolutions in twenty minutes .I call my walk in the ellipsis of the jogging track a revolution.

You begin the revolution like the clock's hand. Everybody starts the walk as they enter the park ,clock-wise. Why nobody knows. Some psychology stuff. For a change I try anti-clockwise and look what happens .I see several faces of my fellow-walkers which I do not see as I flow along with them every day. It is another thing if I want to see their faces.

The chap of the seventies music flows along behind me. Some times he revolves along with a friend with whom he carries on relentless conversation. A scrap from his conversation today was his assertion that a third party he is referring to will not live long. Of cancer. Cancer in the stomach or some such thing. Cancer somewhere else is a different matter.By the time I come to the end of this scrap I have passed the neem tree in the revolution. Forgot to smell the fragrance of the tiny white flowers in the air.

I passed the seventies man in the next revolution too.This time ,near the stage,I hear a scrap from his seventies film music flowing from his shirt pocket. In the blue clouds, in the waves of the wind,I hear the song you sing.

At the bench there is this bidi-smoking grandpa answering a barrage of questions from a four years old kid. Don't put your foot in the gaps on the wooden bench.Mind your gap. Of course you can play on the grass but not now. You will have to drink milk first.

I look up at the sky. Half way my eyes rest on the neredu tree ,now green in the sky. Do I see the fruit already? I think my revolutions are coming to an end.

Can there be revolutions of an oblong type? It is not necessary that all revolving should be circular.

Thinking Blog

Thoughts strayed and straying