Ami Amo

There exist certain persons who are able - with nothing more than inherent light and native sweetness - to turn the heart over and around. Persons who one may meet after twelve years and yet pick up that last thread of conversation that hovered about a rusty gate, a pinching competition, or another Mario level.

One must guard against pride, cocksurety, and ignorance just as hard as against indecision, self-pity and often - what we think to be - love. But when said persons walk back into the daily scheme of things - if only long enough for some ginger tea, some levity - keeping things at bay becomes irrelevant. There is, for a while, no further need for walls, fists and scowls. Said persons remind us of who we were, where we are likely to be, and reillumine that ghost of Ithaca.

This being the right moment to ask you to remember to thank whichever god you believe in or don't, for creating said persons who bring back from obsolescence, that much abused token of

Friend. 

that which must be forgiven

All at once, I miss college terribly. Apart from the early morning visitors - ranging from the hoarding and the weaving to the ultrasonic variety - this room also comes with hyperbolic acoustics. So this song comes on, not one I have ever much wondered about or remarked upon, but it comes on and all at once, I miss it. I thought it would never come.

This oppressive revisiting. Longing for inexplicable things like bus rides at sunset, alone. Like walks in between canteens, stopping for coffee only as an excuse to keep walking, running into old faces from school, from unexpected places. The strange way how everyone seemed to own the campus and be owned by it in turn. Every junkie, every geek, every scowling politico - as if organic growths, rational fallouts of that maze of asphalt and recycled flora. That strange sense of floating through knowing that this was how I would remember it. Aware of the memories hardening, often skewed, perhaps inaccurate, but settling nonetheless for good. Those born under Revati were meant to make an art out of leaving.

The smell of rain, thin coffee, books, ammonia, mulch, cement dust and sometimes skin. Earphones seem to be the refrain in these flashbacks. Sitting on the stairs, not needing conversation but happy in the soft glow of others talking. The easy distance that had replaced the first passionate ardour. Not that I disown the love, the attachment. Never had there been such closeness, such belonging. Not that I don't remember with a shudder the equally disembowelling periods. Times of total discomfiture when people, books, this self skin seemed grossly alien and designed to kill. But keener are these times of neither love nor hate, these times of blessed contentedness spent in solitude, sometimes shared solitude, which only like minds can understand. The absence of guilt, doubt, fear, intolerance. The ballooning joy of everything from a three-and-a-half-legged dog that followed one around the lake to a sudden flower offered. How the littlest of life's touches seemed to brim over.

I had a migraine when I started this. But now the song's over and Ma's just returned with a bucket load of haleem so all maudlin writing must be ended herewith. =)

longue durée

And its ineffability. Not the absence of Foresight; merely its irrelevance. Which is to say, thank you, those who stick around when there's nothing to stop you from leaving. 

dust bunnies

Finally got around to organising shelves today - might I take this moment to echo ancient maternal wisdom and extoll the virtues of domestic chores? If the blog's stopped being therapeutic, take to a broom - the usual run-ins with old photographs, books signed by friends ere Facebook, when departures meant something. One knew that new cities were not merely an update: STD, postal blight made keeping in touch a rare disease.

Hastily sketched, ill-spelled letters of love and tears tucked away to be found at unlikely hours like these. Terrible photographs with half eyes and overexposed teeth. Bookmarks, ribbons from the craftier ones. Each will place heart in neardeath chokehold.

Fondness is now a dubious thing. There are looming godheads of religion, philosophy, even medicine, that question all attachment. Nothing more than maya, narcissistic misrecognition, symptom of syphilis - sentiment has been turned into a tennis equation. Love all. 0-0.

But each such snag recognises the futility of choice. One can agree with ideas and yet be unable to stem the lived experience. Neither invalidates the other, merely makes existence perilous and diamond-edged. Perhaps enlightenment awaits with clear choices, but till then, live brilliant.

In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss.

- G. K. Chesterton, 'The Blue Cross'

rattle

lesson o' de day

Definite danger to too much disclosure. Delving deep is met with deft but deliberate change in discussion. Detours don't work; debarred is debarred.

thus spake freud

Two ways of ringing in the old - remembering and repeating. So when you're not mooning over the past you're cloning it. That should explain the fish bowl.

five finger exercise

video

When you stare too long at an embryo what stares back? Life itself? Or the Ipse- the singularity, of genius (in waiting)?

9 to 5; EST

Untitled, 2001 (Ophelia) by Gregory Crewdson

So that is what I'll be analysing till 4. With Bournvita and leftover Peanut Butter fudge. Ironic that even with 97 academic papers down, none of them to my name. Discoveries like these make it worthwhile. Even now that they've stopped payment. Gross, really, being employed.

coir; not tussar

Existence as heap of unravelled twine. Locus? Described by trailing kitestring. Glass and grime make it impossible for compassionate bystander - waiving the impossibility of compassionate bystander - to pick up loose thread and ask that liberating Pourquoi story.

Meanwhile, roll along, diminishing in size, as if at mercy of a malign cosmic paw. Begin "I- and know not who. The inability to overcome solipsism, for one isn't even that far yet.

There it is. How Humans Came to be Undone.

a little indulgence

another step to adieu

Changes in domicile primarily entail reestablishing boundaries. The cat, vicious and hostile, will have to be brought into fold. Offerings of fish and love have, so far, received nothing but hisses in return. The dogs - recalcitrant, somewhat bored - must be taught anew who’s Boss. The kitchen needs exploring, familiarising, before it can be - to borrow the tongue of the day - owned. The same with all other hearts of darkness: convenient carpet-corners hiding some evidence of mischief, the underside of beds, the loft.

There is much to be done - always reassuring, this, in the face of sightless, brutal yearning. Giving into leisure now can mean death by remorse. The terrible weight of unacknowledged knowing will kill if not ignored.

Experimenting with the dicey contents of fridge, giving walls fresh coat of yellow, making unnecessary coffee over the latest release in Satire - Fantasy. Otherwise called lifesavers.

The Price of Discontent

I miss being certain in an unconscious way, Not this certainty of dogma; this certified certainty. Nourished by its devouring of all other, more feeble certainties. I miss the absence of calculation. I miss the seventeen year old who hugged and cried and walked for miles alone, all in one breath. She's not been shed; nor sheltered. I miss being Nice. Air piano for half an hour with a metronomic cat tail shall help. That; or sleep.

circumambulation

This week has already brought three changes of scene; another lying - nay, shuffling, in wait.

It is always this way, is it not? Ebb and flow, surplus and deficit, wanting and wasting. But even with the exaggerated misanthropy that seems to wrestle my present: each letting the other win; even with the endless (if not tireless) movement on feet (being only carriage); even then. How to stroll away from this box, this room, this universe of one's own?

Why do we cling when tomorrow we will not know one other? What does it matter if you have too much or too little of everything and nothing or the reverse? To be calm, to not be obtuse. To be firm, to not be stubborn. To love, to not crave. To seek happiness, and finding it, to accept happiness. To stay, to stay, to stay.

I could tell you that my heart shattered into seven hundred and twenty-three perfect pieces of pale blue crystal today. I could tell you that's just how it was, my tungsten wore out and decided to leap. I could tell you that when it happened it was frost, it was gall, it was midnight, it was innards strung up with steel wool.

But my heart (bless the little fellow); it no longer plays those parts. Its response to these sudden death changes in script (indicated by that fatal ka-ching!) is a mildly annoyed and mostly bored puff of smoke that spirals and spells 'Next, please' on my face; on my hands.

We Don't Make The Papers

The old lady does not want to be helped up. She glares through her thickset glasses and her daughter, now over forty, looks embarrassed. The girl sitting nearest, also embarrassed, springs up and disappears. There is a stray, unaccountable note of reproof in the air, and the bus, like any red-handed child, finds the shortest way to a flamboyant, casual exit.

Bringing up the rear are seven gentlemen, of average height. Their average, that is. One appears to be asleep, even through the frequent and violent sternutations of his companion. The third, also stern, glares at the clearly drugged boy on his left while the two nearest the window giggle at nearly everything, but the man with the briefcase doesn't mind at all.

Having the faculties of perception and imagination rather keen and muddled in her, the girl knows that this, this is how she was to live. Writing these histories of no consequence; warming up to the world's invisible things. The man next to her, also elderly, clutches his yellow bag under the sagging, now asleep, chin. He has on an iron grey suit, black tie and socks, with a vest of a between shade. He may be dreaming of school.

Exchanging frequent winks with most of his female passengers' reflections, hanging by a wrist, is the conductor. An amber traffic light does to him what red purportedly does to decorative bulls in Spain. The driver hurls out abuses at his lustful racking of the bus's haunches, but secretly decides to keep him.

Of the several thousand people one saw everyday, she remembered only the unlikely. The ones she loved, also the most unlikely, were not apt to get along. The girl realised all of this, of course, but thought only of the sun on her left that sped out of sight.

social interaction

Take the time between aching facial muscles and taut cranial, to thank god for the few who don't need smiles, nods or conversation.