Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset

Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,

There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table,
There must be one which I will never read.

There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.

There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.

And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.

Limits, a poem by Jorge Luis Borges (From The Self and the Other)
The sign in the last photograph roughly reads," Those who have a strong desire to reach moksha will find the path (anyhow)".

London Rain

The rain of London pimples
The ebony street with white
And the neon lamps of London
Stain the canals of night
And the park becomes a jungle
In the alchemy of night.

My wishes turn to violent
Horses black as coal--
The randy mares of fancy,
The stallions of the soul--
Eager to take the fences
That fence about my soul.

Across the countless chimneys
The horses ride and across
The country to the channel
Where warning beacons toss,
To a place where God and No-God
Play at pitch and toss.

Whichever wins I am happy
For God will give me bliss
But No-God will absolve me
From all I do amiss
And I need not suffer conscience
If the world was made amiss.

Under God we can reckon
On pardon when we fall
But if we are under No-God
Nothing will matter at all,
Arson and rape and murder
Must count for nothing at all.

So reinforced by logic
As having nothing to lose
My lust goes riding on horseback
To ravish where I choose,
To burgle all the turrets
Of beauty as I choose.

But now the rain gives over
Its dance upon the town,
Logic and lust together
Come dimly tumbling down,
And neither God nor No-God
Is either up or down.

The argument was wilful,
The alternatives untrue,
We need no metaphysics
To sanction what we do
Or to muffle us in comfort
From what we did not do.

Whether the living river
Began in bog or lake,
The world is what was given,
The world is what we make
And only we can discover
Life in the life we make.

So let the water sizzle
Upon the gleaming slates,
There will be sunshine after
When the rain abates
And rain returning duly
When the sun abates.

My wishes now come homeward,
Their gallopings in vain,
Logic and lust are quiet,
Once more it starts to rain.
Falling asleep I listen
To the falling London rain. 

London Rain, a poem by Louise MacNeice.
(Glenn Patterson in a BBC profile of Louise MacNeice says he "captured the essence of those rare fleeting moments when everything seems to come together, to make sense"– such an apt description of his lyrical poetry.)

In the begining there was the word

and some time back there was this post.

Lets pretend nothing bad ever happens.

Even if it does, it happens to others, far away.

Other lives like so many species of flies.

Each distinct and separate from us.

Lets pretend that words are living–

Poetry saves lives. These squiggles have depth and meaning.

Lets pretend art is beauty. And beauty is our saviour.

We shall rage against the night for beauty. And only beauty.

Lets pretend every dissenting voice is a cynic.

A miasma. A pebble in the eye.

We shall write them words full of beauty.

See. Lets pretend they shall. 

Lets pretend everyone else is stupid.

Lets pretend we get depressed

because no one understands what we understand.

We see things that no one else sees.

We shall collect words that speak to us.

We shall read more. Every sentence, every paragraph

another brick in our immaculate comprehension.

Lets pretend this is the true purpose of life.

Not another Bob Dylan concert

Just because we bought your stuff doesn’t mean we owe you anything.

Flash back: You are at a Bob Dylan concert. And it is awful. It is so awful that you feel like recording it and re-playing it back to him in an attempt to make him appreciate what you are going through. It is so awful that you close your eyes in an attempt to block the thought of all the money you have given him over the years, not to mention the small fortune you’ve spent to be here along with all these other suckers. You try not to think of how far the cost of the ticket would have gone–– grocery for a couple of weeks or more, the tube fare for the month, a (minuscule) part of the down payment on a new flat, even a meaningless bauble for I, me, myself. For you’ve had it up to here subsiding other people’s lifestyle. At the very least you’ll go home and Google ‘Henry Timrod’.

But the hype like an iron clamp will grip your throat and even though people are getting up during the songs to refill their glasses to drown their sorrow, they will give you hard, meaningful glances. As if they’ve identified you as the weakest link. For they’ve worked long and hard on what they’ll put up on facebook along with blurry pictures of Dylan (in the same, white hat always) seen from, what appears to be many, many miles away. (Is he even there?) And no one can take that away from them. Damn it! After this they deserve something. Anything.

Was ‘mumblecore*’ invented to describe the brutality being unleashed on stage? And the eyes turn back towards you; smoldering holes in your back. You have been scarred for life.

But it’s al’right, Ma. I was already bleeding.

Flash forward:

You, “Dylan is playing at Hop Farm this summer.”

Me, “Yeah. Right.”

Both together, “Ha ha ha ha ha.”

Tears of laughter. Over and out.

*Nope. It is a term used to describe low-budget independent American films of early 2000's. Do they have anything in common with Bob Dylan? Answer: Well, you've heard Dylan muttering on stage. Now would you call him a 'slacker'?

Marginalia

Marginalia: the scribbles and doodles on the margins of books. First recorded use of the word is in 1819 in Blackwood’s Magazine.

Fermat’s Last Theorem is possibly the most famous marginalia. Around 1637 Fermat wrote, what is considered his Last Theorem, in the margin of his copy of the Arithmetica next to Diophantus' sum-of-squares problem ending with the words, “I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.” He never wrote about the proof ever again. Till 1995, when it was finally proven, Fermat's Last Theorem was considered the most difficult problem in Mathematics.

Samuel T. Coleridge’s marginalia, the scribbles he made in the margins of other people's books, is published in five volumes.

A secondhand book on science bought from Broadway Market Bookstore travels the seven seas just because of the dedication scribbled on the opening page by a 9 year old in 1936. One-dimensional flowers and butterflies pop out from dairies that haven’t been opened in ages. Characters with their eyes about to burst out, the same toothy donkey, extra-terrestrial beings, anatomically implausible birds, little girls with triangular bodies, the occasional dog, more flowers than one can count, rudderless boats, esoteric line drawings of nothing– are scattered all around the house, living within the pages of various books.

But our marginalia is cloistered mostly in notebooks and diaries. Any conversation we are having with the text is not recorded for posterity in the margins of the book being read. We somehow never got to the stage of leaving a mark on books like a dog does on a hydrant.* That is something that is encountered only in books found in second-hand bookstores or the one’s borrowed from the library. In case of the latter various found objects––airline boarding passes, laundry and ATM receipts,  unidentifiable food stains, email address noted on torn edges of envelops––add to the mystifying dialogue.

All this, though, pales in the face of the scribbles of overworked monks and copyists. Michael Camille even wrote a book about it. The 'amusing doodles' found in the margins of the illuminated texts shine a light on the life of the 'others'– the underbelly of society. The marginalia found in medieval manuscripts, overwhelming feature the grotesque and the profane, and seem to subvert the message of the texts they appear on the margin's of. However, they often not only uphold, but also reinforce the conventional, rigid hierarchies. Or as Camille writes, “the edges of discourse...always return us to the rules of the center.” (Suffice to say a longer explanation would require going into among other things the nature of and the relationship between the sacred and the profane through the ages, which is way beyond the intention and scope of this post.)

Then there are the modern day scholars scribbling in the margins of much loved/hated texts in college libraries.  Some content to express their feelings through the amount of energy expended in underlining the fateful lines. Others making “in-jokes” that in just a couple of years will seem redundant if not completely absurd. Though some jokes, mostly involving the grotesque and the profane, seem to live long and prosper.

*Tara Bray Smith

Afterword: Of course not everyone is enthused by marginalia. For me personally, food stains on books are a cause of great agony. For libraries marginalia, of any and every sort, is an act of vandalism.

For those enthralled by marginalia, more can be found in a book about readers writing in books. H J Jackson, an editor of Coleridge’s poems (which could explain her fascination with the subject), scours though books and the annotations made by readers, famous and obscure, over the last three centuries in an attempt to cover the history, psychology and the ‘dark side’ of marginalia and brings into focus the war between the ‘annotators’ and the ‘bibliophiles’.

Or else, here is Billy Collins reading his poem titled Marginalia, which incidentally is the only instance in which I find food stains on books beautiful.

An Afternoon in the Stacks

Closing the book, I find I have left my head
inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open
their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound,
words adjusting themselves to their meaning.
Long passages open at successive pages. An echo,
continuous from the title onward, hums
behind me. From in here the world looms,
a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences
carved out when an author traveled and a reader
kept the way open. When this book ends
I will pull it inside-out like a sock
and throw it back in the library. But the rumor
of it will haunt all that follows in my life.
A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move.

- An Afternoon in the Stacks, a poem by William Stafford

Why it is better to watch a Fellini film rather than logging onto facebook

Just the other day I realized that facebook is like a public square– a public square from a scene from a film by Federico Fellini. We had just watched Fellini’s I clowns and so, naturally one’s mind was sharp as a razor and attuned to all sorts of metaphors and comparisons, invented or real.

Recollect the opening of Amarcord– the burning of the ‘Old Witch of Winter’ and celebration of the arrival of spring. Now remember the people milling around in the square: the town idiot, the blind accordion player ridiculed by the schoolboys, the buxom and stout middle-aged tobacconist, the street vendor who is an incorrigible liar, the town lawyer who has a penchant for narrating the town’s history (even when no one is listening), the mindlessly exhibitionist motorcycle rider clad in black and of course, the town beauty. Not to forget the odd nymphomaniac. Well, that’s the average person’s facebook wall. A public square in a sexually repressed provincial town in a film by Fellini.

The way one would behave in a public square then, it seems, is the ideal way to behave on facebook. Look at the displays in the shop windows, enter only if you see something that catches your eye, there is no obligation to say you ‘like’ something even if you like it, smile if someone makes an eye contact and speak only when you are spoken too. In short, try not to be the village idiot standing on the soapbox mouthing inanities or the motorcycle rider ceaselessly vrooming to and fro in a pathetic attempt to catch everyone’s attention. Most importantly, only visit when you need something or  when something special is happening. Even then chances are it wouldn’t be half as fantastic or rewarding as a Fellini film.

That’s why it is always better to watch a Fellini film rather than logging onto facebook.

Love is not all

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. I do not think I would.

Love is not all, a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

A beautiful reading of the poem accompanied by paintings of Edvard Munch is available here.

Rainy Day Thoughts

I am holding Granta's May edition titled ‘Britain’ in my hands, and staring at the cover all I can think of is:

And the crack in the tea cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.*

How strange this connection between man and poetry. 

If you have ever read a poem and felt the lines spoke to you; they articulated your thoughts and hopes then you'd understand why 'In relation to the future, a poem is like a note sealed in a bottle and thrown into the sea'. Charles Simic in a recent post in NY review of books states, “If poetry is not the most utopian project ever devised by human beings, I don’t know what is”. You’ll have to read Simic’s post to work out how (or even whether) this sentiment applies to your understanding of poetry. For words and the constant misunderstanding of the intent behind them could, if one is pressed for a quick response, be summarized as the sum total of the drama that is human existence. Though one would, perhaps, end with a flourish– ‘all existence is meaningless’.

Talking about meaning and misunderstanding, or should it be called different ways of understanding, the poem that comes to mind is Yeats ‘The Second Coming’**. Lines from this poem get quoted with regular frequency whenever the world has faced a crisis in recent history, just like Keynes during an economic crisis. And just like Robert Frost and the end of 'The Road Not Taken' (it is the sigh– I shall be telling this with a sigh––that makes one pause and consider the road not taken), here too it is the last few lines that have been widely interpreted.

Though if you read the poem carefully and ‘see’ the vast image brought forth by the Spiritus Mundi (spirit of the world) would you still believe that the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem could be our saviour? And if you read about Yeats and his theory of gyres then the doubts will recede further.

Why does a poet write? Why does a reader read? Sometimes these seem like questions worth considering, though most of the time a person pens a few lines and moves on. Another person reads them and moves on. Just like life.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.***

*W.H. Auden, As I walked out one evening.

**TURNING and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Interesting trivia: The Second Coming has not only been quoted in many books, comics and music albums, but also has been the source of the titles of some very popular books:

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

***The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward FitzGerald.

Quit Your Books

Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

UP! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun, above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless--
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

The Tables Turned, a poem by William Wordsworth.
The singing bird is the Chaffinch, not the throstle (song thrush) mentioned in the poem. 

A season by another name...but just as sweet

In another corner of the earth it is monsoon that ushers in the season of flowers and you feel like whistling even though your shoe is full of slush.* After the May flowers are done with their fiery display a cloud chased by another and then another comes bursting through the sky. And the forecast promises rain. And more rain. Days upon days of rain. As buckets of rain begin to fall, the children start dancing in the street their faces uplifted to the sky.

In another part of the city a different kind of celebration is underway.  Every walk through overgrown, dense vegetation bustling with life is too put it blandly an adventure. And if, like me, you have an irrational fear of snakes often a heart stopping one. But the raindrops come falling and flowers, some only half awake, nod in tandem. From high up in the trees the koel (cuckoo) sings a– in part melancholy, in part joyous– tune; much like the monsoon state of mind.

Thus in another hemisphere, in another era, a poet puts his pen on paper in praise of the darkening skies and clouds bulging with the promise of rain.

Wildflowers in order of appearance:
Celosia argentea (known as cockscomb in the gardens).
Argeya nervosa or woolly morning glory or elephant creeper (leaves look like elephant's ears), native to India. Known in Hindi as ghav bel (gugguli).
Forest turmeric (wild haldi– the first flowers of the monsoon).
Hibiscus tertaphyllus (wild bhindi/lady finger/okra).
Commelina or dayflowers.
Costus speciosus (crape ginger, known as keukand in Hindi).
Smilax fruit. The plant is known as kumarika in Hindi.
Trichosanthes (belongs to cucumber family; same family as gourd and pumpkin).
Red Java tea a medicinal plant native to India.

All flowers identified with help from Flowers of India and SGNP flickr group.

*Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush. – Doug Larson

She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways

So it begins again. A walk in a grassy meadow. A violet by a mossy stone half hidden from the eye*. A handful of pictures. And then hours of poring over field guides and a long world wide web search. First comes resemblance, then a mass of confusion. What's the difference between a harebell and a bluebell? If you had been paying attention you'd know by now that the knapweed is nothing like the melancholy thistle. The Astragalus genus (common name milk-vetch) has about 3000 species. And the Asteraceae group has more than 22750 species spread across 1620 genera and 12 subfamilies. That includes the aster, daisy, marigolds, chrysanthemums, zinnias, dahlias and sunflowers. If that isn't a humbling encounter with biodiversity, then what is? Finally along comes a name and with it an introduction to  the fascinating world of what we call 'wildflowers' affording us a tiny glimpse into the other far more enduring and enthralling world wide web. The one where Lucy and a violet by a mossy stone not only share a common ground but also a common fate. Or as Shakespeare wrote, one touch of nature makes the whole world kin*.

Wildflowers in order of appearance: scabious (rare to picture without a butterfly or a moth feasting on its rich nectar), early marsh orchid, mountain buttercup, bladder campion, harebell, hawkweed, Astragalus monspessulanus(?), Cat's ear (with the background blur composed of red clover, white daisy and yellow kidney vetch).

*She Dwelt Among Untrodden Ways by William Wordsworth a poem that instilled a lifelong search for unappreciated beauty epitomized by wildflowers.
** From Troilus and Cressida

How was your day?

The rain makes no sound. The whistle you hear at 4:30 am is not the train but the blackbird. The incessant buzz is not the bee but the traffic. Never ceases. Never ceases to wonder. The city is wide awake. We better go back to bed.

The hours pass. The river holds a mirror up to the sky. Now clear as a slate. White lines chalked by the sails and the seagulls. Come evening it will turn blue. Above the clouds like newly unfurled petals of roses will blush softly pink. The sun will slowly sink behind the Gherkin. But now the clouds gather conspiratorially. The wind tugging at the long black coats. The long black umbrellas marking time.

On Central Line memories distort geography*. In Bethnal Green memory does not abide. Mile End Park mourns the loss. Newspapers report a body was fished out from Regent’s Canal. But that was days ago. Not the tragedy that the robin recalls.

There is no good café on George Street**. Perhaps this isn’t that George Street. Perhaps this isn’t that city. Perhaps it’s the definition of good that is at fault. The server at Prêt a Manger is from France. A mere coincidence? He asks you the name of the little girl in Slumdog Millionaire. You oblige. His face is the perfect representation of ‘unbridled happiness.’ Often described as the sun shining though dark clouds. In the ‘real’ world the sun is occupied otherwise.

This is the Tower of Babel. This is the sea of humanity. This is Oxford Circus. This is why people travel: to queue outside Primark to buy a T-shirt worth 100 pennies.  Bringing us to the pressing question: How many pennies do we need to have pennies enough? We shall ponder tonight as we dine, with the bankers looking down from the windows of their glass and steel towers.

It is late afternoon. Babies and dogs are walking along the marina. I am birdwatching with my eyes closed***. Four hours later the river will turn blue.

* Finding India in Unexpected Places by Sujata Bhat, World Poems on the Underground.

**For A Good Café on George Street by The Rosie Taylor Project a lovely song click here.

***Birdwatching with your eyes closed by Simon Barnes. More on that shortly.

New York City

 After Leonard Cohen, Famous Blue Raincoat

There’s rain in the morning, the mid of December

I am looking for coffee and someplace to wander

New York is cold, but I like where I am living

The High Line Park is close by and the sparrows there are singing

I hear they’ve built the skyscraper national park* on the tip of an island

They sell tickets to climb them, ‘why should we’ isn’t on record

I came back with a sense of the place, a feel–

No, it wasn’t a Woody Allen film

Or like Sex and the City

Do you see what I mean?

As the rain cleared I saw it looked so much familiar

That highway from Delhi, that street like in London

The flowers on the pavement, the people rushing

Sights and smells from Bombay kept coming back, flooding

The book I had grabbed on my way to catch the flight

‘Invisible Cities’ by Calvino proved a good companion and guide

Well I see you there with the people, the buildings, those streets

One more crowded metropolis

Well I see you’ll, perhaps, disagree–

But know that I liked you, the instant I saw you

Your charm has its own familiar, peculiar sway

What more can I possibly say?

I guess I like living in cities– the energy, the madness–

I am glad we got acquainted that day

*Kurt Vonnegut famously referred to Manhattan as ‘the skyscraper national park’.

In passing

Cyclamen on Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, Rebecca Solnit

Orchid on Numbers in the Dark, Italo Calvino

The hush of the falling flowers in the hour before dawn. You've been gone, way too long. Time has passed. Time passes. Relentlessly. Every gesture plotting its escape. Moments flee rapidly. Time is past. But this is the present.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
–– excerpt from Burnt Norton, by T. S. Eliot (Four Quartets)

Everything

All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else. – Buddha
Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it – Confucious
One must love everything– Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

Lately, I have been contemplating the word 'Everything'. Over the years as 'belongings' have diminished to only so much and nothing else, everything has become a well-worn word. Everything is disposable. We don't need everything. Everything isn't important. Everything must go.

3 suitcases, 2 checked in bags. 20 cartons of books and household goods. That is all. But is all everything? Einstein said, 'Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted'. Now you see what I mean? How do we make sense of everything?

The shape, the size, the feel of everything, as certain as the seasons, shifts and changes. And often slides into nothing. Yesterday what was everything, today it's nothing. Nothing. Always following everything. Like the shadow following the form. Till the inevitable moment in time when they merge to the point that it becomes almost redundant to separate nothing from everything. If you have nothing, you have everything.

I

Cleaning an Attic
By Brent Pallas

The day had finally come   

when everything there   

seemed misplaced or out of place   

as an ex's box of things. The unused   

beside the irreplaceable, the easy-   

to-assemble uncomplicated now   

by disuse. Some hand   

of randomness leaving behind   

its lampshades stained   

like ancient maps, its ladders   

still climbing upward, and enough   

old tools to restart a world.   

Every drawer filled   

with the other half of things.   

Everything care embraced,   

and held once as new,   

left too ragged for another winter   

to wear. Its ring of keys   

dangling by a nail   

for rooms left long ago. And whatever   

I said I'd never forget   

found, just as it seemed   

completely forgot—all its letters   

beginning with Dear....

II

Everything
By Fanny Howe

Infinite nesting

pushes all matter

towards emptiness:

child-nodes,

tree-droppings

with a root element of null.

None is always included

in every cluster

of children.

Nothing in nothing

prepares us.

Yet a fresh light was shed

on immortality

for me climbing the stairs

firm foot first.

Everything was in the banister:

crows on branches, crickets,

architects, handsaws and democrats.

Red moon at 3 am.

III

Hold Everything Dear

by Gareth Evans, from 'Hold Everything Dear' by John Berger

As the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey

as the rose buds a green room to breathe

and blossoms like the wind

as the thin birches whisper their stories of the wind to the urgent

in the trucks

as the leaves of the hedge store the light

the day thought it had lost

as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a sparrow in the turning air

as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky

and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark

hold everything dear

the calligraphy of birds across the morning

the million hands of the axe, the soft hand of the earth

one step ahead of time

the broken teeth of tribes and their long place

steppe-scattered and together

clay’s small, surviving handle, the near ghost of a jug

carrying itself towards us through the soil

the pledge of offered arms, the single sheet that is our common walking

the map of the palm held

in a knot

but given as a torch

hold everything dear

the paths they make towards us and how far we open towards them

the justice of a grass that unravels palaces but shelters the songs of the searching

the vessel that names the waves, the jug of this life, as it fills with the days

as it sinks to become what it loves

memory that grows into a shape the tree always knew as a seed

the words

the bread

the child who reaches for the truths beyond the door

the yearning to begin again together

animals keen inside the parliament of the world

the people in the room the people in the street the people

hold everything dear

The Fool

The Fool's number is 0, no number, but for me 0 is a number. The fool in the tarot deck is as strong as all the cards put together. Why? Because he represents man on his spiritual quest. Not knowing where he is going, the fool is ready to discover. He is the hero of the fairy tales who appears dim-witted but is able to find the "treasure" where others have failed. The fool has few possessions. He travels light.*

The fool with his childlike sense of wonder dances through life looking at things for what they are and not what they are supposed to mean or what they are supposed to symbolize. He lacks knowledge, wealth and success in the conventional sense. So it is no surprise that often the terms 'merry' and 'happy' are associated with him.

That's why, perhaps, we have a day dedicated to celebrate the fool in all of us. As we become a sum total of our consumptions, our worth measured in terms of possessions and happiness becomes a pursuit of a 'like' here and a 'share' there. As we surrender our sense of wonder at the alter of  'gaining' knowledge and 'attaining' a 'respectable' position in the world, maybe it is necessary to sometimes be shown for the fool that we actually are. To remind us, as we sit smug and comfortable in our grand palace of knowledge and wealth, impervious to the chains rattling at our ankle, that somewhere out in the world there is a fool not knowing where he is going, but ready to discover. He is carefree. He is merry. And he travels light.

*Niki de Saint Phalle Tarot Cards. To take a tour of Niki de Saint Phalle's magical Il Giardino dei Tarocchi or The Garden of Tarot click here.

Today I Am Wise

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself. 
– Rumi

(Click on the picture to enlarge and read.)

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This post is a culmination of ruminations that can be found here and here.

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As it happens often when you open a random page of a well loved and much read book it pithily lays bare the path out of the labyrinth that you had been spending months (if not years) trying to decipher.

In another life I worked in the development sector. It is no secret. Nor is it a matter of pride– or embarrassment.  Like so many other things in the world it just is. Leonard Cohen, in a brilliant interview in The Guardian said, “All I have to put in my song is my experience.” Similarly when I say, I left the development sector and found the path to true virtue (I make no claim to be virtuous though I hope to get there), it is based purely upon my experience.

In an attempt to reach the kernel of ‘why’ I felt discomforted in the ‘company’ of ‘organized do gooders’ I may have written what could amount to a decent sized thesis. Though I could summarize it in these few word– Doing good* for the sake of feeling good about you. Intentional acts of kindness performed in the belief that by being charitable one is not just good but somehow better than other living beings that inhabit this planet. That was something I couldn’t abide with. Because Intentional Virtue is not Virtue.

The picture above is from The Tao Speaks: Lao Tzu's Whispers of Wisdom, adapted and illustrated by Tsai Chih Chung, translated by Brian Bruya.

*The good is italicized because like all value judgments what is good is not only comparative but also established by people living in a particular time and age. That is why morality is a double bind and also one of the fiercest and most destructive constrains devised by man.