Please click pic to have a better view and clearer read

Posted in Bangla Poems ]]> http://lovesragpicker.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/hridoy-grenade/feed/ 2 Life's Elsewhere hridoy-grenade http://lovesragpicker.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/atmoporichoy/ http://lovesragpicker.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/atmoporichoy/#comments Thu, 16 Apr 2009 06:51:18 +0000 Life's Elsewhere http://lovesragpicker.wordpress.com/?p=844 ]]>

This is a attempted translation/completed transcreation of an earlier poem; thus begins a new category: Bangla Poems

Continuing from reflections part 1

…at this moment, the most satisfying of the 18 songs in the film (probably because the moment where it is placed; no visuals, only the song, play it and read…

1.

I am having a gala time discussing DevD with my closest friends. Probably have talked for a cumulative 24 hours at least. Yesterday saw it again in probably the widest screen in Kolkata; then we were there few of us friends, dazed and trippy like Rajeev Ravi’s visuals in the film. Appreciation of DevD is a good test of who exactly like-minded friends are.

And then got irritated reading reviews again. Convinced: add up even the 20 best reviews and you don’t get the film (I have linked the best two in the previous post). People are getting it utterly wrong, or latching to the least of the film’s achievements. Yes, even Khalid Mohammad got it wrong; no DevD is not only a jazzed-up, doped, sexed-up take on the Saratchandra novel. If it would had been so, so many hours of discussions wouldn’t have followed in my life. Yes, me and my friends are so goddamn serious about films that we hardly spend minutes about smart-ass contemporary cinemas.

I don’t consider Anurag Kashyap as a messiah down there to save Indian cinema. Instead, it might lead you to deadeningly blinded alleys if you follow his template because Kashyap is a cinematic freak. You cannot follow him because he pours himself entirely into his films and you have neither lived his life and nor dreaded his nightmares…you can’t repeat his successes.

Let the lesson be rather: learn how to pour yourself into your cinema.

But I will qualify myself further. DevD is not Anurag’s film only, if you watch it sincerely (now what’s that I cannot explain) you will know how a single film can turn out to be equally personal for Abhay Deol, Amit Trivedi and Rajeev Ravi too. Subtract any one of them and the film fails.

I am still not prepared to write adequately about the film. DevD is one of those rare films where the experience starts after the film ends. It gives you a template of emotions, now you live with your own DevD screened in your mind.

2.

I will write only about the Leni/Chanda character in this post. I ended with her in my earlier one…

This character is probably the most audacious addition by Kashyap. Another director would have obviously opted for Mahi Gill in the role of Chandramukhi; her zest, looks, strength and brazenness puts her straight into the lineage of Vyjayantimala, Rekha (yes, no one is listening to me! Mukaddar ka Sikandar was one of the best takes on Devdas; and who else but a young Amitabh Bachchan could have played our melancholic drunk best?), Madhuri Dixit etc (and oh yes…Tabu!). But also who else but without the freakish madness of Kashyap would have cast a fragile and french Kalki Koechlin in the role which is so well-etched in Indian minds?

I doubt if the sexual definition of the character was there in his mind. Since its not productive to read or guess another person’s mind can only try to jot down strange things going on in my mind.

Leni is a veritable child the film. Asked a friend in a hushed down voice: “Is this guy triggering the latent paedophile in us?” Dev’s character is at least 10 years senior than her in the film. Look at her in her school-dress when she is walking down the streets of her damnation. The first episode of the film was just rollicking fun for me. Kashyap never lets us identify with the scumbug that his main male protagonist is and Paro is too firebrand for us men. We can drool at her but hardly can match an eyeline. Then our Dev is in the classic fix: he suddenly discovers that the girl he has just spurned is looking devastatingly beautiful in her wedding-dress. Devdas hits the bottle. The film severely undercuts the moment by underlining it heavily with the irreverent ‘emosanal atyachar’. You don’t know whether to laugh or sigh. Paro doesn’t seem to regret the moment, she is having a great jig! I should thank Kashyap for doing away with the sick ‘branding-paro-with-a-cut-in-her-forehead’ thingie of the novel. Our Dev trips and passes out. The black screen announces the next chapter: Chanda.

The following shots shows a thin teenager and her cosmopolitan parents. We are not sure what to do with the bluish coldness of the shots. Then she starts walking down the streets and ‘Yahi Meri Zindagi’ starts in the soundtrack. Anyone who has listened to it knows how cruelly contrapuntal it is to her damnation which follows after her MMS sex-video scandal. The child is damned. Smudged in sin though still a flower of a virgin. Even her dad ‘downloaded and got off’ before eating his bullet.

This is the moment when I get emotionally hooked into the film, this is the moment when chuckles and guffaws gets silenced in the theater for long. If you are maudlin like me you will have tears in yours eyes when she is phoning her mom, you will get shit-scared when a relative growls about ‘honor killing’, you almost shriek under your breath “run, kid, run!’ when she walks out of her ancestral home, you will be numbed when she lands up in the brothel out of sheer hunger and you are dumbed when her folks in the brothel celebrates her school-final results. Then when the chapter ends with our hero’s drugged out body flopping in her bed  there she is, in her garish pink outlandish whore-costumes staring at her ’soul’s brother’ with expressions in her face which speaks more volumes than you can write down.

The descent to hell will begin, but Dev being Dev, will take a helluva lot of time to figure out that at least in this journey he has a friend, someone who speaks really less, snorts coke but never gets hooked and never makes it a concert saying that she is in love. She only says, even when she is hurt: “you are such a slut!’ with a twinkle hiding a tear-in-vain in her eyes. And she almost tells: “remain fallen and damned my brother, for as long as you remain so…you might…stay as my man”.

My point to drive home. DevD follows a trajectory of emotions which are not exactly conventionally curved. Dev’s final loop of doped helplessness needed an emotional trigger. But when Dev ‘fell’ we laughed at him. Later when he is falling down, we are not laughing any more. We have suddenly started feeling for him. For him? Not exactly ‘for’ him…rather for a ’state of being fallen’ which is rather independent of him, because instead of witnessing his fall we witness Leni/Chanda’s and it is effectively same…or…it is more. We laughed at sex in the first episode, we didn’t do so in the second. Suddenly, a truck of emotions triggered by her is carried forward by Dev in the final of the triad of chapters.

Those who thought that the film is all-and-only brashness-and-sleaze, like Khalid-’the pun’-Mohammad, has stopped feeling things any more or I am more beautiful. As he said in his review, the ending is a huge letdown because of it’s ’sweetness’. It is not; it is the inevitable. At least I wouldn’t remain engrossed for days if a film is only a gallery of smart irreverence for its own sake. DevD is gutsy because after damaging irreparably the Dev-Paro mystic it really shows us what love and emotions could have been like…of course not palatable like your standard Bollywood prescriptions.

My accolades to Kalki Koechlin.

Love you kid…(that’s for Chanda).

…and I will continue further.

Kalki Koechlin: Chanda in DevD

Kalki Koechlin: Chanda in DevD

Kalki Koechlin: Chanda in DevD

2009 Hindi film directed by Anurag Kashyap

– Dev. D (2009)at IMDB,

– Dev. D – in Wikipedia,

– Dev D – Official Movie website

Couple of notable movie reviews from many:

– Dope and Glory

– The Tale of Two Different Halves

And all those articles tagged Dev.D at Passion for Cinema, which is almost unabashedly an Anurag Kasyap fansite, so you might take things with a pinch of salt.

First a disclaimer: this is not a review of the film. Dev.D is turning out to be a film which is triggering numerous reviews where the feel of the film is reproduced again and again through effusive words. This is a rare phenomenon in contemporary movie criticism, where a critical review almost turns out to be reliving of the viewing experience (and I have read almost 50 of them; Dev.D is triggering the best among writers). This can only rarely happen when a work of art manages to put forward something rare too: a zeitgeist. I am sure Anurag Kashyap’s next one, Gulaal (released this week) will intensify the high. Personally, I fear watching Gulaal (I deferred Dev.D for long), I might be overwhelmed. The effect is, in short, reeling: one cannot stay…normal.

I have another ill-maintained blog on films. A piece on Dev.D was supposed to be posted there. But those few of my kind readers who have followed this blog from its inception couple of years ago know that this article deserves a place here, in Love’s Ragpicker. To put it humbly, my posts and poems probably was putting forward something which finds such a happy echo in Kashyap’s film.

Curiously, the film leaves a different impact on me rather than the one I expected after reading those reviews and conversing with ecstatic friends. I expected a dark, sordid, brutally anarchic film which descends down the roads of perdition. Not that they are wrong, but Dev.D was a heart-warming experience to me. I immediately messaged a friend that it is a “fairy tale trip to me. I deliciously relished Dev’s debasement and his liberation”. No, I didn’t identify with the rich arrogant self-centered indecisive Punjabi brat Abhay Deol plays with such intense understatement (I like his jaws!). I identified with his predicament, with his state-of-being, with the haze into which he almost sleepwalks that is the landscape of Kashyap’s mind, the only living Hindi filmmaker who can paint a dystopic world with aplomb. And the journey was, again, curiously, heartwarming. The film deserved the sunlit landscapes in its final reels, not as a relief but as a poetic denouement.

The landscape of Kashyap’s mind. Years ago Kashyap came to Kolkata, at my workplace to talk about his No Smoking, something still more daredevil than his later films if not more effective. He played ‘Emosanal Atyachar’ to us and said that he is particularly not fond of Bengal/India’s existential icon, Devdas. There is a discernible trajectory in the depiction of K, the Kafkaesque protagonist of No Smoking. He flaunts his superbly sculpted body narcissistically in the beginning, ogling at himself now and then in the mirror. At the end he is there in the front of his mirror again, showing his invisible pinkie. His finger is cut-off, he isn’t that perfect again. Kashyap doesn’t particularly like his male protagonists. They are faulty, scarred, bruised, devilish (Kay Kay Menon in his unreleased Paanch, I did manage to see a bootleg) and seldom the one you can anchor yourself to. What is left is that landscape of the mind.

That’s so welcome in Kashyap’s films. He is thoroughly personal. Welcome all those artists who can wrench cinema back to a medium of personal expression. One knows how difficult it is in Indian Cinema. Dev.D goes beyond being a spoof of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s classic 1917 Bengali novel Devdas, though folks are ga ga about all those subversions he throws in the face of Hindi cinema. Hindi mainstream cinema, with its moribund juggernaut of ‘values’, sentiments, clichés, opinions and hypocrisies are just waiting, pants lowered well, to be subverted. Still told one of my friends that I am a bit wary about Dev.D, I am not particularly fond of spoofs. She said it is not.

Kashyap does subvert, and brutally so. He damages the myth of Dev-Paro ‘platonic love’ which the ilk like Sanjay Leela Bhansali has squeezed dry. The Dev-Paro romance is evacuated of all ‘emotional securities’. It is pure lust, it is lurid, it is so horny that you chuckle embarrassed seeing them misrecognising a fuck  for love. I know it hurts. But Kashyap hurts without demeaning Paro; rather Mahi Gill will be remembered as a firebrand who is too sure about herself. All that is left is a Dev with a face of a joker, with the bang of a bottle in his head. Well, the oedipal excuse for rebellion in the original novel – that it was his dad who opposed and nullified the marriage – is also taken way. He is responsible for his own act. No excuses.

So, no love left sublime to sublimate your sins, because you refuse to call your sins what it is: sin. Dev is not the sinner. He is just a man in hots and nothing more. We are sinners, because we supported inanities in cinema. Reduce a capitalist fiasco which leads to death of thousands in search of a promised land to a choco-sweet story of Jack and Rose: that’s a sin. Reduce a problem that is man-woman relations into archie-hallmarks cards: that’s a sin. Being virginally lyrical in the times of the novel is sin. When all is reduced to dust, you have one task left: to find love again. Dev.D does it. The ending has irked many; few critics have said that Kashyap surrenders to sweetness again. I differ here. Love here is the humble recognition that your lover slept/sleeps with others. You don’t own the woman; still something remains to be explored and shared. You are an outcast because you have forgot how to survive, she is a whore because she battled to survive (the gruesome scene where a relative was contemplating honor-killing); you are left with no sanctifying certificate that is marriage; when all is stripped off, let love begin. The classic ending of erstwhile Devdas’s: Paro running towards a dying Dev and the doors closing at her face, secures the male fantasy somehow akin to Satidaha, that you still own the woman’s soul when you are withering away to death (and the classic twist of course that Paro is still a virgin, her older husband doesn’t sleep with her). The erstwhile Paro is almost like a good hot bathtub foam to Indian men, you wash your dirt away in her disinfectant luminescence. Something cunningly referred in the last scene she appears in Dev.D: she cleans his room, saying again and again that he stenches, the room smells. But she refuses the final ‘cleaning’. “Are you pulling my leg?” Dev snaps; “I am showing you my guts”, repartees Paro. Kashyap is showing his guts, true; he is also saying that Hindi cinema is such a dirty linen it can hardly be cleaned with doses of antiseptic sentiments. Dev, in the penultimate scene, is being cleaned, but he has already accepted it. You need to accept your muck.

As I mentioned above, Kashyap’s protagonists are seldom images providing an anchor to identify. He provides us no safe refuges. Dev is probably the most deplorable specimen of men you see walking or biking down the streets of North Indian cities. Dumbed, numbed pounds of flesh with enough dough in their sacs to waste it away in indulgences. No, you might have expected it but there are no ‘60s countercultural excuses (there is Lennon in Gulaal) when Dev is reeling with vodka and ecstasy. It is – plain and simply – bad and debauched a behavior, not a rebellion.

But a rich brat wallowing in his self-pity is hardly anything new. Dev is uplifted from such a muck too. It is difficult to write how it is done; it is pure ‘emosanal’, not narrative, neither discursive. I cannot do it now. Probably it is only the cinematic which lifted me up in the final quarter of the film.

A famous scene in erstwhile Devdas is the drunk hero wallowing in garbage and Chanda lifting him up. Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s version referred to it verbally, couldn’t show it because in his vision of a clean and opulent Indian past (continuous to his present production values and gloss) garbage cannot feature. I was missing the scene in Kashyap’s. It finally arrived in a way, recall the scene with the dog, and where it is placed in the narrative is telling. It is where Dev arrives, not a place somewhere in the middle of the narrative. Those scenes after the running down of pavement-dwellers, bailed by a lawyer tellingly named Bimal Barua (Pramathesh Barua directed the 1935 version, and Bimal Roy the 1955 one, the two definitive ones), the heartrending yet choked cry of Abhay Deol in his father’s funeral (look where Kashyap displaces it in the narrative line) show a systematic and intended pauperization of Dev. These were so liberating to me! To use expressions out of the coffers of history: Dev is getting declassed, de-bourgeoisfied! He is reducing himself to nothing, burning his dad’s developmental money away (the dad runs an iron-and-steel plant which recalled my childhood years in Bengal’s leading industrial township, when the nation was so socialist and Nehruvian). When Dev had a fat purse and credit-cards, he was pursued by pimps. When he has nothing, he is beaten up because of precisely so. And then the dizzy unexpected, unexplained accident he witnesses!

It is exhilarating. Kashyap’s cinema, though it works broadly within mainstream frameworks, is art. One can work out a template how to pursuit art following him. Be uncompromising, be brutal, care a damn, work within the frameworks you are provided and rip it apart, quote, steal and refer everything you regard worthwhile and still, beyond a devilish fun you make of the system, be earnest, be emotional, be thoroughly personal in such way that people cringe at the face of your regarding that you have the most valuable things to say under the sun. Arrogance, in short. Sincerity, in another word.

And you might say nothing. Kashyap is always incomplete, has nothing to sermon about. He is not ‘great’. Even when he says something, opines about something, he leaves things tantalizingly incomplete. Chanda says to Dev in the film, painting Dev’s face into a Heath-Ledger-Joker that he can talk now. Did Dev talk? I suspect. He is not sure of his language, not sure of his content, he has lots to say, he doesn’t know how to. It is gratifying that someone wants to hear. It is not imperative that you should be able to say it. Now.

But should a moment come, you should be able to dare a perfect and precise speech. An overlooked scene in Dev.D literally brought tears in my eyes (unfashionable reception-habits for a Kashyap film?). Chanda, recalling her father’s suicide after her MMS sex-scandal, says: “he would have said – forget it baby, what has happened has happened, let’s forget it; instead, he shot himself”. Dev asks her to come closer, hugs her tight and says, “forget it baby, what has happened has happened, let’s forget it.” That is the perfect ethical speech. We, numbed at the sentiments of our maudlin Hindi cinema, experience emotions, purely renewed. And Kashyap is equally capable of perfect, precise, ethical, cinematic speech.

Intend to continue this post…

This is an aborted poem. Have stared at it for long. I refuse to work out a final paragraph. The girl beneath is contrapuntal to the poem: she, it appears, is not entertaining questions and has all the answers. Why do girls, sometimes, appear to have all the answers?

What are you searching for in the
Cleavages of clouds, in the
Winds in the weeds in the grass?

Whom are you searching out in the
Ribbons of crowds, in the
Skies full of digital dust?

What are you searching in the
Words you have hurt, in the
Echoes that you’ve heard in the halls?

Whom are you searching in the
Names you have spurned, in the
Bodies which are waiting to be balled?

There is nothing worth searching
When the angels are dead and stoned
The lord has forsaken the poets
And the poet in the lovers is mourned
It is jigging time…

Why are you waiting for the
Lips to land, for the
Footsteps in the sands of your skin?

Why are you waiting for the
Baby to scream, for the
Saint to deliver the dream?

Why are you waiting for the
Dance to unfurl, for the
Notice to announce the team?

Why are you waiting for the
Plague to hit, for the
Enemies to make their retreat?

There is nothing worth waiting
When the whistle is already blown
The lord has forsaken the lovers
And love from the prayers are gone
It is payback time…

When will you do it boy
How will you do that what
Might turn you into the man?

Where will you do it girl
When will you prove your worth
And take my world in your hand?

Why don’t we uproot and rip
All those wires and circuits
That bind us the way we are defined

When will I cease writing
And I will really mean
Everything I’ve hatched and have designed…

Image Courtesy: Untitled by Sebastian Pfnuer from FILE Magazine

…and a scene from Jean Renoir’s Une Partie de Campagne (1936)

Leonard Cohen wrote in a wall on Mountain Street, Montreal the following lines: ‘Marita/Please find me/I am almost 30′. Just took off from that point. I don’t know if ‘forlorn’ and ‘gulliver’ can be used as verbs (I know why I used the former and have no clues about the latter). I am worried about the last line; it is too loaded. why did I write this?

***

Marita, forlorn me, I am running out of 30s
To raw to be sublime, too fine to be earthy
Too foggy for a clear-sky eye all over you mooning
Too confounded to ring true and lesser mettle to prove it
I need profundities to sweeten the truth
I need a veil of vaseline to ease it in you
I need woolen things when the wind is too rude
I need a soft pencil to blacken a few
Forsake me for a younger one
Recycle me out when its stale and done
Gift me back a fire to burn in
In this windy turn…

I have mastered words
I can twist a speech
But have not chewed
A fiber called feelings
For a good long time
And I long for those years
When I groped for words
And my eyes betrayed
The lyrical dust
And my nickel and dimes
I transact now
With credit cards…

Marita, Forlorn me, I am running out of 30s
I know no causes, vote for a well-honed party
All joie-de-vivre which chimed the twenties sounds thumbed and hackneyed
I know precise tears for the victims, hyperboles for the mighty
I have shook hands with the kings men, I’ve phoned a few
I can pick up guiles in the eyes of the ruled
Too old to unfold a hard-rock band, quite young somehow in my trade
At this age my poets and prophets were already hallowed, some were already dead
Deliver me off for a younger one
Pay me off for a daughter or son
Roll in a twist and a churning
In this mill-of-a-run…

I just overturn words
To drip a new meaning
Like I-love-you-s
To do-you-love-me-s
For a good short laugh
And I long for those years
When I will grope for the touch
And my age will betray
An yearning beyond past
And my paper-wafer skin and eyelights dim
Might convey sincerely how
Loneliness rusts…

It is too far off; I am running out of 30s
No wars to die it young, no wisdom to age it nerdy
Too dude for “Ma! I’m hungry!”
Too full to complain its empty
Forsake! Forlorn! Its too late to be born!
The jokers have baited me with a veil of a throne
I might refuse the ratty races, but would it make me late and slow
Too late to show the day the morning, too early to top the late-night show
Gulliver me for the younger ones
Just another chance to speed up the run
Try another trick, buy me another drink
I might be fun…

But I’m tired; don’t fight me
Really running short of stock
Too thrifty to gather a hedonist’s wit
Too shifty to lock you with an earnest talk
Something happens between a man and a woman
Therefore Sylvia Plath poems, thus Leonard Cohen songs
Marita, still find me, I am running out of 30s
If I can’t be your teddy, I might be your dog
If you need a re-run, I am always ready
To die in your chamber, night or fog…

Things slip, things also fall
In the morning slumber calls
In the wall-street-noon the devil smiles his dues
Writing this, I’m writing none
Waiting forever for my turn
In these top-ten times when chiclets rule

The singer has slit her tongue
The prophets are playing it dumb
These are not the times for us to be born
And the moment all should fall apart
I find a stain in my shirt
Of a lip which preferred to say nothing wrong

It will jazz up in the evening
The saxophone and the violins
The road will curve for a better bend
I’m matching up to the stride,
my little breathing June-child
Stay alive until the music ends…

Park Street swells like John Coltrane
Hydrants wash away holy rains
The blessings they are cherished by some few
The woman moves like Miles Davis
She is a sinner, might be diseased
But of secret chords, she might have certain clues

And I smile at those revellers
Those who try to jewel her
They are almost poets and she the bonnie muse
But I have chose another way
Though I have learnt to hum with their sway
But the high of oblivion I have refused

They will jazz up all these evenings
Even if I flee the orgies
The night will curve to the brighter side
I’m taking myself for a ride
My little flowing June-child
Breeze away until the music dies…

Sisters or sinners, its our choice
To lust for flesh or love the voice
We are free to choose and thus we are condemned
Waited too long, now we abandon Rome
Life is a disease, hope a symptom
Dreams are stuff better buried in our beds

I have spurned the throne, and thus the queen
Can’t be the bard of beauties and ruins
Too proud to kneel, being too vain to warn
Will turn you into a tree in the square
Me just a smoke in search of fire
And you too kind to lend some woods to burn

Sure it will jazz up in the evening
Even if I screw up the scene
The waltz will curve to a nicer turn
I bay for blood and wince at lights
My little darkling June-child
Dance away until the music burns…

I bang my head, I swear, I curse
I’ve shoved the shaft in our culture’s arse
But I still yearn to gift you a verse that is pure
I’m not in war, only hatching murders
I tremble at my edges and borders
I deepen the brow of the mask I’ll wear tomorrow

In a poem that was meant for you
I smirk at my face, I paint it blue
I’m afraid I might spread the juice in you
I know I’m just a faceless one
Neither the beast, nor the swan
And in this muck may you stay beautiful

And we’ll jazz it up in the evening
Since you are there, there is music
Music is the bliss to lift us higher up
Don’t stop listening to those unheard chimes
My little sleeping June-child
Dream away as long the music shines…

Image Courtesy: Breath by Kerem Sesen via FILE Magazine

Soumik Datta, a student and friend and fellow-Cohenite, posted something which I am having the urge to quote in its entirety

What if you must have something on your mind constantly, not as an obsession possessing you, but as a perpetual contender to your attention, a corollary distraction to anything you’re consciously occupied with? Something neither driving you insane (for nothing ever will), nor yet letting you be…
You don’t receive as well anymore: you listen to music, and you only appreciate its ambiance; you watch movies, but they only affect you when they do so viscerally; and you can’t read, for the printed word offers the least degree of unconscious pleasure: it barely lulls you in despite distractions, like the rhythm of action, the resonance of sound. You can’t create in any form: for words sounds visions slip past you too fast, and you know not what you want to say nor how. Even intoxicants leave you high and dry, their effects restricted to the dullness or animation they bring to your spirit and body, and no more.
Context limits our choices in courses of action. And things makes less and less of a difference when you’re not free to initiate those courses that can make the difference.
If you must have and hold on to something on your mind, you must resign yourself to a restless exile: a loss of centre, and control. You must keep running, though you’ll have nowhere left to run to no more.
Do you say, ‘Don’t think twice, it’s alright’? Well, what else can you do.

***

Now here is one of my brighter students and I am not actually worried that he is not attending classes these days. That’s never a big deal, but the state-of-affairs above is, ’cause it succinctly describes the state I am in too. He named the post – tellingly enough – ‘acceptance’. Thus, here we are, teacher and student: ‘acceptance’ is such a great leveler!

The only difference is – and it is a goddamn pissing-off one – you are younger than me Soumik! I can, now, feel it ticking away in my body: the time of youth, the time when ought to start it, the work which then should have been patiently pursued for the rest of life. And I am absolutely clueless of what it should be, what is the shape of the work to come.

To me, it is the act of writing the self into history. The self, not necessarily my own. Writing, or creating sounds and images, some kind of toil, some kind of slogging which will burn me out to a long satisfying sleep.

The problem is, something is eating me that this act of writing needs a collateral of living it out, forging a consonance between the two. And the bird says that since I am not doing the one I can’t do the either.

Symptom: I am not being able to express myself in prose these days. It bursts out through poetry, an overcharged gush of sickness gets coupled with a throbbing pressure of eros. It makes me feel momentarily alive. The more vicariously sexual it becomes the more I taste blood. But these things are not worth it. I am not happy with the language I produce. This is not mine.

Just read everything about ‘writing’ in my paragraphs above in terms of ‘living’, you will get it. Slowly it is sending me nearer the edge, towards the time when I will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, part my hair behind, dare to eat a peach, wear white flannel trousers, walk upon the beach. I need to know why I am here! What I was supposed to be busy with! In this evening-office called life! I hear something rumbling inside, but I cannot grab the shape of it… I know, I need to wait.

But it feels better if the noise inside is shaped into words by someone else…like Soumik, like Inam…

Let me instead stare at the following; I don’t know why. The words are Irving Layton’s…

The truth is this: instead of remembering they are prophets and the descendants of prophets, the poets have swapped roles with entertainers and culture-peddlers. They have refused the crown of thorns.

(“Foreword,” Balls for a One-Armed Juggler, 1963)

I now see there is no way for the poet to avoid misunderstanding, even abuse, when he follows his prophetic vocation to lead his fellowmen towards sanity and light. If he offers his hand in friendship and love, he must expect someone will try to chop it off at the shoulder. … A poet is someone who has a strong sense of self and feels his life to be meaningful.

(“Foreword,” Collected Poems, 1965)

Image Courtesy: Sign No. 2 by Kasper Sonne

I.
Why do women so love
metaphors?

Because only women can hear the strange music that blows in the air
Only when the minor chord touches her, she radiates the unseen shiver
The tremble spreads in the air and again it converges in
Because she can feel it coming within her: the thing, the meaning
Because she loves it coming before it really comes to her
Because she wants it she wants it now she won’t take it before it is time
Because the metaphor means you have crossed it over, at least once, better twice
Because she adores your voice, but she knows it sounds better than things merely nice
Because she loves the face beneath your mask (she only likes it if there is one)
Because she smiles at the implied and plays with the written and the done
Because she knows the answer but is eager for the words you are searching for
Because she knows what you will say, she is just stitching and unstitching knots
Because she likes your shirt smelling like your skin and your skin tasting like something else
Because she will give what a man wants and hates the precise demands
Because she likes a sentence which she can smoothen like a wrinkle and clean like a stain
Because she overlooks the mortal thing and cherishes the fragile porcelain
Because though you chase her she knows she is not real, she is the opening
The real, as you define it, is something she refuses to dwell in
She likes feelings which shimmer like ideas, light in the pond’s skin
Because the answers above never reach it, more love slips away, love seeps in…

Thanks for the question, Inam…I don’t know how the above is connected to the poem following…

II.

Another year-end; I remain shelled under my hide
Fidgeting whom to call, how to shed my pride
Caged in trappings I chose and I didn’t
Sweetness in the air kills, sexual like peppermint
I’m waiting; something might be coming
Something should come

I was dumped in this city like a complying refugee
Its invitations scared me, I still don’t know the well-known streets
Where to go to lose myself, where to go to sin
I’m forever rooted within my ordained loves, within received securities
I’m waiting; something might be coming
Something should come

The city has the face of a woman, the billboards say
Scavengers of fortunes reap silvers off her slow decay
She swells, she sells well and I searched for her yesterdays
In a tune playing in the air, which only they can hear
They might teach me; they might be coming
I waited for them to come

The woman who baited me to her puddle in the pungent park
Her blood was rotting; another one was cocooned in her coming dark
She invited me to her abortion; the other one was misleading the blind
They were not real, but they knew the tune; but I hankered for the sight divine
I saw in your face light was coming like a grace
Trembling did it come

Your flares were blinding, you released a purple scream
There was a razor blade sheathed beneath your chemised dream
My tongue was slit loving you, my mouth is still glistening wet
I was waiting to leave you but I waited till you left
I saw in your maddening haze the moment coming like a blaze
So momentous did it come

And it was gone, rolling and heavy like a midnight train
In this city christmas still comes, holier than the halogen
Trapped in a cage with its windows and doors open
I’m waiting, like a pagan for its coveted heathen
Something should come

And more I trace in songs tuneless the journey of the moan
I’m stripped to words which I string in verse and hang it round my bones
The sound, it swirls in my ribs, in my reels; it is hurting just like truth
Curve me into something legible; cool me in your lute
I’m waiting, like a poem for the forceps of the poet
That woman she should come

She who is the muse who writes, the queen of all that is sung
Here I am ready to be wrought, here I am the chosen one
Gift me a garland of flowers and words, a tower with a beckoning beacon
The promise of the miracle, the vision of the unicorn
I’m waiting, something might be coming within me
Something might become

It’s a face before it is born
It’s a mourn before the the morn’
It’s a will before the done
It’s a stillness before the run
It’s a word which will balm the burn
It’s the chord which will sound the turn
It’s a petal which will unfurl
It’s a pearl which will deliver
It’s the shape before it escapes
It’s the name before it is said

It will come.

Image Courtesy: Oblivious by Danielle Kelly via FILE Magazine

Strangely, only writing articulates my being satisfactorily these days but the urge to publish has diminished too. I don’t know how to reconcile them, this diminishing urge and growing satisfaction. So here are a couple of poems which I treated like journals, lesser as poems, something continuous to personal prose and really giving a damn… I know it will be read by less people because it is longish. But I know that these days only friends read me…

I enjoy hyperlinking lines in a poem. I am drenched in Leonard Cohen’s songs these days. You might find, if you have listened to him too, his lines popping up here and there in my scarcely appearing writings these days. Sometimes I will link the phrases to his original verses sometimes I might not.

I won’t mention why I am angry, bitter at things happening to human beings in my country and in the world at large. I want to, instead, I want to kneel down at her altar, at her nakedness instead even if she is as fallible mortal as I am, even if she is as much unknown to me as much thoroughly I know this ugly world. It is just the act of beholding, just the moment. I give a damn to those daytime life of mine and the newspapers…

But before the poems…this song…along with Gustav Klimt’s paintings

The steadfast that I am, the fleeting that you are all
The bliss that spread in veins when an unexpected woman calls
She asks for the place I am living and who are living with me
She asks which day I was born, if I am a Cancer or a Gemini
I say: lady, I am both, I’m crowded and I am alone
I’m born here everyday, I’m delivered by none.

This friend introduced me to someone: this man has his way with the girls
He has this face like a scripture, but look for those eyes in the lurch
And the old one told me that a ladies’ man should roll in laughter and glee
In those sleepless ten thousand nights when I’m telling tales only to me
Even when words in hushed voices and in abbreviated telephone-texts
Assail like celestial waves haunted with touchlessness

This is the way I chose it, this is the way I preferred
This is the way I regret it, this is the way I suffer
This is what I have a laugh about…that’s my lot

My poet wished for a love of the harlot, to be happy, satisfied and free
Since he has lost his lovely mother to a general he went gunning to kill
My singer was named the silent one, he taught me how to gently kneel
At the delta which is resplendent, to her coming light as the breeze
And my seer taught me to stare at her, and disrobe my lust and lurid gaze
We will search her in the ribs of you all, we will unlock you with our secret keys

I’m a condemned man with my eyes dazzled by Jean-Luc Godard’s replete screens
Cohen’s drones in my ears, Baudelaire in my blighted lips
Receiving dart-stings in my office, young ones’ affections down the streets
Afflictions in my calcium, my head always in Paris
With our spleen and with our bile, with murder rolling in our fists
Sleepwalking shadows in the daytime, at night beautiful and beast

We who are forgiving all those ills, we who are always unjustly cursed
We in our silhouetted pride, with our bloodsoaked pens and verse
Walking in all sorts of wrongly places, the wrong years being my motherland
To station myself in your cross, I always stumble, I always stand
We with our tunes and slides and words, with our tongues locked in wars
Want to lie with you unreal ladies; that’s the lot, irredeemable, worse…

I have realized that I am far from writing something like that Cohen-song I have linked to. I have nothing of his sublime humility. The ‘lie’ in the last line of my poem has double-edges obviously and I hate to admit that I mean the lesser obvious more…

Murder and hatred rolling in our daytime wrists, bitter desire of wrecking the system we inhabit, simply because it is utterly wrong and as my poet said: “…the naked man and woman are just a shining artifact of the past…” something turned into ugliness by advertisements and porn, something Pier Paolo Pasolini showed blatantly in his unbearably nightmarish Salo (can recall I fell suicidal when the sun flashed in my eyes after I staggered out of the theater watching the film; I watched it again and will never do so in this lifetime).

And how I wish to exorcise my anger, just like this post is desperately trying to mute all those political frustrations and trying to be down on its knees at her delta, the cradle of rivers and the seas…

Feeling closer to those things I have already lost
Burning bridges that I’ve already crossed
Paring fingernails about to report on the war
Gets on my nerves when I start pondering again on love
Ghosts of things to come never leave me…

It’s not love, it is something else
A long-known word has moved in to a  stranger place
In these days when people whisper their secrets to their pockets
Silver circles roll in blind men’s sockets
A touch of soul in my skin never sets me free…

I wash away those angels’ faces each morning on my window-pane
I’m glad I discovered another one in the patches of my walls again
Like a killer who collects eyeballs I have also gathered them
And all those stares askance they still remain
After the faces are gone, my morning replies their questions…

Before I really might wet
With my grateful tears a woman’s grasses and her gate
I might sell my soul to a pimp and ghoul
Therefore I shiver and I fret
I don’t want to curve you into a sausage or a steak
My melancholy’s sister, my gin-voiced siren, my longing’s twin of the moment…

The day I was abandoned I was unfettered
I bartered all my caresses for these unpenned letters
Admitting never cared much for whom they will be addressed
Envelops are like clothes to be peeled off, words to be undressed
The names weigh lesser than the body therefore bared; nevertheless…

It was never love, it was something else
My being exploding in splinters of sentences in the space
In these days when my faceless voice sounds like rattles of freshly-minted coins
I rotate fingered and get un-owned, exchanged; it was a choice
To radiate vaporized pleasures and never to make promises…

I shave away a face each week in my wash-basin
I’m glad I curve a familiar one after what is shed and what remains
Is it a drive to desert before I’m abandoned again
Is it a revenge to keep her waiting, is it a ploy to wear another blame
My evening conjures an answer to shape a midnight’s question…

And you really might taste
My liquid scream, a man’s true fears when he breaks and he melts
In the soapbox between your legs, when he hides his unsheathed face
Therefore I shiver and I fret (and I don’t regret)
I don’t want to unravel my extent of a calf or a wreck
My pride’s examiner, my executioner, my relentless mirror of the moment…

Sorry, Sea of Memories…

I.

Dear Madam Butterfly how did you
Offer such tunes too delirious to be true
Before you saw the flesh which might be begging
orbs of pithy sweat hallucinatory as dew
If only my written words meant so much to you
Why did you set out rules before the bout assumed
And you threw up the board ’cause it didn’t begin
A story which would have started well with you
But I’m always leaving towns before I am through
We can pick up feelings but events, we can never choose

II.

To lay down a verse lesser than all I have wrote for you
I have deserted the woman you possibly would have been
And never tried to because what is more selfish
Your cravings for those words that smell tangier than my surface
Or my lust for the dizzy dust that your daily being sustain
I’ll leave your clothed nakedness unraveled unmanned
And I will temper my steel and send you the seething hiss
I’ll leave you forever ’cause you set unredeemed fire
I’ll reach for you more ’cause I won’t ever keep waiting at your door

III.

And all of you whom I have received when you women knocked
And all of your hours of waiting for the cut
And all of your voices that made my recent years
All of us postboxes standing by the street, lowered eyelids
To all those letters undelivered and never returned, sealed
And everything you gave me and my eyes wide shut
I know you wanted more I knew you’ll never spell it
I know I always pretended I never caught a broader hint
And you who will cling to your younger clearer men
I know you will steal my face during their blinding bliss
And you might be strange enough to lie about it to me

IV.

If a kiss is a ripple in the face of the water
Where did the kiss begin the breeze above flowing
Or the bouts of air released from her depths of dither
In those stories of kisses I appeared to wither
You needed a lump of stone to curve out another dream
And I realize in the chips ripped of and malingering
Were my possibilities and the standing shape your whim
I’ll never understand why I am driven to leaving
A story of short-lived passion gifted yourself a you
The tale of everlasting puzzle robbed myself of me.

V.

Pushing the pen firmly in the skin of a page
He tries to squeeze out few lines of litany
Trying to exorcise all seemingly trappings of the self that is
He has vowed not to pretend and never to admit
That he can’t recall when it was the last time or ever he has knelt
Selflessly before a cleavage whiter than winter, helplessly buried himself in deeper shit
But he still feels gnawing frost at the edge of his yearning….

Image Courtesy:Hidden 2008 by Deborah Hally, Composition 2 (Nikki/Yellow) by Alice Marsh-elmer, Untitled by Vedran Rapo and Untitled by Byron Barrett. All images via FILE Magazine

“Yeah let’s do something crazy, something absolutely wrong/while we are waiting for the miracle, for the miracle to come”

- Leonard Cohen, Waiting for the Miracle, The Future.

1.

When the boy laid his sight on those shadows spread out on her skin, supposedly not to be touched by living daylights, he remembers he started crying before not touching. Oozing tears is not the correct sort of performance of liquid masculinity, so one had to hold it back and hide it. It’s a sport, it’s a game, let us take it at its funniest end: he earlier assuaged her trepidations. Tears do not belong to such contracts.

He was haunted by moving images. Cinema introduces a reverse vector to all known motions in this world. The hand which is moving towards the touch is haunted by the possibility: body inevitably moving away from the body. The tragedy of sex is the virginity of souls. The touch irreversibly etches the trajectory of not being able to touch anymore. Of retracing backwards the move you thought you were finishing.

That day he saw his hand moving in, hoping to pull out some piece of paper which might be deemed ‘necessary and lost’ by the system he has sold his soul and freedom to. The little finger trying to move away from its more powerful and longer siblings, memories assailed his hand to a momentary freeze.

Each similar forward movement of the palm meant a search for something lost. The little finger, veering away, warns intuitively, that the search will fail. The palm and those longer fingers never understand, are never disarmed. They were too sure to clasp, tear, dig, rip out all lost valuables, being more sure that this must be the place we waited years to… Once upon a time he had it all, he thought, everything he wished to rip off from her. But no one returns back valuables unless politely asked to, not even the earth, neither the ocean. And the boy never knew the language to ask politely, because he never knew the name of those things he had lost, never knew if anyone taught him what they exactly were called.

The hand retracted. Without intending it, without knowing that it should be the end of the reverse motion loop when it snaps. From his fist, rough sands of wet time dripped off. Dreaming of a piece of dry skin falling like a rumpled paper with a twisted name in it he vowed to forever drift to faces he had never been to, to too many skins which have no name.

2.

Where the skins have no name. Where rains are poison still. And since the skins had none, names that is, they were empty enough to be sketched with a past. Empty screens beg those flickers which starts telling stories. Each touch being a sharp sting of the tongue of a venomous smiling flame. So he told her, the one who arrived and the next, to touch him with words. Words are not empty, words have their names written over them. Words came wrapped with names and meanings, and fumes of suggestions. Those wrappings revealed something fleshier than sands.

Overwrite my body with words. With words which smell stronger. Oversmell me, kill the stench of a corpse, of feelings which still rot but never die. Numb my feelings with ideas that burn. Tatoo me with unknown alphabets. Write those inevitably known ones in places where I can never set my prying eyes on. Read them when I am overturned and sleeping. Trace them with your fingers, I will guess them wrongly so we can play it again. We need to play it again because the wind is growing over the trees.

But tears still tremble at the edge of the window-ledge. Tears which failed the alkaline tests. Hello, I am the woman whom you will leave next. Hi, I am your man you will break to curse. When we exchange words we promise feelings. And feelings are creatures I wish to skin alive. Give me your words. Speak about me so that I can read you out, and I promise the margins will have copious notes.

And my words, since I never wrap them in addressed envelops are always promiscuous. Are you telling this to me? What’s there in what you say which means it’s meant for me, my name up there is not a guarantee. She ends it with a period, I can see the question-marks are sadly missing. I know you won’t believe me if I answer sincerely. So what’s the use of speaking? We always ask questions for answers we wish to, for lies we are sure of, for certainties we don’t want to get rid off. If it is not meant for you, its meant for nobody, its usable by all.

Those faces are not one and same. But the stories we trigger are. The hand will inevitably retract so it refuses to advance any more. Words when delivered never return.

3.

I know you will never believe my words. I know you will never invite my touch no more. I know you have your own fears, of hands which will move away forever from your flesh, leaving stains of sullenness. I know you have your own tears, of not keeping the promises which kisses leave, even if it is thousand kisses deep. Since you will never give it to me, I shower you with words of lust. I will burn you with trembles of possibilities.

And we start crying when you ask: are those words meant for me? Words float away while kisses and touches do anchor. Touches and kisses die and get buried in our flesh. They are planted while words flutter away their brittle butterfly-wings. Tears therefore arrive in the unspoken contract. She never understood why the tears are not foolish. You know why truth is just another salty ocular liquid.

Let me shed off my legendary pride. Let me utter crazy things smelling absolutely wrong. Let me do so because you are so afraid of things I am saying, because you say you never will, because you say it will turn to be so crazily wrong. Let me spill all my delicious venom unto you. And you shed tears which I will never see, ‘cause I am blind by choice with a vapid mouth. You shed tears ‘cause you know I will inevitably cease my words in no time, because they leave bitterness in my tongue too and one day I will say it no more, ’cause still you like them. And I am such a Mephistopheles who is so good with words and keeping things vague and one night you might need those vagueness again.

To you, my last night, because when you will turn away I will see my next one lined in your spine. You are everyone I will meet, everyone I will reduce to and will never forget, everyone I will remember with endearing affection, all those faces which will wait with a question and wont wait for the reply in the final town. All my future nights, waiting there and hunting me. Because I have lost those things I have forgot names of. Let us die together for a little while within a dying world while dreaming of not dying.

4.

“Your story was so long,
The plot was so intense,
It took you years to cross
The lines of self-defense.
The wounded forms appear:
The loss, the full extent;
And simple kindness here,
The solitude of strength.
You walk into my room.
You stand there at my desk,
Begin your letter to
The one who’s coming next…”

- Leonard Cohen, The Letters, Dear Heather.

Image: Poster of Jean-Luc Godard’s Je vous salue, Marie

Hope few are awake, wish only friends are reading… You might encounter lots of Wild West imageries in the posts following because I have been watching only Westerns these days and systematically so…

This blog, through its bombast and silence, has been the best index of my emotional life for one-and-half years, like the holstered gun in a half-breed gunslinger’s waist during his long-distance loneliness of riding. Unlike a hooligan’s one, it is a gun of a reluctant but destined man, the silence is aspired and appreciated.

I don’t shoot to kill except cases of self-defense, I shoot to practice. I admit the iron’s overload of ridiculous manhood, I admit its wages of shameful sin, I admit its contract with the devil. I do not inhabit the age of living anymore, I am riding in the era of survival.

There had been posts here which provoked reactions from loved ones which I harbor in my heart because it burns, my private burden of bitterness which eats me up in there. Oh there had been widespread cheers, applause, awed eyes which I enjoyed much at the beginning. Suddenly I mutated into a public persona. “You write well”, “I read your blog”, unknown faces uttering reticence and delivering much through eyes. I acquired the skill of smiling back and uttering less than a formal thanks. I am a visible person in my trade; I am a performer. But in such cases I know the faces. This turned out to be strange, amusingly so, suddenly being read without being seen, suddenly being watched in the darkness. It was blissful like pungent corruption. Suddenly there were bloodstains in my wrists and palms.

I started drifting. To places I had never seen before. To faces I have never been before. Winds beneath my feet and a pine-box crawling somewhere like a snail.

My private burden of bitterness because everyone of you tender ones cussed my blog decently beneath your breaths one day, suddenly you erupted, fingered my wounds and accused me of sin. You who started praising my expressions, my words. It had an inevitable pattern. When you started caressing my words I knew you will curse them too. So many times my fingers trembled on the button to delete, a single squeeze needed to obliterate them all of my words glistening like carnal beads of sweat and instead I decided to drift, though I tried to stay, attempted feebling arguments, it was merely ceremonious, my final gestures of respect for tender ones. To you, you and you.

The final nails, each time, was an epithet of judgment. Short precise decree that I am a sinner. That I am far from being an artist, my words are always loaded with intentions which are seldom holy. But I never performed evil.

So there he is, trying to defend himself under the burning sun, a man who displayed his words as if he had exhibited his skin up there without a veil. And, as you teethed, for sale.

I will never accuse you tender ones of inconsideration, of harsh judgments. I will accuse you of pretending not to be selfish. You tried to outplay my pride with your pride. You wanted to be the origin of my words and to be the destination of my words too. You wanted to be the face for which my words predating your arrival should have waited. Only one of you hissed that my words should have meant for you and you only, and I never stopped being haunted by you because you bared your fangs, because you ceased to pretend, because you did shed your decency of pride…once upon a time. But why did you, goddamn ladies, intend to own my words which, once emitted, are beyond me like raindrops unleashed from the skies? How can the sky came them back?

I sheathed my iron. I emptied it even when I drifted away from the face which hated me more it cared for me. But I gasped, I couldn’t breath even when the air was sweetest. I rode faster and furthest from her gaze. I was free again to write but still I never stopped to satisfy my itching palms, my quivering fingers, my urges pushing me beyond my reserve. I slept under the unveiled stars and a sudden distant echo of an unknown nocturnal bird did slit my sleep’s throat: why do I always endanger my possibility to settle before a face? The stars never answered me, the darkness behind the gaping wound never did.

He is the fastest one west to El Paso. That’s a lie. He always had been lucky not because he was fearless, but because he knew that this life of unbridled, unanchored freedom has fewer meanings now, it’s never worthy a thing you would cling on to and protect via pragmatic retreats. An inch of good luck might hit the ribs and end this weary streetwalk to fame which has ceased to be his gallery of trophies; fame and admiration, like one’s first name or others, are thingies assigned to you but for others to use, soft-toys people squeeze for a few days and discard. Eyes which look up to him will be the eyes which will burn the next day and eyes which will grow up to yell: draw it, you slimy two-faced low-down half-breed liar! Hatred and envy is in the flipside of early admiration. It tires, this ritual of parading brittle pride, still one draws next and shoots gathering all bitterness against beasts-with-balls and again luck misses the aching inches your weariness so begged this time and did men see the tinge of sadness in the twisted lips of the legs which are still standing?

Because next: another pair of eyes looking at the face of a varmint in the garden. You saved your skin and you have slipped away from decency. The precision, the reticent rhythm, the sudden blitz of speed after throbbing stasis, the moments when the taut body is suffused with the calmness of rigorous mind: all those skills you acquired because you inhabit the age of survival, not the age of living, will throw you beyond the town of the lawful and the decent and the beautiful. Condemned in the loneliness of a long-distance ride you might never reach the pine-box which is crawling away somewhere, you might even miss it for inches. You might be nibbled away by worms and ants, sans glory, sans grass, sans shade, sans a song…

But hell! Drifting through the faces has turned out to be the brother of your breathing. You have lost your ability to settle, boy, always culled by an eerie voice unheeded by anyone in the world to come or in the world that is, an instinct saying that there is something beyond, a reckoning. And your throat wets with a crystal lust, your sinews squeeze for a better kill…

Image Courtesy: Blues Reset via File Magazine.

Image Courtesy: Charles l. Johnson via FILE Magazine

Wake up, sleeping blog, wake up… Wake up without your clothes, wake up stark. Wake up in whatever phase of the dream you are in, wake up…you might…just DIE!

The crowd has trickled away…dear blog…only stone-eyes remaining unblinking still, stone-eyes of angels, cupids, gremlins, gargoyles. Unblinking eyes are friendly eyes, they won’t harm you.

Wake up sleeping blog…I have things to tell you. I feel like…bursting with words in my bladder. Dear blog, we have hibernated till the sifting crowd has swept their expectations away. It is still like a corpse-ridden battleground, few are alive to claim possession of dead words and decapitated sentences any more.

Wake up. It’s time. To run.

1.

I’m eating her words each night, promising nothing. When you eat someone’s words…you make promises. But you eat her words until you say that you’d preferred to lie, you never, ever promised anything, to anyone during your promiscuous nocturnal trips, when you send your army of shamanic words to ravage them gentle citizens.

And you promised to exorcise, instead you vitiated…malignant.

I only have few things to say in my defense: I’m a sucker for well-curved words. …And words, that’s something people never perceive to agree, are terminally ill children whose life-expectancy stretches up a bit each time they are responded to and caressed. I’m destined to look back to words which wait for a touch… My touch hurts because all touches are destined to withdraw and no one pays heed to prior notices, they flutter in the dust unread, unseen…

2.

I dreamt I am two-faced, dear blog. Half of it is painted with a purple grin, the rest is hooded as if it is hiding a scar. One appears shameless, another covering a shameful eye. Before the grin menacingly reminded the scowl that he makes him ‘complete’…they were talking. When they are…sometimes…poised to kill each other, they recall that they are supposed to, born to, destined to talk with each other, interminably.

When the hood asked “why are you what you are? Bizarre and faulty?”, the grin answered, after looking up askew, rolling eyes clockwise twice and anticlockwise and pretending once-in-a-lifetime introspection: “because I look the way you see me, I am the way you react to me, I am what I provoke in you, i am what you are afraid to be!”

“You are scarred, challenged, amputated and incomplete!” the hood hissed and invited the final wordplay, replete with chuckled glee.

3.

Imagine a hellish ride through the wilderness in a stormy dusk. You plead the horse need not be tortured more because it is a being which haven’t learnt speaking and therefore predates lying. Then you find a ghost-town consisting of semblances of roofs, walls and shades. At least the horse will get its rest! You now search for a appropriate shade for your head. And all those doors are open with silhouettes of waiting, inviting bat-like apparitions, women in their loosely gowns.

All of them sport faces of women who have scores left to be settled with you. None will accuse you, nothing matters still, but ghosts of dead questions are liberated if they are asked and answers are seldom believed.
Only your face matters when you are trying to answer, and your eyes and your voice… It’s just those remains of curiosity you need to satisfy if you wish to leave this place…unscathed: why? Did you? Do that?

A man living a life where he refuses to be either what he feels he is or how he is being read by angel-eyes. Since you plunge an anchor in a woman’s iris you decide not to make ocular contacts. An account which should repel you with its arrogance, haughtiness and vanity but believe me it is truth according to them. He writes to exorcise ghosts and haunt kindly ones. I should be better forgotten because I am a pain in your memory’s ass!

A blog which dreamt it was a film, like the dog dreaming it is a butterfly. Don’t blame me, I heard a old man in dark glasses say it and a younger man in glasses which are lesser so obeying it…

“Film is like a battleground… Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word, emotion!” Samuel Fuller in Pierrot le fou, 1965.

4.

“How many men have you forgotten?”
“As many women as you’ve remembered.”
“Don’t go away!”
“I haven’t moved.”
“Tell me something nice.”
“Sure. What do you want to hear?”
“Lie to me. Tell me all these years you’ve waited.”
“All these years I’ve waited.”
“Tell me you’d have died if I hadn’t come back.”
“I would have died if you hadn’t come back.”
“Tell me you still love me like I love you.”
“I still love you like you love me.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

Johnny Guitar, 1954, Nicholas Ray.

“well, maybe there’s a god above
but all i’ve ever learned from love
was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you
it’s not a cry that you hear at night
it’s not somebody who’s seen the light
it’s a cold and it’s a broken halleluja” – Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

This blog is personal, pretending to be literary. After 200 odd posts and intended reduced visits I intend to post only in Bengali for the time being, of course with occasional exceptions. This blog desires to be quiet, so you might find comments closed in many posts. I have my share of favorite readers and I do like to increase numbers. But please read the posts and not my life, life is too personal a deal to dabble with

This blog has attempted a resurrection previously, dies out now and then and in the process of doing so it intends to partially hide its previous corpses. My categories are unique enough, so clicking them in post-infos might lead you to a list of my posts only in WordPress, pages-links have disappeared though links to 45 or so of my earlier pages are strewn across my earlier posts. I am sure few will visit them, but if someone is kind or curious enough to do so, s/he will find all the links live (sans those posts or pages whose deaths I cannot recall). You will find a page of contents to my earlier writings here.

Love’s Ragpicker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.

Click here for a brief history of the Rizwanur Rehman tragedy

.

Death of Rizwanur Rehman: Police conduct inhuman, says court

News Source: The Telegraph, India, August 15, 2008

Calcutta, Aug. 14: Calcutta High Court today accepted the CBI’s conclusion that Rizwanur Rahman had committed suicide and cleared the agency to chargesheet seven people, including his father-in-law Ashok Todi and three police officers, for abetment.
The three others are Ashok’s brother Pradip Todi, relative Anil Saraogi and the Rahmans’ family friend Pappu, all accused of trying to break up Rizwanur’s marriage with Priyanka Todi, which her father did not approve of.
The city police’s attempts to arm-twist the couple were “unconstitutional” and “inhuman”, the court said, adding that then police commissioner Prasun Mukherjee’s conduct had encouraged “his subordinates to harass the couple even more”.
The three officers to be chargesheeted are Ajoy Kumar, Sukanti Chakraborty and Krishnendu Das. The charges of abetment to suicide, criminal intimidation and criminal conspiracy carry a maximum punishment of 10 years in jail.
Justice Dipankar Dutta also recommended departmental proceedings against Prasun and then deputy commissioner (headquarters) Gyanwant Singh for acting “irresponsibly on the false accusations made by Ashok Todi”.
He said Prasun had “suppressed facts” and “shown more interest in helping the Todis than the young couple”. Gyanwant had been the first officer to call the couple to Lalbazar before referring the case to Ajoy Kumar.
The trial will be held in a CBI court at the Bankshall Court premises in Calcutta.
However, the court stayed the operation of the order for three weeks, giving the Todis and the government time to appeal before a higher bench. Government sources indicated the state would appeal.
Mamata Banerjee today demanded that the chief minister quit and apologise to Rizwanur’s mother since the verdict had gone against his government.

Calcutta, Aug. 14: Police’s attempt to break up the marriage of Rizwanur Rehman and Priyanka Todi was “unconstitutional” and “inhuman”, the high court said on Thursday.
“The way the police handled the case was unconstitutional, inhuman… and against the rule book… They were fed with false allegations (by Priyanka’s family) which they accepted unquestioningly,” Justice Dipankar Dutta said.
The judge allowed the CBI to file chargesheets against three police officers and four members of the Todi family — including Priyanka’s father Ashok — for their role in driving Rizwanur to suicide.
Commenting on the conduct of the police, the court said “there are two kinds of thanas in the city” — local police stations where “common people” lodge their complaints and the one in Lalbazar where “influential people” go with their problems.
“It seems the police only act on complaints lodged with Lalbazar,” Justice Dutta said, referring to the manner in which the cops had summoned Rizwanur and Priyanka to their headquarters following a “complaint” from the Todis.
The judge said this was done even after Karaya police station — Rizwanur’s house in Tiljala Lane was under its jurisdiction — confirmed that the marriage was legal.
On former police commissioner Prasun Mukherjee (now additional director-general), the court said he had “suppressed facts” and that his statement on September 23 that Rizwanur had committed suicide “only added fuel to the fire”. The statement came two days after the 30-year-old graphic designer’s body was found on the railway tracks in Patipukur and before the post-mortem report arrived.
“In the press conference, Mukherjee had suppressed the fact that he had already met Pradip Todi who had sought his help in breaking up the marriage… He gave credence to the false allegations levelled by the Todis instead of helping the couple when they had turned to police for help. This encouraged his subordinates to harass the couple even more,” the judge observed.
“This was not expected of a senior officer,” the judge added. “Mukherjee had shown more interest in helping the Todis than the young couple.”
As for Gyanwant Singh and Ajoy Kumar, the two deputy commissioners who have since been transferred, the court said they had acted “illegally by interfering in the affairs of a legally married couple.”
Blaming the police “pressure” on Rizwanur for his death, the judge said: “The police had acted illegally. It’s a fact that the pressure applied by the police on Rizwanur to break up his marriage led to his death. He felt suffocated…”
The judge said it was clear that Priyanka’s father Ashok Todi had influenced the police and that the CBI had “done no wrong” by filing a murder case against the Todis before starting its probe.

Rizwanur case: CBI told to chargesheet accused

News Source: Times of India, August 15, 2008
In remarks critical of the role of then Kolkata Police Commissioner Prasun Mukherjee in the Rizwanur Rehman death case, the Calcutta High Court on Thursday directed the CBI to chargesheet all the seven accused including three police officers.
Those to be chargesheeted are – industrialist Ashok Todi, father-in-law of Rizwanur, his brother Pradip Todi, their cousin A Saraogi, Pappu, a friend of Rizwanur’s family, then DCP (Detective Department) Ajay Kumar, ACP Sukanti Chakraborty and SI Krishnendu Das (of anti-dowry unit).
Computer graphics teacher Rizwanur, who was under tremendous pressure to get separated from his wife Priyanka, daughter of Ashok Todi, ever since their marriage, was found dead along a rail track on September 21, last year.
Taking a strong exception to Mukherjee’s role, Justice Dipankar Datta observed that he had not stated at his press conference the fact that Todi had met him and that Rizwanur and Priyanka had been called at the city police headquarters at Lalbazar.
It is conclusively inferred that the police had favoured the Todis and the then Police Commissioner did not respond with correct facts, Justice Datta said in his 120-page order.
Holding that the city police had taken a partial attitude and had failed to discharge it duty while handling the case, he said that the police power had been misutilised.
Rizwanur’s death had sparked off widespread furore following which the High Court directed CBI to conduct a probe into the case.
The CBI submitted its report on February 28 to the court stating that Rizwanur had committed suicide, but recommended action against senior city police officers including the then Police Commissioner.
News Source: Times of India, August 15, 2008
Nearly a year after Rizwanur Rahman’s mysterious death – an incident that shook the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government – Calcutta High Court on Thursday ordered CBI to file chargesheets against all seven accused for “provoking” the young graphic designer to suicide.
The order comes just four days before what would have been Rizwan and Priyanka Todi’s first wedding anniversary. Rizwan had fought a lone battle against police and some of the city’s most powerful people before being found dead on railway tracks on September 21, 2007.
The seven accused include Priyanka’s father Ashok Todi, uncles Pradip Todi and Anil Saraogi, police officers Ajoy Kumar, Sukanti Chakraborty and Krishnendu Das and ‘mediator’ Syed Mohinuddin alias Pappu.
Justice Dipankar Dutta also gave the go-ahead to the state government to initiate departmental proceedings against all five police officers, including former police commissioner Prasun Mukherjee and the then DC (headquarters) Gyanwant Singh, if deemed necessary. The court stayed the operation of the order for three weeks.
Justice Dutta was scathing in his comments on the way police handled the case. He held police’s interference in the legal marriage of Rizwan and Priyanka “unconstitutional and illegal.” The court had used the same terms for the police firing in Nandigram on March 14 which killed 14 villagers.
“It is an inescapable conclusion that there are two police stations. Lalbazar (police headquarters) is for the influential ones. And local police stations are for the aam aadmi. It is disgraceful that people have to knock on the high court’s door for lodging an FIR,” Justice Dutta said in a packed courtroom.
Kolkata police was lambasted for not heeding Rizwan and Priyanka’s letter for help. “He (Rizwan) was summoned by high-ranking officers as if he had committed an offence. The complaint of Rizwan and Priyanka never reached the CP’s table. False and frivolous complaints were lodged against Rizwan,” Justice Dutta said.

Image Courtesy: Three Lights by Daily Dose of Imagery.

The blog is sleeping still, and dreaming. Below: excerpts from some posts (links provided) I wrote on Cinema.

The Bride wore Yellow » To begin with, not a post written by me; but a collection of a couple of reviews of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, vols. I & II, written by a dear friend. This was published in June, 2007.

Look at my eyes girl, you will see your mother’s son »
One of those rare (very long) academic writings the likes of which I hate to publish in this blog, this one was about Ritwik Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar. I remember promising that I will write a follow-up post on Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar, I didn’t keep the promise…

A Blank Little Post »
Like a blank little screen… Not exactly on cinema, somehow provoked by…

• Something which communicates, something which cinema can, theoretically, never use/record: the touch. The way the touch conveys. Ultimately that was the ur-language, the language before language was. And social language, the voice, the written words, the words typed in, the glance and the look, all try to displace, replace, substitute that vehicle to mean: the touch. Not because touch has become impossible, but because touch has lost its magic. Therefore sick chats, sicker phone-sex, nauseating scraps and mails … all try to convey a kink which the touch is supposed not to be able of triggering; no, if words or ogles are meant to be a means to the end of the touches, one finds that the touch is ultimately as cold as frozen maggoty meat. But once upon a time touch was a language. Can you remember how the shivers in the water-envelop told you that mom is happy with you inside her? Or dad’s first nervous trembling grasp? And all those things which we never tried to remember because we never thought that we will lose them. And now, each desperate kiss is to be recorded, the hand grasping the hand is firmer so that one does not forget and one day we cannot recall a touch, differentiate her from her, isn’t it as nightmarish as forgetting the face whose name we can recall (the other way round is always more irritating but less disturbing)?. But how many unique touches assigned to unique people do we remember?

The way they touched: in memorium Ingmar Bergman and Ciao…Antonioni! Cinema passes away »
…And then, tributes to two great filmmakers dying on consecutive July-days…

• But touching your skins, the skins of your face, were we able to mean, able to express? So cliched it was, the places to touch, each time the same and you expected none to change the game; as boys, as men…your landscapes were just those few tourist-spots, which in photos were displayed, which the prints described and brochures prescribed: a moonlit land were limited to those erogenous zones where neons glowed, where high billboards…
• …Yesterday it was Ingmar Bergman, today Michelangelo Antonioni. Old men fading away in rain, sat in the parkbench like bookends. And I can see a lonely man in Grenoble, stubbles and a stick, sitting in the park, paused his weary flipping through the pages of his book named Histoire du Cinema and staring blank. Time is up, JLG! The chessboard is withdrawn, the mimes have ended their tennis-play. No more stories to tell, no more women to look at, no more ideas to give birth to, no more battles to win… No more life in your Europe to wonder at through your lenses…

L’Avventura: an Erotica »
This is a favorite piece of mine. It’s based on a great Antonioni film and is one of those rare work of complete fiction in this blog and at those collage of images I can stare for minutes! It had a setting, rather an important historical one: the way my metropolis is expanding and invading the rural hinterlands. It is an erotica, but it had political subtexts and it ended like this

• When I am watching your face being flushed with desire, peeping into those skins which I was so eager to see, touching you there where I always yearned to touch…I know I am grappling the surfaces, the cloths of your soul and can never enter those dungeons of yours where feelings are cajoling thoughts…I was being overwhelmed with sentiments and tears that these will end faster ’cause we are kids afraid under the open sky which is a metropolis looming large over the countryside, that we might not have our time again, that touching you there always bears the shadow of lifting away my body from yours, that bodies meet to part again. But you are there girl, under the clouds and the sky…living to the lees few moments of your day when your body is your mind! Immeasurable floods of thoughts swarming your mind’s sky…

The Boy inside me »
This was…very, very personal; but still based on another famous Nouvelle Vague film. Now I smile when I read it…

• Believe me, you always accused me of pampering him, but I am tired of him! I abhor him, his obstinate silence of not growing up, his arrogance of not coping up, his systematic evaporation of all cuteness which would have redeemed him, the hints of pimples in his cheeks renders him unsuitable of any affection. I watch him, he looks hungry. But when he watches me contemplating him, he gathers up a poise, a dumbness, a gait, a glance which provokes a slap hard to restrain. An wriggling unease in my torso thrusts me towards finding out an excuse to do it: slap him right and left after offering a choice of any one. But okay, I turn away my eyes because a slap must never search out a miscreant, the other way round is preferable.

A Day in the Life »
I liked this one too! A post you are supposed to read along with the Beatles song provided. It was haunted with a teardrop following a kiss-in-the-screen…

• I was troubled when someone again brought the issue of bullets and holes and body-and-hole counts. Someone said that my blog is the most blatant instance of narcissism: I have merely used politics months ago to draw attention to my self-centered writings. I hate discussing my blog in my office. As the sun climbed down the sky I was worried that my phone might ring and I am not in a position to speak. You might phone me and ask me if I am enjoying the separation. She might phone me and ask why am I not letting her love me since I did let you throughout these years and you didn’t deserve it and she deserves it. “Why are you not allowing me/did you not allow me to take care of you?” both of you might ask and believe me, though I try to hide it from my colleagues, my students and all those beautiful eyes, I feel like screaming into most insecure tears under the sky that I don’t know, I never had the answers, I never will answer even if I come across the truth of that question. It only hurts that both of you are crying bitter in this hazy afternoon and Sylvia Bataille turned her tear-drenched face towards me last night.

About Pierrotting »
Another aborted beginning. Don’t read it if you hate rambling long thoughts-aloud to strange references… I thought of writing a novel on a favorite French Nouvelle Vague character. I never wrote it, but here were some ambitious sketches… There is also another index to few more posts here (featuring an affectionate farewell to yours truly by that man whom I miss – Paul Knopfler – who called me “Pierrot”). Darn Paul! Things are really making me nostalgic about months a year ago!

• I gather meanings, I collect words. Sitting by the water when I am trying to light a cigarrette in the breeze, this madman visits me in this place. I pay him a coin, he offers me a word. These days he offers me one even if I lack changes. I know it is a word which I have dropped few hours ago in another street and never knew that I have lost it. Tossing the word, I discover that a new meaning is there on the flip-side of it. Or, it is not exactly a new meaning always; I never knew it had a meaning afterall, or I have actually lost my dictionary, or I have forgot that words have meanings at all. I know words have their use-values, or their exchange-values. I use them each day to squeeze out their utilities or to buy things in exchange, but only when this madman gives them back to me I understand that they also have “meanings”.

Image courtesy: Concrete Leaf by Daily Dose of Imagery

This blog is sleeping; and dreams like words and images arise out of its unconscious, the archive of hidden and buried posts. Here are snippets of what I wrote about writing, chronologically presented unlike dreams:

The Erotics of Writing »

• And then I read them again, and I feel dizzy, as if in a post-coital bliss, and I start recalling what happened moments ago, when I was assailed by your words, and I cannot recall, my faculty of recording moments was suspended then, I was in throes of pleasure which is gone like the flashes and bangs of thunder but fading sounds still rumble. This recalling is the process of understanding your writings. We males try to understand, you women feel and experience, and when you are writing you resist those masculine processes of total comprehension, appropriation, prose-ification of meaning. Your words in flux, meanings melting, the enigma of non-linear train of thoughts baffle all masculine habit of meaning-making. So I stop understanding you, cannot recall that narrative of making love … and I realise that I cannot understand you ever, I don’t wish to. You are there lying by me like a satisfied woman who has tasted her man and I can feel the “set of secret languages delightfully taking a shape” within me, I will write now, or later. Only regrets that I never can catch that shape. May I maintain that poetry is feminine, I am convinced about that (and not all women writing achieve that being woman, not all men approve of that idea) and I should thank you girls.

Writing, Post-coital »

• The writing becomes autonomous, almost. Uncontrollable, “a result of undecided love”, graving/craving for fruit, to whom you need to forfeit yourself when it is hungry, and when it is hungry, only love can keep it alive. Yeah, mystic, paranormal, a web that entangles yourself, the writer. But whose actually is the ‘claustrophobic state of affair’, the baby feeling cocooned, or mommy feeling stuffed in with a throbbing life? This is not known to me, either or both. Thinking also of the state of reader, me when I read you; I do feel stuffed with unnameable things which is, ironically, language with few extra bags and baggages (unnameable, ’cause babies inside do not have names until we name them on the paper).

An Erotica on Writing »

• That is writing to me. Writing you. Speaking you. Looking at your face divine. Breaking into thankful tears after orgasmic release. The mystic sublime of an atheist, non-believer like me. Making love through words. And you lie there, replete with my words all over your body, words readable by no-one but me, in a language universal but private, words which might mean nothing, but the act of fingering your body with alphabets, mouthing your body with phrases, stroking your body with brushes of tongues touching sounds, writing you into existence when you already exist, making you the woman. Bearing you and giving birth to you while you are there somewhere. And when the writing ceases starting to miss you, you fly away, escape somewhere, the pain that I cannot hold you eternally like that, the remorse of finishing it off, but the inevitability of reaching the end of a frantic narrative beyond my control. I write you to the world, speak you to myself, love you to you only.

About ‘Love-Language’: another view from this side »

• So that’s the point: a language corrupted, how do we redeem language of love from the clutches of proprietary power, patriarchy and gender. Gender? Can love-language be relieved of gender? Isn’t it a sheer impossibility? Not exactly, in my language, we have the immense treasure of love-songs written by Rabindranath Tagore, who exploited well the absence of gender-markers in the verbs or pronouns of Bengali language and created a bliss of androgeneity, or, in other words, sheer absence of gender. Love-language can be relieved of gender, not only in its use of registers, but also in the ideological unconscious (or ideological superego?) underneath the manifest language. But how … dunno … have a hunch that poetic love-language must express the body instead of gender; am not talking of erotica or pornography, am talking about a body beyond masculinity or femininity. What am I talking about? Probably about a language which isn’t there …

The Artist’s Underword »

• But what can you do then? Well, I have my ways. Artists can be blunt, should be misleading, dishonest, capricious, not in his works, but in his statements…Artists are clever people, armed with cunning, they know how to survive, they know how to dupe and bribe the powerful, because they know that only they are capable of making hidden statements which will be understood/deciphered in posteriority. And artists should never, ever elucidate themselves, because a reader/viewer must work out the meaning investing at least a few fraction of cerebral labour that the artist spends; as specialised readers, we artists know that the pleasure of experiencing an artwork lies exactly in the pursuit of this elusive structures of design and meaning…

The Readers’ Underwords »

• Should someone write about his own work? If one does, does it render the ‘original’ artwork redundant, ‘cause its lacking something? Or should they be considered as rejoinders/afterthoughts/footnotes to the ‘original’ and be considered as a continuation? In my previous post I talked about certain artists’ mischievousness. I still stand by it. Eccentric, you might label me…but I think that artists toil and slog, and they slog hard; they cannot make their works easily consumable (unless they are really paid a helluva lot of dough!). I am not being an old-fashioned modernist, I am accusing the common receivers’ habit of shorter attention span, instant gratification and shallow comprehensibility that the culture industry coupled with consumerism brews. And which medium can be more exemplary of that than the one I am currently dabbling in and you are engaging with than blogging?

Writing me in, writing me out »

• I define art as all-encompassing, writing, painting, photography…the difference is quantitative, not qualitative. Let me take painting or poetry as a model. What is poetry? As a teacher who hates to be esoteric I try to place things initially in very simple terms to my students. To them I have defined poetry as an exercise which wrests away words from the socially accepted, constrained lexical ‘meaning’. Thus each word gains connotation in a certain context, within a certain syntax of language and emotions…that’s poetry to me. That’s art to me. When I look at Van Gogh’s later paintings, I don’t look at sunflowers or churches or crows or wheatfields. I watch the yellows, I watch the hasty and bold brushstrokes…because brushstrokes in late Van Gogh appear as brushstrokes…a static medium is suddenly evoking swirling motions. As a student of cinema I know that the introduction of motion within staticity also introduces something else: time. So when I watch those yellows and brushstrokes I know I am watching the nervous desperation of an unloved man who knows he is on the brink of either total madness or a suicide…he doesn’t have much time left at his disposal…

Still writing me in, writing art thou? »

• A blog, unlike a book, is temporal, with a past, present and future. I am thinking about my blog and the past few weeks when I was not being able to post anything due to my exhaustions and depressions. The home page was showing a post which was dated days back…the intervals were painfully gaping open my inactivity, my writer’s block…in more precise terms (now this is too personal) my ongoing inability to express. Thinking of Paul’s blog which has sadly halted in a particular day; each day the post at the top speaks out the piling up days of silence. As I was trying to “breathe tomorrow in” during my days of troubled articulation, fingers poised over the keyboard but unable to strike, I knew I was trying to “exhale today away”. And in a blog like this, I am only what I eat!

Self-portrait in Gratitude »

• How dangerously can I probe into myself? I know the zones at the edge of which I might just falter and halt. I started writing last year after experiencing a major crisis in my life, which is very apparent in this blog but it is an event which I don’t wish to discuss much, because it does not involve my life only. When I started writing, this mining and unearthing of the self was, of course, a project but I never wished to confess. I knew vaguely that it was a reconstruction of the self through mourning something. Thus, when I am reconstructing anew, it is not exactly detrimental to my psyche if I dissect my earlier self because it is something I have abandoned. If redefining self is what I will be doing, then I can lighten my shoulders of many burdens too, many assumed and imposed identities. That’s what I am doing.

Adorning the surface of a loss »

• It is like the potters, the makers of vases and vessels. They shape the surface of a space that holds nothing. That this shape will be used later to hold water, or grain or a plant is a different proposition altogether. The potter has nothing to do with it. They delimit the contours of a space of nothingness, it is like an act of mourning, giving surface to a shape holding something which is lost and lost irretrievably…It is possible; to write the private, but I don’t attempt it. It is neither possible for me to write about the enormity and complexity of real pains, real loves, real longings and losses, nor will it be fair doing so…because of other lives involved. In those enormity of emotions, we are selfish, utter egoists and thus blinded from the truth. Though I know of certain processes of relatively freeing my discourse from my ego, I am sometimes ruthlessly posited against myself when I write or speak but I really don’t matter. Truth can be best understood from fictions, even our own truth, from shapes of things which we have lost or sometimes is worth losing because you know it will return with its enormity.

My Own Private Euphoria: an incomplete post »

• My choice of expressing myself in what is our father-tongue rather was a conscious one. Because I never intend to publish these in hard-copies, never intend to be known as a poet in the public, I wanted a space where even Indian-English novels have failed to reach…at ground-zero, a place where local Bangla rock-bands have reached (and failed to reap results), a level where pure expression is possible because culture has still not reached there with its codifications and history of the normative. The magic of words have never failed, but culture has failed miserably. I needed a space, during a moment of crisis in my life, to start from a scratch, to pour myself into words and imminently forgetting it, to give birth to a self and see it flicker and die within moments, to gather all achievements and feel it all as ‘virtual’ the next morning. Blogging, thankfully, has no history or canons; no tradition as yardsticks, no landmarks to imitate or fight with. At least sitting by my keyboard I can start with my emotions and arrive elsewhere…

This post will mean anything only to my regular readers. This rambling post, I don’t know how long it will be, might turn out to be a landmark post. Okay, let me shun that pompous beginning…

I was particularly disturbed when I wrote my last one, and somehow, each of the five responses had been epiphanic to me. Epiphany lies in the state of imagination of the beholder, so you will never understand – radicalancient, jane, ritwik and particularly lou – where and how you touched it. The touch…was mine only.

For generations of a some not-so-distant future, if this blog stays and wordpress servers never crash, one might find the portrait of the psyche of a typical Bengali male, as Jane described my posts twice or so, a kind which is rapidly fading; I might safely say: here is one of the last bastion of survivors.

I.

One of the best has deleted his blog. I remember Radical Hypocrite’s swan song, where he mentioned me in my proper name (I fondly remember). Thankfully, all his posts are saved in my coffers and he said when he was going:

The tale awaits the listener for there’s midnight now, imagined or otherwise, and silence, if you will excuse the sound of dripping water, for there is always a damn tap somewhere that refuses to shut its mouth, and the nocturnal sounds of the highway, the solitary car speeding by, the whimpered stillness of buses that have concealed their sighs and bones in a blue scrappy paint …all the tired whispers of the men who have lingered in the roadside stalls, repeating to themselves the stories of their homes or the dreams they once had of coming to this big city, of making it big and all other beautiful breaths of despair and love.

…I’ve almost stopped opening my heart out to people for the simple reason it’s very difficult to explain the occasional spells of serious depressions I suffer. And I won’t do that again, not here, not anywhere, not while I live.

…How many times did I tear off the pages of my favourite books, break the earthen idols of Hindoo goddesses my mother devoutly worships, how many times did I hit myself hard against the wall, hit my face with a fist pulled hard, bit my hands and legs, all to force teardrops from my eyes? Pain in pleasure, pleasure in pain, self-mortification, as the bastard psychiatrist told me when I parted ways with the only dream I had consciously lived till now.

… I shall end at the beginning, I shall return to that privileged instant of my life, my lost, forgotten shared dream, my religion, though I am and will remain a conscious heretic…and when you were old enough to see a flock of shrieking, brightly coloured birds flying off overhead, darkening the sun, casting huge shadows, birds of your individual dreams dreaming about a collective, flying away, and having lost your Icarus wings, beyond repair, tried never to make sense of it all, you’ll never understand how difficult it becomes at times just to pretend being ‘normal’.

I don’t blame you, envy you, loathe you for not knowing all that. Each of us have had enough quantities of self-loathing sufficient to last and overwhelm our lifetimes. I thank you again for bearing with me. See my heart, mutilated by pride and once maddened with fidelity- I’ve opened it up here for you. For once, I’ve ceased to be a hypocrite to myself…

I can’t write better words…but I am not going away!

Only a Bengali, living anachronistically in this strange city of our can write such words, when a history of a bit more than a century of his race haunts his mind. It was the story of men; the women have just started to speak it out. We dreamt of a flock of shrieking, brightly coloured birds, darkening the sun, casting huge shadows…across the planet, we saw our shadows fly…

We reveled in the death of a dream, dying of loves.

II.

My last post is a disaster of a kind. For a whole day or more, I saw the third section not getting connected with the previous two, sticking out as the only truth of my face. The first one, after the prelude, mentioned three reactions to – as I said it – the trivial, the symptomatic and the horrible. Now I smile a bit when I see that I couldn’t describe the last one; my keyboard stuttered there, incidentally the most riveting of those abominations: my tryst with pain had a halt. It has reached its limits.

Yes readers, this year-long journey of blogging was a tryst with pain. Writing created a kind of rhythm, a rise and then a sudden fall into crashing pain. My sincerity towards writing, my honesty lied in the sustaining of that moment: when pain engulfed me and I curved my words out of my flesh. Because we always mourned the day the music died…

Through poems after poems I talked about the dissolution of the self into the suffering of the ‘other’. This ‘other’ was not mere grammatical others. I talked of the moment when the body is abandoned and love still lingers in the shrunk limbs and ribs. When a man understands that the dream of liberating all suffering under the sun has been soured, the frontguard is demolished and the rearguard had their retreat, he has nothing to lose but a history of being a man, he yearned for the state of that longing and suffering which only she was able to…throughout history.

Suffering: the answer blows in the wind why. Longing: for a better day. I have seen it with my own eyes how you do it. A bastion resigns the fight and witnesses how it still goes on, waged by them in their quotidian ways. He wonders where the manifesto lies, what is the war-plan. He understands that it is, almost, the same thing running. Once upon a time, young men abandoned the city, went to the countrysides to wage the war and tutor the underdogs about their own war. The young men only discovered, in unknown bloody terrains, that they are nothing but city-bred idealists, true but tender like calf-love. Now they discover, they are men only, in the wrong side of the power-court. It’s not easy, crossing over to the other side. Getting rid of your class-sensibilities was easier than getting rid of the power-strictures written in your body. To get rid of your body you need to overwhelm yourself with unknown emotions.

So certain posts appeared where I screamed that she suffers… everywoman… this was the suffering which the history of those dreamers paid scant attention to; but this is the suffering empathizing with which the journey of Bengali modernity started in the 19th century and then, as it was destined to be, deferred and abandoned. Then it was the age of reform; now, one can’t repeat those pompous claims, it was a private journey of undoing oneself, without the ego-trip of emancipating the other. The drive was engendered due to autobiographical, therefore silent, circumstances. I talked about lives elsewhere, or that ‘life is elsewhere’ and how he is a Love’s Ragpicker, picking up abandoned poems written by her. But as one of my students twisted my pen-name into a delicious pun: “life is nowhere!”, no-where and also “now here!”; the way one reads it.

Somewhere in the last post it had a halt. Before analyzing rape as a ur-form of all crimes of power I failed to feel it through my words. I always treated my words like little bits of bodies; I reached the limit. Qualifying; I didn’t ‘fail’, I didn’t try it. And therefore, the third section in my last post lacked the connection. It didn’t properly explain why I was wallowing in a history of blood between the masculine and the feminine. What actually hit me hard, like the revelation in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown… I couldn’t ‘perform’ the pain anymore.

As he said, “pain in pleasure, pleasure in pain, self-mortification…all to force teardrops from my eyes”, it has to stop somewhere. As Lou said, how long will we go on bearing spectacles of self-inflicted pain? The woman in question, the ’symptomatic’ of the triad of abominations in my last post, displayed how her body cyclically got rid of possible futures. Yours truly has similarly displayed the painful abortions of many possible pasts, might be in a metaphoric way (well, the pleasure lies in turning the pain into a metaphor). The great Bengali dream of a better world is strewn across the evening skies as possible fetuses of the past. I am not saying that the alternative to this is the first woman in the triad of abominations: lend yourself to a banal spectacle of groping or the horror of the last one: submission to a lifetime of humiliation like Mr Fritzl’s daughter. There might be still another way left… I am saying it now.

Yes reader. I read the humiliation of those three women as three ways of submission to the horrors of overwhelming power. Like a triptych it was before my eyes: a woman lending herself to be groped live by a banal comedian, another one displaying her miscarriages in a pretentious show, another one living a life in the cellars to be raped by her father for years. Now I read them as ways of defeats. As Ritwik said and I understood later: the theme of my last post was ’shame’; I meant ‘anger’. I still feel there is something more in it… In my way, I identified with the sufferings bordering almost to justifying masculine power; I overlooked that these are nothing but plain, hopeless submissions. This is negative identification, my typical extreme way of identifying with the victims of power. I am not commenting on those women any more, I am reading against the grain of my ways of seeing it. This is not the way to undo yourself, there are other ways of identifying with her…

I was not identifying; I was projecting myself unto them.

Poor erstwhile-radical Bengali male did it because he has historically started it: abandoning the fight and facing straight the relentlessness of his opponent’s blows. His face might turn into a pulp but he will not touch the ground and he will still stare straight and bloody in his eyes! But as radicalancient commented: “as long as I am happy, I am fine. I wasn’t named “the light of happiness” for nothing!”

That’s the words of a true fighter!

I must learn how to be fine!

III.

As I mentioned, this post will mean anything only to my regular readers, if my posts are blessed by staying in their memories. This post explains, though in a pretty tertiary way, much of the preceding 126 posts. It was not a designed journey; writing is seldom so programmed. But I had a fair idea of how my writing self was being born out of it; and I knew the deep-structure of meanings and motivations: my life of intellect and emotions of past one year. I am not saying quits; I am just ending a phase, closing a chapter. I need to think of the next…

But the tryst with pain ends as I have reached the limits, or have understood my limitations…

I once started a series called self-portraits and was particularly happy with one. For months I had been working on another one; I thought this time I will jam – like in the earlier I jammed with my friend Inam – with Ritwik Banerjee’s poems. Sorry Ritwik, can’t keep up with your writings! But Let me just present you the self-portrait proper, they always were lengthy proses ending with my dabblings in graphics!

You can still read the words which meant to be…

I also fidgeted for months because these work uses lots of original images. If the artists of the original works are offended because I have derived from their original images, I offer my apologies, your works had been inspirational!
Image Courtesy:
The Girl and the Bird by Daily Dose of Imagery
Dark knight by Daily Dose of Imagery
Abstraction #2 by Paul Politis
Nature’s Greatest Form by Joe Nicora
The Last Light by Jens Hoffmann
Catch Me if You Can by al lim

Had been going through another phase of life when you comprehend less though you introspect more and I didn’t post anything for almost two weeks. Had been pondering how to write next after a year of blogging and 125 surviving posts. My occasional foray into poetry was not poking me further; though being the index of my emotional life, this blog decided to remain silent these early weeks of May, when things were really emotionally heady.

But sometimes the lyrical dies, the novelistic fails and the quote of the day in my feedreader reminds Krishnamurti’s “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” I’m sorry I adjusted and did not scream. I regret I am, still, healthy.

I am not sharing three news items, I resist elaborating in details what has fouled my mood; they range from the trivial to the horrible, circumventing the symptomatic. I am sharing three reactions.

I.

Laurelin, one of those feminist bloggers whose writings I regularly browse, reacted against an onstage molestation by a buffoon named Johnny Vegas in the name of a comedy-show and then reacted against trolls. How I recall my similar experiences when this blog also tried to react against certain social evils! One of those symptoms of sickness: everyone has their reasons, everything has its reasons! I like the way she says: “You do not have a right to my space, no matter how smart/important/rational you may think you are”.

I was just checking out one of the blogs maintained by The Radical Ancient, a friend who is gradually arriving our WordPress, and then heard her reacting against one of the most hideous sickness performed by a woman: an ‘artist’ announcing her next installation showcasing her innumerable designed miscarriages. She says: “[Art major Aliza Shvarts'] real “crime”, if any, is that she is creating a life for the express purpose of destroying it. And THAT is the part I can neither rationalize nor condone. It’s not rational, it’s not natural, it does not serve towards anyone’s happiness. The most it will do is get her some attention, which she probably thinks will make her happy.”

Those two, in the name of performances and art. Sickening still: there are reasons against these reactions. The third is neither art nor buffoonery, it is a crime precipitated for a lifetime. I hate to summarize it. Another respected blogger also reacts: “Mr Fritzl is a man, not a monster. He’s just a man who took being father and husband to monstrous extremes. I know on one hand that doesn’t seem important or even counter intuitive, but I do think that if we reject Mr Fritzl’s humanity that we lose the chance to understand what drives some to this extreme. For good or for ill the forces that created this situation are echoed to some degree in each of us and in society at large. Or for a warped analogy, if one finds a cancerous tumour in one’s body, it’s neither helpful nor accurate to say “That evil tumour isn’t part of me.” While obviously the tumour must be excised, it can’t hurt to try and figure out what caused it in the first place.”

II.

Dear reader, did you travel the above links to enlighten yourself about the profound sickness of the world we are living in, where the president of US of A accuses my countrymen of triggering world-wide food shortages because we Indians are supposedly overfed? What do we deem more shocking, Mr Bush’s conclusions or the above three abominations? Probably neither, they are mere fodders for news. Johny Vegas will molest women live in the name of self-deprecating comedy after a volunteer says she liked it. Arts majors like Aliza Shvarts will maintain that she has all the rights to use her body as statements as long as it is her body. And daughters of the likes of Mr Fritzl will simply wither away to disappearance. Women will remain fodders to men’s news.

If you consider the second example as contrapuntal to the other two because it involves no men, I would beg to differ. I recall how I was admonished by many women, including my mother (the others were from the working class: maidservants), because I was watching a cow giving birth near my house. Not without shame, I realized that I was watching something exclusive to women; I was defiling shame, something I can never explain but I understood and learned to respect until I was gendered into a man by culture.

Ms Shvarts is defiling the private, if shame remains too abstruse a concept for us moderns. Apart from creating possibilities of lives only too record its destruction, her decision to display what happens with the feminine body can only be understood as an act performed for the global masculine gaze. There had been reasons inquiring if the victim to Johnny Vegas’ monstrosity consented or enjoyed the act or why Mr Fritzl’s raped daughter did not resist successfully her father’s crimes of a lifetime. Such reasons are already tainted with blood, as is the displaying the defilement of one’s own body, just because it is the body of the universally humiliated, the private body of a woman.

As I maintained in my last tirade against my own gender: “[R]ape is the ur-form of all crimes of power. It was never about lust or pleasure; it is always about ultimate control through ultimate humiliation.” I should qualify my statement further: every act of rape aspires to be exhibited and the resultant state of the victim be displayed as the rapist’s trophy. This aspiration is rendered true in states of riots, civil wars and pogroms. I can confirm this statement because I understand the psyche of my gender, I have heard male jokes for half-a-lifetime. Rape is seldom the act which it desires to be: it desires not only to be visible but also to be a final act. It wills the victims body to be exhausted of its enjoyment (let me keep the ambiguity of this expression), it desires the victims body to be displayed as being irreparably damaged. Any instance of extreme pornography will suffice, all the instances of those lesser mild ones just falls short of it. Ms Shvarts is displaying what Mr Fritzl achieved and Mr Vegas desires: the ultimate fun of the inflicted horror!

III.

Women will remain fodder to men’s reasons…

This blog, sometimes explicitly, trembles on the thin line between the double-take on gender-relations. When I wrote a lengthy note on my pen-name, I tried to clarify that even when I try to remain lyrical, I can never disavow the novelistic: it is the masculine and the feminine within a sea of history’s blood. Even when I am celebrating love, it is tinged with the melancholic; I know the bloodstain remains as long the relationship between a man and a woman remains social. The boy child grows up to be a member of the powerful of the gender-rung, the girl child grows up to experience her quotidian powerlessness. I am hyperlinking to my own posts just to recall, just to remember, just to remind…myself that we will miss the idyll of love in this lifetime; no poems, as cute as they might sound, can ring true being oblivious of the fact…

I don’t know what to feel. Guilt? That is self-pitiable and callous. Anger? That’s too subjective to objectively harbor. Regret? But I did not choose to be a man and how am I sure that I don’t feel safer that I am one?

I regret I am healthy, adjusting myself to a profoundly sick society, and not screaming. I regret that I am condemned to be only cerebral. Each day I see bodies which culture has taught me to be measurable in their degrees of attractiveness. Culture taught me to be blind to the walking experience/awareness of humiliations when I watch them walk down the streets, that is what culture accentuates in women as they temper their survival-instincts. I can only take recourse to art to undo what culture has taught. What you bodily survive, I can only cerebrally approximate: how does it feel to be not on your own…no direction home…like a rolling stone gathering societies’ moss.

NB: Please read Aniket Alam’s series on female infanticide, which he describes as The Greatest Genocide in History: Part I, Part II, Part III

It is estimated by historians that about 72 million people were killed during the second World War. Of this number 25 million died in combat, as much as 11 million were killed in the Nazi Holocaust and another 20 million perished in war induced famine. But this is not the single event with the largest killing of human beings in history.

Demographers and economists estimate that today over a 100 million women have been killed globally by societies which prefer sons over daughters.

Inam, with whom I jammed once here, wrote this commenting on my rather ‘weird’ last post:

I like it that your love, your lust and your dreams are overpoweringly solid and real. Actually i am getting quite angry (sigh) with all these middle-aged women who have taken to writing poetry to complain against their husbands and middle-aged men who continue to write about daffodils in order to appear intellectual to women! You might think I have lost my head to rant like this, but trust me, this is what I have found out after all my forays into the city’s art circuit (esp. in English, since you did raise the question of language). Your blog, in my opinion, is a pleasant change and a firm rebellion in the face of such puerile hypocrisies, though you may beg to differ… I think, in the end no art is really real. All artists are pretenders, which is very good for art; however some choose to wear the mask of realism, which remains a mask after all. It’s no use unnecessarily connecting the art with the artist; the “Perfect” artist should be able to create the biggest comedies in time of infinite personal sorrow and vice-versa.

I.

So let me ponder on those things again: am I ‘doing’ literature when I am writing poems in a blog? Is someone, who is not a poet occupationally (let me not use the term profession again), able to write out of his experiential context? Can a amateur poet’s writings be considered as part and parcel of the history of poetry in the language in which he writes? What about a situation like myself: of a man who has only only read few canonised poems in English, much more in Bengali and heard a lot of lyrics of rock songs? Where will I be situated? And finally: how real are artworks? Is a poet a conman, relishing the shape of his creation which started from utter despondency with utter glee? How about the way I write English: the way I have placed “utter despondency” beside “utter glee” in the last sentence?

I was more interested in the adorning of the surface of a loss…

Let me place few things straight. Even if I am not a novice or a stranger in the realm of art I try to remain an outsider. I have few friends who are poets in occupation (in Bengal there are too many) because I have a feeling that poetry is gobbled up by ‘culture’ these days. I personally believe in a kind of oppositional relationship between ‘art’ and ‘culture’. I dabble more in cinema, something much more plebian and infamous for producing costly garbage annually. I have high regards for poetry but I don’t keep myself updated. As Inam hinted in his mentioned comment, culture is overproduced these days and in the process is turning fake! But Bengal being an incorrigibly arty place, we people go on articulating languages which stretches words beyond the literal…

But at least in Bengal, as far the young men and women in this metropolis are concerned, blogging has released a fresh new lease. You don’t need to tread those hackneyed places any more to make your poetic utterances heard. Women are writing more, writing in pseudonymns, writing incognito, writing about things which they wouldn’t possibly articulate either in print or in longhand ten years ago. As I have repeatedly said, I learn a lot from their writings each day, about things which five years of studying English Literature didn’t illuminate much. I knew how the voice of an age is evident in artistic expressions, I knew how an artistic movement informed a work of art or vice versa, but I hardly knew how writing can shape your person into a new subjectivity (I never saw it happening in present continuous tense!) or unravel a fragment of the self which culture doesn’t help much to bloom. I am waiting for the day when expressing oneself in the local language in Internet will be as easy as in English.

In the process, we have wrenched ourselves free from the history of the language. While readers elsewhere might not get the point, we know how our notion of English (and here the language is inexorably literary) is conditioned by more than 300 years of history. It remains the language of a class, a language to be flaunted and exhibited more than to be used in a functional sense. The Web has freed us from the awareness of a crippling history. One should say that the history of the rock music had been very instrumental in our case. The register of the poetic is more readily available from music these days than from sanitised canons. The awareness of the ‘vulgar’ has freed us. In the absence of an editorial mediation – an agency which is nothing but extensions of the universities – people are expressing themselves exactly the way they like it to be. Unaware of the history of the literature, or the trends of last two decades or so, it is only Calibans calling, and it is just the beginning.

I need to qualify my euphoria. I wrote in Bengali for years, but believe me, writing in Bengali is difficult because its so easy to construe few lines of standard poetry in this language these days. Bengal’s poetry is immensely rich and the place is notorious for producing one poet in every three young men (use of gender consciously) in the street. The production had been huge in the last few decades as the history had been faceless (no one knows of distinct historical trajectories followed by the vernacular poetry in the last few decades); it is almost a cottage industry now and overproduction has rendered high-level of skills but low-chances of expressibility. A bloodless craftmanship is something which one encounters in Bengali poetry, everywhere.

My choice of expressing myself in what is our father-tongue rather was a conscious one. Because I never intend to publish these in hard-copies, never intend to be known as a poet in the public, I wanted a space where even Indian-English novels have failed to reach…at ground-zero, a place where local Bangla rock-bands have reached (and failed to reap results), a level where pure expression is possible because culture has still not reached there with its codifications and history of the normative. The magic of words have never failed, but culture has failed miserably. I needed a space, during a moment of crisis in my life, to start from a scratch, to pour myself into words and imminently forgetting it, to give birth to a self and see it flicker and die within moments, to gather all achievements and feel it all as ‘virtual’ the next morning. Blogging, thankfully, has no history or canons; no tradition as yardsticks, no landmarks to imitate or fight with. At least sitting by my keyboard I can start with my emotions and arrive elsewhere…

Phew! I have still not said anything about the adorning of the surface of a loss…

II.

I need to end today’s post mentioning a rich discovery of mine in the blogosphere. I just stumbled across someone’s blog few days – no, nights – ago. She calls herself ‘Average Jane’, she is a mother of a little girl and in her late 30s. As someone commented that the edge of her words grow ever-sharper, she said that she continues writing till she bleeds (probably you can hear her “ouch!” and see her licking her thumb and a crimson patch in the keyboard). Reading, rather viewing her short posts I became embarrassed that I am such a loquacious one. She writes short and sharp prose-pieces. Visit her blog.

She has the voice of a story-teller. Someone told that her daughter is surely having a gala time. But she tells stories with a sudden end rather than a satisfying closure. She would whisper like an woman untimely retired to a land without happenings but infused with memories. One wonders: one has listened to grandmas telling stories, and one thought that younger women have lost their abilities to store memories which can surface – decades latter – like lullabies without tunes. And suddenly I hear someone, just a few years older than me, digging up watery memories and pouring it down my throat. She would talk about objects of memories: about a grandfather clock and its strange hands, about a “cupboard full of pretty knickknacks” and “dainty Japanese dolls”, pink umbrellas and red balloons and sketchbooks. She would talk about a boy who is running forever, a girl named Jasmine and her half-hidden friend Gopu and a mild-looking friend who beheaded a soldier in her dreams or a man in the train reading financial news within whom a question is born. When she writes subtly about eros one shivers back to the memory of how women remembers those zones of your body you never knew existed, when she writes about fears you feel that the nightly corridor down there is not exactly breath-less, when she talks about relationships she might say: “I am who I am because of what my mother made me and my daughter now every single day”.

She is from my city. She exactly is an instance of how blogging has liberated the voice of many women of this age. Reading her posts – I have all pages saved in my computer, the way I do it – I recalled Charulata writing in Satyajit Ray’s film. She says my writings make her nostalgic of her college days and I feel – like many of you my wonderful friends have made me feel – that even if I don’t matter in this world, I might have some value. A day is made. Rather a night, which the next day will undo.

To all readers who consider themselves lover’s of art, something ghastly is happening in the name of art. Please sign the online petition after viewing this post: Save Dog From ‘Art’

I have shifted my last post elsewhere. It ended with the line: “Disgusting…I’m done!”

I.

A brother told me that day, “Why are you posting hopeless poems?” I got immediately pissed off, but my good sense prevails always. He cares, therefore while I have my rights not to reply, he has his rights to comment on this question at large: “Why do you write what you write?” Further questions from me, then: Who is hurt? Me or my readers? Is anyone hurt at all?

Because I will continue to write the way I write. This post will slowly arrive at that moot question: why do I write what I write? Bitterly amused, I watch the statistics each day on my dashboard: visitors to this blog go on reading those posts which poised me as the good citizen, reacting to social evils etc. But I have – for reasons complex enough – stopped writing those sorts of posts anymore. Not because I don’t care about the society I am immersed into, but because I continue to do. I know there is another blog within this blog, there are other holes to enter my home, just like I have a public persona wrapped around my private person. The amusing point is, that public person have stopped speaking, but his words continue to be heard. It is there in the air.

But the most visited page these days in this blog is neither a post nor anything written by me. It is just a strategic placement of a modernist ‘rose’ on a classical hair, flippantly and playfully placed by a girl I loved so much and now – historically – we are not in speaking terms anymore, though we tried our best to… To you: I feel kind of proud and jealous (yes, in that order) when I see that this blog sometimes appear on the first page of certain google searches because of you, not me.

Why do I get hurt when someone questions my writing? From the obvious to the analytic, there can be answers. But let me not rant against the comment, let me ponder upon my anger, considering it to be something wrong or excessive or contradictory. I got angry because my poems were not being read as poems, but as my self. Well, I write about personal things, private moments. Many of my revered bloggers do so. But probably we will hate it when our biographies will be read into our fragile little posts. People knowing the situation I am in, the situation in which this blog started (and I know it has meandered into quite different trajectories, and she knows) will jump into reading me rather than my poems. Disgusting!

That I am hopeless is nobody’s problem!

I am not arriving myself when I hit ‘publish’. Probably reception about two different things are getting inflated: poems and a ‘personal weblog’. Unfortunately, in this age after television, anybody can be stars (Bogarte and Garbo are long dead). So, somewhere this trend started where you can conjure a star out of yourself in the public sphere and a medium extended itself to us to do so. You write, you confess about your personal life, you reveal, you expose and you might get immensely read. Yes, weblogs or online personal diaries provoke the exhibitionists within ourselves. We wash our laundry in public and it might be highly salacious and embarrassing simultaneously. So, in a medium where such habits of reception were already defined I started writing and exposed myself to such reception. But I will continue to write about personal things. Because blogging is radically something else too: it is publication without the mediation of the industry. It is also about the diminished temporal distance between writing and being read and simultaneously about extending the physical distance between the writer and the possible reader. It is also about debunking the aura of the writer. It is, simply, liberating.

But I was not writing about GTD skills or sports.

Nope, still I don’t consider my writings as literature. It is something apart from that. It is something new. In this age of specialized professions we maintain that even people who are not poets have their claims on the poetic and can publish themselves. English is not my language, Bengali is and I don’t consider it literary enough when I express myself in a language to which I am not organically linked. I know if I would have written in my language it would hardly be the way it turns out to be in my posts. So what the hell do I do when I write?

I trace the surface of a loss, a vacuum.

It is like the potters, the makers of vases and vessels. They shape the surface of a space that holds nothing. That this shape will be used later to hold water, or grain or a plant is a different proposition altogether. The potter has nothing to do with it. They delimit the contours of a space of nothingness, it is like an act of mourning, giving surface to a shape holding something which is lost and lost irretrievably.

Not my idea. One of my learned senior was speaking so. He was speaking about art, ironically. And I am using the idea to explain that I am not doing canonical literature when I am writing my poems. The potter seldom stops after shaping it. He then adorns the surface with designs; the surface is overwrought to produce beauty (if not the classical idea of beauty any more, just the beauty of a well-shaped, well-wrought thing). Then he just abandons it at some strategic moment to shape another rotundity holding nothingness.

I never write about those originary emotions. I shape a contour round it as it is in the process of being lost. I write the surface to lose the content. Then I design the exteriority of the surface. It turns out to be a poem on love, or pain, on loss. But it is neither the loss, the pain or the love which I suffered and experienced. That does not mean that it is false; it is just not mine any more. I release a sigh of relief when it stops resembling mine (because it started from that point, when I was suffering). Of course it harbors a shape of things which was mine. But it is a mere semblance, just a shape, not the thing.

I write to write about loves, pains and losses which are not only mine. Okay, this blog is introspective. It always starts from the person only to arrive someplace else: my life is elsewhere when I am hitting the ‘publish’ button. I am not evading or escaping from the personal to arrive at the literary, since again, I am not a professional. I am only evacuating the personal. I might have some value but I don’t matter.

Because the private is unwritable. You might take my last post for example. When I read Lou’s poem, I liked the phrase “freight of trembles” in the context where it appeared. I liked it more because of the thing it tried to suggest, which might be so dear to us poetic people. When I was tweaking it to “freight of feelings” I am not only just importing bits of alliteration into it but also defamiliarising it a bit. I was enjoying this process of quoting or referring through hyperlinking, something which would have been impossible in a hard copy. Then it was also about Kristina’s beautiful self-portraits. I was adorning the surface of the vase. It still retains the shape of the originary emotion but I know when the potter shapes and adorns it, the pot is empty. The shape remains, not the thing, but even the mere shape might have its impact.

It is possible; to write the private, but I don’t attempt it. It is neither possible for me to write about the enormity and complexity of real pains, real loves, real longings and losses, nor will it be fair doing so…because of other lives involved. In those enormity of emotions, we are selfish, utter egoists and thus blinded from the truth. Though I know of certain processes of relatively freeing my discourse from my ego, I am sometimes ruthlessly posited against myself when I write or speak but I really don’t matter. Truth can be best understood from fictions, even our own truth, from shapes of things which we have lost or sometimes is worth losing because you know it will return with its enormity.

When I write about pain, it is to evacuate the me-ness (and menace, and meanness…as I gleefully used the pun in my last poem) of the pain. When I write about love, it is to escape the egocentrism of my own love. When I write about loss, it is to forget once more about the loss I am talking about. The loss slips away. Blatantly, it is not the loss of a woman, though a woman is its site so many times. She embodied what I have lost, she embodies what is lost, she will embody what is lost. I am not talking about any particular woman; in the last sentence I have spoke about three women at least, I haven’t met the last one still.

But without any malice to many, it is so liberating that it will be a woman!

To all those kind souls whom I have loved and lived or left
Please come back, stay in my dreams; I have this tryst with pain
I am seeing that same face again, my room is pungent with heat
Waves which dance from walls to walls and a clock which smiles at me
I heard one pan-flute moan, some childhood pining strains
I woke up and searched for the words of the song and washed my eyelids in rain.

I dreamt you were writhing and unloading a freight of feelings, you were in fever
I dreamt that your head is shaved, afflicted with rotting desire
I dreamt my stupor, woke up and lived it, my muteness melting in tears
I might turn madcap, I dreamt of a drowning lass in beads and flowers
I dreamt of a man, bereft of his manhood and me-ness, groveling in quicksand
He has abandoned his body, but in his ribs and shrunk limbs, love lingers and remains

The ladies once turned into trees, all your flesh-skins melting to one
I’m haunted: one face remains; I am running like a hunted in the run
Shedding all trappings I have yielded to, gaining all things that unmakes a man
I’m searching all words that will end this tryst and a tale that a scream began
I dreamt of melting and turning into you: my Ophelic lover wanton
I’m writing nine and the same poem, I’m afraid I’ll turn into one.

Picture Courtesy: ~Chiaroscura~ featuring Kristina’s self-portraits; poem inspired by the picture, Lou’s poem, a bad dream (if not a nightmare) and a particular phrase by Leonard Cohen.

If I am not being able to…
I give my friend’s words to you
If not my verses, not my tune
It is still yours, ’cause it’s beautiful

Like nervous bodies resembling a fight
Arriving a stillness beyond sounds and sights
I shuffled some paeans messed up in blood
To reach the calmness of a simple word

When that book of life is read
All those words but ‘love’ is dead
We spent our days, we pay our rents
To savor just a prized moment

The minute which will stay with you
What you own that is my due
I open my fist to see it’s gone
I close my eyes and I return

To the hour when ‘I’ turns to dust
Beneath all diamonds, beyond all rusts
It might be ‘love’, it might be ‘you’
One simple word: one choice of truth

If I am not enough able to…
I’ll toss the coin and call it for you
Either you win or I lose
Tomorrow is yours ’cause it’s beautiful.

Picture Courtesy: ~Chiaroscura~, featuring Kristina’s self-portraits.
Discerning ears might find tributes to Don McLean and Joan Baez and the link in the poem speaks for itself…