The Obverse of the Sublime

I read a beautiful essay by Italo Calvino yesterday, called the 'Obverse of the sublime'. The essay is about him visiting the Imperial Palace in Japan in a guided tour group. It begins by describing an autumn tree in Japan.

“But it is not with an act of outrageous chromatic arrogance that the maples impose themselves on one’s view: if the eye is drawn towards them as though lured by a musical motif, it is because of the lightness of their starry leaves. Which seem suspended around their thin branches, the leaves all horizontal, without depth, yearning to expand and at the same time not to clutter the transparency of the air.”

I was floored at the ‘yearning to expand and at the same time not to clutter the transparency of the air’. How can one think and write like that and pass on that joy to the reader? It amazes me, fascinates me.  He not only brings what he sees alive for you, but draws you deeper in his contemplation and worldview. Literally opening up a treasure chest of ways of seeing for you.

This essay leading me, I read through his travelogues from Japan. And the combination of Calvino’s ways of seeing and Japan’s ways of being is quite otherworldly.

“New to the country, I am still at the stage where everything I see has a value precisely because I don’t know what value to give it. When everything finds an order and a place in my mind then I will start not to find anything worthy of note, not to see any more what I am seeing. Because seeing means perceiving differences, and as soon as differences all become uniform in what is predictable and everyday, our gaze simply runs over a smooth surface devoid of anything to catch hold of.  Travelling does not help us much in understanding but it does serve to reactivate for a second the use of our eyes, the visual reading of the world.”

From what he says about travel, one can perhaps extend to unravel the riches in the ordinary, or the familiar. The way we seem to perceive reality is quite a patchwork of memory and observation. At times, by playing around with space and time - by stepping away, by changing the vantage point or by focusing on another aspect of the observed, we can ruffle the memory a bit to reconfigure itself and in turn, reactivate ourselves for a better ‘visual reading of the world’. Every act of looking anew changes the observed.

Reading him, it seems that richness of feeling, of observing, of living a fuller, deeper, more felt life does not require a lot. It sometimes just needs an openness to feel, and a patience and malleability to let things appear in a form unknown to you, and to be able to play around with the ideas, and then, a simple thing as leaves falling from a gingko tree can hold the keys to a deep meditative state, where one thought can lead to another, and before you know it, you unravel deep secrets of your own which you didn’t even know existed.

A simple thing, this art of seeing in a new way, but, powers so magical – we go seeking out in the world for riches, for more and more, and here, he shows you this new power, where your whole world gets upgraded instantly to a new level.

**

Here, just some water,
There amidst the trees
The sea!

The gardens, designed by poet-architects, are made to be experienced and evoke epiphanies like this haiku here. I haven’t really seen any Japanese gardens as such, or read a lot about them, but under his gaze, the gardens and all their reflected poetry seems to come alive.

“The construction of a nature that can be mastered by the mind so that the mind can in turn receive a sense of rhythm and proportion from nature: that is how once could define the intention that has led to the layout of these gardens. Everything here has to seem spontaneous and for that very reason everything is calculated.”

“Hillocks, rocks, slopes, multiply the landscape. […] The Japanese passion for the small that provides the illusion of the big comes out also in the composition of the landscape.”

On the pools of water in Japanese gardens,

“There are usually two of them, one of flowing water, the other a still pool, which create two different landscapes, to tone in with two different states of mind.” 

And just by reading his take on these pools, I seem to stumble on some sort of solution for my own internal struggles – those of width vs depth, the look out vs the look in, action vs contemplation. These pools a visual to solve for those complex inner battles. Two lakes. One for each state of mind. Beautiful.

**

His curious, observing, reflecting gaze falls on Japanese houses, palaces, the aesthetic of unobtrusive, ‘the bare and the unadorned’, and he wonders whether this ideal “was achievable only at the peak of authority and wealth, and whether it presupposed other houses chock-full of people and tools and junk and rubbish, with the smell of frying, sweat, sleep, houses full of bad moods, people rushing, places where shelled peas, sliced fish, darned socks, washed sheets, emptied bed-pans.”

It makes you think about yourself, and wonder at what he calls, “the heavy weight of existences that materializes in our furnishings and impregnates all our Western rooms.” When you begin to think about it, you realize that one cannot exclude everything. The normal life must carry the weight of the living, “the smell of the frying”, etc, but how much of the life the task of living should occupy – this arriving at essentials through exclusion requires a going through and is a matter of discernment, and perhaps, that is the question to be lived through.

Very soon, this chain of observation on housing and its aesthetics leads him to reflect on the cost of culture itself. He has this conversation with a fellow student tourist:

 ‘Do you like all this?’ asked my student. ‘I cannot help thinking that this perfection and harmony cost so much misery to millions of people over the centuries.’

‘But isn’t the cost of culture always this?’ I object. Creating a space and time for reflection and imagination and study presupposes an accumulation of wealth, and behind every accumulation of wealth there are obscure lives subject to labour and sacrifices and oppression without any hope. Every project or image that allows us to reach out towards another way of being outside the injustice that surrounds us carries the mark of the injustice without which it could not have been conceived.

This understanding and acknowledgement of the cost of culture, which many of us in a bid to explain the world around fair narratives often choose to ignore or overlook or push away from the view, because it is not pretty and sullies the landscape a bit. But having that understanding of the cost helps, makes one conscious of the privilege and hopefully, mindful enough to not squander it, since it carries not only the weight of one person’s life and thoughts, but the weight of history, of all the lives that went before to be able to provide us with that “different space and time, a proof that the total domination of sound and fury can be challenged…”  Another paradoxical, non-linear way of seeing things. And we need more people who can show us things like that - in few words, carrying a weight of years of reflection and consideration. Things which perhaps need to enter the common ways and currencies of thinking.

It did make me realise the position of privilege that I have, to be able to spend an afternoon ruminating over one essay from Calvino’s collection of sand, when rest of the world struggles with what seems like the defining moment of this decade, the way wars were for the last century.

**

I can keep quoting from those essays on Japan. His essays laid out like the Japanese gardens he writes about. The writing rich in meditations, observations, digressions, which can both serve as a trigger and a trainer to one’s thinking and seeing.

“It is by limiting the number of things around us that one prepares oneself for accepting the idea of a world that is infinitely larger than ours. The universe is an equilibrium of solids and voids. The words and gestures that accompany the pouring of the foaming tea must have space and silence around them, but also a sense of inner meditation, a limit.”

**

Elsewhere, he talks about the moon.

“Love for the moon often has its double in love for its reflection, as if to stress a vocation for mirror games in that reflected light.”

And the way life works sometimes, this morning, I woke up to a beautiful sight as if directly from Calvino’s Collection of sand - the moon and the stars, reflected in the pool.

The depths of the sky so calmly and so beautifully reflected in the shallow pool. I couldn’t see the moon from the window when I looked out, was too high in the sky, but saw it down below, unexpectedly, looking up to me from the pool.

Interestingly, I haven’t seen anything like this ever. I have seen moon reflected in a lake, and often in the ocean, but that’s not the same. Those waters are moving often, never this calm, so calm, that if someone disoriented you, you wouldn’t know whether you were looking up to the sky or down to the pool.

The unruffled calmness can make a shallow pool of water hold the sky. And I seem to understand Calvino’s essay a little better.

The Cost of Living

I am new to Deborah Levy’s writing. British author, born in South Africa (her mum identified with Doris Lessing's Martha Quest), she has written several novels, poems and plays. I haven't read anything else yet, but this book is a memoir, so, in a way, a good place to begin to get to know the author a little.

This memoir was written as she was moving out of her marriage and into a new identity. Everything around her is disintegrating, and she seeks a new composition. Her life, in that state of flux, partly in the past which seemed to vanish in ruins, and partly in the future, which she’s trying to compose with us. And as tends to be the nature of transitions and flux, the 'gift' of the troubles, the time and space proximate to the churn and chaos can be a rich source of memories, thoughts and feelings, life aground, thrown asunder while the person, gasping for air, helpless, seeking a grip, or an anchor, if not a float, digging, searching everywhere, shallow, deep in that accumulated debris of living.

And as readers, we are the ones rewarded with those feelings encapsulated in a slim volume that one can read through over an evening, and mull over for a month.

Through this memoir, as an outsider to herself, she tries to observe her own past selves at different stages of her life, and bit by bit, reclaims her own 'self', giving permissions not sought previously, and laying out new, extended boundaries for that 'self'- composing herself anew in that disintegration.

Her life revolves around writing: 

“At this uncertain time, writing was one of the few activities in which I could handle the anxiety of uncertainty, of not knowing what was going to happen next.”

And her grief, her spring of ideas. As an analogue to her situation, she offers the following from Proust,

"Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart."

Her prose at times, perhaps in an unintended way, exposes her vulnerability, her fragile state and yet her humility, faith and openness to life. Struggling to make ends meet, living in a small apartment, seeking a room of her own, she finds a guardian angel of sorts, who gives her the shed to write in and lets her that much needed space, the solitude and a desk – “to be valued and respected in this way, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, was a new experience.”

Like Camus, she says, she has an invincible summer inside of her. And amidst all the chaos, and holding together of self and life, she finds her joy in writing, 

“An idea presented itself, came my way, perhaps hatched from a grief, but I did not know if it would survive my free-floating attention, never mind my more focused attention. To unfold any number of ideas through all the dimensions of time is the greatest adventure of the writing life.”

**

The rewards of reading such a memoir are in the contemplation of parallels and intersections. Laying bare their lived, raw moments, closely examining them for the reader, the author, subtly coaxing you, as a reader, to reflect and go on that journey into the interior yourself, drawing out meanings and questions from the author's deep-in-the-chaos narrative. At times then, one agrees with the author, and at other times, views diverge significantly. Not only it allows you to know the author a little more, it lets you know yourself a little more.

She struggles with several questions - of having it all, of minor and major characters in an equal relationship, of femininity and of masks, of how to be in a new context uprooted from a life built over twenty years, and when everything’s up for the taking, what do you take.

“It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them.”

I find the following thoughts that she shares on her mother beautifully summing up the struggle she tries to live through, of finding the self while playing the role.

“There is a photograph I have kept of my mother in her late twenties. She is sitting on a rock at a picnic with friends. Her hair is wet because she’s just had a swim.  There is a kind of introspection in her expression that I now relate to the very best of her. I can see that she is close to herself in this random moment. I’m not sure that I thought  introspection was the best of her when as a child and teenager. What do we need dreamy mothers for? We do not want mothers who gaze beyond us, longing to be elsewhere. We need her to be of this world, lively, capable, entirely present to our needs.   

Did I mock the dreamer in my mother and then insult her for having no dreams?”

It sums up the struggle so nicely. Yet the inherent certainty of the statement – "we do not want mothers who gaze beyond us…” somehow ends up distressing me.  I strongly feel that by giving such words a sense of certainty, even in the context of recounting the past, and not letting them breathe in doubt or even a ‘perhaps’,  we draw firm boundaries that the author might have questioned, but seemingly accepted. I feel that one needs to let such seeming 'certainties' stand in a fog of doubt, to let them some space to shift.

Just the way I feel about 'certainties' like these floating around everywhere in all kinds of media.

A little later, she portrays the complicated world of women wishing to have it all – “When our father does the things he needs to do in the world, we understand it is his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us. It is a miracle she survives our mixed messages, written in society’s most poisoned ink. It is enough to drive her mad.” 

Maybe it is so, maybe not. The way most world seems to currently approach this situation of women wishing to have a fuller life. I feel that perhaps the questioning needs to happen at the level of the mother bothered by the mixed messages and the poisoned ink - why does she need to be so bothered? Can we do something about that? Perhaps if we begin looking at that question, and ponder on that, we might find a way out of the difficulty of even calling it a ‘having it all'. 

A difficult question. Easy to frame it for others, but the moment one begins to look inside, and ‘live’ the question the way Rilke asks us to, we get to grasp the difficulty and enormity of the work needed, the internal work. 

**

An interesting read. Will hopefully read more from the author soon.

VALIS by Philip K. Dick

First word – joy. This SF marks my third completed book of the year. Glad to have come across it. Held me for an evening, and then left me with some 100 things to look up and understand further and has been living in my head since, fusing the story with all the other things I stumble on because of it.

This book, like other books from the substance abused period of 60s and 70s (?), at the plot level, talks about rationality, insanity, mental hospitals, substances, related depression, suicide, and the general downward spiral of life which has lost its anchor and doesn’t really know what and where to call home.

But, at the idea level, it explores the nature of reality as an illusion.  VALIS is an acronym of Vast Active Living Intelligence System – a perturbation in the reality field, caused by something not of our world. The protagonist (PKD, the author with another name) witnesses it, and tries to make sense of it.

What PKD does for us is takes this theme of questioning the perceived reality, trying to fathom the unknowable which many sci-fi books explore in their own ways, at times by imagining potential futures, and at other times through alternate scenarios or displaced realities, but often, a lot of sci-fi books fail to reach escape velocity, and end back in the same human drama that they try to transcend in the first place.

I guess in the case of VALIS, the fiction was never the point. The framing of the book seems to be the introduction of the relatively obscure thoughts in his Exegesis. And then the author trying to put in some sort of fictional narrative to explore what happens to him in his perceived reality. Making sense of VALIS being the key driver and illusory nature of reality the key idea.

In his real world, he believed that “God or someone calling himself God, had fired precious information”.  To give us an understanding of how he feels about it, he quotes from an aria by Handel, ‘Deeper, and deeper still’ to give us an opposite reference point to consider:

“Total eclipse! No sun, no moon,
All dark amidst the blaze of noon!
Oh, glorious light! No cheering ray
To glad my eyes with welcome day!
Why this deprived Thy prime decree?
Sun, moon and stars are dark to me!”, 

And in his case, he is on the diagonally opposite end of this darkness in the blaze of noon – he was illuminated by some otherworldly light.  And rest of his life becomes an exercise in making sense of and making peace with that event.

After that peak of an experience, trying to live through routine life’s much blander days, in his despair, he says “They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep him.” And one can almost feel his seemingly infinite loss.

In his fictional world – “The exegesis [...] an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense of the inscrutable.” After comparing it to borderline mental illness, he says, not only just that, but  “you ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize.”

To put his thoughts in recognizable forms, he borrows from, reflects on and quotes from a wide range of thoughts, philosophies to set the context and background to what he wishes to say.

On the illusory nature of reality, he gives us – ‘that our world is only seeming’; it is only “Obvious structure” which is under the mastery of an unseen “latent structure”, and he quotes Heraclitus, “The nature of the things is in the habit of concealing itself.”

Here’s him borrowing from Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, to explore reality, as if, it were a maze

“There is no route out of this maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.
PARSIFAL: I move only a little, yet already I seem to have gone far.
GURNEMANZ: You see, my son, here time turns into space.”

**

The Exegesis which VALIS keeps referring to is 8,000 pages of notes left behind by PKD to explore the events of 1974. The printed book, The Exegesis of Philip K Dick is 900 pages long. One can feel the anguish of the author, seeking to rediscover and pin down his experience – revising, reframing, thinking afresh, trying every which way to fathom the elusive, his remaining life becoming a meditation on that single event. Little we know as to how some of these things work. The human brain is still one of the darker, underexplored secrets of science, consciousness, reality. The author believed his experience was real, and that is good enough at times. Reality itself is a function of so many variables – the observed, the limited equipment that we have for observing, and our lived background where we project the observed to arrive at ‘reality’. Everyone’s reality can be pretty unique. PKD tried to explain it to himself, and because life gifted him with something otherworldly to consume and be consumed by, he, through his thoughts, leaves us with so many new/ old thoughts in a reframed way – real or not, they are quite unique – a very non-routine thing in this routine existence.  And just for that, it is a book worth reading.

Perhaps my only gripe with the idea is around some of the clunkiness it roots itself in on one end. It believes that anything prior to 1974 was a sort of implanted memories for entire world and the world was living around 100 AD in 1974. This seems quite complicated. And quite random. The beauty of this universe is in its simplicity, the elegance of the construct, in its use of really nothing to create this elaborate, vivid, brilliant manifestation – and hence, something about it, the arbitrary nature of 1974 feels a bit random and sticks out. On the other end, the clunkiness roots in the belief that there needs to be a saviour to bring back the golden days, and the book eventually turns to a search for that potential saviour – all interesting but seems to turn the book back into one of those ending on a little disappointing note kind of SF, finding hurried solutions in escapist arguments – externalising salvation. (I set myself for disappointment by seeking too much from SF)

Despite this, about the core idea, I can keep talking about and thinking about it for hours. At some level and in certain moods, I try to ascribe to similar ways of considering the universe – as an illusion, maya, call it with whatever name, and this is where some of the fundamental thoughts about considering the universe converge in the past, in different cultures, in different schools of thoughts, in different thought chains that have been handed down to us, the finest ones tend to regard this ‘reality’ as illusory, and world as ‘seeming’. And the amazing thing is that now, when we do understand a little bit more scientifically, it all seems to converge to a similar illusory reality.

On the fundamental units and particles that seem to form us, this is what Michio Kaku says in Parallel Worlds:

“But according to string theory, if we had a supermicroscope that could peer into the heart of an electron, we would see that it was not a point particle at all but a tiny vibrating string. It only appeared to be a point particle because our instruments were too crude.

This tiny string, in turn, vibrates at different frequencies and resonances. If we were to pluck this vibrating string, it would change mode and become another subatomic particle, such as a quark. Pluck it again, and it turns into a neutrino. In this way, we can explain the blizzard of subatomic particles as nothing but different musical notes of the string. We can now replace the hundreds of subatomic particles seen in the laboratory with a single object, the string.”

Isn't this convergence beautiful?

Seemingly, we are an arrangement, a form, not really the content. But this form takes on all our meaning for us.

**

Highly recommended to anyone interested. Like any good book, opens so many doors.

Narratives

Yesterday was the leap day. March begins today. Soon, people all around the world will start talking about International Women's Day and all the oft-repeated arguments and questions around fairness that every such token day brings.

I think any kind of unfairness begins in the mind. We may hold a belief that world should be a certain way, and then it turns out to be a little tilted, leaning some other way. The belief of fairness is perhaps rooted in our deepest desire as human beings to be regarded as a human being, as any human being, but this world, with all the centuries of narrative silt settled on its already jaded thinking has decided to segregate human beings into different adjective classes, and it talks but moves little and moves slow to change the larger narrative arc.

The way people are raised, the narrative background helps form thought chains which then bind them, root them, hinder them, restrict them - at times, without their even noticing or relenting that these are chains - to a given, inculcated worldview.  You keep telling little girls that they are made of sugar and spice, and all things nice, and keep repeating such rhymes, you raise women wishing to live upto that narrative. (And here, even I don't know how many thought chains I'm bound with).

Words and thoughts take shape, lend permission and conjure boundaries. By spelling them out, a possibility field is created, allowing, and then bounding behaviour. Not explicitly, but implicitly, taking life from and lending weight to societal judgement.

Ideally, people, being rational beings, rise above and question these narratives and make fresh judgement and think for themselves. But fresh thought requires courage and energy. And our modern lives leave little energy for purity of thought or questioning of the basics that form us. And the way current media works, questioning human thought fights a long, tiring and possibly losing battle, because it takes a lot to keep fighting off established narratives which are deepened further every passing day with each new post, tweet, song and movie.  Eventually, it  pushes you out of your depth (which you never get a chance to gauge well), tires you, making you fall back on the handy float of instilled and reinforced narratives - new 'propaganda' with a lovelier name.

The other traitor in the camp is the paradoxical way human mind works - where we tend to see reinforcements of what we wish to see, and the what-we-wish-to-see is actively being shaped through this battle, as if, our pawn, with each new step changes shade and by the end of the crawl becomes the opposite queen.

In such cases, perhaps, the way to bring about any change is by straightening the narrative, by nudging it gently in the direction of fairness, which ultimately means letting people be their own people in all their brilliant glory and unbrilliant folly without needing to seek permission to just be rather than operate as adjectived human beings. (as long as they are not a nuisance to society - and there again, the definition of nuisance is similarly loaded).

So, since this is March, and since I feel like it, sharing this poem by Ogden Nash - nice fun poem for anyone who feels bound by invisible thought chains (and they may not just be little girls and boys and their parents singing rhymes of sugar and spice, but all those people who find themselves in the little camp against bigger narratives).

Adventures Of Isabel (Poem by Ogden Nash)

Isabel met an enormous bear,
Isabel, Isabel, didn't care;
The bear was hungry, the bear was ravenous,
The bear's big mouth was cruel and cavernous.
The bear said, Isabel, glad to meet you,
How do, Isabel, now I'll eat you!
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry.
Isabel didn't scream or scurry.
She washed her hands and she straightened her hair up,
Then Isabel quietly ate the bear up.

Once in a night as black as pitch
Isabel met a wicked old witch.
the witch's face was cross and wrinkled,
The witch's gums with teeth were sprinkled.
Ho, ho, Isabel! the old witch crowed,
I'll turn you into an ugly toad!
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry,
Isabel didn't scream or scurry,
She showed no rage and she showed no rancor,
But she turned the witch into milk and drank her.

Isabel met a hideous giant,
Isabel continued self reliant.
The giant was hairy, the giant was horrid,
He had one eye in the middle of his forehead.
Good morning, Isabel, the giant said,
I'll grind your bones to make my bread.
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry,
Isabel didn't scream or scurry.
She nibbled the zwieback that she always fed off,
And when it was gone, she cut the giant's head off.

Isabel met a troublesome doctor,
He punched and he poked till he really shocked her.
The doctor's talk was of coughs and chills
And the doctor's satchel bulged with pills.
The doctor said unto Isabel,
Swallow this, it will make you well.
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry,
Isabel didn't scream or scurry.
She took those pills from the pill concocter,
And Isabel calmly cured the doctor.

Personally for me, the takeaway is this - it is this, this ability to say 'bring it on' to anything that life in its beautiful mesmerisation of randomness throws at you, the 'bring it on' allows you to live fully and truly as a human being, and gives a more open and malleable mental make-up to take on the new, and to live the way Shakespeare suggests -  above all to thine ownself be true, etc.

Reading update

Reading Naipaul, Watching Gandhi

I haven’t read a lot of Naipaul’s fiction. I read Guerillas a few years ago. I have often tried to read one of his more popular novels, A House for Mr Biswas but without much progress. When fiction is set in or around India, I find it difficult to access. Usually, fiction carves this new space where you step in and think through characters based in other times and other places, mostly distant, which, fiction set in current times or about India does not provide. 

I read Naipaul’s essay collection, Literary Occasions sometime late last year. This is the writer talking about his making, about the years that formed him, about his early days, about the perceptions he has collected of growing up as a person of Indian origin in a foreign place which was still called Indies by another name. The collection also includes a couple of forewords to his books. It is an enjoyable collection, worth a re-read. There is the struggle and joy of him becoming a writer, and there's his joy as a reader as he takes us through his reading influences.

There are certain writers where their worldview seems to run like an identifiable thread running through their work, easy to be picked, a theme or a memory, and sometimes making it difficult to draw the lines between their memoirs and fiction. I have felt that while reading books by Marquez and in his autobiography. Similarly in Naipaul's writing, there's a recurring theme of  him being a perpetual outsider. Most of his essays seemed to return to the theme of his struggle with reconciling the world  that is and the world that he sees given his contexts.

Around the same time as I was reading Naipaul, we watched Gandhi (or re-watched it to introduce the movie to the kid as he wrote his essays on modern and historical heroes). And for me, the dawning epiphany was in finding a similar theme in Gandhi - that Gandhi’s views, thoughts and approaches to the world were shaped elsewhere (and not in India) and he arrived in India fairly fully formed, which might seem obvious, but not so to me so far given the way history is taught or written in India. He brought his outsider views to India and saw things differently. 

  

Zadie Smith

One of the last books I read in 2019 was Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. I have come across her essays and have loved reading them.  I read it like a page-turner for most parts, but in terms of overall thoughts,  I think I favour her essays over fiction. Similar to my discomfort with reading books set in India, books set too close in time do not let the longer, historical arcs to settle down that tend to form the background to a good reading experience.

Another thought that it brought up - although White Teeth charts people from different immigrant cultures, I felt somehow it didn't fully bridge the gap of seeing through two points. Unlike, say the authors who’ve grown up and lived in two different cultures and who write from inside those cultures. Perhaps it is just the way I feel, but the first-generation immigrants seem to work with a richer palette than some of the second-generation writers. Thoughts not fully formed, but something which appears to me as I read from say Rushdie, to Naipaul to Zadie Smith. Looking forward to reading Quchiotte in the near future once K finishes reading it.

Meanwhile, I continue to read Zadie Smith's essays. Hoping to read through her collection of occasional essays soon.

Poems and “The Order of Time”

Last few days have seen me return to poems – call it my poetry phase. A lot of TS Eliot and some EE Cummings. Between breakfastfood and coffeespoons, myriad meanings inherent in words occupy me.  I love being in that space, but words, at times operate in the realm of uncertainty. There being no one reading of the poems, sometimes one can be so lost in such triggered thought chains that it messes up one’s sense of perspective and objectivity.

Deep in a poem, it dawns on me that poems don’t deal with centre. They tend to deal with the extremes, the edges of emotions (of what I get of poems). Edges are where life finds meaning and its bounds, yet edges imply quite high highs and low lows. And yet again, if not for the edges, how does one even define centre? And most daily life happens in the solid centre. To be able to traverse and occupy both the edges as well have a solid grasp of the centre stays a perpetual aspiration, but not there yet.

By opening up to a poet’s influence and hosting a poet’s words in your mind, one begins to think in their metaphors and turns of phrase not knowing when the influence becomes one’s own belief. And I wonder at what point does the quote stop being a quote and becomes one’s own thought. Most of the time if it is a poet, it doesn't & perhaps shouldn't matter - the influence works for the better. But unless one perpetually questions, one risks rational, free and independent thought.

So how is one to restore objectivity?

There are many ways (I hope). At times, solving bounded, finite, complex problems works for me  – problems grounded in certainty. Where there are infinite interpretations to poems, there is only one possible picture waiting to be revealed by a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle, or one clean solution to  a difficult Math problem, or workings of an excel model. A consuming issue requiring every shred of attention and thought with just one possible answer helps at times.

Sometimes the displacement provided by a good novel or sci-fi works. At other times, science helps. It brings back the scale perspective.

**

With that, I started reading Carlo Rovelli’s  “The Order of Time”. This one is a small book, similar to his “Seven brief lessons on physics”.  It is focused on the nature of time.

The first section crumbles time for us, stripping it of all the conceptual layers that we think it of – of it being unified, of it flowing in one direction, of it being present, of it being independent. The second part describes and explores time thus delayered to its essence, and the final section rebuilds time for us. I am still in the first bit.

"Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us"

The puzzle of time is one of the fundamental puzzles linking the unanswered questions of gravity, consciousness, and perception, our existence itself. Like the people few centuries ago beginning to grapple with the idea of Earth being round and a moving body and not a fixed centre with the heavens moving around it, we find it challenging to accept time as not a uniform, constant, forever kind of thing the way we perceive it.

"We inhabit time as fish live in water" 

(and perhaps DFW would then ask, ‘how’s the water?’)

The subject fascinates me immensely. Previously, while reading another of Rovelli’s book, I had to resort to this freewriting post to find a home for my fascination. Even now, I have very limited understanding to have any coherence of my own thoughts on the subject. I’ll resort to quoting from the book.

Here's Carlo Rovelli talking about Einstein in that chain of exceptional people, Copernicus and Anaximander, and taking away the unity of time (that time passes slowly in some places and rapidly in others).

“The ability to understand something before it’s observed is at the heart of scientific thinking. 

In the course of making such strides, we learn that the things that seemed self-evident to us were really no more than prejudices.”

The relativity of time:

“Times are legion: a different one for every point in space. There is not one single time; there is a vast multitude of them. “

Moving to the direction of time, the difference between past and future:

“The difference between past and future does not lie in the elementary laws of motion; it does not reside in the deep grammar of nature. It is the natural disordering that leads to gradually less particular, less special situations.”

Talking about a pack of cards, sorted and then shuffled, and how our perception of entropy defines the shuffled pack being disordered, he draws the point that each ordering is as unique but we limit ourselves to noticing only certain aspects of the cards (say, color or suit or numbers – everything else seems to be non-unique). But the understanding that everything is particular makes the difference in past and future vanish.

The disconcerting conclusion -

“the difference between the past and the future refers only to our own blurred vision of the world. …is it really possible that a perception so vivid, basic, existential—my perception of the passage of time—depends on the fact that I cannot apprehend the world  in all of its minute detail? Even allowing for the fact that our perceptions of the world are frequently wrong, can the world really be so profoundly different from our  perception of it as this?”

Next he dismantles the idea of ‘now’:

“The idea that a well-defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience."

And temporal structure without the present:

“In short, a common present does not exist: the temporal structure of spacetime is not a stratification of times … it is, rather, a structure made up entirely of light cones: More than a hundred years have passed since we learned that the “present of the universe” does not exist. And yet this continues to confound us and still seems difficult to conceptualize. 

If the present has no meaning, then what “exists” in the universe? Is not what “exists” precisely what is here “in the present”? The whole idea that the universe exists now in a certain configuration and changes together with the passage of time simply doesn’t stack up anymore.”

And this is where I pause. A lot more still to go and gradually the time spent on each new page has increased. He also quotes a lot of poetry, and notes “Perhaps poetry is another of science’s deepest roots: the capacity to see beyond the visible.”

**

Although most other times, science tends to work, today, I think I should have picked up a jigsaw puzzle instead or fiction. Even after those hours deep in Carlo Rovelli’s book, for the closing word  to capture some of Rovelli's essence of time, I still think of Eliot's words:

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”

I feel like quoting the whole poem. He further says:

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."

Come to think of it, Four Quartets and Carlo Rovelli are a good pairing.

But the thing is, the problem I set out to solve still remains.  

Perhaps, time itself is the solution.

Difficult Loves

I have been reading Italo Calvino’s short story collection, Difficult Loves. These stories were written in the 1940s and 1950s when Calvino was still in his 20s and 30s.

These stories follow the private thoughts,  the stream of consciousness (though much structured than usual streams) of people, the protagonists. A day in their life. An adventure. Or a phase in their life. The adventure of a soldier, a reader, of a poet or a traveller. Mostly men. A few females too, like the adventure of the bather who realizes she has lost her swim suit in the water. And then the adventure of the reader. Private sensations, private thoughts so articulately laid out that you slip them on like a glove.

Which then draws you to the writer. How well can he create the sensations that you get in the story and the characters and are one with them without thinking that you are reading the written word.  In that sense different from Balzac, my last read. Balzac’s was the writing which recreated the world he writes about. Calvino’s is about the person – you can almost feel the same things the characters feel, you get to be one with his characters.

One of the stories, the adventure of the photographer is apt for the modern times of Instagram. What he says here is worth remarking on since he says this in the 1950s.

“You only have to start saying of something: ‘Ah how beautiful! We must photograph it!'  and you are already close to the view of the person who things that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore in order really to live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second, to madness.”

This is before the same character takes on to photography himself. And over the course of the story, enamored by photography, his efforts are directed towards wanting to create a portrait out of space and time. Like any artist, trying to create something that can breach the boundaries of the finite, and dissolve into and exist in that other dimension of thought, the dimension outside of time and space.

**

Each story is a world in itself. Requires me to pause once I close the page on the story and just ruminate. Dwelling on the space it creates, not letting go. These stories deal in emotions, sensations. Beautiful stories, and although translated, the magic works. There are a couple of long short stories too. One of them, Smog – the story is alright, not as hitting as the shorter stories – but I get it, given the lingering smoke that has pervaded everything in Sydney for the last few weeks, now months.  And in parts, little parts, Smog also reminds me of the opening setup of Pessoa’s Book of disquiet.

One more long short story to go before I mark this one as read.

Makes me wish – if I could make a cave in time, or a kind of loop in time, where I can just read and read, and then once done, come out and still be at the same time where I left off, or if not the same time, may be five mins later. I wish, I wish!  But it doesn’t work that way.


**

Later (Feb 19): Finished reading Calvino's book, and I finally get my books-read in the year count to two. The last story in the book was about real estate and changing nature of cities, and people - a long short story. I think I liked the shorter stories in the book better. Hoping to read more from Calvino soon.

Balzac's Père Goriot

Written in early 19th century, the book is one of the most widely-read translated Balzac novels, depicts the France and society of early to mid-1800s – alien from the one I live in, operating with very different moral compass and social mores. Strange land early France. Stranger were its social codes.

One reads Balzac for perhaps the world he creates for you. Reading his opening description of the Pension, one can almost see, smell and feel what he shows you. Fast paced, short novel, but so rich in detail and drama that you live in that parallel universe for the hours you spend with him. No matter what the moral and social contradictions it plays in your head and all the inexplicable observations you end up piling your thoughts with.

The novel is set in a boarding house in Paris, where there's Pere Goriot, a retiree who seems to have happily married off his daughters and given them his fortune and now lives frugally, and there’s Rastingac, a law student, fresh from the provinces, full of high ambition but the ways of making your way to the top in France of those times are less through hard work (as the modern, free society wants you to implicitly believe), but as everyone in those times seem to understand, explicitly in who knows who and who bestows favour on whom. The construct of marriages is more like economic and social partnerships, and almost everyone is crafty (all women, men), laying out schemes to get what they want. And layer on that a father who believes the only way to live is to keep pampering the grown-up, married daughters to the extent that after he has given all his fortune to them, he takes out his remaining annuity principal to fund a party dress (!) leaving him with nothing to live on or to give any more which brings its own heart-breaking realizations.

It all is intriguing, and for lack of a better word, strange. Every character is flawed, and not really true to themselves, inconsistent through the temporal dimension of the novel – like real people, as if the author is also getting to know them with you and not really knows them already. And perhaps that’s what it is – a reflection on the society of those times, penned so close to reality that it reads like satire. You do feel like following up on the characters and for that we have the whole of Balzac universe, over 90 novels he wrote in this ‘Human Comedy’ series. Before Zola peopled the streets of Paris with his characters, it was Balzac.

I enjoyed the read and the contradictory firing up of thoughts. It addresses some innate curiosity - this contemplation of worldviews of people of a different place and time - it satiates some and then adds more questions. And Balzac seems like a big mine to explore those questions.

Long long ago, I read a collection of his stories, and this was the first novel. The edition I read from is Norton’s Critical Edition, translated by Burton Raffel and comes pack full of responses on Balzac from Emile Zola to Proust to Henry James to modern times too (I hope to read through some of them). For the time being, perhaps that’ll be all of Balzac for me, but I do know now whom to read if I need a total capture of senses. So easily takes you away from the realities of your own day and time, both public and private.


PS: A few weeks later. Thinking about Balzac's world, and other fictional worlds of a time and place removed from ours. All worlds different from ours seem absurd and unreal. To the people living in those worlds, the world is what it is, and everything makes great sense. But someone looking at them from somewhere else, a wonder arises, things don't make sense, and a 100 questions crop up. And you need to suspend that disbelief to swim in those waters. That way of existing seeming the real and the only way to be for the people inside. But seen from a different vantage point, things don't line up the way they do inside, like the sphere for the square.

I guess, so it goes for our world too.

Wrapping up 2019

Here’s the list of books I read in 2019 (most recent at top) 

• The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton 
• Small Memories - Jose Saramago (A memoir)
• Train Dreams by Denis Johnson 
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith 
• Literary Occasions by VS Naipaul (Essays) 
• Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (Memoir) 
• Work Suspended and other stories - Evelyn Waugh (SS) 
• The First Person and other stories - Ali Smith (SS) 
• Nobody's Looking At You by Janet Malcolm (NF/Essays) 
• Victory - An Island Tale by Joseph Conrad 
• Such Fine Boys by Patrick Modiano (translation) 
• My Antonia by Willa Cather 
• Public Library and other stories by Ali Smith (SS) 
• A Manual For Cleaning Women - Lucia Berlin (SS) 
• Welcome Home - Lucia Berlin's Memoir (NF) 
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (SF) 
• My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante 
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens 
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens 
• The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan 
• The Muse's Tragedy and Other Stories by Edith Wharton (SS) 
• Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (translated by Edward G. Seidensticker) 
• The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe (translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan) 

A shorter list compared to the other two recent years. Not many. However, for a while, I did write about the books I read. Glad about that. For the most recently read ones (the 5 or 6 not-linked bullets), my notes are still in draft-form. Not a lot, but hopefully I’ll get around to cleaning the drafts – and then perhaps I might still have a para for each of those not-linked bullets, if not a post. 

2019 also marked the decade for this blog. I started this when I got my first kindle, when they launched global shipping, in 2009. I was still in my 20s and A was still a baby/ toddler then, almost. We were still in Mumbai then.  I’ve still got that first kindle somewhere – a bit dislodged from its original book-flap cover, although it never seems to go beyond the frozen screensaver image.  There’s a blacker, newer kindle now which too gathers dust since I gravitate towards books in their physical form. 

Compared to all the other blogs I have launched and closed meanwhile, this one has been here for a while, so cheers to that and to the decade of ‘the kindled and the unkindled’.

Not that these markers matter much but new years, new months, new weeks, they all bring a fleeting lift – a re-imagining of self, a refresh of resolutions, a renewed sense of possibilities. 

Here's to 2020, and to reading.

A poem by Borges

Here's a poem I read recently. One of Jorge Luis Borges' poem, translated by W.S. Merwin.

I don't get around to reading many poems. And when I do read them, at times I don't get them. They require patience and keenness to enter the poet's frame of mind.

However, this one speaks to me. I now have it on my phone and I go back to it often. Sharing it here.

The South

To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars,
from the bench of shadow to have watched
those scattered lights
that my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations,
to have heard the note of water
in the cistern,
known the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle,
the silence of the sleeping bird,
the arch of the entrance, the damp
- these things perhaps are the poem.

The collection is called 'Selected Poems' by Borges edited by Alexander Coleman. There are a few more which I'll like to add here. Soon.

Nabokov's 'Speak, Memory'

It took me a few weeks to cover the distance from front to the back cover of this book. It demanded attention, and lengths of uninterrupted time. The initial part was swift, and I read and kept a lot of notes which pretty much form this post. The last few chapters were slow for me. There came a few days of not attending to this book and rather read a lot of other stuff - essays, a lot of utilitarian research, not literature really. The flow had been interrupted, and the magic was undone. But I do have the memory of the magic. Hope the post still shows how enamored I am, and hope to read it again some time! And hope to read more from Nabokov soon.

**

Speak, Memory is Nabokov's memoir, a selective autobiography of the first 40 or so years of his life. A lot of the writing here has been published elsewhere as essays, stand-alone narratives. But he revisited them in compiling this collection. Put them in the broadly natural flow of his life.

He writes about time. He writes about themes. He writes about his earliest memories, and makes us see them, vivid. There's beauty dripping from every page. Words and words! One can keep collecting Nabokov’s words the way he collected butterflies. Beautiful words and phrases making what he says his own. The thought that it leads me to is that there is little new to be said under the sun, but the way he says it, Oh! Such beauty. Makes you wonder why bother to read anything else. He writes like a poet. There is so much heartbreaking beauty in his prose. His words, his phrases and what he sets up for you. What he shows you. How he sees things and what he chooses to interlace and this beautifully, detailed, intricate, yet, such fine account.

The book accounts for the years 1903 - 1940. Nabokov was born in 1899 and broadly kept in step with the century’s years. From his earliest memories in Russia - 

“The old and the new, the liberal touch and the patriarchal one, fatal poverty and fatalistic wealth got fantastically interwoven in that strange first decade of our century.”

Little that I can add, just quote. And a lot so quotes I have. 

He talks about time, and his philosophy is perhaps what lends weight to his beautiful prose. 

"I have journeyed back in thought — with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went — to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits."

"Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison."

"How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!"

"I felt myself purged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time. One shared it - just as excited bathers share shining seawater - with creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by time’s common flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive."

"One night during a trip abroad...I recall kneeling on my pillow at the window of a sleeping car and seeing with an inexplicable pang, a handful of fabulous lights that beckoned to me from a distant hillside, and then slipped into a pocket of black velvet: diamonds that I later gave away to my characters to alleviate the burden of my wealth.”

“The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.”

It has something perhaps to do with the way English is his language but not the first tongue. English, learnt in different surroundings. It is a medium which opens up a wealth and treasure of thought and books, but it is an acquired medium. The original medium was something else. Does it affect the way we relate to words and language?

The way Nabokov writes, he defines, he collects, he classifies. He talks about mushrooms, about his family tree, and despite some of these being tedious, in his hands they flow like poetry. I don’t know is this a bias because reading him seems like a win - a delight of words, of phrases, of sentences, of ways of seeing, and of philosophy. You get everything in one book. And because there is so much to be gleaned, I re-read the chapters I’ve just finished reading to revel again in those beautiful sentences. True pleasure and joy.

His initial years in Russia were very comfortable. Perhaps very few people live like that. The extremely rich perhaps. And I was intrigued at the places where he talks about the family tree going back to 1300s and the way his mother managed to live without getting into kitchen or household admin! Very few women have managed that in their lifetimes.

**

What you take away from books is the number of things or imagery that is vividly created for you. Some books leave you with a few, but the really successful ones with you leave you with a lot of those. The way Katherine Mansfield sees things. Some of the early bits of Mrs Dalloway. And so much from Nabokov.

May be it is a product of the attention you can bestow on the book. The openness with which you let it affect you. It is your openness, your eagerness to receive and seek, and the author’s dealing with the subject, in this case his memories make them stand true for you.

“It is certainly not then - not in dreams - but when one is wise awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement , on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow that blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.”

The eye of the artist. The memories of a writer. As he says, he has lent so many of his memories to his characters. The eye that traces the past from a dim fog and makes it come alive for us. The way the perspective is drawn is that of a visual artist. So much more than just a writer.

Even shadows moving through the garden path bring alive a summer afternoon - “Eyed shadows moved through the garden paths. On the white window ledges, on the long window seats covered with faded calico, the sun breaks into geometrical gems after passing through rhomboids and squares of stained glass”

About the nonutlitarian delights of art:

“When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but marking mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. ‘Natural Selection’ , in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behaviour, nor could one appeal to the theory of ‘the struggle for life’ when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”

**

However, as he moves out of Russia, the book loses a bit of vibrancy. And although I enjoyed it, I felt that joy was a little bit lacking from that writing. May be it was a byproduct of the attention I had on reading. I do not have much to quote from final sections of the book.

Sometime, perhaps when I read it again.

The final section of the book is a pseudo-review by Nabokov of his own book. I am glad that most of this post was drafted as I was still reading through the initial bits. Because once you read the final section, it is a recap, and a light thrown on his thinking process, on the mechanics and it is a nice wrap and little is to be said after that.

But let me close this post with another quote of his. Here, he reminds us again of the elasticity of time:

“ I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness - in a landscape selected at random - is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern - to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

Recent reads - short stories

I recently read a couple of short story collections.

One was Ali Smith's "The First Person and other stories". And the other was Evelyn Waugh's "Work Suspended and other stories". This is a late update. I read them a few weeks ago.

I enjoy short stories. They are also good for times when it is difficult to carve out sustained reading time.  I feel that with essays too. More recently, it has been Nabokov's Speak Memory and Teju Cole's collection of non-fiction writing. They send me on different paths too. More on them soon - that is, once I finish reading them. The point is difficult to read a complete narrative or a novel at the moment. So reading whatever takes me away for a little while but brings me back soon.

Ali Smith's this collection was different from the Public Library one. I had loved that one. This one, the First Person and Other Stories, was a little bit difficult to completely warm up to. The language and the smooth, flowing narrative is the same as any other writing by Ali Smith. It is the characters, their sadness at times, and at times the strangeness of the set-up. There were some interesting bits - I would say, more of a mixed bag, this collection. There's this thing about her writing, she quotes from so many places, and she uses such beautiful words, that I'm often tempted to stop and look them up deeper, but there is a compulsion in her sentences, which pulls you along. It is like a slide. Once you are on it, even though you do wish to go slow and look around and enjoy the scenery, you cannot do much; you just slide.

I felt that most of the stories here were exploratory. They explored a setting - the narrator and narrator's younger self. The narrator and a lost cause/ lost child. The narrator and a random parcel at her doorstep. It starts with something and as if, the author wishes to see where it will take her. And it takes her to strange lands. I feel I need to reread some to understand what is really going on, to understand the intent or even where the focus of the story lies.

I liked "True short story", a story about short story. More than a short story, an exploration of what a short story is and leaves you with collectible quotes from several writers. Consider this:

"Tzvetan Todorov says that the thing about a short story is that it's so short it doesn't allow us the time to forget that it's only literature and not actually life.

Nadine Gordimer says short stories are absolutely about the present moment, like the brief flash of a number of fireflies here and there in the dark.

...

William Carlos Williams says that the short story, which acts like the flare of a match struck in the dark, is the only real form for describing the briefness, the brokenness and the simultaneous wholeness of people's life."

The other collection I read was Evelyn Waugh's "Work Suspended and Other Stories". I haven't read anything from Evelyn Waugh in the past and this seemed like a good way to get introduced to the author. This one is a collection of short stories and a couple of novella length works. Most of the short stories in the collection are satirical. Interesting picture of the times - 1920s, 1930s, between the wars. Depicting a wide and disparate set of people and their lives, immediate problems and their preoccupations. One of the novella-length story, Scott King's Modern Europe, is another satire. This time focusing on a school teacher from England on a trip to a fictional totalitarian country, and through his journey, we explore the difficult, senseless, nightmarish random country (reminded me of early pages of The Unconsoled or a bad dream).

The one story that stood out in all this, was Work Suspended. This one was different from all the rest. More like a novel. Traces the life of a writer of detective fiction, and his fascination for a friend's wife - not much in this seemed satirical. His work gets suspended because he puts his book away to make way for the war.

Interesting collection. Keen to read more at some point.

Take this waltz

This one is not a book related post.

I am going through a song phase. Every once in a while I go through a song phase, or a poem phase that lasts until I wear out the song a bit, but before I do so, I wish to capture the latest one here. A few days ago it was 'a long and winding road'.

The current one is 'Take this waltz' by Leonard Cohen and I discovered it very recently, and it has grown on me. Helps that it is a poem too (by Spanish poet Lorca), which took Cohen somewhere around 150 hrs to translate to get it just right in English. I am not sure whether I get the poem completely - I get the mood, the tone, and I love the pace and the way it is set to song. And like all haunting poems, this one too lives on love and loss.

Probably it is the Rebecca West that I'm reading (her journey through Czechoslovakia, and its constant reference to Vienna). I am enjoying this on loop. And since it's that part of the phase where I need to tell everyone I meet to listen to this song, I am sharing it here (since this song is a poem too). Until I decide better, here goes:

Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women
There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows
There's a tree where the doves go to die
There's a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost

Aey, aey, aey, aey
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws

Oh, I want you, I want you, I want you
On a chair with a dead magazine
In the cave at the tip of the lilly
In some hallway where love's never been
On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand

Aey, aey, aey, aey
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take its broken waist in your hand

This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With its very own breath of brandy and Death
Dragging its tail in the sea

There's a concert hall in Vienna
Where your mouth had a thousand reviews
There's a bar where the boys have stopped talking
They've been sentenced to death by the blues
Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture
With a garland of freshly cut tears?

Aey, aey, aey, aey
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz, it's been dying for years

There's an attic where children are playing
Where I've got to lie down with you soon
In a dream of Hungarian lanterns
In the mist of some sweet afternoon
And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow
All your sheep and your lillies of snow

Aey, aey, aey, aey
Take this waltz, take this waltz
With its "I'll never forget you, you know"

This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With its very own breath of brandy and Death
Dragging its tail in the sea

And I'll dance with you in Vienna
I'll be wearing a river's disguise
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
My mouth on the dew of your thighs
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook
With the photographs there, and the moss
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross
And you'll carry me down on your dancing
To the pools that you lift on your wrist

Oh my love, oh my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz
It's yours now, it's all that there is

A few recent reads

Last few months have been different than normal in quite a few ways. No matter the specifics, but they left me with little time or desire or both to read or if read, then, to write. I could read a little bit this week, so here again, trying to fill in the gaps.

Some notes on a few of my recent reads:

Janet Malcolm's Nobody's Looking at You

Her Forty One False Starts sits on the shelf - been sitting there for a while. I have read it haphazardly. Quickly read a  few essays and then couldn't read the rest. And hence, still counted as an unfinished book on my list. So when I came across this one, I didn't give in to the temptation of reading by pull. I read it through from beginning to end, over this week. And glad that I did.

This is her most recent essay collection I believe - writings from different publications. Divided in three main groups. First one is profiles of a few people beginning with Eileen Fisher, about Yuja Wang, Rachel Maddow and about a second-hand/ old books store in New York. I loved each one of those profiles. Quite contemporary compared to some of my other readings. One can just google and read up more around and about the subjects from wherever JM leaves off.

The next section is around American politics and processes. Little context for me but I liked her writing, and I was keen to read cover to cover so I pushed through that section.  A lot of references in the 'The Art of Testifying' piece were lost on me. But immediately next was the piece on Sarah Palin and family, and one doesn't need much context for reading through it ('Special Needs'). It was a strange, intriguing piece. More than the writing, I think for me what held me was the dissonance of what one knows, being a non-American, and what JM shows. The writing was engaging, gossipy, humorous and still somehow, fair, sympathetic.

The final section was around literature, and mostly reviews of books on a range of topics, from feminism, sexual harassment to Tolstoy, Bloomsbury set, Plath and Hughes, and some more. There was an interesting essay on translations of Russian fiction - edifying, akin to enrolling in a class, and I mean it in the best way. The books she reviews are not my standard reading fare and glad to read reviews and views and thoughts - again akin to learning from a teacher. These are more than reviews, they give a flavour, a context, and a lot of comparison and information, like any good essay. I am glad that I read them otherwise they don't really show up on paths I take.

Most of the essays in this collection are available in online archives of these mags. Enjoyed it. Next steps - quite keen to look deeper at Eileen Fisher (the company) and the related question of eventual company ownership.


Joseph Conrad's Victory - An Island Tale

I liked this one. Very different from the last one I read from him (The Secret Agent). In parts reminiscent of Heart of  Darkness. But just a little bit - mainly in the colonial way,  to the extent that it is set in that slice of colonial time and space which regards non-White world as racially inferior.

And still, it is not about people in any general sense. It is about a specific person and about circumstances. And about passivity and activity. And about the way life works sometime. If one can look past the annoying colonial set up, and the presumed superiority of that set-up, and one looks at the protagonist, Heyst just as a person living on an island, giving it all up, cutting off all ties (almost), and still, due to some random chain of circumstances, getting caught in the web of life again, and losing. It is about how one sees through the world, understand it is all a farce, and yet one gets drawn into it, makes ties, and then those ties define the chimera of life. One tries to reason, explain, apply logic and structure and sequence and narrative, but things happen all of the sudden, and the tables get turned and if the passive wouldn't act, then activity comes to them.


Such Fine Boys by Patrick Modiano (translation) ****

I don't seem to have any notes for this one except for the four stars I've added on my recent reads page. This fairly recent translation came with a foreword by Clezio. The book is a sort of sketchbook, a collection of portraits. A few boys who attended a boarding school together. The narrator and a few other boys, the abandoned, unwanted (but not without substantial means) children at this school near Paris. Now adults, at different points in their lives. Each chapter picks up one of the boys or characters from the school the narrator comes across at some point, and through that portrayal, the narrator tells us a little bit more about the history, the old times at the boarding school, their lives on the weekends and the current times, and somewhere in the chapter, the narration shifts and the person being narrated about becomes the narrator. Their lives in and around Paris. It is the bizarre-ness of these lives that was the most arresting bit. I still recall certain scenes from the book and at times get tempted to believe that I watched a movie or saw a show. But it was all the author in translation working on my imagination - images and scenes as vivid as a TV show.

On recently reading Hilton Als' Paris Review Interview, I came across this interesting way he refers to theater. He quotes Dianne Wiest:

She wrote to me, “A great play turns you [the audience] into each character . . . It pulls at you to question your thoughts and feelings through the prism of characters. A great play requires hard work from an audience. It is not about something, it is the something. The conflict belongs all to you and you live it and carry it with you.”

Something that Patrick Modiano's book ends up doing to you.

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Another beautiful read.

What I recall and what stayed - This little kid at the end of chapter 1, going to his grandparents after his parents are no more, alone in this world (the vulnerability of little, lonely kids!!), after a long travel, last miles of his journey, in the middle of nowhere, night, between heaven and Earth - away from everything that he knows- and that night, the author says that the child does not pray, but believes what would be would be. I am unable to recreate the effect that it made on me. But the juxtaposition of this little, vulnerable fellow and this big, freeing thought - what will be, will be somehow warmed up my heart.

The book is about this kid growing up at his grandparents' - initially at their farm in the open country, the West, and then in a small town nearby, and this girl, Antonia, and her family, who arrive to the neighborhood on the same day as the narrator, European immigrants, and they set about to rebuild their lives in this new country. A portrait of life in the farming America at the turn of last century.
Choices available to boys is different from those available to girls. It is an interesting portrait of those times, those lives and the place.

My first from Willa Cather. Over time if I come across more, I'll hopefully read more.


Public Library and other stories by Ali Smith

Quite enjoyed this one. Interesting, beautiful stories.Strange emotions. Poetry. Sentences run along carrying you with them. So fast, gliding. Different stories highlight different people. From Katherine Mansfield, to DHL. And then throughout the book, what people think of libraries, public libraries and how they are important. A book about books. If you love reading, you love such books. So many references. There are words she plays with, collects, loves. Then there are all these people she reads and admires. And then there are so many interesting, curious facts. And then her own memories and dreams. And they are all beautifully, breathtakingly meshed together in these stories. So although the narrative strangeness and abruptness can jar you, the flow is too smooth to stop mid-way. If anything, you turn back, and reopen the pages to slide down again and see the vista at may be a different angle than seen first.

Another author I want to read more from.