A poem

Today brought this poem by Czeslaw Milosz. 

Secretaries

I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing
That is dictated to me and a few others.
Secretaries, mutually unknown, we walk the earth
Without much comprehension. Beginning a phrase in the middle
Or ending it with a comma. And how it all looks when completed
Is not up to us to inquire, we won't read it anyway.

Another of his poem has this phrase :  if not I, then someone else/ Would be walking here, trying to understand his age.

My current read

Since I take weeks/months sometimes to read some books, and since I also wish to keep adding to this page here, I've thought I'll perhaps share a little bit more about what goes on in my reading space. 

I am currently reading Les Miserables. I began sometime in June after finishing Moby Dick, which still sits close, opened sometimes to just get back the flavor of that language and poetry. Les Miserables (I heard someone call it LesMis on a TV show), is a long book. It has 48 mini books in it. I am somewhere beyond midway. Yesterday, I happened on a beautiful page - a diary extract which a person leaves for another person to read. It is something worth noting from. Some passages here below. 

But before getting into that, a little bit more about the book. It has that similar high energy throughout which some long books have with a slowly building and unfolding narrative. And then there are those sections, won't call them detours but these essay like chapters or books which take you out of the story into something else - be it the June 18th battle of Waterloo, or the mechanisms of a convent, or just Paris of early 19th century. A lot of instances like that which help in making the book come alive - or the time and space it is set in come alive. I am enjoying reading it, and although part of me that keeps pace and looks at the bookmark against the closed book for progress wishes to read quickly, part of me wants to take the passages slowly, specially some chapters which revive the time and place, and just how people lived then. Still a few hundred pages to go. 

This book is a new translation by Julie Rose from 2008. 

Other few explorations include Margaret Atwood's Curious Pursuits. There are a few others, but more another time. Now to the passages from Les Miserables which I wish to copy, - echoes of Sufi thought:  

The reduction of the universe to one single being, the expansion of one single being into God: That is what love is.


Love is the angels' greeting to the stars.


God is behind all things, but all things hide God. Things are black, human beings opaque. To love someone is to make them transparent.


Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the body's position, the soul is on its knees.


Lovers who are separated cheat absence by a thousand chimeras that, nonetheless, have their reality. They are prevented from seeing each other, they can't write to each other, yet they find a whole host of mysterious ways of communicating. They send each other birdsong, the perfume of flowers, the laughter of children, the sun's rays, the wind's sighs, starlight, all of Creation. And why not? All God's works are made to serve love. Love is powerful enough to load the whole of nature with its messages.
O spring, you are the letter I write to her.


The future belongs even more to hearts than to minds. Loving is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. The infinite requires the inexhaustible.


Love partakes of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like the soul, it is a divine spark, like the soul, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire that is inside us, that is everlasting and infinite, that nothing can limit and that nothing can extinguish. You feel it burn right to the marrow of your bones and you see it shine out to the back of the sky.


O love! Adoration! Sensual joy of two minds that understand each other, of two hearts that are exchanged, of two glances that pierce each other through!...I have sometimes dreamed that now and then the hours broke away from the life of the angels and came down here below to traverse the destiny of men.


...God is the fullness of heaven; love is the fullness of mankind.


When love has melted and blended two beings in an angelic and sacred unity, the secret of life is open to them; they are nothing more, then, than the two sides of a single destiny; they are nothing more than the two wings of a single spirit. Love, soar!


Deep hearts, wise spirits, take life the way God made it. It is a long ordeal, an unintelligible preparation for an unknown destiny. ...Try to love souls and you will find them again.


What a great thing, to be loved! What an even greater thing, to love! The heart becomes heroic through passion. It is no longer made up of anything but what is pure; it no longer relies on anything but what is elevated and grand. An unworthy thought can no more germinate in it than a nettle on a glacier. The lofty and serene soul, out of reach of vulgar passions and emotions, rises above the clouds and shadows of this world, the follies, the lies, the hatreds, the vanities, the miseries, and inhabits the endless skies and feels only the deep and subterranean rumblings of destiny, as the mountain peak feels earthquakes.


If there wasn't someone who loved, the sun would go out.

'Intrepid effort of the soul'

Over the last couple of years I have read a handful of books perhaps. Some of them were long books and took me long weeks, if not months. Most recent was Moby Dick. 

Moby Dick was a surprisingly rewarding reading experience. Surprising, because it is one of those books one has often heard about, but the reading of it was completely different from any of the heard instances. It was a refreshingly fun, some sort of live-wire energy flowing through it. 

Everything about the book was delightful - the language, its poetry, the tone, the intonations, the subject matter or the main preoccupation of the narrator, the world it describes. And then, add to it a series of essays interwoven in the narrative. I call it a series of essays because each one begins anew and afresh - and opens up a new world for you, again and again. Each one has that fresh energy. And then throughout the book are fabulous passages one wishes to share with the world, or take the people around you by hand and make them read those passages. Usually such fabuolous, deep writing tends to be about life and philosophy interwoven with the narrative or the story - layered and deep - what I perhaps mean to say is that the quality of the writing or the richness is because of the writer's thoughts interspersed throughout the book which shed a unique light on life and world, and in that, connect to something deep within the reader – to bring home to reader’s own life and world. 

In their keenness to share an entirety with you, a world with you, they provide a resting pace to the reader. There is no clamor for the reader's attention - there is just a giving, a sharing of the world of writer's mind. Here that mind is on the surface occupied with Moby Dick and whaling. But that is just the surface. All the talk about whales and people on the boat seems just like the top layer of some  deeper philosophical thought. I say philosophical – the word stands in for anything that connects deeply to the life and world of the reader irrespective of whales, boats or the life one leads. It addresses that deep wonder and question which as humanity we all share consciously or unconsciously at some level, about life, its meanings, its context in this universe, and just how to go about living well, if that provide some meaning. 

Books like these have a richness of a whole world in them, and seem to keep on giving on every reading.  Every encounter is a new encounter – the richness of language, the freshness, the depth. I’ll probably be surprised and delighted afresh on meeting those lines.  And I think of Infinite Jest and the generosity of DFW. I think of War and Peace. Or how I felt after closing Don Quixote. Joys of good writing! 

To anyone who has not read it, and who enjoys reading fiction, this is a book worth spending slow hours on. And to close this post, here sharing Chapter 23 in its brief entirety:

The Lee Shore.

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.

When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

Tradition and the individual talent

Seamus Heaney in his 'Finders Keepers' talks lovingly and reverentially of T S Eliot. Reminded and inspired, I too spend my hours with Eliot's Collected Poems. And the desire and need to read more from and about Eliot. Looking up 'Joy of Reading', Charles Von Doren suggests reading certain poems and prose by Eliot, esp "Tradition and the Individual Talent". This can be found in 'The Sacred Wood'.Here. 

This essay prompts its own response. A simple one, that is noting this down some lines this post and perhaps reviving this blog.

Some lines from the essay:

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may 44call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; 45and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

Reading this, a tangential response. From my narrow point of view, this, that considering an artist or writer in a historical chain, is perhaps one way to consider the whole thing. Perhaps other way to look at it is that all great writing resonates with a few simple truths that shine through them in myriad details and complexities. Perhaps there are a few simple truths to begin with, and each great writer discovers again and again the same fountain that feeds all spirit. 

Eliot puts it beautifully in four quartets:

And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

The other problem or conundrum or curiosity or existential matter that he seems to grapple with which finds voice in his poems too is the intersection of temporal with the timeless. A beautiful poem seems to create a timeless space in our temporality. Perhaps the good fortune of finding timelessness in temporality - is the good fortune of any reader.

And again, from Four Quartets:

...But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint—

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. ...

 And further:

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from. And every phrase

And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,

Taking its place to support the others,

The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,

An easy commerce of the old and the new,

The common word exact without vulgarity,

The formal word precise but not pedantic,

The complete consort dancing together)

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,

Every poem an epitaph. And any action

Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat

Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration. A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

**

Unrelated note. Some books, essays or poems are like verbs. While reading, they seem to create a space which one seems to enter, a state, just the way the words have been threaded together by the poet or the writer. After reading, I don’t seem to remember a lot from them except perhaps sharpening of a sense or some feeling stays which is enveloping. Like a verb then - it is in the act of reading them - the state of reading, rather than any retention of what is read. Perhaps one changes while reading them rather than carry away words from them. As Eliot would perhaps say, the husk of meaning, in changing, fulfilling. If some writings behave like verbs, perhaps Eliot's poems are an atmosphere of their own. 

**

Back to the blog. I hope to read with same verve the crumbs of great writing that come my way; my personal desires are still the same, to prolong my time with such crumbs, by reading on them, around them, about them: the joys and delights of good writing. And hopefully sharing it here. To any kindred with kindled.

Adam and Eve

I recently read Mark Twain's Extracts from Diaries of Adam and Eve, and it is a delightful and fun short read. I got nudged to the book from Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Wave in the mind"  - her book about herself, reading and writing. There is a foreword of sorts to these diaries and so glad that I found them online and read them through. Available here:  Eve's Diary, extracts from Adam's Diary

There are many tangents one can launch (for example, Eve considering herself an experiment), but something I remember it by, is the closing note, Adam at Eve's grave:

"ADAM: Wheresoever she was, THERE was Eden."

And then here's something that summarises the vein in which these diaries are written, how the author regards Adam and Eve, here's an extract from Adam's diary: 

Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl and make allowances. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she can't speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it, and pour out endearing names upon it. And she is color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage, blue sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains, the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering in the wastes of space—none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can see, but because they have color and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them. If she could quiet down and keep still a couple minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that case I think I could enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature—lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and once when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes, watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she was beautiful.

Both Adam and Eve change and grow in their diaries, and over time, their regard for each other grows as well culminating in that final quote by Adam on Eve and Eden. 

Reading this and thinking, that Adam and Eve, are quite singular characters with no precedents, no one to learn from but each other. They provide such a large imaginary ground to artists. 

That led me to think about where all I have read them referred to in books or poems. So here is opening a list of where I have come across them (this list is quite short at the moment :), will add to this as I come across/ remember more.

• Milton's Paradise Lost
• Diaries of Adam and Eve (links above)
• Robert Frost poem - Never again would birds' song be the same
• This poem on Eve and Serpent - Paul Valery 
• 
  

A wholly new start

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Keats

I recently read a lecture on Mathematics (introductory part of the lecture), delivered by David Hilbert at the turn of last century, a sort of looking back at and looking forward to and gathering some of the biggest unsolved questions or wonders then in Maths. But as did so, he did one of those old-fashioned things, which perhaps finds itself a place in many rituals, and perhaps is a really nice thing generally - that, of recalling to mind. Recalling to mind certain things to bring forth or sort of invoke a frame of mind, a background which lets both the speaker and the listener perhaps orient to or share some of the common frame, the hypothetical thought space where the speaker can then unfold some of his thoughts. Seeing that done beautifully, one wonders why don't we do that more often. Anyway, this practice of recalling to mind, seems to be an age-old thing, as things that endure, generally are strong, and strong generally are beautiful and sensible, and perhaps encapsulate wisdom in practice. Even if the reader is the self, even if it is a note to self recalled often - perhaps just to invoke the companionship of some words.

So here, recalling these words from Keats: 

"As tradesmen say everything is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer—being in itself a Nothing. Ethereal things may at least be thus real, divided under three heads—Things real—things semireal—and nothings. Things real, such as existences of Sun moon and Stars—and passages of Shakspeare.—Things semireal, such as love, the Clouds etc., which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist—and Nothings, which are made great and dignified by an ardent pursuit—which, by the by, stamp the Burgundy mark on the bottles of our minds, insomuch as they are able to “consecrate whate’er they look upon.”"

I am relatively new to Keats. Name heard often, a poem or two, but after recently acquiring a poem collection in a second-hand book sale, I seem to come across Keats' words more often. And then as one reads others, and reads Keats again, perhaps something that personally strikes me is a zest, a freshness, a proximity to life - the words that spring highest. Some writers when they write can weave the life around them in their words, so when you open their lines, it is a fragrance fresh from their time, that comes forth and surrounds you. 

I still read Keats. Beginner stages. Just a little read so far. Some poems, a few letters. Poems take a while generally with me. A beginner to poetry in a way. I read a poem and then let the poem pick me up as it would. Sometimes, one finds oneself reading the poem again and again, over days, months. Sometimes, years. Some fragments then become part of you, coming up to converse with you at times as strangers, at times, as yourself. With Keats, it is mostly the life in his words, then, his humility, his perspective, his good sense that his quotes I write here and there on little notes and scraps and some here following too, hoping the words find me again and again.

I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness—I look not for it if it be not in the present hour,—nothing startles me beyond the moment. The Setting Sun will always set me to rights, or if a Sparrow come before my Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel. 

Words penned some two hundred years ago, can brighten up any reader instantly. Here too, the recalling to mind things simple and basic to turn around any head lost or overwhelmed, a setting to rights.

To a beginner keen to learn more, the joy of hearing a poet's words on poetry is an introductory lesson of sorts, an appreciation of what perhaps the poet appreciates, himself perhaps exploring the shape of his own thoughts on paper as he writes and reads, and writes:

In poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their centre.

1st. I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

2d. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of Imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight. But it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it—And this leads me to

Another axiom—That if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

I feel, one can perhaps recall to mind things. Or one can recall to mind atmospheres. Some words can help recall to mind states. In the calculus of things, perhaps states are an integration of atmospheres traversing a being. Perhaps that few artists can do, which is an everyday magic of living (a pre and post workout self for example), but in words, only perhaps poets find their way around it. And hence, perhaps prose by poets is one of the best things one can ever read. It has pleasures beyond reading. And hence, this note from Keats. His appreciation of the transformation that happens on encounter with a waterfall, "I live in the eye".

What astonishes me more than any thing is the tone, the coloring, the slate, the stone, the moss, the rock-weed; or, if I may so say, the intellect, the countenance of such places. The space, the magnitude of mountains and waterfalls are well imagined before one sees them; but this countenance or intellectual tone must surpass every imagination and defy any remembrance. I shall learn poetry here and shall henceforth write more than ever, for the abstract endeavor of being able to add a mite to that mass of beauty which is harvested from these grand materials, by the finest spirits, and put into etherial existence for the relish of one’s fellows. I cannot think with Hazlitt that these scenes make man appear little. I never forgot my stature so completely – I live in the eye; and my imagination, surpassed, is at rest.

At times, words obscure. At times, words reveal or illuminate. Generally a poet's words reveal. They illuminate the subject touched, they reveal the poet's world, ways, thoughts and approach to life, and perhaps, inadvertently, they reveal the poet. Poets are integrators that way, artists of words, their words seem to be very close to the fount of their own lives, often spanning the breadth and depth of living in a few words.

Perhaps a poet's words are like a concurring hum or a variation on a theme, a music, which, in a various way, repeat the same fount close to the poet, the fount of its own living, just another way to see or say the same thing, a new rejoicing in the approach to the only fount one knows. Perhaps.

New year post

I like reading book blogs. And posts by different people on books, poems, essays, things they have liked and shared, added with their personal notes on the things. There is the joy of discovery, of reading, of sharing.

So in that spirit, hoping to add a few posts this year. I like reading my own old posts too. 

Little to report on the yearly reading. Haven't been tracking it that well. Little closed completely. Yet, a lot opened and explored. A Shakespeare. A Russian novel begun early in the year, started reading again later in the year, and still continues. A lot of reading on reading. 

New year. A time for refresh. Some new resolutions. A new reason to begin. Not that beginning needs reasons. Yet, a new year seems symbolic enough to accompany it. This year, hoping to post more here. Perhaps, instead of waiting to post after I finish a book, which I have not been tracking on the recent-reads that well, I thought, perhaps a poem, an essay, a note.

April and Poems

April being the ‘cruellest month’, I tried to launch the month with ‘The Wasteland’. I read a few lines, soon something came up, and since then, I’ve been in and out of the poem. As always. Now that I think about it, very few moments have seen me read one of Eliot’s poems in a straight-line fashion. Always from here and there, wherever the eye lands. Always fragments. Fragments at times stuck in different parts of my mind coming up unbeckoned, summing up a moment at times. Living my life through second hand phrases. If one were to live through a poet’s phrases, makes sense to stock up on some. ‘Four Quartets’ seems to be a good place to stock up, Prufrock floats to the surface often but The Wasteland is not something I get yet, but hopefully, over time, I’ll understand it more.

April saw me reading Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’. And then ‘Paradise Regained'. And in between a host of poems from here and there. But it takes a while for things to be absorbed such that they show up unbeckoned. It is all an active effort initially. One has to read them a few times. Read them aloud maybe. Or read them for the favourite bits. Or wear them out, get to know them well. Get familiar.  Almost make them your own.

At the moment, this seeks to be settling in from Paradise Lost:

"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same"

Reading Paradise Lost makes me want to read more of the poetic dramas, and long poems, preferably aloud, in a play-act fashion, entering the character or the narrator – God or Satan or Adam or Eve. Now, hoping to get into one of those Shakespearean characters. A line-up on my to-read list already. May May see some of those play-acts.

But the big treat this month was discovering Haikus.

It was Calvino with his essay on Japanese Gardens, and how he thinks that the gardens mirrored Japanese Haikus, that made me look up Haikus. And since then, I have a few pages open everywhere - on the phone, on the comp, which take me down the Haiku garden.

They need to be admired, like flowers, which are in full bloom in April where I live. Almost every tree laden with scores of blooms, branches drooping, overwhelmed, flowers all over the footpaths and grassy patches. And one can’t walk there without thinking of Yeats’ “I have spread my dreams under your feet;/ Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”.  Every gaze presents an eyeful of flowers. Every few steps one needs to stop to admire one of those open-faced beauties closely. You look at their perfection, their tender curving opening blossoming and even as they blossom, the edges of the petals already turning dark, already dying. You stand there enchanted until the business of living pulls you out, you run to catch-up, just until the next flower that beckons and tugs at something in you, and you stop and stare again.

So it goes with Haikus. They take a moment of your attention. But they grab it like those flowers. And once read, they keep playing around in your thought space for a bit, until again, the practical business of living draws your attention elsewhere.

Haiku is a Japanese poetry style, short verse in three lines, with a fixed number of syllables in each. From Wikipedia -  the chief idea is ‘cutting’ or juxtaposition of two ideas/ images and a cutting word between them. But I can access Haikus only in translation. And I realise some of their colour is lost in translation, still, even though faded, they are a joy to behold.

One of my favourite ones is a haiku about haiku:

“A haiku is like a finger pointing to the moon.
If the finger is bejeweled, we no longer see the moon.”
(Matsuo Basho)

The idea of this haiku, of simplicity, of letting the content shine, of this desire for unadorned kernel of things, this idea and the haiku seem to have found some place inside and they keep rising to the surface now and again. This longing for simple truth and beauty, that perhaps sits inside all of us, when sees its reflection in these flowers or these haikus, rejoices, claps for recognition, and in their small, blossomy way, make the moment and the day memorable.

I now keep these haikus around in stumbly places. When I don’t know what I’m looking for, and I come across those open haiku pages, it is like flowers on my day's path. And who is not glad to see flowers on their path?

And as if so many flowers were not enough, yesterday, I walked into Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat (a string of Quatrains, which is a verse in four lines; translated from Persian).  A long and winding road that led me there, but the last link was AA Milne’s note on Autumn and something about a book of verses and bread and thou. And I looked up and found this dreamy paradise:

XII
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise now!

What delights me is that Omar Khayyam wrote these lines some 900 years ago, but the paradise held in that thought appeals even in this day and age, almost a millennium away. The unadorned kernel, the true and the beautiful shines through and tugs at you wherever found. Here, reflected in flowers, in haikus, and in quatrains.

Although I did rip through the verses like they were bread (another fragment – “I had a love I ripped through like it was bread.”, from a poem by Amy Woolard ), like Haikus, these verses cannot be consumed all in one go. Need to be strewn around. Then one day, on a grey, dreary road, it appears, like one perfect red autumn leaf, lifting up the road and the moment to something heavenly.

Amongst other things, I have been reading Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waves’ for the last few days. The book seems to belongs here in this post with all the poems. Prose, but each paragraph a new scene. As if each of those reminiscing moments were a poem. Poems in prose. Like those flowers, each paragraph needs to be stared at, to hold each image for a while longer. And I should perhaps write about the book once I finish reading it, but just see how Rhoda thinks of wandering down a poem:

“Here is a poem about a hedge. I will wander down it and pick flowers, green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured May, wild roses and ivy serpentine. I will clasp them in my hands and lay them on the desk's shiny surface. I will sit by the river's trembling edge and look at the water-lilies, broad and bright, which lit the oak that overhung the hedge with moonlight beams of their own watery light.”

Pretty much what I would like to do too.


April seems to inspire quite a few poems. Although my hemisphere bathes in autumn light, most April poems spell spring. (One of my favourite ones is EE Cummings: and april's where we are). As the sun sets and April bows, draws its curtains and wraps itself up to hide away somewhere in memories next to some of those poetic phrases, here's another one from Cummings,

Paris;this April sunset completely utters
utters serenely silently a cathedral 

before whose upward lean magnificent face
the streets turn young with rain,

spiral acres of bloated rose
coiled within cobalt miles of sky
yield to and heed
the mauve
               of twilight(who slenderly descends,
daintily carrying in her eyes the dangerous first stars)
people move love hurry in a gently

arriving gloom and
see!(the new moon
fills abruptly with sudden silver
these torn pockets of lame and begging colour)while
there and here the lithe indolent *******
Night,argues

with certain houses

The Divine Invasion

The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick is the second in series in the VALIS trilogy.

Not really as much a sci-fi but an alternate theological outcome imagined in an alternate reality. Quick read. Like Valis, this one too refers back to those two months in PKD’s life forever seeking explanation. One reads less for the book itself (which is alright as a standalone read, not really worth recommending) but because one is interested in understanding the effort and pain that those two months’ events of Exegesis (link) put PKD through. His novels become another way to almost see a person at work unravelling, shuffling, mixing things, trying to find a solution to this cosmic puzzle which he feels he has been exposed to, and which commands all his remaining life, because, really, once faced with something like that, how can anything else in this world ever match?

The book seems to take place in an alternate reality, which is around 2,000 years from the time of Jesus. Alternate because the world is different, quite at an advanced level of tech from our current world - with space travel, domes in space, colonies on other planets, cryonic suspension which kept dead/ almost dead people suspended to be revived as if in pause.

The novel circles around God seeking birth in the in an echo of the Virgin birth, and the people thus drawn in the story - Rybys (the mother), Herb (the father), and then the God-child's pursuit to remember himself (since in human form he seems to have forgotten) so that he can rid the world of the effects of the original fall. He is helped by divine characters in human form –Elias (prophet Elijah), and Zina. The assumption here is that everything has already happened, all future is history, just being lived through, contained in this specific bubble of a space-time which the beings and God in being form need to live through, and rediscover himself. There are many allusions throughout the book to different religious texts and strictures, and I’m glad that I was reading Paradise Lost around the same time and could gather some common allusions.

Partway through the book, reality changes to a completely different version at behest of one of the divine beings living as human. The characters are the same but their life’s background becomes completely different.  Quite interesting this treatment of reality and time and space, as if a ‘reality’ were an outfit to wear, easily modifiable by those who can, and the people living through whichever version not realising that the reality they observe didn’t really exist even a minute before. All their memories and whatever calls itself ‘past’ replaced say the very moment we encounter them in the book and unsuspecting, they seem to live through it as if that was all they have known forever, as if human beings were a computer program, operating against changing backgrounds and treating every background as the true reality in the moment of operation. (Many thorny issues with the way it is dealt, and linking it with the all future is past concept, but it keeps you occupied and is fun to keep daydreaming about.)

Overall though the book doesn’t really resolve itself well. And that’s the trouble with most sci-fi, and more so with sci-fi which attempt an understanding to the grandest puzzle that ever is. One is bound to be disappointed.

In this case, I feel some of the dissatisfaction might have something to do with storytelling and characters. The reader’s imagination needs characters through which they can live in the world of the book. They should provide enough space for the reader to fit in and project and make the novel come alive. Sometimes it is a little thread that can bind the reader’s imagination and the character together – a little identifiable vulnerability, sometimes just the basic human traits. But when you have characters who talk like the way the ten-year old supposed God talks in pompous-sounding statements (“You would lead the Lord your God?”), there is little space for a reader in that book’s world. Add to it changing realities and histories, and such stories can become quite impersonal and drifty, and a work to read through. The reader observes and reads because that is what a reader does, but with little heart.

One can hold on to the clueless Herb here. And one does.

**

One of the other thoughts it lets you ponder on is the nature of God. The story takes you through different ideas in an alternate world. And reimagines and reconsiders some of the existing religious scriptures and strictures in new light. Different religions regard their gods differently. But if the religion is too stricture heavy, where it seems as if they treat people as little children, instructing them on every little thing, even though evolved over ages and must have ancient wisdom, hence worth following, even though all that, it begins to feel constricting, this instructing higher power. Such instructing higher power starts to seem like a bureaucratic thing, a push to the middling areas, rather than a nurturing, trying to let people explore the infinities within or without kind of God one would like or even an indifferent absolute.

**

Another tangential thought is around prison of perception. PKD refers to prison of light, and he talks about memory. Thinking on those lines leads to some fun new ways of appreciating reality.

We do understand now that the way the light falls is what all reality is. (Read light as waves of all frequencies). We perceive this light with our limited bands of reception which our limited equipment can handle – waves we see, hear or feel. A very narrow band in all that really is out there which just misses us by because we don’t have the equipment to receive it. As if, walking blind and deaf in a rich, rippling, wavy universe and we can sense little of because that is the prison – the barred ranges of allowed perception. A little tweak, and who knows what we can see and perceive.

Add to it the way our minds perceive time. All the past and future seems to already exist out there, and we, with our limited understanding and vision of time, and a limited focus/spotlighting function, seem to be locked in a perpetual now, future invisible to us, and past as receding memories, the current moment always the biggest and most real, short sighted us. A little tweak here too, and who knows what we can fathom.

Barred from perceiving space (if space is just waves), barred from perceiving time (if time is past and future).  A subtle prison. And the thing is we don’t ever feel like we are in prison, we feel blessed to be living and experiencing what we are, because really, what else do we even know. We do sense that there is more to be known and what we do know is almost nothing, but we are defined by what we know and we build ladders to the unknown through known materials, so beyond feeling good about wherever we are, what else is to be done?

Paradise Lost

The current lock-down and the general slowing of life gave me the opportunity to attempt to read Milton’s Paradise Lost. (In January, I wouldn’t have thought I’ll be devoting hours reading this classic, but then, if not now, when?).

I haven’t read much of classics, almost nothing of drama and historical, epical poems like these, and I have no reference point to look at these except that of an interested and keen reader approaching a work of art with an open mind and no references to colour things. And as a personal experiment of sorts, I have tried to read it in as unprefaced a way as possible – refraining from reading around and about Paradise Lost and Milton - to give myself a clean, untinted lens to look at it and an empty slate to record it without feeling too encumbered by the weight and opinions which some of such works live under. Add to that, I am a level removed because quite unfamiliar with the mythology and the biblical references, and some of those contexts quite miss me (and I did need to look up some of these).

Given this blank slate reading, writing this I do feel a little like a vandaliser who perhaps does not know or understand the value of what they touch. Still, since some of these works are to work independent of all the aura around them, and that is perhaps how a classic is established, how much  it can react with you unfolding its magic without any other aid except the words. And I do react to it, it bothers and ruffles, and I have so many fragmented thoughts and questions. This is my attempt to collect some of those.

**

What is Paradise Lost?

In one sentence, it is Milton’s take on events around the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise after partaking of the fruit from the tree of knowledge. As to the exact nature of the Paradise which is lost, and whether Adam and Eve were better off losing it, or whether it was really a Paradise or not is something to perhaps keep thinking about. Something perhaps the poet would have liked us to keep thinking about.

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,

Briefly, divided in 12 books or episodes, the poem opens in hell, where Satan and the rest of the fallen, ‘confounded’ angels, organise themselves under Satan to find a way to restore their lost glory, and alight on the plan to infest the newly created earth with evil. Satan, fighting his way through hell’s gates, death, sin, and into the deep chaos eventually makes his way to Earth’s shores. In heaven meanwhile, Godhead notices Satan’s arrival and tells of the events to come, and alludes to the fall. To which, the Son offers himself in his love and in lieu of mankind ("Behold me then: me for him, life for life/ I offer: on me let thine anger fall;")

Satan finds his way to Eden and manages to plant a dream in sleeping Eve’s mind before being found and sent away by angels. An angel from heaven arrives in Paradise and relates to Adam and Eve the potential trouble, and gives them context of the three-day heavenly battle that led to Satan’s fall, and eventually to creation of Earth by God’s Son and of Adam and Eve to lord over paradise perpetually in bliss. The angel asks them to be mindful and grateful. With their new understanding, Adam and Eve try to be careful, but Satan, still quite single-minded in his pursuit, takes a serpent form and finding Eve alone, leads her to the apple. 

So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate.
Earth felt the wound; and nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.

Then follow the registering of the magnitude of the fall in slow degrees. Layered like waves, the realisations crash on the bewildered minds of these two child-like people. Reflected internally in their states of mind, externally in the weather, the retreating angels, the changed world, the eventual understanding of the irreversible sinks in. God’s son comes to judge Satan, Eve and Adam. Satan and the other fallen angels are reduced to serpents, the tree of knowledge takes root in hell and its fruit ash as they attempt to taste it. For Adam and Eve, the judgement is expulsion. An angel, before expelling them, softens the blow by sharing visions of the future which showcase mankind’s future, earthly joys and miseries, diseases, war, famine, flood, Noah’s ark to eventually God’s son's coming to Earth as Christ, and ending with the promise of a second coming.

Although one knows even as one opens the book that their paradise is about to be lost, still, the coldness of the creator, and the loss of these two vulnerable people (of all of humankind, perhaps the most), can quite get one.

They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

**

(The text - I read from a searchable version which simplified Milton’s spellings but for early sojourners like me, this itself was a milestone which I am celebrating in this post.)

Reading something like this - lyrical, flowing, quite removed from the cadences of all other conversations and all the real and fictional words and phrases generally mixing and merging and raining around you reveals a never-felt-before reading experience. Quite removed, quite sanctuary like. Requires a dedicated attention and devotion and muting of all other wordly matters around you.

The principal joy of this reading was in the reading aloud, the breathless rolling text, and because you move at speaking pace and not reading pace, and because it is not super easy but difficult enough, and because it is so graphic and full of action, like a movie, it rolls out in front of your eyes engulfing you completely, and presents the gore of hell and yet the politics of it all, and then the dread of the dark and the doom that seems to hit Earth the moment Satan hits the shore, it can drum up dread in air around you. 

This drumming up of dread – from this concentrated interaction with words of a poet dead for three centuries, is perhaps one of those unknowingly longed for moments, that a reader seems to be on quest for as they open book after book of stories waiting to unroll and unfold and drum up stuff out of thin air. Things which change you once you know them. And to think that the day before you didn’t even know you were walking headlong into it. And since I need to try to precisely pin this feeling – that unknowing of knowing or looking forward to knowing is a dry fact but the knowing seems to change you.

For me, now these joys await in Shakespeare, of whom I’ve read just a drama or two. This new delightful looking forward to, to all those long poetic texts waiting to be read aloud!

**

Reading a mythological/ historical work like this makes me wonder about how art works and engages us. Any art, be it a poem, a novel, a painting,  often creates a new world from scratch and pulls us in, and we try to fit into that world, trying to find characters we can pin affinities on, or empathise with, living through them in their world – all the time suspending our disbelief and living in the book or the art thus playing out in our imaginary vision.

Alternatively, art can engage with us in a third space of sorts, where, it plays off certain established or context-rich words or themes. Say words like 'heaven', 'hell', 'Adam & Eve'. Themes or words which may have lifetime worth of random observations, emotional responses and facts clustering or sedimented around them in the reader’s or observer’s mind. When it operates in that third space, lifting off a new point in the reader’s mind, it seems to interact with much more of a reader than just their imagination. And because it seems to interact with more of the reader, it becomes thought triggering, ruffling, at times, providing answers, and over time, they become classics. And we keep going back to them, perhaps not just to dip again in their beauty, but also, while dipping, since they speak to so much more of us, to find more of ourselves of times past and to uncover some more of our own thoughts thus refracted in their waters.

The artist’s freedom is in playing with the theme, characters, a new lift-off on a shared word, and if the artist’s take on the narrative ruts already established in the reader’s mind is as epic, it becomes the new reference point for history, myth or even superhero fiction. Which is perhaps what happens here. Once Satan seen through Milton’s eyes, difficult to go back.

**

Prior to this poem, my general impression of Satan, or the mental foothold where the poem leaps from in my reader's mind, is the general  idea gleaned from popular media that Satan is evil. And so are most mythical/ historical villains which are routinely caricaturised in most popular media. And as we read, we understand that Satan wishes to convert all good to evil, and in multiple ways. But in his portrayal, irrespective of his aims or objects which he seems to be bound to as if his very grain demands it, irrespective of all that, there is a respect and empathy in his detailing which is quite refreshing.

The poet brings him to life as an angel, rebellious, fallen, yet keen to better his and his ilk’s lot, brave, thoughtful, reflective. His portrayal, from his leadership in bringing together the fallen angels, to the assumption of the title of the king of the fallen ( “but who here/ Will envy whom the highest place exposes/ Foremost to stand against the Thunderer's aim/ Your bulwark, and condemns to greatest share/ Of endless pain?”), his political craftery, to his brave journey to find Earth, add nuances to his character, greater than those lent to any other character in the book, and perhaps very few other fictional characters I know of.

But the place which seems to lift him off the page for me, is when Satan, with his seemingly troubled heart, tired and reflective after his long trip from hell, on the shores of earth, with heaven in sight, contemplates his own eventual fall. Not after the battle in heavens, not before creation, but his real fall seems to happen right before Eve’s, when eventually, finally, he embraces evil. Through this reflective phase, later too, sitting atop the tree of life, he continues this long pause of reflection before finally leaping down to action. Perhaps this is here where the storytelling too leaps up to something else.

Yet, not rejoicing in his speed, though bold
Far off and fearless, nor with cause to boast,
Begins his dire attempt; which nigh the birth
Now rolling boils in his tumultuous breast,
And like a devilish engine back recoils
Upon himself; horror and doubt distract
His troubled thoughts, and from the bottom stir
The Hell within him; for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step, no more than from himself, can fly
By change of place: Now conscience wakes despair,
That slumbered; wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.

Troubled thoughts, troubled heart – caught between what was and what is to be, and almost fallen, fallen but not really, still striving, until takes the plunge down from the tree of life. The transitory moments, the moments that can capture the shifts, the change, between the branch and the ground.

Reading his reflection, I feel that the things that move us the most come from the margins, the edges, or these in-between two states, two spheres, the points of no return, the unknowing and the knowing, the tiny space between those two can hold the deepest and the purest points of feeling. Everything before and everything after is prose and prosaic. It is that pinning, that pining when one is neither this nor that (not because one doesn’t know, but one knows and can’t help it like Satan), the brief dusk, or the moment the sun comes out, right before. These points, these peaking spaces which seem to be the neck of the hourglass, the point where the sand passes through is the point where perhaps some of the best poetry happens. And hence Satan here gets the best lines, and then Adam as soon as he realises what Eve has done. That point, where the recognition of the change has reached the subconscious but not really registered in the conscious, that space and point.

It is not easy to replicate, because by nature such points are few and defining. But if captured, they sum up the past and the future and in them reveal the nature of things, be it what Satan stands for, or the point and the pointlessness of the rest of it all. The point of the rest of it all is to just arrive at this point hence the pointlessness.

**

Given that an act of rebellion triggered the whole chain of events eventually leading to the Paradise being Lost, the politics of heaven is quite central to this poem.

On one end, as the poem opens, we have these fallen angels in hell who had sided with Satan when Satan decided to question and rebel against Godhead’s power over heaven, now gathering, assessing and consolidating their remaining forces under the charismatic political maneuvering by Satan.Played out like one of Shakespeare’s Roman parliament/ political arena, the angels strategise, debate, each with quite nuanced, detailed arguments to consolidate their resources to be able to fight again, or to revenge, or to somehow dilute and lessen God’s power and authority.

Reading through this opening section in hell, and the subsequent ones played out in heaven, the realisation that hits one is that the ‘want’ of the fallen was somehow more intense, more interesting and more dramatic, and more closely felt/ observed by the poet, or lends itself better to empathy, and hence is better felt than the monotonous, unchanging bliss, or the perpetual ‘have’ of the remaining angels in heaven. Because of their strong need to change the unacceptable place they find themselves in, and the high-stake situation, there is a lot more motivation and movement, in the dynamic and leaping lines of the fallen than the relatively placid, stable, and hymn-like sections of heaven’s angels.

But the starkest, strangest point, that perhaps ruffled and intrigued me the most is around Godhead and his way of operating. Just going by the lines spoken by him through this poem, and the way there is so much of his effort mainly directed towards establishing a perpetual, uncontested reign of heaven,  and the Son, makes you pause and wonder at almost each of his lines, and makes you want to contest and argue about the godliness of such a God thus emerging from these lines, so wrought with human failings and full of human-like aspirations.

Son, thou in whom my glory I behold
In full resplendence, Heir of all my might,
Nearly it now concerns us to be sure
Of our Omnipotence, and with what arms
We mean to hold what anciently we claim
Of deity or empire: Such a foe
Is rising, who intends to erect his throne
Equal to ours, throughout the spacious north;
Nor so content, hath in his thought to try
In battle, what our power is, or our right.
Let us advise, and to this hazard draw
With speed what force is left, and all employ
In our defense; lest unawares we lose
This our high place, our sanctuary, our hill.

One then wonders about what brings it about. Perhaps a human drama, proximate to Milton in time or place, projected on the Gods for dramatic effect and to engage the common denominator in human-like prejudices and petty politics. Perhaps.

The initial battle in heaven itself where God’s decision to let the angels on both sides war it out and wear themselves out for two days before asking his Son to go with all of God’s forces and establish a final, glorious victory pushing out Satan and his co-conspirators to hell, in the context of the subsequent events, seems to feel like a power-play, a very human historic drama.

For thee I have ordained it; and thus far
Have suffered, that the glory may be thine
Of ending this great war, since none but Thou
Can end it. Into thee such virtue and grace
Immense I have transfused, that all may know
In Heaven and Hell thy power above compare;
And, this perverse commotion governed thus,
To manifest thee worthiest to be Heir
Of all things; to be Heir, and to be King
By sacred unction, thy deserved right.

The Son shines in the battle, but beyond the battle too, in the way creation and the loss of paradise comes about, it begins to feel as if, all that was just a second act to establish the son as – “Heir, and to be King/ By sacred unction, thy deserved right.” Creation, with the forbidden fruit in the middle of paradise seems to sing loud and clear the pre-ordained fall, forever since blamed on Eve, to be eventually retributed by the Son, because although he is and will be immortal in that universe, he chooses to come in mortal form on Earth to help save humanity. The Son seems to be the saving grace in heaven, who seems to offer himself out of immense love and mercy more becoming of a God.

This fall, this loss and this letting be picked up, and praise the Lord all the more for it, this, in a foreordained, and foreknown universe with a God who seems to have designed everything, eventually, ridiculously build to the realisation that all this so that the Godhead can retain heaven’s supremacy.

And when you look at things like that, it just makes you turn away from the God thus portrayed. Makes you wonder how poor our imagination of trying to portray the absolute. Not the poet’s fault. He builds a take on the long-held narrative.

The sad output of all the political actions in heaven is the perpetual bad name that Eve lives with. Almost everything brought down to that one action. And repeated often in heaven and Earth as a lest-you-forget reminder. But all the events that eventually lead to it and the reasons of laying out of past (Satan’s fall) and future(Son as Christ) seem to be forgotten or overlooked in the ease of pointing the finger at Eve’s judgement.  As if that was the trigger! As if she even had the luxury of choosing or not choosing the apple!

**

A creation mired in political reasons and hurtling towards judgment.

This portrayal of God and the general fragile nature of the way Creation and fall came about stays one of the most distressing things in the poem. Since the apple, everything dipped deep in shades of trespass, guilt, wrongdoing, which since the humanity still seems to seek some sort of forgiveness for and still awaits judgement. A sad loss for humanity, to have only such a narrow, instructing, injunctive, judging god to contemplate, who creates and then punishes a fragile transgression in seeming perpetuity.

Add to it this forbidding of seeking knowledge, and the angels’ admonishments to Adam and Eve to stay within their station, and not question the beyond, again highlights the poverty of our imaginations in creating such a finite sort of god. One shouldn't perhaps say such things as one knows little, but it feels too complicated and unbeautiful and against the very grain of simplicity and koan like beauty of what we do understand of the universe, it seems more a human projected on divine drama to make sense of the living and the joys and losses and the emotional range of being human,  and I should perhaps read it like that.

As to the almighty or the absolute, if anything, I would hope and think that whichever higher power or forces left us here in this floating spacetime, and gave us this gift of consciousness, one of the most beautiful things we can do is contemplate on the beauty and wonder of it all and seek and attempt to know and to understand.

**

In Milton’s take on this story, one of the most painful episodes is right after Eve and Adam eat the fruit and before they have been judged, even as Eden and the Earth and sky were changing and losing hospitality, there is this big loss of hospitality, of accord, of mutual regard and understanding between Adam and Eve. Together perhaps they could have created their little Eden wherever, but in the state described in book X, they seem to lose peace and paradise even in paradise.

He came; and with him Eve, more loath, though first
To offend; discountenanced both, and discomposed;
Love was not in their looks, either to God,
Or to each other; but apparent guilt,
And shame, and perturbation, and despair,
Anger, and obstinacy, and hate, and guile.

Leading me again to the question whether Eden was really the paradise that was lost? 

**

An observation - there are not many females in the poem. Eve, and Sin. And a few more who come up during vision session and are regarded with an admonishing eye. As to Eve and Sin, it feels like they both seek a room of their own of sorts. Initially sin, when she rues her fall and since then, the continuous series of hourly birth of monsters ("These yelling monsters, that with ceaseless cry/ Surround me") , and then Eve, who even before tempted by the serpent to the apple, felt stifled in Paradise, and sought some space of her own. A morning where she prefers to work apart from Adam saying:

If this be our condition, thus to dwell
In narrow circuit straitened by a foe,
Subtle or violent, we not endued
Single with like defense, wherever met;
How are we happy, still in fear of harm?

Quite an interesting take by the poet – whether needed to be done to let the serpent find Eve alone, or by design, it seems to sum up the lot. 

**

Note to Self: There are still many thoughts and fragments that need working through (esp around Eve, the space sci-fi nature of this story, the beautiful metaphors all through, the science of 1600s, and a lot more), but I wish to read Paradise Regained, and really keen to read a few other poetic dramas and hence need to close this for the moment.

Perhaps why we call them classics. One book can keep revealing, if we care to keep looking.

This post can also be read as a 'why we read' post. We read because of all this above.  Things which we didn’t think we had to say or that troubled and triggered and then eventually, things which we didn’t think we were thinking but as if these poems, these books give you little ropes and buckets to bring up stuff from your subconscious and lay them out and examine them at peace, one by one, and hence, examine yourself. Such joys and pleasures, where else?

Rosshalde

I picked this book by Herman Hesse at a second-hand book sale. Small, novella length book. Often attracted by its length, but as often detracted by the blurb which alludes to a tragedy, it took me a while to finally get around to reading it. And quite glad that I read it finally.

Long time ago I read his Siddhartha, which houses one of K’s favourite quotes, “I can think. I can wait. I can fast.” Something to aspire to live by and perhaps something quite apt for the strange current times too. More recently, I read Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. I loved the timeless sci-fi/ alternate reality book. That book too, like Siddhartha, seemed a world removed from ours, woven around an idea. The narrative held me quite well, but what I valued most is the thought-space that the book left me with - more than a fiction, a meditation on what living well could be, pursuing riches in thoughts, ideas, time and space to think and wonder rather than the material riches which tends to be the default hankering in our modern world.

Books such as these can be a treasure, not only providing the narrative satisfaction but can also leave you in a better space mentally/ richer in meditative, sorted thought or inspired thoughts not as instruction but as kindling for your personal thoughtspace. Perhaps it is for books like these that Virginia Woolf  says explode in your mind in a hundred questions, and open up several thought chains (or something on similar lines).

Similar to them in the treasured quality, but compared to those two, Rosshalde is relatively rooted in relatable realities. The story revolves around Veraguth, a famous painter and his idyllic estate, Rosshalde, where he lives with his wife and child. They live in the same estate, but separated. A visit from his highly adored friend opens up some of the packed emotions and seems to provide an inflection to Veraguth’s life.

The very first chapter sketches the scene around the artist, his work, his friend, his wife and his child. The rest of the book evolves like a painting in progress, with each successive chapter layering brushstrokes to this detailed opening sketch. The narrative starts to slowly deepen the colours of foreboding, of something very precious about to be lost, eventually mingling them with the dark colours of regret for the final stroke on this artwork of a novel.

Although this is a translated text, the writing itself echoes the artist it portrays. The novel reads like a word painting, if there were such a thing. Like an artwork commanding deep engagement, the book makes you want to linger on the pages longer, savouring and re-reading.  Trying to think back to what other books or stories have brought up similar thoughts, and I think of AS Byatt’s Matisse Stories. There seems to be something that when authors start talking about visual artists, their own works seem to become multidimensional  – they invoke not just the visual, but almost every other sense, as if the influence of a great artist at work, influences them to pin down all the details of the moment that can bring it alive in the reader’s mind. There are others too, people like Nabokov and Virginia Woolf, whose prose can give you that feeling, but perhaps not in so few words. Here, Hesse does it like poets. I do not understand musical harmony, but I think of the word harmony in the context of this novel.  And the balance is that of a koan writer’s. Just enough and no more.

**

Attention, observation, noticing, registering – all the things perhaps we should load our moments with when not completely absorbed or occupied. This is what I takeaway from the novel. The frames of the novel move forward through these scenes expressed in perhaps one, two or three paras, a lot of breathing space for the imagination to participate and help unfold a chapter worth’s of detail around its characters and their living. Intensely observed moments.

For example, in the opening pages, there is this little section where the painter after his coffee, cigar, conversation is settling back into his concentrated perusal of the art that he’s working on, and the servant is observant enough to realise that slow vanishing and reminds Veraguth of something, and as of ‘in the manner of an exhausted man spoken to when on the point of falling asleep’, he is pulled out and you can intensely feel the loss that he feels - this broken concentration, and the way he reacts, trying to establish his authority back over the moment, miffed, and then ends up annoyed with himself. So long it takes to find that elusive space, so many things need to go right, and takes little to throw you off. Just three paragraphs and so much conveyed!! And you feel with him. 

For someone to capture life like that, not just in the noticed sensory details, but in the observed, fluid, seemingly unavoidable mixing and splashing of consecutive moments and yet, the artist’s keenness to retain the purity & sanctity of moments. Difficult for me to put it in words, and I can just wonder at how the characters observe and how the author manages to convey something in a hundred words that would take me pages and pages to explain the delight of. A pleasure, and a real privilege to stumble on pages like these. 

In one of the opening pages, over a few lines, we understand how Veraguth and his wife feel towards each other, we sense the estrangement, the tension, yet the unrevealing front towards Pierre. Just a few words and the scene is sketched.  And through the book, a phrase here, and a para there, fills in the rest of the picture.

"Though she had ceased to love her husband she still regarded the loss of his affection as a sadly incomprehensible and undeserved misfortune."

Another instance, where, between the couple - ‘a strange shadow of resignation, patience and politeness’. And it unsettles one. These three emotions, all very nice perhaps, but can really be perceived cruelly when what is expected is passion. One feels that things that perhaps require a passionate discussion or address, get smashed, trashed and totally crushed under resignation, politeness and patience. Good emotions to wear for strangers, neighbours and acquaintances, maybe relatives, but cannot be all that is in between a husband and a wife. Those three words, and one can feel the cold distance between them.

**

For me, the best loved parts in the book are around the process of art. The joy and wonder of seeing an artist at work, in process, creating a masterpiece. Insights which one doesn’t usually stumble on, so beautifully laid out for you.  For instance, in the opening chapter, this image captivates the artist - a fisherman on boat who has just appeared through the milky morning mist on the silvery lake and the mirror-like lake, the elusive mist, the silvery fish:

Veraguth saw a “Dark outline bathed in the cold, faintly quivering light of the milky rainy daybreak” and was  “Instantly captivated by the scene and by the strange light”. “Since then he had turned the picture over and over in his mind, suffering torments until it took shape.”

This torment to captivate that image on canvas. He submits all of his conscious and unconscious hours to the image:

“In the last few years he had become accustomed on nights before working days to take no other image to bed and sleep with him than that of the painting he was working on.”
”Compelling the picture to take form on his retina. Saturated with it, he closed his clear grey eyes, heaved a gentle sigh, and soon fell asleep.”

He sees something - a minute of seeing, and weeks of tormented preoccupation. Leads me to think that if one were to aspire to make art, then perhaps something like this, and nothing less - the output that can engage for a minute but captivate and occupy a willing audience for much longer.

This bit here, is more of an inspiration section for me. I have a lot of ideas, and little skill, but at any time I try to sketch, I can, as if, dip into a richer reality because, suddenly, one observes and notices so much more, that even if you close your eyes, you can almost see the colours, how the light falls, the curves, the angles, how reflections interact with shadows, all summoned to the deeper reality by that 'unrelenting line'. (here I am reminded of this quote from one of Annie Dillard's books - "The draftsman must aggress; only by persistent assault will the live image capitulate and give up its secret to an unrelenting line." )

Even if one has tried to sketch nothing more than a cup and saucer reflecting light or tried to paint flowers and wondered and wondered and struggled with how to capture that elusive white streak to make the picture come alive, one can gain some sort of an almost understanding of what the author expresses here:

Veraguth stood facing his large canvas with the three figures, working on the woman’s light bluish-green dress. On her throat a small gold ornament glittered sad and forlorn, alone to catch the precious light which found no resting place on the shaded face and gilded alien and joyless over the cool blue dress…the selfsame light which played gaily and tenderly in the blond tousled hair of the beautiful child beside her.

He felt the music of the light, how its resounding stream dispersed and came together again, how it flagged on meeting resistance, how it was absorbed but triumphed invincibly anew on every receptive surface, how it played on the colours with capricious but infallibly precise sensibility, intact despite a thousand refractions and in all its playful meanders unswervingly faithful to its inborn law. And with relish he breathed the heady air of art, the bitter joy of the creator who must give himself till he stands on the brink of annihilation, and can find the sacred happiness of freedom only in a n iron discipline that checks all caprice and gains moments of fulfilment only through ascetic obedience to his sense of truth.

And as any good art that needs to transcend the labour and technique that goes in it, and yet convey the magic, here's his desire:

But the things that torment me now have nothing to do with technique. Do you know, more and more often in the last few years something I see brings back my childhood. In those days everything looks different; one day I hope to put something of that in my painting. Once in a while I recapture the feeling for a moment or two, suddenly everything has that special glow again – but that’s not enough. We have so many good painters, sensitive, discriminating men who paint the world as an intelligent, discriminating, unassuming old gentleman sees it. But we have none who paints it as a fresh, high-spirited, imperious boy sees it, and most of those who try to are poor craftsmen.

**

Through the book, there are numerous references to the discipline and loving hard work, the attention and the at times achieved with difficulty and at times, the byproduct of his life choices – the artist’s solitude that he offers his art. It is inspiring to see people pursuing something and working intently. Here’s one of those instances where what’s on display is the life behind the art that is on public display. 

“So this was how these pictures, hung in the places of honour in galleries all over the world and sold at higher prices, were made; they were made in rooms that knew only work and self- denial, where one could find nothing festive, nothing useless, no cherished baubles of bric-a-brac, no fragrance of wine or flowers, no memory of women.”

Eventually, the choices that lead him to this solitude, or the compelling nature of his art comes in sharp focus under the lens of regret when he sits near his child, Pierre as he breathes his last few breaths. 

"Oh, how often little Pierre had come to him and found him tired or indifferent, deep in his work or lost in care, how often his mind had been far away as he held this thin little hand in his and he had scarcely listened to the child's words, each one of which had now become an inestimable pleasure. That could never be made good."

And this deep regret, which is perhaps the most natural human reaction in the face of deep grief, sends me tangentially on this wonder about how human mind works. Our immediate tends to take significance magnitudes beyond anything that goes prior, even at times seemingly aligning past narratives, nudging them such that they seem to thread causally to the present. 

But isn't this cats in the cradle feeling (the song) a one-dimensional way of looking at things? This way of seeing things, this knifing/ shuffling through the memories foregoing all other angles, with uneven weights - on one end, the present with this child and the grief, and on the other, all the decisions you ever made and all the things you did, in each lived moment making your choices and assigning weights relative to the time and understanding then, and then arriving at this moment of grief, to reassign new, big weights to the end with pain, with the vulnerable child, and the misery – it seems a very uneven comparison, set to throw everything off. In the face of the tragedy in the book, this, my writing it like this sounds inappropriate, heartless and rude at some level. Still, just to think, given a chance, how many people are willing to change the lived lives to align it to the new weights and narrative.

Living through our perpetual now, if we already knew of what's to be to help us weigh in everything and make good decisions, then where is the joy of living and stumbling and discovering your future with all its faults, follies and foibles.

A Doll's House

Written in 1879, this is one of Henrik Ibsen’s social dramas around women’s place in home or society. The play opens with Nora, a wife and a mother (as she’s described through the play) coming home after shopping on Christmas eve, and takes place over three days and three Acts. Beginning with the warm, family evening of Christmas prep which left me feeling the couple talking as if kids playing grown-ups (and the deeper current of how he treats her or what he expects from her), it explores the repercussions of a debt that Nora had taken in times of need unknown to her husband while he was sick, and in her naivety/ innocence of commercial matters and in her devoted love agreed to terms quite unfavourable.

The play unfolds as she gets tied up more and more in trying to keep the matter hidden from Torvald, the husband, and tries to resolve the issue by herself, which, one would think, should have been resolved by them talking and working it through rather than her bearing the weight of that decision alone. But then, we wouldn’t be reading about how she eventually realises that she lives, as if, in a doll’s world.

There are a few other themes detailed in the play but the one that raises most questions in my mind is about a couple as a unit or the couple as Torvald, the husband and master of their household and Nora as a subject.

From the point of view of today’s time and age, the question bothers, grates and provokes.  But I try to remember that the play is from the times of a century and half ago.  I perhaps need to read more from that time to be able to properly compare and contextualise where Nora and Mrs Linde stand vis-a-vis other women of that time. Searching in my own understanding of history (from growing up context in India) or from my limited reading of those times, I feel that they seem to fare better in independence. Elsewhere in the world, perhaps Nora would not even have been able to buy macaroons on her own, forget taking a debt in her own name or Mrs Linde working and running an independent household. From limited contexts, I think of Isabel Archer, and her need to get married. I think of Carol Milford from Main Street of 1920s. Compared to them, I felt that Nora, when she eventually sits down to have her chat with her husband was quite ahead of her times.

So, although, reading it in 2020, one can get quickly bothered by the way Torvald Helmer seems to pin down boundaries for Nora, but I think it is not fair to colour my views on the play in that emotion.

Devoid of historical contexts, plays or stories like these, about seemingly real people in seemingly average times need some sort of extremes or stretching away from the routine behaviour or situation to bring out the reactions from its characters, and make some sort of lasting impression that 140 years away too, one can feel for Nora when she gasps for air, struggling for a room of her own equivalent when she has one of her final conversations with Torvald:

“It is perfectly true, Torvald. When I was at home with father, he told me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions; and if I differed from him I concealed the fact, because he would not have liked it. He called me his doll-child, and he played with me just as I used to play with my dolls. 

I mean that I was simply transferred from father’s hands into yours. You arranged everything according to your taste, and so I got the same tastes as you – or else I pretended to, I am not really sure which – I think sometimes the one and sometimes the other. When I look back on it, it seems to me as if I had been living here like a poor woman – just from hand to mouth. I have existed merely to perform tricks for you, Torvald. But you wanted it like that. You and father have committed a great sin against me. It is your fault that I have made nothing of my life.”

Nora speaks not only for her, but perhaps for a lot of people who, while living in relatively comfortable situations, tend to lack that space - not for the lack of means but for the lack of some sort of permission. Why should they seek permission for this space? One would think that beyond the requirements of a well-functioning family unit where members tend to subdue parts of their selves to make a home and family life enjoyable, which is perhaps a choice and offering of the members, not a demand on only one member of the unit. And because of this, if she still struggles for that space, the reason perhaps sits at the root of how families, societies are set up.

Separate from dynamics of a family and the question of physical time and space for individual pursuits, there’s the deeper question of thoughts and independence of those thoughts. With Torvald sharing views and directing thought from larger matters, such as his belief that root of all evil in people is a fault of their mothers, not something that perhaps both parents need to wonder about, to things like embroidery, where he thinks women should embroider rather than knit because it is more graceful. Although a small detail, but sometimes, philosophies are laid bare in details like these. Prejudiced thought space exists across times and places in different forms and perhaps biases can never be fully taken away – just the way we are programmed. But the freedom to stick to and hold their own independent prejudices as a partner in a unit, and not blanket buy into the ones set by the ‘head’ of the unit is a freedom that sometimes goes missing in different set-ups (be it family, societies, nations), and leads to the kind of strife and an unfulfilled sense which is what Nora seems to grapple with.

About the fault though, I try to believe that fault lies not in our stars, ‘but in ourselves, that we are underlings’. It would have been nicer to have her eventual conclusion something stronger, something other than her believing herself to be a victim of her circumstances. I feel it is somehow empowering to believe that what we make of our lives is a person’s responsibility irrespective of the boundaries that are randomly pinned around them.

**

I have not read many plays. And being new, I am brimming with observations on the genre – I realise that plays provide little buffer or softening to the author in terms of a narrator or commentary. The characters are shown live, and to help the reader contextualise them, they must carry all their prejudices, views of the world on their sleeve, and it may not be pretty at times. Plays also seem to demand a more active engagement on the part of the audience or the reader since you need to build the character sketch & historical narrative through following their conversation, and they cannot be too obvious or forthcoming, so you need to let imagination play an active role in meaning making.

Another aspect is the way the drama unfolds. In this play itself, even as one gets a little miffed with the opening conversation, you realise that your focus was drawn to one end of the stage while the author has been busy setting up and illuminating the action that unravels at the centre of the stage, just like the way illusionists and magicians work, and shuffling between the trivial and the patronising nature of that opening, you suddenly come head to head with the deep undercurrent of despair & ‘life is elsewhere’ feeling that runs at the core of this drama.  And you humbly realise that you should not judge too soon, and you begin to understand what Salman Rushdie meant while talking about Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-five, “It sees war as a tragedy so great that perhaps only the mask of comedy allows one to look it in the eye” -  the need for another emotion to lighten the load of the deeper current. 

Another thought is that sometimes, real-like people behaving in unreal ways people can strangely draw oblique mirrors to things we confront within ourselves, and soften the conversation a bit with their seeming unreality.

**

Henrik Ibsen grew up in Norway. His father’s bankruptcy when he was a child and the related growing up hardships and the neglect of the relatively richer relatives informed his social dramas. In the intro note on the author, we are told that “The ground was thus prepared for the future writer who was to castigate the false respectability and complacency of the middle classes.”  and that “Life had to wound his soul till it bled before his writing could proceed from bitter need, from an inner strife which demanded dramatic expression.”

It seems that the very poor seem to treat the realities around them differently than the middle classes, which, once settled and anchored with their small worlds, mediocre possessions, find themselves too invested in their little kingdoms to risk or toss it all for any kind of movement away from their limited/ non-extreme worldviews towards any kind of majorly radical idea. I read somewhere that when it is too easy, the will weakens – not just at a personal level, but whole societies can fall ill. Abundance being harder for us to handle than scarcity. (Something to perhaps think of as we consider the larger discussion on universal basic income, and the invigorating power of the ‘want’ rather than the ‘have’.)

Where complacency or comfort tends to dull us and induces solipsistic thinking, change or movement, from one extreme to another, or times of flux or chaos or the unsettled and uncertain nature of things seems to make the moments of passing so much richer - deepening and stretching the same moments, livening & layering them with imagined certainties buzzing around the uncertainties. Same moments which seem to blink by when things get comfortable can be unimaginable gifts of experience and thought.

And yet, the way we seem to have set up this world and our lives, the middle, the mediocre, the centre, the average becomes the end and the bind. Perhaps it should not be.

And yet again, how to live and what is the objective is a much larger question to think about and handled easier by working out from an individual level. Whether to seek stability, peace in the middle, or the flux and richness and intensity of moments - which objective function to maximise is a problem with the constants themselves colored in variables of individual preferences over time. Trying to get to a society level answer is pretty complicated.

**

I try to turn the question to myself. And with all these general realisations, comes crashing the personal realisation that sometimes things are easier said than done. With all the knowledge and wisdom, which we all seem to have access to and loads of, the commitment to action on that derived, personal wisdom is still so difficult to consistently live upto. One still automatically seeks peace. Chaos, flux and uncertainties can be lived with as if passing through a tunnel, but it doesn’t come naturally - this seeking of the flux.

So, after all this journey of reading and then writing about it, one just comes home to a more nuanced understanding of one’s own motives, desires and eventual actions. What more can one ask for?