Given my current situation (and seductions) in life, I thought this was appropriate. It’s been a month since I got to England and barring one week of illness and a few days of being snowed in, it’s been exciting. Actually, the illness and the being snowed in were probably useful because I got some work done.
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Serendipity: A was in Berlin three weeks back and we met at Paris for a very hectic four days. The Louvre is overwhelming in a way that leads to despair. After walking around for about ten hours, we accepted that at least a month was required to see everything. We didn’t have a month. We had just a day and we had to concede defeat. There was so much to love but discovery-wise, Chardin was interesting. The Musee D’Orsay is much more manageable than the Louvre and one of the things I liked most there was Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Four Parts of the World. I also loved The Orangerie, which has a much smaller collection but is beautifully located inside the Jardin des Tuileries. The rooms full of Monet’s Nympheas or Water Lilies are exciting and serene at the same time.
Okay, I’m not going into what else we did (the Eiffel, a river tour, walks along the Seine etc) and ate (scallops, escargots, crepes, cheese, pain au chocolat) because this is not a travel guide and Paris is not little talked about. There was also an embarrassing episode at a strip-show where we got conned but I won’t get into that either. I did feel a sort of helplessness about all the things we couldn’t find time for. Every now and then, we had to remind ourselves that this was Paris, a city that can’t really be enjoyed in a guided-tour, monument-hopping way. We prioritised leisurely walks and meals over one or two important sights and adopted Indian fatalism about visiting again soon.
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British poet Drew Milne came to read at the university. You can see his work here and here. What do you think? I’m still trying to make up my mind about it. Frankly, my first reaction was not intense. But maybe, I’ll change my mind. I don’t know.
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There was a guest lecture about ecopoetries in America. The speaker went on a bit about Americans and their special relationship to their land. It made me think about our relationship to our land. Especially now that we see it disappearing under construction rubble in cities like Bangalore. It also made me think about some of Ramanujan’s poems, especially A River which has these lovely lines:
People everywhere talked
of the inches rising,
of the precise number of cobbled steps
run over by the water, rising
on the bathing places,
and the way it carried off three village houses,
one pregnant woman
and a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda as usual.
And these…
He said:
the river has water enough
to be poetic
about only once a year
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I haven’t taken too many pictures in London yet, mainly because I’ve been busy doing other things like being completely turned on, obsessed and orgasmic — to continue with the seduction trope — about the Poetry Library. I can’t really explain how moving it is to be in a library devoted to poetry. And they allow you to read and borrow books for free. I know I sound like I want to squeal with joy. But I felt like Gretel finding that magic house made of chocolate and candy in the woods. Minus the witch.
I’ve also been busy visiting more museums, spending time with an old friend and watching movies. Also, Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour made my birthday pretty special.
But here is a gull looking at the Thames. Doesn’t he look like he’s thinking hard?
“Minus the witch”.
Usually not a bad thing, but it made me sigh, for obvious reasons!
When you go to London next, can you please watch DISCONNECT at Royal Court Theatre on Sloane Square (its on till march 20)? Its by a Chennai-based playwright friend of mine Anupama Chandrasekhar
and is based on a bunch of call center employees in Chennai.
At the Louvre, did you see Leonardo Da Vinci’s St. John the Baptist? It is a sorcerous painting – my favourite memory of Paris is discovering that painting and spending minutes in front of it while the crowd disappears from my ears.
that gull looks so pretentious…its a first year philosophy major.
just outside the photo is a female gull, thinking “gawd, he’s so deep and troubled…i bet i can fix him…”
@Sharanya: Aww, sometimes I like witches. Really. Especially your kind.
@Swar: Will try. Heard about this from Richard of the Charles Wallace Trust as well. Saw lots of John the Baptists — he was quite a favourite, wasn’t he? Can’t remember Da Vinci’s especially. Shame on me? Blame it on nine hours of museum walking.
@Mulder and Gully: Haha…I agree about the philosophy major bit. And oh no, are you saying even women in the gull(y) world are not free from such self-destructive tendencies?
@anindita: sadly, yes. gull women are notoriously gullible. they’re also are partial to lame puns. personally, i think puns are for the birds…
Hey Anu, just got back here after a long break. If you want to read about ecopoetry, you should read some of the Tamil poetry from the Sangam period. Especially the Akam poems, since the location in each of them is suggested by a floral motif. Ramanujan has a translation of the Sangam poetry called Poems of Love and War.
@Rakesh: Hey! I have — I bought the fat Oxford Ramanujan collection and promptly fell in love with those. Some time in 2008, I even tried writing in that vein for a while. (Embarrassing attempts
Somehow I thought of A River immediately though in this context because it’s such a directly ecological poem. The landscape in the Sangam poems seems less, I don’t know, threatened?
And welcome back.