I’m commitment-phobic and WordPress has made it so easy to pick and choose and play around with themes. I’ve really been trying to stick with one. But I can’t. So I’m just going to change the look depending on the mood. It’ll be like those smileys you put at the end of each post. This one appeals to my playful mood. How can it not? Just look at those camels.
Hiroshima anniversary. Bombs in general, actually. Coincidentally, I saw this production of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen over the weekend. I liked the play (and the performance) and it took me back to poems on bombs including Yehuda Amichai’s ‘Diameter of the Bomb’ which I’ve posted earlier. Also, a few days back The Guardian featured war poetry commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy. I’ve been very upset with the poems she’s written since she became poet laureate and the one she’s contributed here didn’t do much for me either. But war poetry is very difficult to do well — the stock images just overflow so easily plus one is battling general fatigue and inurement because they’ve become common on TV news. However, I liked:
Afghanistan
by Paul MuldoonIt’s getting dark, but not dark enough to see
An exit wound as an exit strategy.
In related thoughts, death and grief and so on, something in Jeanette Winterson’s column for July on her blog moved me very much:
So the book finished, I was just moving forwards, when I faced two deaths in the next 4 months: Pat Kavanagh, who had been my agent at the most formative time of my writing life, and with whom I had had a very serious affair. For me, if I love, it doesn’t stop, even if the shape changes. Love is as strong as death.
And then my father…What a time… so if I say that I am in a good place now, and that everything has changed – both at a deep level, and on the surface… I keep remembering that the the opening line of my book Written on the Body, is ‘Why is the measure of love loss?’
At one time I could relate to the ‘love doesn’t stop’ bit, but over time, I find myself growing more cynical. Does it become easier to start and stop love once you “master the art of losing”, get used to measuring loss? There are people I can imagine loving all my life. But there are enough others who I loved desperately at one time and now feel a vast sense of fatigue and indifference towards. My mother says “what is true for a time is true for that time” — and post-loss fading should not blur or sully that truth. I lean towards this most days. I really like Winterson. I think her writing is luminous. A friend, who had the incredibly good fortune to attend a reading, tells me that she is as impressive in person. And the generosity and faith of this statement, the heart in it, lives up to all that.
I also find it amazing and very admirable when people notice and remark on beauty even when shrouded in grief. When my father died five years ago, I went into a fugue from which I took months to emerge. I don’t remember writing about a single thing, let alone about his death or the grief. Clearly, my coping mechanisms were not very evolved. I think, today, I would try to do it differently, turn more to things of beauty around me, and to writing. Because that is the best way to cope, isn’t it? To continue to do the things you love most, the things that nourish and nurture.
Winterson mentions the lunar eclipse in her column and I’ve been thinking about it too. Firstly, because I love the moon. I like putting it in poems despite being advised not to. I like reading poems about it even though it’s a face pocked with as many cliches as craters. And the actual eclipse may have been a damp squib but I’m excited anyway because Susan Miller, who is my secret vice and superstition(al) weakness tells me that it will bring me good things and make August generally fabulous. I’m not arguing with anyone who says such nice things.
And lastly, here are two poems of mine — one on war and one on the damned moon. They’ve both been published before (Mosaic, Unisun; Not A Muse, Haven Books) and will also be in my first collection City of Water, to be published by Sahitya Akademi some time soon (hopefully this year)…
Homecoming
You cried while telling me–
about the land, packed stone
under your boots, the air
dry as burnt bread, your skin
blistering like volcanic earth,
your head, a numb knob, stunned
by the monotony of the miles
and the village,
its cluster of homes
like a flock of sheep
in the open, its people
dim with terror,
and how you raped
the first woman you saw there,
how she crumpled like wet newspaper,
pounded your back with her hands
as the child in the corner
cried and cried without knowing why,
and crawled about
and knocked over the kerosene stove.
Your tea had gone cold.
I put my hand on the back
of your neck and said
everything would be okay.
I said that I understood.
But even after all these years,
when I close my eyes, hers
swim up, warm and brown,
and every time we make love,
I see her bruised hands
reach up like a prayer.
***
Moonsong
My love
shames rivals into oblivion,
obscures them
until all that is left in the sky is my orb,
its one gleaming eyeball
white as sand on foreign beaches,
hollow as dust.
You slid in
to find mountains, craters
and lava spew.
Now you are afraid
of my solitary anger,
the coiled serpent
at the base of my spine.
You are afraid
of its nameless hungers,
its slow uncurling down the length
of your body.
You are afraid
it will stalk you in dreams.
You are afraid
of my haunted face in the night,
my fragilities–
the soft space
at the base of my throat,
the fine line of my collar bone.
You are afraid they will unravel you.
You, who have spent a lifetime
simplifying yourself.
K, a dear friend and someone I knew for ten years and across two cities, died of a heart attack last week. He was in his early thirties.
Apart from the usual grief and sudden awareness of mortality, there was a lot of guilt to deal with. K and I had a falling out some years back. It was mostly my fault and I never quite got around to saying sorry. We sidled back into an uneasy truce but lost the closeness. I wanted to avoid melodrama and apology. I assumed that we’d get back to being the same ‘any day now’.
Sometimes, there really isn’t enough time.
K was one of the most life-affirming people I knew — kind, generous, almost spiritual in his ability to love and forgive. He didn’t judge or demand or complain. He miraculously managed to make everyone he met feel good about themselves. He loved parties. He played crazy fortune-telling card games. He liked cats. He was also curiously open, even vulnerable.
I can’t do much justice to this obit but his closest friend has. As for me, I’m vibing all the love in the world to those I love and saying sorry where I need to. That’s what he would have advised.
Just when I was wondering what on earth to blog about, I got this new, shiny thing from Aditi. Tada…!
This means I get to devote one post to entirely pointless, self-indulgent revealings. Because see, according to the rules, I have to list seven things I love and award seven bloggers I love. So here goes…
1. Night-time drives. All sorts of conditions have to be met. Somebody else must drive because I hate driving. That somebody else must be silent so I can just look out of the window and pretend they don’t exist. There must be music of my choice. We must cross at least one flyover or under-bridge so I can think about the Icarus myth or the Persephone myth. Oh, and there must be breeze, lots of it.
2. Bollywood. Including the song and dance (and the ham and cheese).
3. Plans, lists, schedules, time-tables. Pretending to be organised, in other words. I actually get a thrill out of preparing these meticulously. (I have an excel sheet for every occasion). The problem is I get an equal thrill from flouting all these plans and declaring sudden detours.
4. Road trips / trees / birds. I put them together because my love for road trips (or any travel) has a lot to do with my love for trees and creatures. But I also love these (things?) separately.
5. Old houses in Calcutta, the ones with green shuttered windows, creaky fans, dusty corners.
6. Bath products.
7. Okay, I’m going to be boring and say poems. Reading, writing and editing them.
And I give the Kreativ Blogger Award to….
Should audiences refrain from booing?
Etiquette is not, these days, a growth industry. The Internet is inundated with bile in the name of free expression. Television reality shows encourage a thumbs-up, thumbs-down mentality. The allure of instantaneous reaction makes Twitter the talk of the town. Meanwhile, the economic meltdown is melting down manners: More than ever, people who pay good money to see a show feel they have every right to express righteous anger.
Art isn’t easy, but booing is. A mind-closing activity, it tends to be the expression of rigidity in the face of invention. Artists are almost never booed for incompetence (no one can deny the craft of Freyer’s stagecraft). They are booed for intent and out of partisanship. I don’t necessarily advocate acclaim for nothing more than mindless effort, but in a lifetime of attending the performing arts, I have encountered an insignificant number of truly insincere artists.
Not everything works, but at least in the noncommercial realm of the concert stage and the opera house, I credit nearly everyone with trying to say something. And when they actually manage to, the meaning may not immediately sink in.
Booing may be pointless but I’m all for honest panning. Art isn’t easy, true. It’s not meant to be. But is sincerity enough to merit applause, let alone money? I don’t see why I should credit “nearly everyone with trying to say something”. In poetry, we are repeatedly told that it is clearly not enough to just say something. What matters is how you say it. Why should this be different for the performing arts?
In Bangalore, I’ve seen disastrous plays that were touted as good. There are times when I’ve cared less about the money spent and more about how I’m going to make it through the next hour or so before they open the doors and let me out. (It’s difficult to walk out midway at Ranga Shankara though in situations of extreme boredom, I’ve even done that.) Few things are as tortuous as a play with banal lines, flat humour or terrible acting. Being stung to death by bees, for instance.
If the state of literary reviews is not top notch, the state of theatre reviewing in the English language newspapers is even worse. Most feature supplements in the city have degenerated to celebrity-obsessed rags. There are few play reviews and most are written by rookie reporters who know little about art or performance or performing arts. Under these circumstances honest audience reaction is not only healthy, it’s necessary.
Having said this, I must raise a thumb (in typical trigger-happy fashion) for Butter and Mashed Bananas, which I finally managed to catch. They had a clear premise and they managed to communicate it. Their funny lines were actually funny. There was movement and energy. And oh yes, a script that actually seemed to have some thought behind it. All good things.
Ultra Violet
