He
who bent light
and moulded fire,
He
who brought down the skies
and chased angry clouds,
He
who saw rage in the sea
and life in its waves,
He
who gave shadows colour
and the land its waiting heart,
He
who taught me fury
and gave me art,
This stranger
who died in London
gazing into the Thames
on a December morning
one hundred and fifty eight years ago,
I think I knew him.
The sky is a bright blue, unwrinkled, untainted. I sit by my desk, overlooking the window, paper ahead of me, pen straddling my fingers. A flame appears in the distance, as if it has just burnt a hole in the sky and crawled out of it. It seems to relish its sudden freedom, zealously roving around the infinite space at its disposal, unwilling to settle down. And then, as if it had turned towards me from the heavens, I feel its gaze upon me. As if it had two tiny eyes, as if they were united in looking at me. It takes off from its high perch, as if it knew that I knew it was looking back at me, and descends into the mundanity of the land beneath its sky.
As it slowly approaches me, the flame drips colour onto a psychedelic canvas and takes a life of its own, a flaming piece of vibrant life, a butterfly. My eyes dissolve in its colour as it whizzes about the greenery in the distance, away from the window, shy of approaching me. But then our eyes meet and it hesitantly makes its way towards me. Unsure of myself yet acting as if I know exactly what I am doing, I lean closer to it, and whisper gently, as if afraid of hurting its tender papillae with too harsh or grating a sound, "Is it you, is it really you, my love?"
A pause. Like a giant swaggering backwards to go forward, reality surges backwards, in a huge heave, dragging everything with it. A shuffle, and as if time ripples in the moment, memory's slate is erased, the window dissolves into its past as if the precise converse of the breeze blows now, right down to the tiniest detail, the butterfly’s prismatic wings flutter backwards, beat after beat, as it makes its way back into the heavens it descended from, my words fly back between my lips, my neck cranes back of its own accord, the ink slowly drips back into the pen as it retraces its own words, the paper blanks itself word by word, letter by letter, the instants devour themselves, and the words start all over again.
This is it.
Burn, memory, burn.
We.
Shadows scripted by a streetlamp.
Bagpipes on a deserted boulevard.
It's one twenty three.
But time doesn't know us.
Neither do numbers.
It was blue today.
God's mask for monday.
Paper bags in the air.
Appearances disappear.
I wish I'd known Caravaggio.
Do submarines have windows?
My words are too vague.
But you have the keys.
Rolling wheels.
When does a straight line become a circle?
Silly boy.
Dip your fingers in the inky sky.
The air sprouts wings.
The night's silent lullaby.
Can you taste the stars?
Almost.
I wonder, what makes the sun's light
Dance to the tunes of the sea’s foamy white?
I wonder, how could anyone climb so high
And so artfully colour the sky?
I wonder, who taught the waves in the sea
The art of beauty in formless anonymity?
I wonder, why does life steal
These endless pleasures of time we so feel?
I wonder if I wonder too much.
[Author's Note: Thank you, A, for giving my eyes the beauty that is IMG_2590, and thank you, another A, for making it.]
Somewhere a lonely glowworm shatters a darkness. Somewhere an eager voice sings a breathless melody. Somewhere old age heaves a sigh after a tiring tryst with triviality. Somewhere a creeper learns to defy gravity, and charts its own course. Somewhere a world suddenly goes silent, as if trying to listen to itself breathe. Somewhere a sun breathes its last before being engulfed by a sea for the night. Somewhere god plays ball with a dew drop on the contours of a leaf. Somewhere a baby crackles with innocent laughter at the sound of a rattle. Somewhere a sky tiptoes past its angry clouds on a stormy night. Somewhere a breeze blows the petals off a withering flower, burying them in air. Somewhere love is lost, found, made, lost and found again. Somewhere ice breaks, and a glacier crumbles into a blueness. Somewhere a blind flutters across the dusty window of an empty house. Somewhere a fisherman pushes out into a blue darkness, trying to pacify an angry morning. Somewhere a red dot turns amber, and a world rears to life, ready to escape. Somewhere, drenched in rain, a pain comes to terms with itself. Somewhere a wooden bird traipses out of a broken cuckoo clock, as if out of habit. Somewhere a lonesome stranger on a deserted street crashes onto his knees in the dust. Somewhere an aircraft breaks into a cloud, splintering thin air. Somewhere a crowd breaks into a chorus, rhapsodical throats conjuring up a bowl of ecstasy. Somewhere a butterfly flames across a lake's surface, sinking into the colours of its own reflection. Somewhere a lost childhood bursts into life amidst a cacophony of memories. Somewhere a world sleeps, knowing that somewhere else, a world doesn't.
Somewhere, imprisoned by space and time, a mind tirelessly dreams on, imagining a world into existence, churning out vignettes, wrapping them up in its humble words. Somewhere else, a mind wakes up to those dreams, unwrapping the humble gifts that are words, realising space and time, releasing a world into existence.
One lonesome thursday evening,
Entombed in glass,
Staring into the eyes of a foreign land
As a night came to life in its blinding lights,
As red watermelon flesh melted in the warmth of my lips,
As a stranger's scent parleyed with my senses,
As an escalator lived its own death,
I saw Chapman's Ithaca,
Lost my heart in the empty streets of Buenos Aires,
Smarted at the taste of eternal darkness,
Rode the sea's whiteness with your friend Melville
And felt time's sands trickle through my fingers.
Stranded in the middle of everywhere
I was no one, I was every one.
As I read you, Jorge Luis Borges,
As I read you.
[8 32 pm | 12/03/2009 | Bangalore]
Mornings. Evenings.
Here. There.
In. Out.
Black. White.
You. Me.
Again. And again. Over and over again.
The same as yesterday. And the day before.
The same tomorrow. And the day after.
Just different garbs, different times, different names, different places, different faces.
Templates for a life. For a world.
Alluring monotonies. Ready made existences.
Waiting for me to plug into them. And switch myself off.
I shall not give in. No, not to this. I shall not.
I shall not sit by and watch as this world chews me up and spits me out. I shall not learn acceptance. I shall not be subsumed by peripheries. I shall not be lost in the multitudes. I shall not be tamed into submission.
I shall not be taught habit.
I shall belong to nothing. No time. No name. No place. No face.
I shall not give in. I shall breach the confines of the routine. I shall not give in. I shall disown my inheritance. I shall not give in. I shall shatter convention. I shall not give in. I shall scream these walls aside. I shall not give in. I shall tear down traditions.
Let them make me the outcast, taint my reality and condemn me to the shadows, I shall not be contained. I shall be the stain on the face of eternity, the battle cry that brings down an empire, the fervour that ignites the flame. Of this tyranny, nothing shall remain. Bottom lines shall be decimated, facades shall be ripped apart and fate shall be subdued at the altar of subversion. There shall be no restraint, flames shall engulf worlds and ravage them, leaving infernos in their wake. I shall soar beyond gravity's grasp, beyond chance, beyond fear, beyond destiny, beyond mediocrity, and watch coldly as history goes up in flames and dissolves into the dust beneath my feet.
Timeless, they shall forsake me.
Nameless, they shall forget me.
Faceless, they shall consume me.
But no, to this monotony, I shall not give in. I shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not.
Born into the all-encompassing singularity of the capital i, seized by space, stung by life, we wake up to obscurity and stretch across confines, feeding on dreams, gliding through ignorance, gathering selves along the way, wriggling out of childhoods into what lies next, wriggling out of what lies next into whatever else lies next, subsuming multitudes, emerging a different i only to be signified by the same i, learning to forget that we're compelled to crawl through time, we know what we know, yet we go on with the business of living, we live on, through births, through deaths, through indifferent mornings, through ecstatic evenings, through presences, through absences, through pain, through bliss, through friends, through strangers, through hate, through indifference, through love, never letting up even for a moment, weaving in, weaving out, irrepressibly at work on the fabric of time, toiling away at that one never-ending memory we know we shall never get to reflect back on, that one reality that reaffirms us that we have not been in vain, that one grand legacy we wish to bequeath to the endless universe, that one and only entity that knew how it felt to be the undeniably singular i, all for the solitary ambition of stumbling onto that one moment we live for, that crowning blaze of glory, that one period the weary sentence of life so achingly craves for, that one blinding instant the i coruscates before our eyes before vanishing into the amorphous textures of light that make up eternity.
