There lies the shadow

I woke up one morning with a feeling that I have very less time left on this beautiful earth… and I wanted to live that time the way I want to live it.. and that had nothing to do with meeting rooms, coffee, computer monitors, power naps, time management, deadlines and a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I wanted to be able to dream once again and sail through it in slow motion. I wanted to read poetry and talk for hours about critical theory, insane minds, writing, the intensity in creativity and how moments explode into infinity when you are silent and lost, with your eyes affixed to a point in nothingness.

I envy Shelley and Keats… they burnt and burnt like stupendous fires and went away in the whiff of a strong breeze, their light dazzling the daylights out of us long after they are gone.. and I am not free to choose my death. Not free to die when death kindly stops for me… I am given the gift of life that weighs like a loving cross and crushes me under its dead weight.. with it comes smiles, kisses, hugs, warmth, affection and love. I learn to love it and live it and fight the silence and contentment to keep running. When I stop running, the panic descends upon me like darkness with invisible arms.

Silence brings with it questions and reminders and ideals to aspire for and places yet unseen… silence is full of noise. Noise is comfortably numbing and distracts the brain … noise becomes silence. So I run from the silence towards noise… clamorous clutter… I run towards thunders and hailstorms to drown my mind in the cacophony and to drown the awkward realities.. I run. I run from the pain and the death.

Then I tire and sit at the end of the long road… weary and thirsty for answers.. I cannot face my questions and I cannot face my answers.. the tumult rises to a crescendo in the mind and the sun scorches on. The questions become a turbulent sea and mock my hapless inadequacy … they become a gigantic tidal wave and crash upon my head like a blow from a thousand fists… and I die. I die to the need to answer and seek… I die to the need to search and the need to escape.. I die to the falsity that is the distance between the question and the answer. I die. The silence becomes persistent.

“Between truth and falsity lies the question
Between falsity and truth lies the answer”

Who are you?

He fell in love with me in a crowded dream. He had eyes only for me. The first man who wrote me a poem.

The dream brought you so close and disappeared with the despair that dreams alone can bring. And you did not know.. and I did not know how to let you know.

I am awake now and the world is pleasant but the dream remains in the distance, incomplete and unanswered. This pain will never die.

I miss you and it hurts. Who are you?

An Apology

I am sorry if I ever wrote anything that made you want to throw up simply because of its intensity and openness. I just read something like that from someone else’s blog. Some things are best left unwritten.

Silence

I have come to believe that writing does not happen when one feels complete.

I Lost My Notebook

I scattered some plans in the wind
Caught in a moment forgot
Then rain ate some lines on a paper
Words I never recalled

I lost a friend’s second name
In the untraceable directories of childhood

And a white frock with flowers
To rain and sun and running colors

A blotted paper boat
Floating down a trickle stream of rain
I lost

And a forgotten umbrella
In the bus
Honking and absent

I lost
A pen to a stranger
Lid intact
And a carton full of attic treasures
Letters and candy wraps

I found
A sheaf of papers
On irretrievable thoughts

A phone number
Dangling mysteriously
A report card and a stopped watch

I found a key to a door demolished
And wisdom for a problem from the past

I found a feeling and lost a word
When I could not
I had found loss.

Perchance to Dream – I

I spin this tale of inane consequences in a dream. Had I the luxury of a ray of sunlight and a parchment I would have written this down with my blood. However, I who had been condemned to the depths of oblivion in a cavernous dungeon had no such privileges. I would certainly have drawn the last of my life’s energy to put this down, not out of the vanity of being a man of words, nor because it would have made my days any better but simply because it would have given me the consolation of a moment’s tryst with memory and what has gone by.

I do not remember how many days have passed since I was violently thrown into these catacombs while lifeblood still surged with vigour in my veins and the fragrance of youth still burned in my chest. I had dreamt of escape and redemption. Now, I wilt quietly like a shadow that has been swept into the farthest corners of time with nothing left to hold on to but memories. The outside world rumbles on, or so I imagine, with fresher crime, fresher power and fresher pain.

I used to be afraid to move. I knew the presence of other men in here, the numbers of whom I dared not count, if only for fear of finding livid pleasure in finding company in a place like this. My initial days were filled with hate and resentment for the stench that surrounded me and the wails and groans that contaminated my ears. Alas! Those were the days my senses had still been intact. I could see the silhouettes of ghost-like forms moving about, craving a drink of water, or dreaming of butterflies that existed in the world outside.

The walls of this evil home of mine trickled with substances and moss. What places life chooses to establish itself! Little rats and spiders scuttled on me from time to time conveniently mistaking me for food. In the beginning, I had fought them like a fool. I had built mental barriers of prayer to keep these invisible enemies away. I started at the slightest feeling of a feeler on my skin. They had eyes that I had been denied and sight that accompanies the secret veil of darkness. They leered with victory at my human ineptitude to see in the dark.

(To be continued…)

Another Brick Off The Wall

Inspiration like a raven swoops
Under flimsy, barren summer clouds
Poetry looks up with hopeful eyes
And crumbles in a reality check.

Golden girls and lads
and Chimney-sweepers
Resurrect

Ashes
Apathy, the cast iron gate, rusty and ivy-decked
Despair, a cat on the wall, hungry and licking paws
Idiot Metal and terabytes of stifled love
Shining badges, glory and green
Ashes

In a failure to be interpreted
Defeat dies an inconspicuous death
Loneliness waits on the road less travelled
To be christened by the pioneers.

Stammering, they pause
And flounder like dust
Dust indeed – another brick off the wall.

Close Shave

With rejection came relief.

Because every open door means you are forced to relinquish the other doors
and every closed door means you can keep searching…

*Removes thinking cap and wears mad cap*

Women Writers and the Female Body: An Analysis

I have always had a conflict about writing about my body. It has been a very personal space. Certainly, for someone who thinks and feels about everything under the sun, my body has been a ground for a lot of thought. I have been through a lot of physical pain and torture because of which I tend to detach myself from my bodily needs and look at it objectively. I am beginning to think about how I interact with my body. Also, being a woman, I am not very comfortable with discussing my body in a world of men, most of whom do not have very good intentions for a woman who can openly talk about her physicality.

I was attempting to translate a poem called “Female Author” by Sylvia Plath. When I encountered the word “pink-breasted”, I almost wanted to give up. Then I spent a moment thinking about the consequences of translating this word. Personally, I am more comfortable than most women, with my body. I have been laid bare in laboratories, testing centers, and an operation theater and I learned to understand the perceptions about the female body.

I have also come to understand that the female body is often used as a means of intimidating women into fear and submission. A lot of women are embarrassed of their proportions and spend all their time in trying to change the way they look. I don’t! In fact, I am the big woman who takes the second helping of a chocolate cake because I don’t care! I have one life and I care less about who is watching than about my own desires. Women are embarrassed about the parts of their own body and attempt to tell other women to cover them up without so much as understanding why they are afraid.

I am as comfortable with my breasts as my eyes or nose and I cannot be insecure about them forever. I would certainly like to protect my body from the invasive glances of perverts but I cannot live in constant fear of them and make my own body an inconvenience. While we studied Foucault, we studied about “internalization” and the “gaze”. Women tend to internalize the feeling of being gazed at by men and years of telling them to be ashamed of their own body has made them insecure and inhibited.

I have often seen men on the road who spit at me because they don’t approve of the way I look or dress. Then I begin to analyze the kind of person this ’spitter’ is. What is his life like? Perhaps he has no life. He must be a loser who has achieved very less in life. He is probably someone who has a complex about his own status. He is most probably not so well-dressed or well-groomed himself. Then, why do women react? Have our self-respect hit rock bottom that we have to react/respond to the man on the street who has no name or address? He is probably a street-cleaner who is there not because of a lack of choice but because he treated people with disrespect all his life. Perhaps, he is a college student who fails all his subjects because he has not begun to understand what learning is. Why should I react to a person who does not have the status to judge me, let alone value me?

I watched a documentary called “SheWrite” at college, and I loved it. It was about a few Tamil women poets who have started exploring the realm of the female body in their stories and poems. A whole lot of controversy has hit them and there are men opposing them everywhere. I have come to believe that a man can never look at the woman’s body the way a woman looks at herself. Then how can they judge what she has to say about herself? Isn’t it too intimate for him to comment about? What does he know?

This poem evokes so much beauty and a tiny chuckle from me because I can identify with it. I nod in understanding. This poem has been written by a woman and translated by a man. It evoked a whole lot of controversy from several Tamil lyricists (yes, the ones who write sleazy verse for movie songs) who wanted to take this to the level of Witch Burnings.

Breasts
by Kutti Revathi

Breasts are bubbles, rising
In wet marshlands
I wondrously watched — and guarded —
Their gradual swell and blooming
At the edges of my youth’s season
Saying nothing to anyone else,
They sing along
With me alone, always:
Of Love,
Rapture,
Heartbreak
To the nurseries of my turning seasons,
They never once failed or forgot
To bring arousal
During penance, they swell, as if straining
To break free; and in the fierce tug of lust,
They soar, recalling the ecstasy of music
From the crush of embrace, they distil
The essence of love; and in the shock
Of childbirth, milk from coursing blood
Like two teardrops from an unfulfilled love
That cannot ever be wiped away,
They well up, as if in grief, and spill over.

(Translated by N.Kalyan Raman)
Click for more poems by Kutti Revathi

I happened to read the article called “Landscapes of the Body” (The Hindu, Sunday, Dec 07, 2003) by C.S. Lakshmi a.k.a Ambai, one of the earliest forward-thinking Tamil writers. She has analyzed the politics of the female body while being cynical and caustic about the fact that men cannot understand the way women feel about their own bodies. I would not blame men. They have also been brought up to believe that the woman’s body is an object of arousal and requires to be covered at other times. Some men cannot appreciate the little moments of loss of self-restraint in a woman, when she is twirling her skirt in joy or lets herself go in laughter. Their first reaction is the need to control her. Many men imagine that a woman who is open about her sexuality is either trying to “titillate” or “seduce” or she needs to be controlled/fixed. I would not blame them because this attitude is not uncommon in older women in the family who have “internalized” the male idea of what is right or wrong for a woman. I have also noticed that men tend to be extremely private about their bodies. They do not want to explicitly express the sensitivities in their bodies because they are afraid of being taken into control. They observe their own physical needs as a weakness.

The body is something we live with day in and day out. While it seems perfectly sane to discuss “breast cancer” or “breastfeeding” without rousing a controversy, a woman is not allowed to talk about her breasts in other contexts. For a writer, it is completely natural to want to express every experience and how is one supposed to categorize these needs and inhibit oneself?

I also think the psychology behind such suppression and repression is the truth that rarefying the body makes it more mysterious and exploration-worthy. Perhaps this is why men try hard to preserve the secrecy about the female body to keep their own libidos working. It is only natural to lose interest in something that becomes commonplace. I cannot help but wonder why pornography  and Savita Bhabhi are  so welcome but a woman talking about her own body is not. The male psyche is still in denial, of course, but they have got their logic mixed up.  It won’t be long before women realize the logical flaws and loopholes in the patriarchal belief systems and discard them.

Reply from G. Gautama

I had earlier posted the letter I wrote to G. Gautama on my blog. I received his reply yesterday and it was one of the best things that happened to me in a long time.

Please look at my earlier post to understand the context.

I am publishing his reply with his permission. Although the whole mail is full of gems, I have highlighted some of the most beautiful lines. His words are lucid and genuine and his thoughts are so well accommodated in words. I am indeed lucky to have approached him with my questions. I am posting his reply because his message could make a difference to all of you.

Dear Matangi,

It was a surprise to receive your mail. The few paragraphs that you have written express your position, your questions and your thoughts. I must say that you write beautifully and express yourself very aesthetically. This is a rare gift!

Each of us in our life has certain abilities and capacities. What is not clearly seen most often is that we are all disabled as well. In most of us these are concealed and permit us to cope with life. We are conscious when the disabilities are physical. Someone may need a crutch to walk, a wheelchair to move around. Another may need a pair of spectacles for reading, like I do, a cane for walking, hearing aid for listening clearly. Less visible are our disabilities with language and mathematical operations. These are the ones most used in schools, unearthed so to speak for evaluation … Even less visible are our disabilities with music or dance, movement, people and communication, understanding of space.

It would not be wrong therefore to say that each of us has disabilities. You must have heard of artists who paint with their mouth because they do not have hands. Or people who paint with their foot. The finished work of such artists evokes a great deal of admiration and wonder. Rarely do we give thought to what must have been the first attempt of such an artist. Would the first swabs of paint have been artistic, beautiful?

It is quite apparent that whatever efforts human beings make, if we get to hear of them, or if we draw satisfaction from them, they are the product of persistent hard work. There is the famous story of an accomplished violinist. At the end of a concert a man came up to him and said “I would have given my life to have been able to play like this”. The violinist said “I did”. Could this violinist, as a budding musician, when he picked up the violin of the first time, could he have been adept or skilled? Would he not have fumbled many times to get the right note, to get the right combination of notes?

I say all this to place in context your own situation, renal failure at a young age necessitating a renal transplant. Surely a difficult situation! I’m sure you must have felt very sad about this on many an occasion. However you must also have felt that you’re luckier than many others. If you do not misunderstand me I would say all of us are in the same zone — some things to celebrate, some things can be better.

On the other hand life is a design opportunity. I never tire of using this expression. There are cards we have been dealt, there is a time we have been given. What we do with this time is the question that life poses for us. Often we are overwhelmed by the difficulties, the problems we see and the disabilities we encounter. We do things which others expect us to do, often halfheartedly. We do things which take our fancy. And then we drop them, disappointed, unsure, dissatisfied.

There is another dimension to our lives. We are also wounded children as a priest I know mentioned. We carry wounds from our childhood encounters with the larger world of adults. These wounds do not heal that easily and the painful memories are stored in our being. The violence, the exploitation, the harsh words, the agony of near and dear — all these we carry, mostly unconsciously.

So not only are we defined by our abilities and disabilities but also by these wounds and the memories that we carry. These define the things that we choose and those that we adamantly reject.

But then the question remains. Given who we are, disabled as we are what is it that we could be doing with our time on earth. This is not terribly clear to most of us and that only intensifies our agony.

Some of us are lucky because there is a deeper intimation of things. Something inside draws us to certain things. It is almost as if we have no choice. Some of us do not see clearly what is it that we need to do. We pick up something that appeals to us a little bit and then work quite hard at it. The journey and the end product turn out to be satisfying in various degrees. But most of us seem to spend our time, this one lifetime that we have been given, sitting on the fence trying to decide what is it that we should be doing. The other thing we end up doing is complaining. And this becomes a lament, which slowly fills our life.

As a young person it is a bit sad that you encountered kidney failure so early in your life. You’re also extremely lucky that your father donated a kidney to you. Given your interest in writing, teaching and trying out other avenues, it does seem crippling that you have to earn enough money for your medicines. It is also understandable that you do not want to be dependent on other people.

I do not know if I have much advice to offer. For each one of us there is one thing we bring to the table, every moment — a slice of our lifetime. What would we like to give our slices to is one of the decisions we need to make and almost each day. I know people, mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, who devoted their life and time to taking care of people – young ones and older ones. I also know people who devoted themselves to dance or music, almost not caring about anything else. There are people who lead their lives with a smile on their face and others with unsure tense faces.

How would you like to choose your time? What dance would you like to dance and which song would like to sing? It actually does not matter who is looking. This is your time, and your action may be a gift to somebody else, but more than anything else it’s an expression of your own being, and a gift to yourself.

Playing it safe is not going to make one feel satisfied. You will have to ask yourself, looking back after 10 years what would you like to be able to say. “These are the things I tried” or “these are the things I avoided”. No audience outside of us matters because the rewards and recognition have a very short shelf life and are barely satisfactory in the long run.

If something that I’ve written is not clear please do not hesitate to ask any questions. If you wish to share some thoughts you are most welcome.

With warm regards and best wishes

Gautama