I am Memory ©

I am invisible for night

And If the sun seek me It is in vain-

That serves him right.

Night velvet flounces

Of feathery brightness clouds bear,

Lifted by soft breeze these know

In dribs and drabs it goes all the way

where tassels blow and tease

My throat arched beyond the moon’s passage.

You ask in such impertinent plainness

‘Why wander hither and thither

In such listless wonder, Do you?

I lean out to touch the gown

Steeped in imperious purple dye-

My gown is of such pleasure

That cannot bear the roses-

And the briar must forbear

From fancies of the drab noon-tide,  

Who else but the moonbeams wove

sequins along the field of purple , and

for my pleasure?

Touch not with words to confuse

the invisible pleasure of this union with

Living and the dying.

Where none mortal may dream

 

they shall know me in a roundabout way;

Look not dreamer for stars, my eyes 

nor too closely at my lashes 

the seat of seven sisters weaving a dream

It  is a lie for the curious eye.

For I am beholden neither to sun nor the moon

Beyond reproach of reason and madness

I See beyond these vile mortality:

What was, what is and What will be. 

benny

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Out of focus, sharper in clarity

In a couple of weeks I hope to celebrate my birth day. Should I treat it as a day of sorrow? You see I am coming into the wrong side of sixties. But incurable and hopeless idiot I am for a good laugh, I could celebrate it for another reason. You see I am still on the good side of seventies.
On looking back I see the moments of panic and shudder in my life and see nothing I feared did really happen. Fear of parents,teachers who breathed fire and rattled rulers and imposition are all gone. Faces of martinets and House rules are out focus. A nasty marriage divorce, and the fearful step unto the unknown are equally behind me. From where I stand clarity of life as I imagined and how it has been give me a new insight. Clarity of life as a whole, places emphases elsewhere; the reality is much more significant since I can see many chain of events that I had merely treated then as coincidence connect and a few others disappear as of no consequence.
My trust in grace of God and in the mysteries of life has been vindicated. Love as an experience I find far more important and satisfying than a life of ideas. What are sparks of ideas without the reality of life? What is love but the nature of life given the wick to burn? I hope my wife and I shall be warmed even as old age is about us.
benny

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My Cultural Baggage

A couple of years ago I went back to India where I had lived for some fifty years. I came to know a French couple rather well. They were living well in Paris,- and both were professionals, and one day they had enough of it. Love for India had completely taken possession of them. They wanted to see, feel and live close to nature and be in ‘the centre of Cosmic forces’. Which other place but India? Their imagination was quite lively I must admit, and their transparency for all their urban living simply shone through. The man was, of all things an advocate having had his private practice and he felt India demanded all that he could give. Yes he and his wife did give, and at every corner from the law to the whole array of ‘gurus’ in their saffron clothes were for taking all they could. Having ran up all their life savings on the assumption that India of their dreams must some time and somewhere must coincide. It never did happen to their disappointment.
Recently we met once again and the Parisian wanted to know where did he go wrong. Who am I to break his illusions? The French couple loved India of their imagination while I loved the habit of being an Indian. His cultural baggage is neither Paris where he grew up but also imagination that makes reality work. Only what has changed now is this: reality of India added something new to his imagination. Paris that he is going back for good shall be all the more better.
Our cultural baggage is so heavy when consigned to imagination. In reality India weighs no more than Paris since it is to be lived in. Reality and how it is handled requires no ‘culture’ in technicolor but hard common sense.
benny

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Reality As We Make It

If there be hand there must also surely the thought that can draw conclusions from Imagination in manner finite mind of man can understand? What is art but communicating by means of symbols and realities,- superficial at that, between the artist and the viewer. The artist by taking advantage of the texture paint and color draws veil over the viewer’s visual faculties,- and how he opens the window therein is a matter of trust. How the artist has drawn from the immensities and how you deign to follow his insight and art are two different things. Late MF Hussain of India drew Mother India according to his vision and some busybodies saw nakedness ‘ Abominable!’ they cried. They hounded him out of India while those who could have put a stop to the vandalism did nothing. (Just as they didn’t prevent the Babri Masjid demolition.)
ii
Reality of our physical universe is not beyond our ken although emphasis you and I place may vary. Reality is how we translate Imagination into the context of time and place in which we transact realities in a meaningful manner.
Our imagination has grasped essentials of Imagination. If we have celestial tones ringing in our ears and put it down by means of musical notations we are giving the reality a scope it never had before. How good or bad it is must be judged musically and not by intention or any other means. A Mozart or Bach has felicity of expression that makes anyone hearing it to guess whose composition it is. They are unique and their shadows even after a distance of centuries bring to mind as though they were not dead and gone at all. We are reality of an Immense Dream and how we shape it can only be determined as such from our works.
In the Immensities, quintessence of which is indivisible and Absolute we borrow scenery as it were, like Japanese. (In Japan houses are sited taking advantage of the landscape. They borrow scenery so to speak so from where they sit they can enjoy a slice of it. Though they only tinkered with the house Nature has come along freely to raise its quality to the nth degree.). Religion, Science, art literature all human enterprises are windows drawn on it and whether it is shut or open quality of Immensities remain unchanged. An atheist scoffing at the Immensities plays the fool since he is the eye of it. He is a fool since he says there is nothing.
benny

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What Are You Looking At, Man?

At the Altamira Caves©

A group of prehistoric men camped in the Upper Paleolithic caves Spain thought they were guided by some unseen hand. From where they stood they could see in the valley below such abundant wild-life, which they could hunt. There was plenty of meat to go round. Because it was a coastal area they also fished and it gave some variety to their diet. When they painted the caves they were in a manner of speaking thanking whatever made them seek that part of rocky outcrop.
‘Imagination no doubt.’ One wizened man exclaimed.
‘But from where it came to us?’ The young braves queried.
The old man replied, ‘ By the same source that made us leave our history along the walls.’
They didn’t get it so they pressed him to explain. ‘Would we have left these paintings behind if we did not think we would be found?’
Later when roof of a cave collapsed they decided it was time to move on.
As they filed their way to safer regions the old man asked the group of hunter-gatherers who were responsible for painting the walls,’ Don’t you want to leave your signature?’
‘Whatever for?’ perplexed they were at the question, ‘ we were merely the hand that obeyed Imagination whatever it is.’ In our exercising the imagination we prove we are part of a dream at the centre of which holds an Absolute quality.
Let me quote Carlyle”For indeed it is well said,’in every object there is inexhaustible meaning: the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.’ To Newton and Newton’s dog Diamond, what a different pair of universe; while the painting on the optical retina of both was, most likely the same!’( French Revolution./Book I.1.2)
When you look at the immensities do you trace the lineaments of God or Allah and think It gave you the right to demolish those who didn’t see it the way you did?
Wherever one is, that the Centre of Immensities,-for believer, theist, agnostic atheist alike. Centre of Immensities is an expression of Carlyle and I find in him some similarities.
benny

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Now Is The Only Reality

While narrating a battle in which Persia fought against Croesus, the Lydian king, Herodotus in his Histories mentions a curious incident. At the sacking of Sardis a Persian soldier saw the distraught king of Lydia defenseless and vulnerable. So badly had the tide turned and the king did not care if he died or not. Even when the enemy soldier threatened to kill him he sat where he was. But his dumb son seeing the danger screamed. As if by a miracle the young man got his power of speech at that moment.
It is the moment that determines our worth. And we have no clue as to what we are capable of till that moment arrives. The moment of truth. We have only this moment: how shall we delineate truth?
If we cannot create Now in harmony with our Essential Self (or let Soul affix its seal of approval) forget we will ever get into grips with time in its finite mode.
benny

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A Conundrum

Having dreamt up a comet
Unresolved I am as yet
Of this monstrosity,-
Did this leviathan
All fire and ice, from cosmos
Freefall by mischance
To trouble my thoughts?
Why should it be so?
(Unlike Ahab no rancor
I hold for this distraction
Even as it sped to its doom.)
Or did I pull it up
A celestial bauble into orbit
By the gravity of sleep?
benny

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