Orange curtained

I.

Last night I thought of you, I couldn’t sleep - 

the bedclothes were too warm, too soft, their perfume

felt like the long-ago, orange-curtained room

where you’d sat with the sunlight on your sleeve.

The hoarding outside blinked into the night

some wire loose, some pattern of disconnect

patchy skin of an anecdote, near perfect

in recall, but I know that I’m being naïve.

Nothing much has changed meanwhile, there are three

black and white photos still on the bookcase

the walls kaleidoscope into your face

and grief does not leave any marks on these.

Peace is a hollow sound, darkness is an ear

twisted  in the pillow. And insomnia.

II.

I think of you during the day as well

your hands behind my eyes a push button

umbrella, their arcs of fluorescence open,

your voice a softly blooming magic spell

on a fractured day morphing to a lullaby

for a drop of time, neither blink nor aeon,

a swirl of seconds? years? before it’s gone

and I straighten up whatever went awry

turn back again, deep dive into the phone –  

respond to an email, write a paragraph,

read the news, look up the tally, adjust

my nerves, try a new pink smile - mostly half

hearted. Grief’s the shape of my collarbone

and wrist, milliseconds marooned in the past. 

Lockdown Lesson 2

I do not give up hope, though no feathered

thing sits and sings at my open windows,

which look out on a washing line, tethered

to my neighbour’s balcony, dingy rows

of plastic strings and pegs, the deep shadows

of my own building on it, fallen forward –

a skyline toppled, downed like dominos.

A word game where hope can’t finish the word.

The only thing that flies in is a raptor

with blood on its beak, the sharpest claws

scrabbling the old panels of the railing.

It leaves bloodstains. Hope is not the chapter

nor verse of its song, I lean and listen close.

I don’t give up an inch, but it sings nothing.

Write...Edit...Publish... + IWSG June 2020 : Urban Nightmare

It's time to get back to Write...Edit...Publish..., I do hope all WEPers are coping and doing well.   Keeping in mind the ongoing pandemic situation and the personal challenges we are all facing, WEP is going Lite this month. I'm sticking to my comfort zone of photo-essays, aka non-fiction ramblings. I have done better this month on the wordcount control, finally! -  

Pigeon. Panic. Pandemic. 

There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.

~ Matsuo Basho

Right in the middle of the urban nightmare to beat all nightmares, the pigeon desperately wants to fly home. But it can’t. Borders are closed. The mind can go wherever it wants, it can think only flowers, it can think beyond the moon, it can morph into whatever it desires, but the body? The body is governed by the natural laws, physics and biology and biochemistry and abstruse electrochemistry. It is subject to boundaries both physical and geographical. There is no shaking off its shackles. There is no escape from this city. And so it burrows back into the mind, where it can devise its own escape and try on the grasshopper wings again.

Credit: View from Studio (1886)

The rise of the city is inexorably linked to settled agriculture. And art as we know it today is linked to it as well. If there were no public buildings – the monuments, the necropolis, the places of worship, the town square, the library, the parks, as also the private grounds and the sitting room, there would be no need to hang art on walls or install statues or design frescoes and fountains and what have you. The beginnings of Homo sapiens’ art, as with most other beginnings, lie in Africa, in Tan-Tan and Blombos. Some of the prehistoric art we have remnants of, were either made to decorate living humans with – beads and a mix of pigments to hang around and ornament various limbs; or were independent free standing, portable figurines. A purely nomadic hunter gatherer life does not lend itself to monumental art for obvious reasons. Rock art which dates from around 35,000-40,000 years ago or even 200,000 ya is clearly an attempt to beautify or glorify a cave/surface which humans were at for long enough to create those artworks. Therefore, we can safely assume that though art happened pre-agriculture, wall art required a surface that humans stayed put at for some time or they knew they would come back to. If there are no walls, they can’t be decorated, right?

The ancient cities rose on the back of the Neolithic Revolution – or settled agriculture, in the region commonly known as the Fertile Crescent. The oldest cities such as Jericho (9000 BCE) and Ur (6500 BCE) coalesced along its curve. The first writing and recordkeeping happened in Ur in fact, slicing off the ‘pre-‘ from prehistory in one fell swoop. Cities were predicated on an agricultural surplus and humans changed profoundly, from foragers into a society based on specialisation of labour. Not everyone needed to be growing food, so some turned their minds and skills to other things. A non-farming class of residents - that of the artists/artisans – grew as a corollary to settled agriculture.

The earliest civilisations rose out of these communities in the river valleys of Mesopotamia, India, Egypt and China. Settled agriculture meant an exponential growth in the population, as the same piece of land could now support many times the original inhabitants. As the civilisations grew, their cities became political capitals, centres of education, trade and commerce hubs, forums for artistic and creative exchange. But there was also a price to pay for this luscious, spanking new lifestyle. An organised society meant more rigid class divisions and inequalities leading to high crime rates. Living in close proximity meant higher pollution, and last but not the least, diseases on an epidemic scale. The urban nightmare started early - from ancient times.


***

Normality is a paved road: it’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it. 

~ Vincent van Gogh.

Vincent’s nightmares were both urban and various. The most famous of them is the ear incident in Arles. That happened after a heated debate with Paul Gauguin. But there are others as well. Let the grasshopper stop whirring about for a minute and recap his time in Paris.

In 1886, Vincent moved to Paris where his brother Theo was already working at an art dealers. Paris had acquired the reputation of being the art capital of Europe in prior centuries. By the time van Gogh moved there, it was in its artistic prime – it had some of the finest painters and the art schools associated with them. Paris was the centre where several art movements – Romanticism, Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Art Deco etc evolved. Van Gogh arrived in Paris splat in the middle of the Impressionist movement - Monet and Pissarro were already established. Vincent admired the old masters he saw in the Paris museums, at first he didn’t like the Impressionists much. But that changed a year on – he started experimenting with the loose brushstrokes and lighter, brighter colour palettes of the Impressionists. His art evolved at an exponential, breath-taking pace. He worked in the studio of Fernand Cormon and found inspiration from his circle of artist friends such as Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin.

However, living in Paris drained him, even as it elevated his art and grew him as an artist. He smoked and drank too much, ate poorly, the pace of the big city wore him down.

It seems to me almost impossible to be able to work in Paris, unless you have a refuge in which to recover and regain your peace of mind and self-composure. Without that, you’d be bound to get utterly numbed. 

~ Letter to Theo van Gogh, Arles, 21^st Feb 1888

I could never get used to climbing the stairs in Paris, and was always dizzy in a dreadful nightmare that has left me here, but recurred regularly there. 

~ Letter to Willemien van Gogh, Arles, June 1888

The self-portrait he painted in Paris reflected this, he looks exhausted and depressed. And he described it as such to his sister Wil ‘with…wrinkles in forehead and around the mouth, stiffly wooden, a very red beard, quite unkempt and sad.’

Credit: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Paris ultimately gave Vincent the artistic lift-off he had sought, but he had had to pay a heavy price. 

Always a heavy price. Whether as a heedless species traversing the broad arc of history; or a single, keenly aware individual, a misunderstood genius ahead of his time, trying to make a little space for his art.

WC - 1054

FCA

Read the other entries below :

Lockdown lesson I

Credit

I follow the stories. Most stories don’t

have pleasant endings, or even beginnings,

written in happy-go-lucky, squiggly fonts.

Year round extra judicial killings.

Some will make it to the headlines, most won’t.

This peaking death in the middle of spring.

Losses that happen and are telephoned.

The rollbacks, the undemocratic stirrings.  

On the plus side, there’s always one, I’m told -

managed to learn a whole new heap of things:

crash course on firming up the pain threshold;

these so called linings of silver and gold

are exactly that – heightened imaginings.

Positive, and its dire, negative meanings.

Breathless

Credit

I’ve read somewhere – a prophet spent

forty days in the wilderness.

A pair of brothers were absent

for fourteen years more or less.

In strange, nested mythologies,

passages marked in sands and wars.

And in here-n-now territories

time buckles under tormentors.

I heard the empty vessels wreck

my world, too close their keels and teeth.

Saw too, a knee pressed on a neck

and shut my eyes, forgot to breathe.

The mills, I’ve heard, grind small but slow –

how many more aeons to go?

আকাশ , বাড়ি চলো

৪


বহুদিন লেগে গেলো নিজেকে জোটাতে,
সময়ের ধূলিকণার মাঝে খুঁজে নিতে
পিচ গলা রাস্তায় সাঁটা চটিটি ওঠাতে,
অস্থানে পড়া সে পায়ের ছাপ বুঁজে দিতে,
ঘূর্ণির ক্ষুরে ক্ষুরে আগুনের ফুল্কিতে
ক্রিয়া প্রতিক্রিয়ার খাঁজ, ভাঁজ, ক্রমটি গোছাতে।
বহু পথ কেটে গেলো পথ বুঝে নিতে
মানচিত্রের এলোমেলো রেখা মোছাতে।


এবার সব ধোয়া মোছা, সব ভাঙাচোরা
এ মহাপ্রলয়ের মাঝে সব পরিষ্কার -
কোনটা বাতিল করা, কোনটা আবার গড়া,
কোনটা ভাঙা সত্ত্বেও কুড়িয়ে তোলার। 
আর কোনটা যে কোনোদিন যাবে না জোড়া
বুঝে গেছি, নিয়ে চলো আকাশ এবার।  

Allusions and a Lockdown Mantra

Keep listening to the birds, and the crickets,

watching for star reflections in buckets,

though the present is a box full of darkness

remember it’s still a gift and nothing less.

The sky never had a limit, and the ground

is hallowed everywhere, even torn and browned,

even when it's sullied with a pandemic

of deceit and a tsunami of plastic.

When it’s ruthlessly mauled by a cyclone;

the warming of seas, the holes in the ozone.

Lay your skin close to the asphalt and concrete

and under them feel the seasonal heartbeat.

Thirteen ways are good, but you don’t always need

thirteen, one is enough, the rest is just greed.