D'you Know What I Mean?

 

A certain perfume of sunlit clothes, a soft hand

rested against the splayed green leaves of aubergines;

deftly weighing the merits of flours and sand;

weaving through the sections of old magazines.

Take a perfect stranger’s knuckle, or garment’s fall,

a cloud shape, a landscape. And it’s instant recall.

 

I turn eyes off, I turn myself to face the front

and suddenly the front reels back to a time past.

Though I am strong and resolute, I do not want

to burrow back into times with her. It doesn’t last.

Even when I’m quite convinced it’s under control,

a patch of sound, a pixel, equal instant recall. 

 

Low burning flames. And flares of nothing at all -

a swish of breeze, rainbow grease, that’s instant recall.

Disposal

 

Anywhere on earth, in the hills or plains,

when the last one’s drawn, and no breath remains - 

lay the withered grass down on any terrain

and there’s no need to disturb the gods.

 

Feel free not to chant prayers at the pyre -

and by the way, either would do, soil or fire -

home isn’t a point, a place to retire,

because home is, after all, a road.

 

And if you’re feeling brave, when I’m gone

let the birds have the flesh, the sun bleach the bones,

neither fire nor fuss, nor digging nor stone,

just a slow collapse into the clods.

 

Like a small footprint washed off by the sea,

a paper boat sunk after its short journey,

atoms imploding into eternity

without markers for where they implode.

Don’t disturb the gods, don’t disturb the soil,

don’t sully the air with heat and huge turmoil

don’t light up the lamp, don’t pour out the oil,

lose me gently to this bay that is broad.

Keep it light and soft, keep it natural

both the print and tread quiet, and erasable,

the end a laying down, no special disposal,

let me scatter where I fall with my load.

Write...Edit...Publish... + IWSG August 2020 : Long Shadow

Write...Edit...Publish... is sticking to its Lite version for now...and I am sticking to the essay format...

Breath and Shadow

A human being is only breath and shadow. – Sophocles. 

Credit 

The mind is a shape shifter. Like a shadow – squat at midday, long by sunset. One minute it is a grasshopper, all chirpy multitasking cheerfulness, juggling a million thoughts per second, leaping off one to the other, unable to stick with just a single. The next it is a bulldog, just lugubrious folds and salt-of-earth tenacity, focussed sharp and a serial stickler for one at a time.  Yet again it is a pigeon, slicing through the fluff and zooming home to what matters.  As mercurial as a drop of water on a lotus leaf, huddled into its own rounded self, concise and self-contained and tiny, unable to wet anything yet reflecting a whole skyscape of clouds above it.

The mind can contain a whole skyscape of grief and loss and stressful pandemics, yet go about working cell by cell on spreadsheets, or writing word by word, an essay sparked by a prompt. It can imagine the universe is its oyster, it can blithely go about seeing multiverses in a grain of sand.  Smoothly glide back and forth along the continuum of time from history and art history to sci-fi and fantasy. Between truth and fiction, between the abstract and concrete, between the painfully personal and the monumentally universal. There is no end to its skittering about.

Today it’s vaulted back to the first seat of Western higher learning, to Athens. That’s where the history of the cast shadow in Western art goes back to - ancient Greece. They were the first to develop and use ‘a geometry of light’ and cast shadows in art. Apollodorus, an Athenian artist, introduced a shading technique called skiagraphia (lit shadow-painting) to create the impression of volume, depth and space on a flat plane. However, in the Allegory of the Cave, Plato set up a shadow-reality dichotomy that continues to influence all spheres of Western culture even today. That Greek perception of shadow was negative – associated with ignorance, illusory, unreal. 

Credit   

A counterpoint can be found in the Natural History  in which Pliny the Elder, the Roman historian, recorded the Greco-Roman origin myth of Western art: a young woman – the clay modeller Butades’ daughter, who captured her lover’s shadow on a wall as he slept on the night before his departure as a romantic keepsake. This was a far more positive angle, a love story, but it could not throw off the Cave’s, um…long shadow. Cast shadows in art dwindled from the classical period onward, with their dodgy impression of ugly, gloomy, negative, deluding the viewer with trickery and deception. Shadows in art remained a no-no for centuries. Till the Renaissance upended everything. 

***

Darkness is the absence of light. Shadow is the diminution of light. – Leonardo da Vinci.

The grasshopper meanwhile, as is its wont, has leapt down a rabbit hole. What exactly were the Easterners doing to their shadows? Eastern art, the Chinese, Japanese and Indian traditions are deep and ancient, but they always were more stylised than Western art. No space for cast shadows there historically. From the Renaissance onward Western art explored the exact representation of experienced reality through linear perspective, shading and shadows.  Eastern art by and large remained moored in tradition however, and experiments with realism came later, mainly due to European colonisation. But the converse is also true, Eastern art diffused into Europe and inspired Western artists too. In particular, Japanese art crossed the oceans and left its indelible mark on one particular, much celebrated artist.

A landmark Renaissance work, where  linear perspective and cast shadows were first used, was a fresco in the Basilica of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. The artist, Masaccio (1401-28) was one of the pioneers in Renaissance art - he used cast shadows masterfully. 

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In another Masaccio artwork – St Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow, the shadow of the saint dominates the core message, but visually the shadow does not hide the sick. 

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The vocabulary of shadows continued to develop through the work of later artists - Caravaggio, Bernini, Gianlorenzo and others.  By the time of Rembrandt and Vermeer, the techniques of perspective, chiaroscuro and cast shadows were quite established. And then Impressionism with its soft brush strokes, stunning colours, subtle movement and shimmery reflections  shredded all the rules again.

***

Like a shadow, I am and I am not. – Jalaluddin Rumi.

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An evolution of light. Looking at the body of work this artist left in his short career, there seems to be a progression from the shadows into light, both literally and figuratively. In his early works, he used chiaroscuro to marvellous effect. His palette and perspective changed radically midway when he came to Paris. There he encountered two forces which would change his art. One, the Impressionists, and second, Japanese woodcuts. His palette became lighter, brighter, more colourful. His perspectives became flatter, and his art avant-garde,  by repurposing the ancient.

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Japanese art was a major inspiration for Vincent, he wanted to find a take-off point for a more modern, more stylised vibe, and Japanese prints – with their bold patches of colour, prominent contour lines, lack of horizons and shadows, truncated frames and focus on nature – fitted admirably. He went south to Arles looking for the “clearness of atmosphere” and “colour effects” of Oriental prints. Even his idea of an artist’s commune was based on Japanese monks living and working together. His painting of his bedroom at Arles is the epitome of the Japanese influence – bold colours, a subtly distorted perspective and removal of all cast shadows. 

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Unfortunately, what happened on canvas did not translate into personal life. The more his external work exploded with colour and creativity, the greater was the turmoil in his inner workings. The artists’ commune did not materialise, Gauguin came and left after a major disagreement. Vincent had a series of mental breakdowns. His neighbours petitioned for him to be removed on account of ‘insanity.’ An abject sense of failure dogged him. Like some Gothic horror story come eerily to life, for every burst of brilliance on the easel, his life seemed to become a couple of shades darker, regress into the terrible shade of mental illness. Despite his efforts, he was wholly unable to shake that off. Till all that remained was a shadow, without breath.

WC - 1051

FCA

Read the other entries - 

Independence Day 2020.

 

This heart is still tricoloured, as always

but it does flutter at half-mast these days.

Whatever may be raised – in stone, in brick,

in pride, revenge, tit for tat politics –

in time all will be levelled. Nothing stays.

 

Neither your chair, nor my personal grief,

not these elaborate cons, these strange motifs,

the deluge of tinsel and marigold

the optics, the updates tightly controlled,

will ultimately fade. Our time is brief.

 

As uncertain as it is – who’ll outlast

whether you,  I, or the heart at half-mast -

it’s quite clear this pseudo justice can’t stick

mills have an odd habit of being cyclic

and fates are fickle, hardly ever steadfast. 

Greetings on Independence Day to all those who are observing it this month. Not sure about using the word 'celebrating' with all the various on-going challenges.

Oceans apart

Sometimes you don’t feel the distance, you talk

through the stretched time zones, nearly every day,

carefully aligning your staggered clocks.

Sometimes it’s just a text – ‘okay?’ ‘okay.’

At other times, the distance is a log

from here to the vanishing point, its weight

unwieldy, no language, no dialogues

to lift it, to break through, communicate.

So you leave it hanging, leave things alone,

you wipe off the scary scenes in your head.

You keep mumbling, it’s nothing, it’s the phone.

It's not him. It’s just the phone that’s gone dead.

Nothing’s golden at a remove, silence

equals no rare metal beyond a distance. 

Blanking the Verse

All I see is a sparrow, and a dove

perched on the windowsill against the glass

and the sunfilm lets me get quite close up.

All I read is that the deaths have gone flat

even as the cases fizz and spiral

I don’t mean to disregard any pain –

yesterday I heard a friend of a friend

has passed, a colleague of a cousin lost

both her parents within weeks while away,

her mapped mother had slammed the borders shut

and so she wasn’t in on the last rites.

I’d heard in childhood even walls had ears

but now they’ve evolved into empty eyes

in which one screaming headline’s reflected

briefly followed by another, graver -

that chokes off the ability to scream.

Only the glass shows me a pair of birds

perched to avoid the worst of midday heat,

on the wall a death curve that has flatlined

somehow bends into the outline of hope

even though it’s probably transient

even though the numbers are enormous.

For  now I have the dove and the sparrow

and no guilt in choosing a narrow frame.

I have  for now much less than a blank wall

and to blot it out, I have this blank verse.

Far away

Credit

In some far away and long ago
my hands were sand and mist

and chimneys breathing bone white smoke

curled around my seablue wrist

and my eyes were cracks in the road

my feet leapt over and missed

tied together with rigging rope

they’ve learnt to coexist.

As of now they have the knowhow

to do up laces and things

and my knees of leaning towers

figured out straightening

but long ago had a sequinned glow

and far away was king!

No entry

With a milestone for a pillow

with hard asphalt for a mattress

I’m ready to make my way home

through this midday heat, and darkness;

the borders are closed to traffic

they have slammed shut their gateways

and a mushroom cloud is churning,

turning the hamster wheels of days.

But I wear my face lighthearted

I keep the talk convivial

and the laundry colour sorted,

a close focus on trivial.

For the rules mustn’t be broken

and life must always go on

though home’s no longer a shelter

all meanings and routes are gone.

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.