Dawn

"The day, when it is established, is barely noticed in itself; continuous interests claim us; only if there is a dramatic thunderstorm, a blizzard or a partial eclipse of the sun may we momentarily forget the pursuit of our own life.

But at the beginning or the end of the day, at dawn or at sunset, when our relationship with all that we can see is in the process of rapid transformation, we are inclined to be as aware of the moment as of what we fill it with - and, often, more aware.

In the face of the dawn, even the supreme egotist is tempted to forget himself."

Page 41, 'G', John Berger
Photo: Sunrise at 4 AM in Lachung, North Sikkim, India (May 2003)

A Christmas Memory

One freezing cold windy afternoon around Christmas time (Dec 2000), I take the subway to Harvard Square in Cambridge, Boston. Freezing cold windy afternoons usually find me inside heated houses remembering the warmth of the Indian sun and its people. This afternoon, I brave it all in layers of sweaters and caps and socks, the cold still cutting through the skin of my soul, because at The Coop bookstore, I had seen a notice about a storytelling session.

I find my way up to the second floor landing. There is a small group sitting on sofas chatting and nursing hot cups of coffee. I take my place among this group of strangers. And then comes the storyteller, a man in his forties perhaps, big warm smile, books in his hands. And without much ado, he starts reading Christmas stories to this motley group of adults, of different nationalities, most of us strangers to each other.

And we listen to Truman Capote's A Child's Christmas, a story about a young boy's memories of Christmases with a crazy old aunt, his best friend. Christmases going into the woods to find the perfect Christmas tree, and baking cakes for all the people who have been good to them, like the bus driver who went out of his way to drop them, and all the people who were spending Christmas alone.

And then a story by Dylan Thomas about childhood memories of Christmas in Wales. Within no time, we are feeling the snow crunch under our feet in bright fir-lined countrysides. Listening to the sound of logs crackling in warm fireplaces. Smelling fresh plum cakes just taken out of ovens. Tasting heady wine. And raising a toast to the spirit of Christmas - the spirit of forgiveness, renewal, and everlasting compassion in the face of all dryness, indifference, and betrayal.

When the one and a half hour session is over, there is a pause before everyone bursts into applause. And then people smile and laugh, tears in their eyes, and look at each other with warmth, and oddly, no one seems that foreign anymore.

As a French storyteller told during a session here last month, stories are not just meant to make little children sleep, but to make grownups think. And perhaps feel again what we lose touch with, in our haste to fit in with the world's definitions of success.

Stepping out into the darkness, the cold no longer seems so terrible. I stop to watch a group of youngsters doing a rap song and dance on the footpath to make money "to go perform in New York", a handwritten board says. Pretty weak performance by all standards, but I put some money in their collection box with a smile, so what if they just make it to the nearest pub and have a jolly good time - youth and laughter and joyful winter evenings rubbing shoulders with friends are still wonderful things in our fragile lives, and therefore causes worth supporting :)

The cold returns to us every year from the faraway places it goes to during the summer, to remind us how precious warmth is in all its forms, and how it must be created and preserved for our sustenance and continuance, now and forever.

(originally written as Editorial for 'Winter Solstice', the winter edition of the office newsletter Oct '03)

Thanatos

"..In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the death drive ("Todestrieb") is the drive towards death, destruction and forgetfulness. It was first proposed by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The death drive opposes Eros, the tendency towards cohesion and unity. The death drive is sometimes referred to as "Thanatos" in post-Freudian thought, although this term has no basis in Freud's own work.'

When Freud worked with people with trauma (particularly the trauma experienced by soldiers returning from World War I), he observed that subjects often tended to repeat or re-enact these traumatic experiences, a phenomenon that Freud called repetition compulsion. This appeared to violate the pleasure principle, the drive of an individual to maximize his or her pleasure. Freud found this repetition of unpleasant events in the most ordinary of circumstances, even in children's play (such as the celebrated Fort/Da (Gone/There) game played by Freud's grandson, who would stage and re-stage the disappearance of his mother and even himself).

Freud's initial dichotomy between the reality principle (Ego) and the pleasure principle (Id) was unable to account for this phenomenon, as well as several other clinical phenomena, including primary masochism and depression. It was difficult to attribute such non-pleasurable activity to either the self-preserving ego or to the libidinal instincts solely focused on pleasure....

...To explain this discrepancy, Freud postulated the existence of a fundamental death drive that would counterbalance the tendency of beings to do only what they find pleasurable. Organisms, according to this idea, were driven to return to a pre-organic, inanimate state.

In doing so, Freud kept his earlier instinct theory almost intact, while omitting the property of reversal of content used to compensate for non-pleasure-principle behaviours of the sexual instincts, replacing it with a separate instinct of destruction and aggression not influenced by the pleasure principle.

Thus, for example, masochism is no longer the reversal of content of the sexual/self-preserving instincts, but rather the change of objects of sadism from external to internal, notably to the ego. Sadism is thus considered "a direct manifestation of the death instinct".http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_drive

Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

"Because of its unique and distinctive sound, the (Shipping Forecast) broadcasts have an appeal beyond those solely interested in nautical weather. The waters around the British Isles are divided into sea areas, also known as weather areas and many listeners find the well-known repetition of the names of the sea areas almost hypnotic, particularly during the bedtime (for Britain) broadcast at 00:48 UK time."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_Forecast

Watch/listen to a Shipping Forecast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnfywzFE63s

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Carol Ann Duffy
And this explains it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8383178.stm
....................................................................................

A light and fluctuating state...

"What a strange, wondrous thing, music. At last the chattering mind is silenced. No past to regret, no future to worry about, no more frantic knitting of words and thoughts. Only a beautiful, soaring nonsense.

Sound - made pleasing and intelligible through melody, rhythm, harmony and counterpoint - becomes our thinking. The grunting of language and the drudgery of semiotics is left behind. Music is a bird's answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilarating speechlessness.

During the Concerto in B flat, music was my thinking. I don't recall any words, only a light and fluctuating state of being-in-music."

Page 116, 'The Time I heard the Private Donald J.Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton'-

from the book 'The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios' by Yann Martel

Adios, Jimmy

So we had to kill Jimmy, end his suffering, or so we thought, reduce his already brief life as a fish. Euthanize, that is the word.

A fish. A solitary soul floating around in a round bowl, glad to see me every morning at office, because I was the provider of food, unfailing, dependable.

Since I am way beyond believing in unseen powers taking personal interest in the likes of me and Jimmy, it is not for me to see signs, things are just as they are, ordinary, of no consequence in the bigger scheme of things.

The universe, random as always, in its cruelty.

Insane

"...The road twists and banks and curlecues and descends and we and the cycle smoothly roll with it, following it in a separate grace of our own, almost touching the waxen leaves of shrubs and overhanging boughs of trees. The firs and rocks of the higher country are behind us now and around us are soft hills and vines and purple and red flowers, fragrance mixed with woodsmoke up from the distant fog along the valley floor and from beyond that, unseen - a vague scent of ocean... ...

How can I love all this so much and be insane? ...I don't believe it!"

'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'
Robert M Pirsig

The Sacred

After the teacher asked if anyone had
a sacred place
and the students fidgeted and shrank

in their chairs, the most serious of them all
said it was his car,
being in it alone, his tape deck playing

things he'd chosen, and others knew the truth
had been spoken
and began speaking about their rooms,

their hiding places, but the car kept coming up,
the car in motion,
music filling it, and sometimes one other person

who understood the bright altar of the dashboard
and how far away
a car could take him from the need

to speak, or to answer, the key
in having a key
and putting it in, and going.

"The Sacred" by Stephen Dunn, from Between Angels.

Avoidance

"It is true that many creative people fail to make mature personal relationships, and some are extremely isolated. It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological...

Avoidance behaviour is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioural disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships."

Anthony Storr, 'Solitude: A Return to the Self'
Quoted in 'Into the Wild', the story of Christopher McCandless, who "went away". By Jon Krakauer

Cat Solitude

Two Cats

It's better to be a cat than to be a human.
Not because of their much-noted grace and beauty—
their beauty wins them no added pleasure, grace is
only a cat's way

of getting without fuss from one place to another—
but because they see things as they are. Cats never mistake a
saucer of milk for a declaration of passion
or the crook of your knees for

a permanent address. Observing two cats on a sunporch,
you might think of them as a pair of Florentine bravoes
awaiting through slitted eyes the least lapse of attention—
then slash! the stiletto

or alternately as a long-married couple, who hardly
notice each other but find it somehow a comfort
sharing the couch, the evening news, the cocoa.
Both these ideas

are wrong. Two cats together are like two strangers
cast up by different storms on the same desert island
who manage to guard, despite the utter absence
of privacy, chocolate,

useful domestic articles, reading material,
their separate solitudes. They would not dream of
telling each other their dreams, or the plots of old movies,
or inventing a bookful

of coconut recipes. Where we would long ago have
frantically shredded our underwear into signal
flags and be dancing obscenely about on the shore in
a desperate frenzy,

they merely shift on their haunches, calm as two stoics
weighing the probable odds of the soul's immortality,
as if to say, if a ship should happen along we'll
be rescued. If not, not.

"Two Cats" by Katha Pollitt, from The Mind-Body Problem. © Random House, 2009

Bryson, on Cricket :)

"After years of patient study I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game (cricket) that the introduction of golf carts wouldn't fix in a hurry. It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavours look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. I don't wish to denigrate a sport that is enjoyed by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way, but it is an odd game.

...Imagine a form of baseball in which the pitcher, after each delivery, collects the ball from the catcher and walks slowly with it out to centre field; and that there, after a minute's pause to collect himself, he turns and runs full tilt towards the pitcher's mound before hurling the ball at the ankles of a man who stands before him wearing a riding hat, heavy gloves of the sort used to handle radioactive isotopes, and a mattress strapped to each leg. Imagine moreover that if this batsman fails to hit the ball in a way that heartens him sufficiently to try to waddle sixty feet with mattresses strapped to his legs, he is under no formal compulsion to run; he may stand there all day, and, as a rule, does.

If by some miracle he is coaxed into making a misstroke that leads to him being put out, all the fielders throw up their arms in triumph and have a hug. Then tea is called and everyone retires happily to a distant pavilion to fortify for the next siege. Now imagine all this going on for so long that by the time the match concludes autumn has crept in and all your library books are overdue. There you have cricket

....Now the mystery of cricket is not that Australians play it well, but that they play it at all. It has always seemed to me a game much too restrained for the rough-and-tumble Australian temperament. Australians must prefer games in which brawny men in scanty clothing bloody each other's noses. I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other.

And the thing is, it would be a much better game for it."

"Page 155, 'Down Under', by Bill Bryson

Fred Martin

My French artist friend Fred's beautiful sketches, drawn during his many wanderings, across many continents. He used to show me these sketches he drew of people, in his notebook, while waiting at bus stands, travelling in trains etc.
http://lescarnetsdefred.blogspot.com/
Check out his work with clay masks of people's faces - http://baptemesdeterre.blogspot.com/
And his installations with these masks, in the most unexpected locations: http://baptemesdeterre.blogspot.com/
Bonne Chance, Fred!

A terror way beyond falling

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing.

The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant.

The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.

It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

David Foster Wallace

Impatience. And Drifting

Impatience. And Drifting.

Listen - http://www.myspace.com/clioharp

Writing

"A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say-and to feel- " Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought."

Letter to Peter Benchley, Sag Harbour, 1956 from 'A Life in Letters' - John Steinbeck