A Hand

".........I shall
Through month and year
Stitch up the rags
And will unlearn
The evident way.

The pain-dense tracks
Dark in the mist
Will see snow fall.
I will retaste

The tang of day,
The ceased belief
That paths exist
Outside this grief."

Vikram Seth

Touch

At the orphanage, the little girl comes to sit on my lap as always. The person-in-charge tells her to move away, though I protest, she says that the kid is too "touchy". Then the little girl slowly comes and sits at my feet when we are talking grown-up talk. I scratch her head while I continue talking, and draw her closer, while keeping up the conversation so that the lady does not notice. The little girl is content.

Touch. We need it like air. Especially children who have no fathers and mothers and loving arms always waiting to enfold them, the security of shoulders that were created just so that they can always rest their heads.

Prometheus

Prometheus, the creator of humans, feels sorry for them as they shiver through cold winter nights. He steals fire from the gods and gives it to mankind. And so he incurs the terrible wrath of Zeus, who punishes him to be tied to a rock on the top of Mount Caucasus, where an eagle comes to eat his liver every night. The next morning the liver grows back again, so that his torment is eternal.

In the repeated returnings of our suffering, we repay our debt to Prometheus, by reliving in small ways what he suffered for 30 long years...

Flight. Fear.

“It was in America that horses first roamed. A million years before the birth of man, they grazed the vast plains of wiry grass and crossed to other continents over bridges of rock soon severed by retreating ice. They first knew man as the hunted knows the hunter, for long before he saw them as a means to killing other beasts, man killed them for their meat.

Paintings on the walls of caves showed how. Lions and bears would turn and fight and that was the moment men speared them. But the horse was a creature of flight not fight and, with a simple deadly logic, the hunter used flight to destroy it. Whole herds were driven hurtling headlong to their deaths from the tops of cliffs. Deposits of their broken bones bore testimony. And though later he came pretending friendship, the alliance with man would ever be but fragile, for the fear he'd struck into their hearts was too deep to be dislodged.

Since the Neolithic moment when first a horse was haltered, there were those among men who understood this.

They would see into the creature's soul and soothe the wounds they found there. For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled ears, these men were known as Whisperers.”

‘The Horse Whisperer’
Nicholas Evans

Now

"...The only time he remembered his father happy during this time was in the spring when for three days they drove the cattle up to the summer pastures. His mother, Frank, and Rosie came too and the five of them would ride all day and sleep out under the stars.

"If only you could make now last forever," Frank said on one of those nights while they lay on their backs watching a huge half-moon roar up out of the dark shoulders of the mountain. Frank was eleven and not by nature a philosopher. They had all lain still, thinking about this for a while. Somewhere, a long way off, a coyote called.

"I guess that 's all forever is." his father replied. "Just one long trail of nows. And I guess all you can do is try and live one now at a time without getting too worked up about the last now or the next now."

It seemed to Tom as good a recipe for life as he'd yet heard."

'The Horse Whisperer'
Nicholas Evans

Don't Let Me Pass

'Hold Me Fast. Don't Let Me Pass' - a short story by Alice Munro, Canadian writer of fabulous long short stories, addictive like old sofas you keep snuggling back into.

In the story, this old tough lady who runs a farm all by herself, sings an ancient Scottish ballad to her visitor Hazel. About this young man captured by fairies, who desperately wants to get back to being human. He meets a girl who grows to like him, but he is a prisoner of the fairies.

He tells her of the only way the fairies will set him free - someone who loves him must embrace him, and hold on to him tightly while the fairies keep changing him into horrible things one after the other. If she can hold on to him through all this without losing her faith or her love, until all their tricks are exhausted, then they will let him go.

And so the song goes - "Hold me fast, don't let me pass..."

And she does.

Posthumous

Would it surprise you to learn
that years beyond your longest winter
you still get letters from your bank, your old
philanthropies, cold flakes drifting
through the mail-slot with your name?

Though it's been a long time since your face
interrupted the light in my door-frame,
and the last tremblings of your voice
have drained from my telephone wire,
from the lists of the likely, your name
is not missing. It circles in the shadow-world
of the machines, a wind-blown ghost.

For generosity
will be exalted, and good credit
outlasts death. Caribbean cruises, recipes,
low-interest loans. For you who asked
so much of life, who lived acutely
even in duress, the brimming world
awaits your signature.

Cancer and heart disease
are still counting on you for a cure.
B'nai Brith numbers you among the blessed.
They miss you. They want you back.

"Posthumous" by Jean Nordhaus, from Innocence

Freshness

Saturday evening. You walk along Church street, unhurried, munching 2 rupee groundnuts, because you're not going anywhere, and you are quite content to be not going anywhere. Walking down the road, two young boys, obviously newly arrived in the city from a small town, all nicely dressed up, in their own version of "smart", hair nicely combed and in place. They are excited, and slightly nervous, possibly because they are in a big city on a Saturday evening; they are talking animatedly.

I notice they're walking holding hands, like small children, unaware of what connotations it could have to over-informed city people. For when you are in a new strange place where all your usual confidence will prove to be too little, there is no bigger comfort than that the hand of an old Friend.

As they pass me by, I smile, my nose tingling at the uncommon breath of Freshness.

A message weighing nothing

"The post office at Auxonne is small and the postmistress has blue eyes. I have been there only twice.
The first time was to send you a parcel; as the postmistress weighed it on the scale, I imagined your hands opening it.
"Four kilos, three hundred grams."
In a parcel, wrapped by hand, there is a message weighing nothing; the receiver's fingers may unkot the string which the sender's tied.

In the post office I saw in my mind's eye your fingers untying the knot I tied at Auxonne....."

John Berger

Berger

“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Once in a Poem

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been.

Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.


John Berger

Is it like this

Bit of a movie watched on tv, passing by.

Two people who have nowhere to go on Christmas eve, one standing by the pier to jump in and kill herself, talking.
Susan Sarandon, and the Patch Adams actor, I forget his name.
She: "What is your greatest desire?"
He : "To not be alone when I die."

Verandah

A hostel-mate of long ago. Every weekend, when she returned home, her father would always be eagerly waiting for her in the verandah, without fail. And she would sit down right there, bags and all, and start telling him stories of the week, what happened at the university, what each of her friends did, said, what they ate at the hostel, the places she went to, the labwork she did, the weather changes on the campus and what it brought with it.

And her father would be smiling, listening to every word, like it was the word of God, for it was his only child, and her entire world that he was witnessing. He would wait the entire week for this one moment on Saturday morning, when he knew her bus would arrive. This moment when his little story teller would come home with her bagful of stories.

You have only heard about this. But that verandah, you have been there so often.

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