Free

Alexis Zorba: Damn it boss, I like you too much not to say it. You've got everything except one thing: madness! A man needs a little madness, or else...

Basil: Or else?

Alexis Zorba: ...he never dares cut the rope and be free.

Zorba the Greek
Nikos Kazantzakis

Return

".....The Buddha’s return is a pivotal movement, one of those rare events when the divine penetrates history and transfigures it. Like Moses returning from Mt.Sinai, like Jesus appearing in the crowd at the river Jordan to be baptized by John, a man who has left the world returns to serve it, no longer merely human but charged with transcendent power. As the scriptures record of Moses and Jesus, we can imagine how the Buddha must have shone that bright spring morning in the Himalayan foothills.

Dazzled by the radiance of his personality, it is said, people gathered about him and asked, " Are you a god?"
"No."
"Are you an angel?"
"No."
"What are you then?"
The Buddha smiled and answered simply, " I am awake" - the literal meaning of the word buddha, from the Sanskrit root budh, to wake up. "

from the Introduction to
'The Dhammapada'
Translated with a general introduction by Eknath Eswaran

Sureness

"....Anthropologists found that schizophrenia is strongest among those whose ties with the cultural traditions are weakest: drug users, intellectuals, immigrants, students in their first year at college, soldiers recently inducted.

A study of Norwegian-born immigrants in Minnesota showed that over a period of four decades their rate of hospitalization for mental disorders was much higher than those for either non-immigrant Americans or Norwegians in Norway. Isaac Frost found that psychoses often develop among foreign domestic servants in Britain, usually within eighteen months of their arrival.

These psychoses, which are an extreme form of culture shock, emerge among these people because the cultural definition of values which underlies their sanity has been changed. It was not an awareness of 'truth' that was sustaining their sanity, it was their sureness of their cultural directives."

Page 387.
'Lila. An Inquiry into Morals'
Robert M Pirsig

Only to grow...

...Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence;never to rest and never to have;only to grow..."

Introduction
e.e.cummings

Walking towards Oneself

On that hot summer afternoon in Delhi, on the way to the airport, you see these men in orange robes walking barefeet by the side of the road. So many of them, one behind the other. You ask the taxi driver what this is about. He says that they are pilgrims who go to the holy city of Rishikesh [in the Himalayas] and walk back all the way to their respective towns and villages, carrying with them the holy Ganges water. Sometimes for weeks together. Barefoot. Some of them have bandages on their feet. But everyone is walking at the same speed, briskly, purposefully.

You watch them all the way. You have always been fascinated by pilgrims. And there are so many such pilgrimages all over the country. People walk barefeet to so many temples. Braving the elements. Every year.

You admire their absolute faith. And not just that - you envy them the knowledge that they have of themselves. For it is only when you push yourself to the limits, when you test yourself that harshly, that you really know what you are capable of. If you can walk barefoot for weeks in the blazing sun, maybe you are tougher than you thought? And that knowledge must surely change the way you handle life and its travails afterwards?

And maybe that is the very purpose of a pilgrimage - to show us our own riches?
Maybe all pilgrimages finally lead to ourselves?

We "educated city people" are unlikely to go on these barefoot pilgrimages. We do try and test ourselves in other ways, that somehow appear so trivial compared to these.

Are we missing something very important? Are we living on the surface of our selves? Do we lack faith, do we lack courage, have we been reduced by comfort?

Oct 29, 2006

A world without gravity

"...He returned to the clarinet, whose emotional range, from the riotous to the stately, he had not suspected when he was younger. He found a good teacher, an older gentleman, patient, intuitive and funny.

The man told Henry that the only native talent needed to play music well was joy.

Once, when Henry was labouring on Mozart's clarinet concerto, the teacher interrupted him and said, 'Where's the lightness? You've turned Mozart into a heavy, black ox and you're ploughing a field with him.'

With that, he picked up his own clarinet and produced a burst of music that was so loud, clear and brilliant, a wild storm of gyring notes, that Henry was stunned. It was an aural version of Marc Chagall, with goats, brides, grooms and horses swirling about in a multicoloured sky, a world without gravity.

Then the teacher stopped playing, and the sudden emptiness in the room nearly sucked Henry forward."

Page 20, 'Beatrice and Virgil, a novel' by Yann Martel, Author of 'Life of Pi', Winner of the Man Booker Prize
...............................................................................................

Marc Chagall - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Chagall

Au dessus de la ville (Above the city) - http://www.art.com/products/p10278035-sa-i853147/marc-chagall-au-dessus-de-la-ville.htm

Image taken from Google Images. Most of his paintings are in there.

Yann Martel: "He collaborated with Omar Daniel, composer-in-residence at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, on a piece for piano, string quartet and bass. The composition, You Are Where You Are, is based on text written by Martel, which includes parts of cellphone conversations taken from moments in an ordinary day."

Anxiety, curiosity and joy

"Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting - that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is the origin of art - and he had filled that hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to.

Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives. The comfort of strangers, be it a smile, a pat on the shoulder or a word of praise, is truly a comfort."

Page 2, 'Beatrice and Virgil, a novel' by Yann Martel, Author of Life of Pi, Winner of the Man Booker Prize

More on the Greek Harp

New music from Clio, on the Greek Harp -

http://www.myspace.com/clioharp

Need

The Five Hundred Gold Pieces

One of Junaid's followers came to him with a purse containing five hundred gold pieces.

"Have you any more money than this?", asked the Sufi.
"Yes, I have."
"Do you desire more?"
"Yes, I do."

"Then you must keep it, for you are more in need than I; for I have nothing and desire nothing. You have a great deal and still want more."

Page 72. Chapter: Attar of Nisharpur. 'The Way of the Sufi'
Idries Shah

The Snowy Day

The last time I saw you, we met for coffee on a snowy day.
Outside the window of the coffee shop, the snow fell silently

& heavily, the traffic on Coldspring Lane blurred & vague,
each car a cumbersome dream vehicle plowing comically into eternity.

But there you were, real as day, drinking a real cup of coffee.
You were back from India, you had slept for two days, the coffee

tasted wonderful, you said. You had flown to a mountain monastery
to find in prayer & silence what you could not find in the everyday,

taking only a few books, a change of clothes, because for too long you
had carried your life like two suitcases heavy enough to kill you.

When it snows, everything is light & dark at the same time. Black coffee
in a white cup, the hours leaked away, until our cups were empty,

the afternoon gone. Then a kiss on the cheek, a door opening out
into the cold, & I was walking away, up a slippery snowy hill
nothing at all

like your mountain & so little to hold onto. That night the snow fell
& fell & fell, erasing every landmark, quieting the world for a while.

Later, after you died, I had a dream. The phone was ringing.
It was you, your voice, on the other end of the line, laughing

as you said, "Beth, it's Greg. I'm in the hospital. I'm not dead."

"The Snowy Day" by Elizabeth Spires from The Wave-Maker: Poems. © W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.

Temsula Ao

Thanks to a friend who gifted me this book - 'Laburnum for my head' - I got to read my first collection of short stories from a writer from Nagaland.

Though we see so many people from the North-Eastern states in most of our metros, I am always troubled, and ashamed, by the fact that most of us don't know enough about these fellow Indians, their rich cultures, the causes of the strife that continues there. We rarely go out of our way to discover a people or their stories.

I believe that the first step to understanding and caring for a community is listening to their stories.

Read Temsula Ao, who beats so many renowned Indian writers we know of - I am appalled that I had never heard of her before. Superlative writing, and a range that is impressive.

Laburnum for my head, a Penguin publication, by Temsula Ao (awarded the Padma Shree in 2007)
Penguin Review: http://www.penguinbooksindia.com/category/Fiction/Laburnum_for_My_Head_9780143066200.aspx

Buy it: You can buy it for just Rs.123 from Flipkart if you are in India - http://www.flipkart.com/laburnum-my-head-temsula-ao-book-014306620x

Temsula Ao
Temsula Ao is a professor at the Department of English, and the Dean of School of Humanities and Education, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong. She is the author of eight books, including five books of poetry and a collection of short stories, These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone, published by Zubaan-Penguin (2006).

A member of the General Council of the Sahitya Akademi, she was awarded the Padma Shree in 2007.

A nice article by her on her grandmother who lived up to 106 - http://www.harmonyindia.org/hportal/VirtualPrintView.jsp?page_id=4862

From Cinderella to Cordelia: Tales of Wicked Elder Children

Going through some Sufi Teaching Stories the other day, I am once again struck by the marked preference for the youngest child. 

Have you noticed how in folk tales and old stories, the youngest is usually the truest, the bravest, the purest, the nicest one who will brave persecution and fire-breathing dragons and unkindness and will win the prince or the princess or the kingdom or the treasure or whatever in the end (with supernatural elements always coming to his/her aid), while the eldest, or the first two children, are wicked and greedy and come to a Very Bad End? All the way from Cinderella to Cordelia (King Lear, Shakespeare), mind you. 

And this is not restricted to any culture - I have come across this in folk tales and stories from across the world - India, Tibet, Africa, France, Norway, South America, Russia, Canada, China, and Red Indian myths to name a few that I remember - practically all cultures seem to share this belief, irrespective of geographic location. WHY? 

 Have asked this question to many learned people from various places during my university teaching days. Everyone had further proof to add to the observation from their own or other cultures, but no one seemed to know WHY, no one seemed to know of any research already done on this. 

Assuming that writers by and large draw on reality, is it because parents get better at parenting and more relaxed after each child - so while the eldest has to survive all trial-and-error parenting, the youngest is brought up with fewer struggles, with tested methods, and turns out better balanced? Or is it that the youngest is likely to be more pampered more often than not, and is therefore more self-assured? Or is there any genetic reason behind this? Or are the writers not basing themselves on reality, but simply cashing in on the softer feeling we naturally have towards young ones? Or was it a simple narrative constraint - that to contrast the good with the bad, you had to start with bad, so start from the top of the sibling line? (Notice that the comparison is usually between siblings of the same gender) Or have I missed some point that is so obvious I had to miss it? (!) 

But then if an elder child grows up on stories where the younger one is always better, won’t it condition their growing mind even though they are not aware of the damage? Like years later they may realize that they didn’t fight too hard against a blatant unfairness because they somehow felt it was the way things should be, that it was somehow “right” and they didn’t deserve anything better? 

 Aren't these “somehow”s impressions that have been sneaked into our psyche surreptitiously, isn’t it subliminal perception or whatever? So do these stories cause damage? And how much? 

 Wicked Elder Child Theory. 2004.

An entirely different place

"".......He (Somerset Maugham) became convinced, like Zola and Dreiser, that what we call character has a physical basis, that its origin goes back to that of the individual organism, and that physical conditions, especially environment, influence it after birth.

It is very hard that a person through no fault of his own should possess a character, perverse and difficult, which condemns him to an unhappy life. Accidents of the body can shape one's 'soul'- one's consciousness of oneself, the 'I' in the personality which is me.

He notes that some novelists are evidently unconscious of the importance of physical traits and their effect on character.

The world is an entirely different place to the man of 5 foot 7 from what it is to the man of 6 foot 2 ".

From 'Somerset Maugham- A Biographical and Critical Study' by Richard Albert Cordell & William Somerset Maugham

Drifting, the Mississippi way....

On the raft, with old friend Huck...

"...We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness.

It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed—only a little kind of a low chuckle.

We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all—that night, nor the next, nor the next..."

'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', by Mark Twain

We need more hairbonds

There is no such thing as boredom

When you are stuck in a traffic jam, when you are waiting for someone, when you are stranded on a shop verandah during a downpour with a contemplative cow who is in no mood for conversation, when the power goes off and the dog has just eaten the only matchbox, when you have nothing to do, you could Make Theories instead of pulling out that mobile phone. There is no such thing as boredom, believe me.

For example, this one happened in one of those gaps: