100hands? :)

A universe harmonious as a harp.
Rhythm is repeated equal times.
Heartbeat.
Day/night.
Migrant birds' arrivals and departures.
Star cycles and maize cycles.
Mimosa opening during the day
and folding when night comes.
Moon and tide rhythms.
And crabs who know the tide is on the ebb
and before it goes out have their hiding holes.
A single rhythm in planets, the sea, atoms, apples
which ripen and fall, and Newton's head.
Melody, arpeggio, chord.
The harp of the universe.
that is music.
Difference between music and noise...
The bell's sound is in its form.
Or girls' legs, come to that.
Matter is music.
Matter in perpetual motion in space and time.
Rhythmical are hearts and stars.
The universe sings and Pythagoras heard it.
The music of the spheres,
rather than classical music, jazz.

----

from The Music of the Spheres by Ernesto Cardenal.

No?

I say no to corporate magazines. I say no 9am meetings. I say no to 9-5. I say no to cubicles. I say no to annual reports. I say no to tea-parties. I say no to sushi lunches. I say no to group hugs. I say no to the ladder. I say no to the institution. I say no to institutional leeches (who use the ladder). I say no to team-building picnics. But I still sit here in my cubicle, staring at a computer screen designing and branding corporate institutions. Fuckin hypocrite, I wish I could go to sleep and never wake up cos I am saying yes, secretly.

Never to forget

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity for life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

----

Arundhati Roy.
Thanks, espy jee.

Fancy a ride? :)

Christa has a new camera and she is taking lots of lovely photographs. Absolutely love this.

The line that surrounds me

I'm drawing lines, thin lines with yellow circles forming bigger shapes behind them. I am converging into one of the shapes. I am walking over a thin red line and sitting in front of a thin white line.

God, what a night. Never danced this much to remixed bollywood tracks. Jim, Mark and me transformed ourselves into truck drivers in rural India. Felt great. Anyway, on another note, here are some photographs. True Love and The ballad of Mangal Pandey. Like?

5. Less is not necessarily more

Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’

----

Milton Glaser. Go read all the Ten things he has learned.

He said, she said

Your heart is cold,
Your hand is cold,

Your eyes are red,
Your thoughts are dead,

And now upon a road I tread,
At night towards an empty bed.

Appearances

An image forms.
I recognise its familiarity and deepen as the sound gets softer.
No curtains.
I sense the sunset-yellow air.
A line surrounds the form,
like a frame.
I develop a sensation of heart, I
numb to the exterior of the self.
Consumed.
In wonder I
look on to see the formation of a formulaic way.
My acceptance surrounds me
like a neon-yellow line.
Highlighted.
I walk
and as I come closer, I
understand the power of space, air and time.
Intangible, but existing
in my mind.
Only for me.

R sent me something so beautiful today. :)

The curve of your eyes embraces my heart

A ring of sweetness and dance
halo of time, sure nocturnal cradle,
And if I no longer know all I have lived through
It's that your eyes have not always been mine.

Leaves of day and moss of dew,
Reeds of breeze, smiles perfumed,
Wings covering the world of light,
Boats charged with sky and sea,
Hunters of sound and sources of colour

Perfume enclosed by a covey of dawns
that beds forever on the straw of stars,
As the day depends on innocence
The whole world depends on your pure eyes
And all my blood flows under their sight.

----

Paul Eluard's words. Just for you, R.

For the sake of a single poem

...Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) – they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else – ); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, - and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”

----

Rainer Maria Rilke. Thankyou navy. :)

:)

I love the way you're so deliberate,
How you light your cigarette
Head on one side as you pull, you look almost regal.

I am listening to Asha Bhonsle's "Piya ab tu aaja". The remix. I am loving Lezlie Lewis' bass (that's if he is really playing it). Dont hate me. I have a few weaknesses. :)

Music like this confirms the existence of God. The Rachels are God's best gift to me.

Computer k.o.

We sit here, looking at our computer screens, waiting for an email, a sign. Someone will write. We'll wait. All windows open, all doors closed. Waiting. For a sign. Just a few words. To feel loved. To be wanted. All we want is a message. Our eyes wait to see black on white. Our hands wait. To click, click, click. Our ears wait for that sound. We are here, and now, waiting for the sign, a symbol, a thought, a word. The wait is never over. And as we look into a red-green-blue horizon, what we dont realise is how fickle and pixelated our hearts have become.

The Rival

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,

And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.

The moon, too, abuses her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.

No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

----

Plath

32

So Sandeep turns 32 today. This is how he feels.