24.02.08
The answer need not be no,
or yes
I really want to hear what you think
The question is simple,
"Is it possible?"
I don't want to know
"Is it workable?"
"Is it probable?"
You say (or feel, at any rate)
It is a problematic definition
It is a question epistemological
I don't want to know
the theory behind it
Not today, not now,
when I can think nothing
but the smell of your cigarette
on my shirt and
in my hair, with shampoo.
Your fingertips are neat
Your hair is not;
you are irritated, so, by the little bit
of white thread that has escaped
from the collar of your t-shirt
and found its way to your neck;
Your neck is inviting,
your hand on my waist invites more.
Just answer the question:
I can't believe anything till you have said it,
plainly,
no twists and turns of language
simile,
euphemism,
metaphor,
understatement,
angst
that are wont to pepper your speech;
"Is it possible?"
Showing posts with label AppleMan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AppleMan. Show all posts
[Untitled]
I was watching a kite as he desperately flapped his wings for a breath of warm air to lift him up; someone asked me why I was standing there. He escaped, and in that split second I knew, once again, nothing about him and his flights of futility, searching, anguish in his heart, for a whisper of the familiar truth.
"Metaphore, metaphore", they cried to him, and no avail.
***
Neruda wrote of love, war and the unreachable heights of Macchu Pichu.
Dali painted compositions exquisite: never had a rose been so filled with latent potency, poisonously floating above a matte lanscape of clocks, cesspools and slow decay in a desert land. The man in the bowler hat stood still at that mysterious threshold, the murky sea roaring silently behind him, never spraying his suit, time never slowing enough to let that apple fall from its suspended place. Monet held the light in his hands, letting it fall by degrees on the grass, the trees, the sky. David stood alone, the sadness in his eyes invisible to anyone who could not see past his sinews. The spark from the Creation of Adam came and rent his heart to the very core. Cambell's soupcan said silently to him, "Metaphore, metaphore".
***
Massimo stood before his mirror and wondered. What was it that made him fall in love with these things? They were so different. No, disparate, he corrected. Dark eyes looked out from the glass but not at him. Everything was like everything else. But they were called by different names. What was this Surrealism? Even the sunset on the shingled beach off the chalk cliffs was surreal to him. What was this Renaissance? Was not everything ever created a re-naissance of something else, something older?
These categories defeated him. He did not know what to do. When he wrote prose, it came out in iambs and turned into poetry. When he wrote poetry, it emerged in long, torturous lines which coalesced spontaneously into paragraphs and indented the first in every one.
Massimo scratched the front of his old jeans. He loved that sound, the feeling of that friction under his nails. The ginger cat came and went yet again, always returning in its constant emaciatedness to remind him - you eat, I get nothing. You make money, I get nothing. You are educated, you have access to Art, Culture, Music. I have nothing.
The cat was everything that was wrong with the world. Gripped by the old, inexorable guilt every time he saw the cat, he shut it out of sight but could not shut it out of his mind. He grimaced at the automatic pun that hit him. Maybe he was out of his mind. After all, he just realised that his sneaking suspicion had been confirmed, yet again. This cat was no ordinary cat. "Metaphore, metaphore", it called out to him in his language.
Schrödinger kicked in his grave. Any moment now, thought Massimo, I will realise that all the things in the world I had not attributed to Schrödinger's ephemeral cat also came from nowhere else, and will also conglomerate into one hideous heterogeneous ball of energy, only to Big Bang into the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is really the First Law of Everything: "Entropy Increaseth".
Massimo looked down at the newspaper which had carried his first review. "Postmodern" was there even in the title. That word irked him no end. It had been a year since that review and he had not been able to shoot himself. The gun lay in the drawer silently, as before. To shoot himself, he reflected, was to make too strong a statement. His grave, he continued to reflect, should carry an epitaph - monument. A single epigram would not do for his epitaph. How would he explain all his multiplicity of contents?
In a flash, the gun was out, two sharp reports were heard, and Massimo's brains were found spattered all over the Edwardian furniture, Warhol reproductions and his own prosetry.
His epitaph has one line on it: "And all for want of a horseshoe nail".
The cat lies buried at his feet, conquered.
Conquered? Massimo's life is over. The cat has nine to go.
***
Neruda wrote of love, war and the unreachable heights of Macchu Pichu.
Dali painted compositions exquisite: never had a rose been so filled with latent potency, poisonously floating above a matte lanscape of clocks, cesspools and slow decay in a desert land. The man in the bowler hat stood still at that mysterious threshold, the murky sea roaring silently behind him, never spraying his suit, time never slowing enough to let that apple fall from its suspended place. Monet held the light in his hands, letting it fall by degrees on the grass, the trees, the sky. David stood alone, the sadness in his eyes invisible to anyone who could not see past his sinews. The spark from the Creation of Adam came and rent his heart to the very core. Cambell's soupcan said silently to him, "Metaphore, metaphore".
***
Massimo stood before his mirror and wondered. What was it that made him fall in love with these things? They were so different. No, disparate, he corrected. Dark eyes looked out from the glass but not at him. Everything was like everything else. But they were called by different names. What was this Surrealism? Even the sunset on the shingled beach off the chalk cliffs was surreal to him. What was this Renaissance? Was not everything ever created a re-naissance of something else, something older?
These categories defeated him. He did not know what to do. When he wrote prose, it came out in iambs and turned into poetry. When he wrote poetry, it emerged in long, torturous lines which coalesced spontaneously into paragraphs and indented the first in every one.
Massimo scratched the front of his old jeans. He loved that sound, the feeling of that friction under his nails. The ginger cat came and went yet again, always returning in its constant emaciatedness to remind him - you eat, I get nothing. You make money, I get nothing. You are educated, you have access to Art, Culture, Music. I have nothing.
The cat was everything that was wrong with the world. Gripped by the old, inexorable guilt every time he saw the cat, he shut it out of sight but could not shut it out of his mind. He grimaced at the automatic pun that hit him. Maybe he was out of his mind. After all, he just realised that his sneaking suspicion had been confirmed, yet again. This cat was no ordinary cat. "Metaphore, metaphore", it called out to him in his language.
Schrödinger kicked in his grave. Any moment now, thought Massimo, I will realise that all the things in the world I had not attributed to Schrödinger's ephemeral cat also came from nowhere else, and will also conglomerate into one hideous heterogeneous ball of energy, only to Big Bang into the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is really the First Law of Everything: "Entropy Increaseth".
Massimo looked down at the newspaper which had carried his first review. "Postmodern" was there even in the title. That word irked him no end. It had been a year since that review and he had not been able to shoot himself. The gun lay in the drawer silently, as before. To shoot himself, he reflected, was to make too strong a statement. His grave, he continued to reflect, should carry an epitaph - monument. A single epigram would not do for his epitaph. How would he explain all his multiplicity of contents?
In a flash, the gun was out, two sharp reports were heard, and Massimo's brains were found spattered all over the Edwardian furniture, Warhol reproductions and his own prosetry.
His epitaph has one line on it: "And all for want of a horseshoe nail".
The cat lies buried at his feet, conquered.
Conquered? Massimo's life is over. The cat has nine to go.
Kundera Strikes Again
I don't know if I will ever be able to finish 
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, since all I seem to do is find "fortuitous" coincidences all around me and then blog about them!
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, since all I seem to do is find "fortuitous" coincidences all around me and then blog about them! But this is one for the books.
I was editing my Interests field in my Blogger Profile, and as it happened, most of them were written in my usual longwinded manner. So it became virtually impossible to let the one-touch search take its course. If one of your listed interests is, say, "music", all you have to do is click the word and you have a list of all the bloggers with the same interest. (Although, if you're looking, via Blogger, to fortuitously meet someone of the opposite sex with the same interests as you, you should REALLY be more specific!)
The only interest that would actually throw up some results was "Sign Language". I went through the list, only to find that there were LOTS of Virgo women (like me, hence the excitement, duh!) on that list! There was one Jo among them, and being called Jo myself by most of my friends, it struck me as coincidence enough to reach out through cyberspace to this woman in Bristol and just say Hi.
I happened to visit the link on she had given to her husband's blog, and no prizes for guessing what his profile picture was. [Well, it wasn't exactly Magritte's Son of Man]. It was his face, obscured by the iconic apple!
Kundera's characters are born of metaphor; he says one metaphor can give birth to love.
Well, considering how obsessed I am with this painting, I don't want to read this guy's blog in great detail, lest I find him irresistibly attractive :) !
I cannot remember where or when I saw this painting for the first time; by the time I saw The Thomas Crowne Affair, I was no stranger to it. It's not really a painting in my mind anymore, though. It is an image, somewhat fluid in that it works as a collection rather than one image (it can be only the apple, only the hat, only the tie, only the wall. Incidentally I was about to add "only the briefcase" but that is merely an addition I have made to my mental picture of the real picture). It has become in my mind a beacon of all those fortuities that hold my life together. It has dogged me for quite some time; or perhaps I have dogged it. It has been serendipitous for me in ways more than one, not the least being the somersault my stomach does every time I encounter it unexpectedy, like on an unknown Blogger's profile.
This painting is why I took one look at one particular edition of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and knew I HAD to have it (funnily enough, the other edition had on the cover a drawing similar enough to Picasso's Dog, 
a sketch that has been a symbol for the minimalist and impressionistic style of sketching that Appa and I like so much; similar enough perhaps to be seen as fortuitous in itself, as if the book called out to me. But it didn't with that cover. If anything, the title evoked more interest).
a sketch that has been a symbol for the minimalist and impressionistic style of sketching that Appa and I like so much; similar enough perhaps to be seen as fortuitous in itself, as if the book called out to me. But it didn't with that cover. If anything, the title evoked more interest).It has occured to me before, I must admit, but occurs to me now with only greater conviction, that love is often no more the result of some happy chance that some mild attraction made a great deal out of.
But to say "no more than this" is to demean love, and place no value in the pricelessness of chance, and the pristine beauty of happenstance, serendipity, if you will. To do that would be to turn the world into Zembla*, which I, for one, have no intention of doing.
// Now that I have finally put downscaled versions of all these pictures in the same place, they seem to look different from what I recalled of them; Kundera's Bowler hat doesn't really look like Magritte's hat; who knows, maybe even the coincidences aren't as real as they seem.
*Courtesy Wikipedia: William Boyd coined the term zemblanity to mean somewhat the opposite of serendipity: "making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries occurring by design". It derives from Novaya Zemlya (or Nova Zembla), a cold, barren land with many features opposite to the lush Sri Lanka (Serendip). On this island Dutch 16th Century navigator Willem Barentsz and his crew were stranded while searching for a new route to the east.
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