Wind, Sand and Stars

Here is the tale of a composition, and how it overtook its creator. The song opens with the composer doubting its very existence, "Einmal ist keinmal", meaning "What happens but once might as well never have happened at all". Influences on this piece are various, ranging from the books of Antoine de Saint Exupéry and Milan Kundera, to the music of Eric Whitacre and Béla Bartók.

But most of all, with the inputs and criticism of the entire choir, an idea became a song. By the end of the song, we hope you will feel the thrill with which the composer declares, "Einmal IST!"


[1st public performance IIT Delhi, won 1st in Western Group Song competition, part of Rendezvous '08, 20th September, 2008. Composed May-September, 2008]

Wind, Sand and Stars

Einmal ist keinmal
Once there was a letter
Then there was a word and
Then she wrote a sentence
And one day they heard a

SONG!
(she sang them,
hesitatingly,
hesitatingly)

(Swept away by wind)
"Swept away by the wind
Or should I let the stream take me?
Should I let the wind sweep me off my feet or
Should I let the stream drag me underneath, oh?"

She sang to herself and no one else

Einmal ist keinmal

Under the stars, over mountains of sand
Taken as light as a feather by wind
(Windblown sands and stars all twinkling)

Colours waltzing

Fingering the light
She tasted words
Oh sleepless nights she wasted

Trying to fathom (lands all unexplored)
Biplaned through her mind (driven on by wind)
Spiralled inward (endless poetry)
She was writing

Words come tumbling
And forgotten images
Remembered verses

Then in her ears she heard a multitude of voices
Come tell us all the tale of the dream that made a song

Winds may stall
Sands blow away
Stars disappear in the clouds

Listen for this song
Till the end of TIME!

Einmal
IST!

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!

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).

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.

When Richard Linklater met Milan Kundera

My best friend just got out of a four-odd year long relationship into which she had, as she does, poured her heart and soul, only to find that the guy she thought she loved had been lying to her all the time, not just about somebody else he was also seeing, but about tiny little inconsequential things, all of which added up to one big pile of white lies so tall that she had to quit, not being the kind who likes being with a compulsive liar.

She was talking to a friend on the phone the other day, and as phone conversations between interesting people so often do, this one was ending at five in the morning, and she observed that she could talk to her friend from sunrise to sunset (or sunset to sunrise, I’m just reconstructing roughly!), and then he cried, "Have you seen those movies?!"


She had not, in fact, seen Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (which by the way till I just looked them up on Wikipedia, even having seen both, I thought were called Before Sunrise and After Sunset,) so she got the CD of Before Sunset and saw it, not knowing it was the sequel. Anyway, I asked her how it was, and she didn’t like it. I asked why, and she said the man in the movie was obsessed with sex, and she thought that made the whole movie abusive.

Now, I’ve seen this movie once, about a year ago, and after watching the prequel, and I have no recollection of having made any such observation. In fact, I really liked the movie, and I thought it was a beautiful story, not incredibly original, but then people’s stories rarely are.

I told her maybe she should watch it again when she was happier! She’s not usually one for sop in movies (which is not always true about real life), while I, I think would die without the quantum of magic and coincidence in my life that I need, to keep me going.

I suppose her reaction to the movie just goes to show again, what I have suspected for a while; whatever is on your mind superimposes itself on what you do; Milan Kundera is right. I’m half-way through his The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and I know exactly what he means when he says Tereza would always be sentimental about Beethoven because he was playing on the radio when she first met Tomas, the man she would fall in love with, at the restaurant she worked at. "One cognac, please", Tomas’ order, and his first words to her, are not just his words then, they are a message.



Kundera writes,
[in Part Two: Soul and Body, Ch. 9, pg 48 of Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition]

" …Tomas [felt]…uneasy at the thought that his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of…improbable fortuities.
But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?
"Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.

[in Ch. 11, Pg 51]

"…If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence). But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty."

It may not always sound so great, apparently; as my friend superimposed her anger and feeling of being betrayed onto the film, I remember the time I was watching Ido Tadmor on stage recently (April 2008). I was there by myself; I am so used now to finding no one to accompany me on my adventures in Delhi's cultural circuit that I don't even bother asking any more. I sat there in the hall, strangers all around me, not a familiar face in sight (unless you count Manish Arora whom I spotted there!) and it was as if he danced only for me, an art form that was formless, fluid, born of emotion, desire, experience, and not of a need for structure. Where there is no form, your mind can shape an experience into whatever it pleases, with or without your knowledge, whether you like it or not. I was sad that day; maybe sad is not the word, but I was mighty confused, and terribly lonely. The guard that we carry around with us is rarely let down easily; sometimes it is raised higher amongst strangers, sometimes we create strangers out of our friends. Maybe it's just me; but I know my voice changes in genteel company, I talk differently in different situations, and along with that manner of speaking comes a manner in general, I dress differently, I walk differently. I sat there in the auditorium with my guard up, a mile high, and feeling stiffly that this dance thing was going to be a damp squib. Then I looked around, still lonely, and seeing no one familiar or friendly around, I realized that since it didn't matter anyway what I did there that night (no one would recognize me) and there was anyway no one to whom I could confess that I was lonely, I might as well enjoy the show. So I tried, I really tried to grasp what was happening on stage; as it happens the opening song was not to my taste, but the next song was beautiful, his movements suddenly took on new meaning, the tune was a sad one, or so I thought. I'll never know, unless I hear that music again when I am happy. It was beautiful in the way an ancient building up in the mountains is. You feel a wrench, knowing its day of glory is passed and you can never see it in the form in which it was built, but that very sense of history and kahani [tale] behind it makes it the more beautiful. It a is a beauty tinged with sadness, like #20, Barakhamba Road.

I came out of the hall that day taking home with me an experience I will not forget soon; it was the beauty born out of the weight of my own soul, perhaps, that created that experience. I almost began to cry sitting there amongst strangers, not a familiar face in sight; I pulled myself together then, not seeing the point of a public catharsis. My guard went up again, and it could have been banal again, some new-age dancer, some arty-farty stuff; but no. It was beautiful even after I became myself, for in that brief moment I had lost myself to something outside of myself; little knowing that in reality, even what I saw was not merely what I saw, but what I read into what I saw.