The Preamble Before Poetry

After a long time, I finally had the mood for some poetry today. The days have been short of late with the winter setting in, though here in Dubai, the seasons are only Hot and Hotter. But the noons are pleasant all the same – walking back from the class room to the hostel is no longer requires a sand-proof compass. Anyway, I sat down to write and came up with something so feeble and frail that I myself was surprised: I expected better from myself. In the past, I had even made some money selling some of my compositions to bands.

Nobody Wants The Bad Memory

Over cold coffee
In a silent winter morning
No sounds in the air
The fireplace is frozen in time
When nobody wants the bad memory

The leaves are falling
No women on the streets
A dull silence lingers
My tongue is sour with lime
People blinded me with nothing to see

Walls are white
Dull linen curtains
The sun is behind clouds
The doors are closed at home
I’m lost in frail and sudden decline

Savour the self
Before I wander again
All of me never saw you get in
A last excuse for you in the end
And the last memory has walked away

No more sun
Before the moon and stars
Coffee turns more cold
The last sip of love is bitter
Like when the dead have nothing to say

That place
In the corner of my mind
I’ve been waiting for this to go
Enslaved within me and lost
Save me from the bad memory

O, nobody wants the bad memory!

(That’s it)

Whenever I sit down with my laptop and darken the room to set the mood, I also make sure I forget about my own feelings at those precise moments and hope that whatever I jot down isn’t preconditioned with a mood I come to share with the text. But that doesn’t seem to be the case this time. That actually seems like me shouting out for help there, though I don’t know if it’s good enough [:P]. Writing verbose essays and interpretive articles is much easier when you compare it with poetry. An essay or an article can be defined to mean something, and can be structured to adhere to some rules that come in to the picture when you know who constitutes the audience. But poems are simply open, and not follow any rule of any sort. Poems can not be called rebellious even if they are, for that is the flexibility anointed to them. Even if you are not used to adopting a specific style of writing, you will realise that taking up one anew is necessary when you want to write a poem. When those tunes flow through your ears and into your heart and brain, a song is realised in its purpose and you can then dwell in a virtual plane that seems only to consist of emotions. But the flesh, blood and bones that give it some sort of tangibility, and the listener some consolation in his desperate attempts to quantify something as abstract as this, are the lyrics, a reclusive poem that won’t speak through anything else but a song. Poetry is as open as the poems it embraces. Anybody can write a poem, but when I say ‘poetry’, the things it first brings to mind are the withering leaves of Autumn, the pale loneliness of Thoreau, the silent but stormy spirit of Dunbar, the mockery of Orwell, or even the melancholic triumphs in Tolkien’s tales; just as one could always conjure a tale of sorts, but the first mention of English literature brings to mind Shakespeare. Poetry is a realm, and if you were to journey across it, those places you would like to visit again stand to be the landmarks, those constructions to which a second visit made will bring to light a great difference as compared to your first – pearls of wisdom, a whole new world with its own prejudices, while at the same time leaving room for more. What distinguishes those great works from what a child like myself write today? I have as much verbosity. I have the same settings. I have similar conveyances. I have the same iambic structure. I have the same poetic length. Then what is it?

It is the perfect combination of the above, the deliverance that projects every feeling and mood, every slight turn of events, every monotone and vibrancy, in a manner that you alternate in a trance from mania to depression blended seamlessly so. And when you seem to sink in a valley of exaggeration, it is as if a hook appears from nowhere to hoist you up again, to sweep all prejudices away without letting your image drop off the edge of this world, and to place in front of your eyes a commanding view, and to place in your palms the hammer of judgment. And, therefore, the world is the stage set, and you are but an actor lived. It is the inability to sustain such a combination at all times that sets all of us apart from the likes of Wordsworth and Longfellow. Another element is something I call ‘sight’: it is in fact a question that you ask unto yourself. What do you see? Can you disintegrate chaos to facts logically deductible? Can you bring order upon the world by subduing conflicts? Can you trivialise what is perhaps an overbearingness? Can you accentuate and reiterate to reproduce and, thereby, sustain something that will otherwise have spontaneously faded from all memory? The intuition that seeks out secrecy and employs it to bury other whispers in between lines, the sharpening of the mind’s eye to hunt out the last batch of golden deers from the forbidden forest, the creativity that can daunt escaping shadows, that is what your sight is. When you pick up the pen and sit down to write, you should see in your mind a picture that brings to life some other memories, and you should feel in your fingers the meaning of each word as you pen it down. And that is when a poem begins.

And you have only just begun. You must always take care not to be tripped by a miscalculation, a fault line, a cause for a tremor to ripple away from an epicentre of a point, a cascading of nonsense and the recital of gibberish. At every step, think not of the end but of the beginning. A poem is like a river: it will end by itself when you know that your beginning, your start, the birth of ideas, is sensible and worthy of recognition if left alone by itself. A sense of conclusivity will show up at each step and it will spawn a cycle. As you complete each stanza, you will realise that the beginning has already been marked by a cornerstone by some angel or demon lurking in your subconsciousness and guiding you from one consideration to another, and flavouring it with the mood that will, ultimately, come across as information. Beware of the writer’s block. Concentrate on what is at hand, lest some invisible mace knock out everything that has loyally lingered on in your head, leaving you with nothing more than a few leaves which only leave a signature of the truth you thought you were speaking through the departed.

Poetry will continue to dazzle me, while at the same time, hold me in its unrelenting grasp till I write and write like a madman, who has nothing to lose on the day of release but just another joy. My verbosity in exposition is diminished when I look upon a poem – so simple and yet so intricate. And just when I read it and try to scale its peaks, it disappears in a flash of colours, and leads me on a leash to places I have never heard of before, only to bring me back to reality in the nick of time, saving me from a tide of feelings that I would gladly but ignorantly have drowned in.

Societies, Subcultures & Sadism

Of late, I have lost quite a bit of my mental peace around people my own age and for once, wish that I was in the presence of someone much older than ourselves, someone who could understand what I was trying to say even before I had finished the first line. So, last night, I went to bed early and decided to watch a movie – not any movie, but those belonging to the tragedy/tragicomedy/dark comedy genre. I was going through the LAN hub for quite some time before I settled with ‘American Beauty’. I’ve already seen the movie some three times, but decided to see it again anyway because of the way I was totally in peace with myself in its presence. I don’t know why I feel like that. Perhaps it is the way I don’t stand out when I am with a group of other people who have their own problems to worry about. There is enough going on within me that people find “freakish” to appreciate and leave me alone for. And that is when I find solace in some few people who know how to behave in such circumstances: simply put, leaving me alone. ‘American Beauty’ doesn’t stand alone in its projection of a tragic society; following up are ‘Sweeney Todd’, ‘Moulin Rouge’ (not as much for the tragedy of the contemporary society that refuses to subside as for the tragedy in a fictional story), and ‘Reservoir Dogs’ (for its fast-paced locomotion into an inevitable end – when you can actually sit in your seat and pick out some subtle moments in between blood and gore when you know what’s going on inside each one of their heads). Well, I don’t know if I am making any sense in this post. I have never seen my blog as a way to give vent to my feelings (I have living people for that, luckily [:P]), but this time, there seems to be something wrong with more than someone like myself. When I am dejected or depressed, I blame some actions of mine and then work on them to let myself know that everything will be fine. But when I am not able to blame those events, because of which I’m sad, on my actions, then where else would I look? Does sadism still subconsciously persist in our midst? Dickensian wardens in the Victorian era stood out because of their obvious and out-and-loud actions for which they proudly took responsibility for. But in a society that feebly protests, but equally steadfastly so, that an Utopian era is never out of reach, we as people belonging to that society fail to realise that it is our actions in the many seconds of our life that determine whether or not we are building castles in the air for our children. When I am in sorrow and when I am not able to account for it completely, it only saddens me that people still find it in them, even if accidentally so, to behave in imperfect manners. And now is when I understand the true meaning of nihilism as preached by Nietzche.

Looking at Ricky Fitts talk while the video of the flying plastic bag was running on the screen, I was led to think the normality a society was trying to define minute after minute was only being pulled away from humanity as it should be. The law has, by and large, eradicated the number of criminals outside, but like Gandalf says in ‘Lord of the Rings’, “Some of those who are dead deserve to live, and some of those who live deserve death. Can you give it to them?” (I don’t know the exact lines, but that should be it). In trying to redefine a large section of the society using an unchanging set of statements, the state in the form of the law it has scripted has neglected that small portion of hearts and minds that only act out of innocence and in ways they think is right, and for all probability, is right absolutely. Amidst all this junk that I think I’m writing, I find myself rewinding to point 1:01:55 in the film. The simplicity in trying to elaborate on a single feeling of exasperation and joy, distress and elation at the same time, Wes Bentley’s characterisation manages to covey whatever is to be conveyed by abstaining from any literary jargon people like I myself sink into when we think we are possessed with something. I will never forget that scene, even though I may forget the monologue in it. The flying plastic bag that inspired Alan Ball to make AB as a movie is the same flying plastic bag that will remind me that simplicity is lost, only to have been replaced by a subculture on which blame cannot be laid for the sole reason that perfection has been subconsciously misunderstood to stand for a relative term.

Chaotic

Some people have told me over the past few days that I wrote well. However, excited though I was to discover this new “talent” (?) within me, Jake finally pointed out the mistake, or rather the error, in my way of writing: I tend to begin with one idea, thumb a few others, and end up with totally something else. For example, I asked him to go through ‘Two instead of one?’, where I’ve started of with the power of one, screwed it up, moved on to the moon, screwed the moon over and finally ended up with mental illness and, somehow, subtlety. A coherence of ideas is not easy to get hold of, but once you attain that state of readership, it is very difficult to let go. If you’d had the fortune to have read one perfect book that, to you, was of a language that you considered perfect, every other book will seem to miss an element, that spark when ignited keeps you turning the pages.

The perfection in language need not be limited to grammatical errors and their correction, but also the style of writing. Like Emerson said: “A man’s style is his mind’s voice”. The way you dress your words upon their appropriate conception to personify them and enable them to bear down upon the reader with a rain of thoughts and ideas is what constitutes your style. Keeping to a particular style also ensures that your way of writing will earn itself a little professionalism every time you employ it in sensible scripture. This evolution gradually leads to a signature of yours that will have some sort of a patent when it comes to be used. If someone picks up some papers and reads somethings written in a particular style, they’ll be able to identify the author if they know that that particular style is a signature. As regards coherence, the style of writing streamlines the train of thought such that you succumb to your style and let it dictate what you think. If you think it doesn’t suit the style in question, you think of something else.

Though this may seem like an erroneous way to write, that is the way it is. You may have thought of a lot of things, but it is also very probable that you may not have put them down in ink because the ideas did not find compatibility with your style. If this was to be my cloud, the silver linings would be that styles are not governed by any rules as such. Everybody has his or her own styles, and every style is different. This, over a period of time, ensures that the evolution of our thoughts do not overlap completely, thereby enabling everybody to think of everything (collectively). No idea is missed.

The Start Of A Story

The start of a story, according to me, will always be the hardest thing an author does about the book he is going to write. The start of the story is the precise moment when something is created from nothing. But once the first few lines are done, you can always work on something from something. Stories that begin with a description of an existing location can work off of the mood and the feel the setting inspires, and can probably be progressive by twisting one attribute into the place that inspires the author to deviate from what would have happened normally, to what can happen in a way that makes up a whole book. So you have the butterfly’s wings. Next, you need the ball on the top of the hill. This ball, if you’re seeing it in your mind’s eye, can roll off in any one of an infinite number of directions. So now, the author initiates a particular event on behalf of one of the characters. Depending on the intensity of the event and perception of it by the respective characters, the ball now rolls of in one particular direction. Rocks on the way can be the villains, bushes with thorns can be the people who seem freaky but are very nice, and the fencing over the cliff can be ‘the end’, or ‘the happily ever after’ (the ball rests along the fence, and those who seek to disturb it from the sweet retirement of eternal slumber are cursed to roam the mortal lands as zombies till the King returns and releases them from the torment of skin and flesh). As long as the author can define his normality – the path when traveled yields the best results – he or she can always vary the amplitude (or the intensity of impact) and frequency of it to get whatever he or she wants. At least, this is how I see book writing. I always need to quantify things into a finite series of tasks so that I know where I stand.

But today was bad. A close friend of mine has been asking for a long time that I write a book, and since most of my thoughts and posts on this blog dwell on the intricacies of human behaviour, I thought I might begin with a story (of which I had been thinking for quite some time now) that didn’t feature a villain of flesh but a villain of thought – equivalent to mentally tormented people in other words. The thing is, thanks to Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, the first thing that comes to mind is a secret agent name Tanya who is moving in a dark alley with a briefcase chained to her left wrist, and the scenes then jump meaninglessly from car chases to cigarette butts to double crossers. Even if you say “story!” now, I’m gonna say “Tanya!” back to you. It’s that messed up inside my head. The worst part of that is even if I think I have come up with something phenomenal, there always seems to be a Thomas J. Hanks to let me know he or she has been portrayed before in an Academy Award-winning role. Ideas have been taken up in scores in the past, and they are being taken up just as I write. Thankfully, the morally of this tale as I see it seems to me is that you need a book, then you don’t hesitate to think. That’s all.

So, getting back. I had spoken in detail about where I see myself as an author every time I pick up my keyboard and start typing out what will hopefully see the light of day as a bound book. But even when I know where my butterfly is, the flap of it’s wings sets of a tornado, and I see no ball rolling anywhere. My quantifiability has lost ground. Surrealism takes flight. I need to put pen to paper, but I have lost my signature to Microsoft Word 2007. My fingers itch to dance through a million permutations of twenty six letters while I inch closer to infinity, but all I end up doing is analysing every bit of my creation down to the last cell and shelving them off for use in one of my poems. I can never be a writer. At least, I can never be a writer of stories. Fictions belongs to those who can spin yarns – not to those who are adept at breaking down one’s sorrows to a million different reasons. I may be able to plunge Romeo into sorrow by throwing Juliet from over a cliff, but I will also let him know that there is hope in his love if he avenges those who killed her. But that’s the extent of it: I fall prey not to the writer’s block but to the claws of logical deduction. Let Romeo do what he can, but I will always expect him to do what he should. A condescending smile grips my face, and I expect my readers to figure things out for their own. I am only fair at trying to teach people what it means when you say or do something, not at telling them what can happen. I can show you that a circle is made up of an infinite number of tangents around a finite radius. I cannot show you that the circumference of the circle can be pi times the diameter if it isn’t twice pi times the radius. I pride in my understanding and my expressionism. But if you were to place the load of a life on my shoulders, I should be scared to manipulate that poor soul.

But I think you can expect something of a macabre Mephistopheles from me some five years down the line!

Ctrl+F, A Ghost, and The Writer's Block: Where Am I?

The text editor (Mr. TE) in WordPress is a very good friend of mine. Mr. TE has been there to see me go on and on about all kinds of things, some of which did not even concern the respected gentleman. This is one post where I have something to say about Mr. TE: the gentleman comes with a property wherein he allows me to resize him according to my wishes. His breadth is, of course, his to decide about, but his length falls under my perusal every time I visit his humble abode. And now I’ve realised that I like it that way. Why? Because whenever I feel I need to write more about something that I am thinking about, I make the box large and open, which is something of an invitation, a call to fill it up with words and ideas. As for this post, I do have lots to write (I think), but around me, there is no one. Alone in my darkened room, I sit with absolutely nothing to do. I wish i had a search bar somewhere in front of me. I could enter something, some key words, some tags, some categories, and perhaps something would show up.

I have always sought peace and calm, and that seems to happen only in the absence of everything around me except myself. When I write, I see myself floating in front of me like a ghost. It is no hallucination but only a convincingly elusive conception of the mind. But today, the ghost is not home. And I may have my writer’s block. I usually get it when I write about things that hold meaning for me and about which I try desperately to tell others. But today’s post is stranger: I seem to have lost my joy in writing, and I feel sapped of all literary endowments. You may notice it as I jump from idea to idea without bothering to lay a bridge between them; it is like a post that has been written to be read by me again, but in the future. Probably trigger some deja vu. Communication has failed. There is a wall (Pink Floyd?) between my fingers and my thoughts, and I don’t know whence they come. This disorientation is killing me. Even if I had been trapped in trying to demystify some catch-me-if-you-can intricate logic of a paradox, I would have oriented myself to some sort of hypothesizing, some mathematical assumptions, and moved on to try my luck at it. But I have now realised now that writing is different. Writing is when you create something out of nothing. Can you tell me where adjectives come from? Some imperceptible quantification of feelings that varies from person to person? That is hardly a definition. But that is all I see, and I don’t know whether you can understand me or not. I could convey my perception of the objects around me through the usage of words, but they would be lifeless. Merely a suspension of 1s and 0s on some screen in front of you, digital data for you to interpret and quantify on your own. But writing exists because it is inherently involved with the expressive communication of one’s perceptions.

This is no writer’s block, as I seem to be writing (500+ words now) sans a pause – as yet. But my arms seem flaccid, and my fingers seem to be typing of their own free will. A magical spell, ‘abracadabra’, the wave of a wand, a rags to riches author, a million dollar movie. I have now even lost track of whatever I started with. (Having scrolled up to read the first paragraph,) I remember now. The gentlemanly text editor who has been kind enough to reconsider the dimensions of his rich (albeit two dimensional) existence now provides solace to a lost writer. He, Mr. TE, when resized to a small box with a shy two-line exposure of my ideas, now seems different.

He now seems to say, “Look! It’s only the two of us now, and a fine day it seems as yet. I hope I can be your ghost.”

(Approx. fog index: 10.83)

I Am A Slave

I am now totally in the servitude of the music that flows through my ears.

Even while the guitarist has his mind concentrated on the succession of strings he is doomed to pluck for eternity, I can sit on the comfort of my bed, listening to it as I let my mind wander on a multitude of thoughts that scream back into the screen before my mind’s eye.

Do I miss my past?

Can I relive history?

Won’t time then collapse into nothingness if I could bring back something has already occurred?

But how would I decide which part of history to relive?

If I was to choose some section of the filmstrip, then the events of that time frame would be altered and I wouldn’t be what I am now.

Then would it mean I would be there in history in a way that reflects back in time the image of me today?

Oh, I am stuck in the pages of a paradox.

Does it depend on which side of the book I am looking at?

Oh, too many questions.

Abstractions float before my eyes and I can see fumes of smoke dance to my tunes – my tunes of the future I want to live.

It is an imperial command, and you are all doomed to sit before me and hail me!

I am not God!

But why then would I demand servitude?

It is the fear in your heads that has forced you to conceive a supernatural being.

But would kneeling down in front of your fears chase the fears away?

Would it not feed them more?

Misspellings mean nothing any more to me.

Why would they have be directed to wait in my future holding aloft a banner that asks me to step that way so they can inspect me for the changes they have sought to seed me with?

Can changes be initiated?

Or are they so because they happen as an alternative to mistakes that would otherwise lay hidden in plain sight?

Why should life stretch to a hundred years when, in the end, you die with the purpose you are born with?

When you swim out of the divine womb unto the world, it is a punishment.

You have to toil and toil, while the devil shoots his clinging arrows past you, and when the day comes that you have not been asked a question in the first place, you drop your interpretations of the answers around and walk back to the womb of the earth whence you came.

Why?

Why do you drop and turn back when you know where you are going?

Life is not an adventure, it is not a book, it is not anything.

It is because you have made it to be.

Leaving the scientists to explain their overbearingness in fiddling with nature, you have brought upon yourself a shadow of self-pity, leaving a trail of uselessness similar to the void.

Oh, this cocaine makes me feel like I am on this song!

You would think of all this as gibberish, wouldn’t you?

Meaningless sentences pour forth sans a halt, but how can it be when all the words are meaningful?

Or am I blabbering?

You think I am a freak, but when the same words are uttered by a person of note, you accept him/it for not what he is, but for what he has made himself to be.

Evolution has degraded us in the name of civilization, and we have lost the belief in ourselves.

We cannot trust ourselves anymore, and when a man who can walks into our midst, he is great.

We have brought all this mockery upon ourselves, and we bring more by the minute.

Slaves to masters who believe in themselves, the slavery is my master.

I have not me to call out for in agony, for I don’t believe I will come.

The slavery consumes me as the moments that I lived float by, and I can see myself change from what I was, to what the slave will be.

And the master is watching as he whips himself.

Read carefully.

It is nothing but a mirror.

Observations

A friend of mine requested that I write an article on a very abstract topic, rather an observation, on whose exposition I had no clue.  I used to write for a newspaper and I think this prompted him to think that I could write on anything: a wrong and bad assumption. His request had me sitting and thinking on why ‘the good die young’. Wouldn’t you think, like I said, this was more of an observation than a topic? How was I to write an article on this? Seeing as it’s me, as in how I usually take off from the topic at hand and fly off to the logical and etymological reasons behind my conjecture, why do I find it difficult to write on something I think is an observation, and why do I find it easier to write on something that is easy to analyze? Rather, how would you analyze an observation? What are the aspects of an observation you can delve upon to believe, confidently, that there is something of a result to arrive upon?

Observations are made when there is an event involving one or more processes, and there is an instrument (to be more flexible, an object that acts against a frame of reference) that defines the event against space and time and allows you to come to a conclusion about the activities involved in the event, and you yourself, the observer. An observation is said to be made if the observer detects a change in his or her perceptions of the currency of the event, made observable by the object or the instrument. An important thing to be noted here is that the instrument in question must not be self-defining: it must conform in principle and operation to an external frame of reference. The presence of the latter delivers objectivity to the phenomenon, the assurance that the same results will be observed in the presence of the same stimuli. This assurance has given science today a rigid foundation and has been the basis for many an invention and discovery. There are always limitations in making observations as the reliability of the five senses are tested and also, a lot of measuring instruments are involved which invariably result in the presence of an error margin in the end result.

Observations play an important in the scientific method, which involves the observation of a phenomenon, noting the changes with respect to space/time (or both), hypothesizing a causal event for the observations, testing the hypotheses, arriving at a conclusion about the experiment, and reviewing the mistakes. Now, everything that I have written about is based on the assumption that the observations being referred to occur in space-time. But what would be the case if it were an ideate observation? When you receive a packet of information, it is filtered via one of the sensory receptors and stored in the memory. Over time, many packets of information are collected and stored that enable the individual to draw conclusions on the morality of behaviour. More so, rather than to just be stored, the power of recollection allows us as humans to compile a plan of response if the same event occurs again, and therefore construct a response to the stimuli pre-stimulus.

So, finally, where do I stand on my friend’s request? Nowhere. ‘The good die young’ is a conclusion drawn from the interpretations of statistical data or, at the most, from the excessive appraisal of its dramatic implications. Nothing else.

(Approx. fog index: 16.71)