Sermon on Sin

An innocent dream came to me.
It shook me as no storm can do.

Technically,
There is no starting point for action.
One can never know oneself in full.
Hence, one can never really trust oneself.

Yet, start we do. That is our existence.
Therefore, sin and redeem are like brothers.
God far away there is a greatest helper.
Redeems a mankind of pettiness.

But, my dear friend, if I may continue


The power of sin is grave.
It can make us in part know us.
And there it stops.
Part knowledge can only be
A part basis for action.

Thus,
Gravest sin offers a costly path to redemption -
Confess.
Confess not to God far away there.
Confess to your fellow god-brute human.


(Corollary : Kill not thy fellow god-brute.)

To a friendly ear

The favourite shop not open,
Walking on - little concerns
left unburdened in the new town -
I noticed a common thing.
A plastic flapped in the wind.

Few flaps later,
I had whatever consolation.

(far better than none)

That some things govern permanent
in the new and the old town
has pathos.

I remember
This same little bob of pathos and
me teary-eyed in the cinemas -

When those scenes urgently showed
that common things in plain view
can be seen joyously dancing
to their scored melody of
governing dynamics.

Rabbi says, "Why create, Just be"

The little boy knew fun in solitude.
Fun was there to be found and made.
Fun flits by today like beauty before greed.
Clean fun soiled by the inescapable grease
oiling the grown man's misaligned creeds.

Just be

The little being's Maa had
set the festive cap then, with few kisses;
and he had played colours with the plants.
Fun was there to be found and made.

The little one with the pristine garden,
the back wall was his friend and adversary,
engaged in heroic matches to boot,
the clothesline a willing prop,
the birds, wind and heavens intently watching
the action.

Gone are the superior ways.
Fun is there still, to be found and made.
Some hope the man can offer
Rebirth little boy someday.

For G

I want to kiss you;

few words go through
these limbs that miss you,
too short too few.


---------------------

Nov-Dec' 11, Toulouse

For G

Chewing fluffy misery,
few small disappointments
stuck in the gut,
forgot today
real happiness is a mouthful away.

When you come happy I become happy.






-------------------------------------


 Nov '11, Tlse

The Menu Pyramid of Universal Themes serves at the bus stop

The Menu Pyramid of Universal Themes
Serves on the house day after day.
Say when did we municipally order
That piece of quiet greenery
under the sprawling city sky.
Or that gorgeous gorge under the sturdy bridge,
everyone's water flowing under
for no one, a theme-ful garden and architecture.
(Or that heating water gurgling
- setting a stage for an anywhich friendship,
minor annoyance befriending helpless laughter -
In some office day after day.)
Here comes the bus ...
There those clever buses with their schedule
and smoke, their people and hurrying,
sits and stands, tips and shouts, falls and grins,
a mini-dictionary repeating every
so often.
Good day Sir !

There by the window
the soft pink flowers have
Made love again last night
along with the bonnets
for the morning commuter.
Served regular closer to home
The beating of my pacemaker,
a theme for hopefully few lifetimes.

On the tv, the veteran matador
is indulging the lively bull
without hubris, but with
much flourish.

A Lone Intellect

We are many many clueless breeds.
Impose freely  our whatever creeds.
Unnatural, there is no such no thing.
Save in our minds and their meanings.


Still
The lone watch-maker
Kept at it in his dingy lair
Irrespective.

Because
His greatness belonged to future,
Of him his present was doggedly unsure.

But they easily assumed
That only a mortal woman had begot
This mortal hero.

Needless,
He needed faith from us.
Courage he had much,
Poverty even more.
Price for freedom sure !
Sad.

Well,
That is the life in the dark,
Chained to the pet soul's pet little barks.


Easy for the soul to be latent
And call, when the lottery of talent
is never exactly won. Practice,
Still virtuosity is a slim slice
Failure most of the delicious pie.


Why,
The watch-maker still answered
When - I presume - the soul called.

For expression is a necessity.
And necessity begets famously
Invention.

Intellect
His iron grace, he wielded giftedly.
Forged invented natural promontory.
Where he stood singly.

We joined him of course.

In due time.

----------------------------------------------

Dedicated to John Harrison, the inventor of chronometer.

(PS on 11/jul/14 : Nikolai Tesla was another true genius. C. L. Henley also is in the same brand of men.)







Poem about intellect

How the most creative people have no natural place in the present society

They work for a society in the future.

Yet they need validation. Spend their life in relative poverty(as a price for

freedom) and the courage required to bear it and public shadow.

Yet their intellect is the way they can express themselves when natural talent

is not their forte and however much practice and there's a slim chance of virtuosity

And a big chance of statistical failure. Lucky are those who are creative, dexterous

and explorers like Da Vinci(?)

Hence, they create a place of their own by inventing knowledge for themselves

and, as a corollary, for the whole race.

A Manifesto

Any innocent habit can lull.

Pull the man into in-consequence;
The easy-way-out as they say.
The one who knows a little,
Knows also the value of consequence.
It is either a thing of beauty
Or a thing of meaning or both.

The seeker is like a low-brow bee
Taking part in and Partaking of
A grand pollination.

If required, he will prepare to be the bee
or the air, the flower or the soil or just him.
Or she will have to observe herself closely
Looking at the bee, the flowers, the soil
the other day. It will cost sweat,
But then do we not run the last mile of a marathon.
Much watching has to be done;
And watching out too. Watching out
For that lulling.

Because inconsequence is
- not the end of the world -
but a missed opportunity to partake.
Share with bees and flowers this existence.
Plainly said, Inconsequence is wasted divinity.

Thus avowed, imagine this adventure.
We are running up and down a gargantuan mountain
of glasses upon glasses filling up, still or fomenting
with things flowing from somewhere above unseen yet;
Overwhelming bearers of new discernment.
Our armaments : care, prudence, love and imagination.

For G

What has been said before, there's a great lot of it,

And a lot that is great, greatness being like myth

Helping us live, helping us love.

Therefore, the little that I have to say

Need not be said. Yet I'll celebrate anyway !

And what I have to say is not that true love is great,

Nor that love surprises in many ways, and that we may too

Surprise it. It is that in love, the surprises form their own tune and song,

Their own dance. And when the many little songs were tentative, the many steps

Guarded, that little extra time spent anchoring later came to this mind

As warmth in guise of surprise. As would a calm sunny sea after

A stormy sailing on the way to a lucky Paradise.




---------------------------------

Written sometime during Summer '11. definitely before sept.

I Human

Let the machine run ! Let the machine run !

It's one human running gloriously.

Let breathe and eat, let sweat and rest

It's this one life reduced to simplicity.

Let think and believe, let listen and critique

It's this one life lived thoughtfully.

Let the machine run ! Let the machine run !

Or still it to a standstill willfully

That I review this uncomplicated majesty.

-----------------------------------------------

Let the machine run ! Let the machine run !

It's one life in fun and glory.

Let laugh and prank, let injure and heal

It's this one life's childish energy.

Let search and invent, let be told and admit folly

It's this one life's potential for divinity.

Let the machine run ! Let the machine run !

It's only life, a most personal movie !

Let smile and cry, let forgive and forget

It's this one life lived heartily.

Let love and be loved, let anger-hate of love remind

It's this one life lived joyously.

Thoughts

If there're numbers, there's bound to be two,

Bound to be four, one and five.

If there's us, there's bound to be thoughts,

Bound to be thoughts over much, too few or free.

Unless, there're no numbers.

Unless, there's no us.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

With numbers, there're some that come naturally,

Bound to be hundreds of them natural imaginary,

The pi, century, zero, and the equally divine three.

So too with us, there's bound to be thoughts,

Bound to be too too much, too few, or the lucky free.

Unless there's no us.

The Anthropologist's Revelation

The keen anthropologist revealed
The other day, the twenty-first century's

All-governing principle to me.

The grand theory of everything.

He said, "It is the advertisement,
Once the legitimate dreg of papyrus or cheap paper,

The jovial cry of the youthful town-crier,

Now the container of truth and utility.

Smart and suave, it tells fruitfully

The grand story of everything,

All our heroisms and heartiness."

The silent corollary hangs unvoiced in the air :
The anonymous withering slowly, becoming flesh-less,
Less than penniless vacuum.

There's a logic in everything,

Sad or not.

The flow of a sad logic takes the smile

Out of a smiling child.

Like the logic of death and the logic of dying.

Let me go find that anonymous piece of rock, the anonymous story.

But where are they ?

I will pretend to grieve for that dying breed.

Real grief is a lot of work.

And there's enough glamor and glitz
- Forget the booze, tragedies and sad music -
To lose oneself in, anyway.

The Allocation of Humanly Gods

Each man to his own man and brother.
Few Gods to each loving one.

One to the mother who but loved her dear son -
Found the entire creation in him,
gobbled up like candied fun.
Few to the hunter-gatherer who kills, feeds flesh and
fruit to the delight of the brahmin's vegetarian God,
To the children not on their best behaviour
Make sparkling mischief religiously,
The lovers lost in an eternity of each other
forgetting the divine soft moonlight.
To the one out there seeking in the wilderness,
Already wise like the wild.
To all of us onwards on to that one heaven of oblivion
Preserved carefully in our mouths and instruments,
By infinite worshiping hands.

Each mouth instrument hand a God in the crowd.
The Gods upstairs bow to each blessed one.

An Extraordinary Feat

Resist the pull of the pen,

The pull of the deliberating mind,

The pull of the sentimental heart,

Resist. Your very very best might elude.

An extraordinary feat requires an extraordinary effort.

It deserves, demands your soul,

Every drop of blood and oxygen,

All your memories, your everything.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

I inhabit now the immortal soul of my brothers and sisters.

I am now all my people.

My deepest deepest wish has come true.

I will rejoice in pure abandon with my brother and sister.

Pure joy is rarest on Earth.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The ball sails in an arc most majestic.

I have done it !

My children and friends, We have done it !

With the immense power vested in me -

The power of billion stirring souls,

From their outwardest skins to their hearts' cores -

I will seal this moment forever in my eyes.

See through my eyes.

We are the victors today.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am proud of myself today,

Proud of my beautiful body, my deftest hands,

My strongest legs, My sharpest brain, my powerful lungs.

They gave their all. I'll give them my tears.

My unrestrained laughter, my uncontrolled foolish dance.

Right now here now, I'm Alive

In full splendor.

I am the bravest hero.

They shout through me the loudest victory chant.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

I am happy for my sons.

Bravest champions, You gave me

Your sweat and life.

I have asked a lot from you,

Been unkind, loved too much.

Love and too-much-love are blind,

You and I know in our hearts.

You have played the game like the ancient olympians,

Graceful and strong in your gritty sweet victory.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Wherefore I find words ? Who speaks through me ?

Who gives life to me ?

I have found the answer today.

It is the simple desire of all of me,

My whole head to the tip of my toe,

My innumerable little sweet cells, all my breathing organs,

their deepest wish to live with the head held high,

With no fear in their mind.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

What is the highest purpose of victory ?

My friends and children, It is to find

The fortitude to cleanse oneself,

To bring one's soul to Purity.

My garment needs so much cleaning.

And today on the victory stand,

I vow to find the strength

Somehow.

Today on the victory stand,

I am my people

For a fraction of history.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

PS :Dedicated to India's great World Cup victory in Cricket.

Ugliest Death H

Vik Muniz. Death of Marat; after David. 2005

See the beautiful man lying - unshrouded -

In a small sunny backyard. Lying on a heap

Of mute trash and toxin, shrouded in noxious vapor -

Ugly offsprings of his own abnormal doings.

See how sad he looks in his death moment,

The face not allowed the peace and grace

Allowed to one and all a mortal sinner.

See also the bright child frozen mid-leap

As if a parting sculpture for someone.

Child, someone said you were the father of man.

You perhaps bore the wrong man this time.

See also the woman, his mother

Whose battered face betrays radiant beauty.

Burned by her own bounty and kindness.

Behold Now,

Some law granting her Justice

As she becomes justly the angry Goddess,

Savoring her revenge as she keeps alive

Her defiler - the dying man's headless ego -

While she takes his innocent heart

Like a morbid ritual's sacrificial offering.

Wake up dear Man, rise above this unclean dying.

Be a Man. Own up. Stop puerile denying.

You're Hercules and Hanuman's father.

Let this be a silly dream that went deadly wrong.

Death can be a noble song. Die with honor intact.

A message to Dreamers and Realists

Dreamer dreams and Realist keeps it real
Like Roses are red and Violets are blue.
But then a Dream is as much Reality
As Reality is a cooked-up fancy Dream,
Like a Rose goes blue and a Violet bleeds red
And also how they bloom with bees and (into us) spread.
Thus, Dreamer - Keep it real. And Realist - Keep dreams !

Sermon on Society

Society's worst curse : If it makes the man apologetic for everything.

To Charles Buckowski

Meet the crazy man on the honest street

And it's his honesty that scares you.

Retire to my ivory tower I'll,

Made of palpable bricks and bodies

Where muddy thoughts prime thickly
The surface 'neath the exterior shine.

Where is the pretty plain ivory ?

Retiring in a tipsy haze

That Friday night before the weekend,

I met a man on the street.

The man was drunk.

Yet, in spite of the Friday festivities,

The sweet fermented grain

Frothed - perhaps - in him

A dormant fermenting.

For

He almost cried. He did not howl.

The fellow held it back from the stranger

As though sentimental is not correct form.

Held back as he thought aloud of his mother

Back home in Columbia. Of her

Who had worked - back-breakingly - in the cotton fields

So that her son could eat and clothe

In comfort.

He held it back from me

When he choked about his circumstance

Which only makes for a comedian's joke.

The funny thing being his comfortable salary.

The other funny thing - Him thinking.
Why think when there's a comfortable salary ?

(Don't they say "Ignorance is Bliss" -
That maxim which most always
Lives up to its billing.)

Why care for how the world revolves. For how,
While he folded to cosy comfort,
His fellow Egyptians dared.

Yet the funnier thing is

He kept saying sorry to me,
Again and again,

For having these "issues" harbored,

And having to bother a stranger in hurry

To talk to.

The only token true thing I could give back to him,

Smiling, was the starlight coming from afar,

That must look a little extra beautiful

Over Egypt for a few days.

Balloons

Here's a small balloon to the child in me.
I can't blow a big balloon here now, you see.

Not yet (Someday maybe).

Out goes the air . . . .

In the theater lobby,
Which looked a mishmash of lines and light, coherent colours,
He was talking to someone who is fast receding from his memory palace into the empty. To the left, he saw a woman, a striking woman, white haired, in an office cubicle, cut in half by the grey felted partition, looking at a screen whose black ubiquitous plastic back he saw clearly, concentrating, gesticulating, contorting her whole face every fraction of a second. Frown and Ecstasy were playing together. Something was being read.

Was it being lived at the same time ? Like music. It looked comical too. Like the sane-looking loony back in his hometown's temple, talking and reciting to himself. She was reading poetry. What other possibility is there ?

He opened his eyes at that point of manic realization and saw little of sun's rays in the room. He was surprised and slightly scared for a second. Soon formed a sort of fellow feeling. He kept enjoying the new feeling for few minutes. This feeling that he surmised must be shared by men and women who enjoy - within a banal life - the banality of life keenly, sometimes urgently. Who draw their power from it. He enjoyed it like how all children enjoy balloons. The fuzzy cerebral warmth mixing easily with the heat of the blanket and the streams of sunny light that reminded him of coloured glasses in giant cathedrals.

Tying the balloon's string is the hard bit. Every child who has tied a balloon knows that. Air always leaks out.

The night before, he kept talking with his friends. After a week of mostly solitary, he welcomed this flow of free talk. He kept gushing about poetry on and on like an infatuated teen. About its lens-like focusing effect on to the process of language and emotion and meaning unlike diffuse prose. As if he had been reading poems all this while on a crazy merry-go-round. They also talked about the other perennially moving circle.

"I let you breathe to me the potency of natural law. If you allow that law to govern your breath, then it follows that there is a nagging circle wherever you go. You become the chicken and egg for all time to come." Not the best thought before going to bed.

In the dream, the striking old lady might as well have read this :

When the thought and the word
Sparred with the sharpest sword
In an imaginary location
For their rightful station
On the circle;
In peace they enlightened,
In war they remorselessly burned
The brain in my cranium;
Burst all the happy balloons.

The string looks nice when in a clean ribbon knot.

Heart or Past Hearts

The bucolic craftsman
Sat in the sun
Putting the circle mirrors
Into a fabric foilage.
He was grafting with care
A newer image of the Bodhi Tree
He saw on the village computer the other day,
In the tradition of the ancestral kin.
The leafy mirrors took to the tasty sunlight.
Ate the exquisite sunlight,
As the informed humans would say.

The leaves probably made themselves.
Who knows. It's complicated.
The bucolic craftsman felt
The Lord of the World, Jagganath
Operating through the lines on his bare palms.
(As the knowledgeable would say,
The Lord supplied the agency.)

Hmmm.

Hmmm Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmm Hmmmm Hmmm....

The Martians started signaling then.
"Abandon your observations
And Inferences.
We will supply you our words.
You supply us your heart."





-----------------------------------------

Meitner or Leer dichotomy : http://bostonreview.net/BR36.1/burt.php

Thinker's Blues

How come you achieve painless love?,
When there's pain and cry before any happy thing,
joy and cry for a little while after. A remnant smile maybe.
The next unseen ghost is lurking to ambush,
To haunt

It seems
That to laugh
One has to be made mad
Or love disenchanted
Which is hollow love.
Love and Bliss are theoretically at odds.
You are the great practical master.
The master balancer.
You and the overwhelming presence
Of beauty like the finest sand
That stays swell on the palm
When gently palmed.

A theoretical point on Intolerance in Society

Here's a thought I'd had a few years ago : Our society as a group of individuals is automatically susceptible to Intolerance. Given a starting situation of many tolerant individuals and few intolerant ones, and a finite probability of evangelism/conversion to a set of (intolerant) ideals, intolerance has to grow with time, if we go by the ideal definition of tolerance as allowing anyone his/her own beliefs. Obviously, and paradoxically, the tolerant majority(if ever there's one) has to intolerantly force the group to tolerance, like a strong magnetic field magnetises a chunk of magnet against entropy.


-------------------------------

Update on 2nd Nov' 17 :

Read in http://nautil.us/blog/when-did-tribalism-get-to-be-so-fashionable

When Did Tribalism Get To Be So Fashionable?
POSTED BY SIMON DEDEO ON OCT 24, 2017

"Both the text and the figure in the piece show clearly the devastating effects these shibboleth machines have, not only on others, but on themselves. After a particular shibboleth machine dominates, the system—thanks to errors induced by neutral drift—enters a period of large-scale instability. Their society (such as it is) collapses as mothers birth daughters who engage in civil war. It’s a generic feature of intolerant systems: unless you switch off cultural evolution itself, a strategy of total war against non-copies will be vulnerable to misrecognition. Imagine a less-tolerant subspecies, which takes less care to avoid killing fellow members of its tribe, emerges; it will outcompete its more cautious brothers, driving them to extinction. (There should be a theorem hidden in there somewhere, though I haven’t gone so far as to prove it.)"

Book Lovers on a Date

One La Femme
Two Twigs of Tea
Three Chairs a desk
Four legs and knee

Five be the mythical kin
Six Six Six the sinny bin
Seven dwarves in a fairy story
Eight thoroughfares ended Gautama's misery

Nine became niney time
Ten about the books they chimed
Eleven soon the hour was
Twelve The hands aligned

Thirteen were soon the limbs
Fourteen they soon would become
Fifteen more groped fleshed milled
Sixteen squared sensations filled

Seventeen cubed Seventeen or
Eighteen factorial heightened
Nineteen raised to Nineteen sweaty beads rolled
Twenty raised to Twenty raised to Twenty sighs they sealed

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

Infinity's reckoning of one communion.

On Self-Doubt

A simple inability
Triggered the silly circuit of cry-baby,
Inside.

Life has to always move on.
He walked back
To a familiarer setting,
His building.
He had to get lunch.
Got a toasted bagel.

An impression of immersion
In his own version of existence
Brought about his observation
Of that over-toasted bagel,
Its corrugations and charred black tips,
Its toric shape,

Into a more than a
Geometric flash,
Edible form.

The very next cognition,
He was questioning that observation :
questioning if there was anything more
Than that geometric flash or edible form.
Or if there was,
Maybe he can't ever know.
Or if he can,
He can't pronounce it
To his or someone's satisfaction.

Yet as he walks now in the evening dark
Under the fleeting weather,
Under the grey stratus
With orange diffuse light
Hexaclinic snow in the air,
He can still not neglect
The sorrowful cold metaphor
For his toast-gone-cold reality.

Smitten or Bitten ?

I knew I was smitten
Or on the way


To

The snake's bite.

That something
Bubbled inside the brain
Bubbling itself
Line by Line
Edit by Edit






Blub by Blub

It was all bubbles.
Pure Evaporate.
Not meant for long term memory.

Some crazy game we play
To get back




At the Waking World.

Or not.

The Mystic Mountain

There I finally found it !
My Shangri la .....
Lurking behind the nearby hill.

O so beautiful, so beautiful !
Yours folds of white so bright,
Blessed, promising me all
I've ever desired.

Now I know where I'll find you.
Sitting here in a car, going the tangent's direction,
I care no more.
I know where to find you.

So fitting you are
A snow-capped mountain,
Like the abode of the sages the ninjas,
In the distance reachable.


I'm breathing so freely now !
The oxygen fills me, my eyes,
my focus.
The bluest sky holds you as you
Try hide from me --
Or the sun ??


Oh No No No !


Breath. Oxygen.
Breathe.


Yes. You appear a cool cloud floating.
You're not cruel.

I think I get
                 what You're silent about.
What white clouds and snowy mountains
All day, in their silence,
Unsay.

A Higher Act

Alice to Bob :

More I speak, more i feel
This wonderful feeling
to me it belongs.
A soul so pure, a heart so fresh
I yearn for you, and your words.
Life is fine and all does rhyme
when you aren't here, not mine too.
Then I hear you, I tell you
So I find, when I look in hindsight,
much better my life to be,
much spirit raised in me.
I hope I mean the same
for you, but I see not how?
Oh dear, these words that I write,
are here in ink and here to stay.
Wonder how my head sieves
my thoughts, how does it perceive?

Much damage already done,

Oh grief ! Here I stop.

-------------

Above : composed by a friend

Bob to Alice :

I thought I wrote poetry
When I was wallowing
In myself.
You've taught me -
Hope an awakening -
The higher act : Living this self,
Like our parents or Yasoda maiyaa,
Not through the invisible God or oneself.
But finding God and oneself
through those you cherish and love.
I'm touched, mi amigo :)

Spelling Mistakes

In these days of automatic spellcheckers and word processors, a simple spelling mistake is that much more precious. It reminds me of those days when the freakin' things wouldn't stick. No matter what you did you always got some wrong. Some even till this day. Now when they are committed, I either don't take notice or I surgically correct them and move on or, when I am taking a dip in the well of the sentimental fool , reminisce about the days when we were children commiting spelling mistakes all the way to the light of innocent and glory.

Learnings

A Poet can liberate himself quite a bit by transferring his thoughts to an external agency.

Learnings

One important skill that all can use - I borrow this from Michael Lawler who learnt it from someone else - is to get people to say deep things and then steal or borrow it from them ! Like Jack White of White Stripes said of Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and U2's David Howell Evans upon being asked, "What will happen when you meet them ?", "I don't know... I'll trick them.... trick them into telling me all their tricks", in an interesting documentary.

And anyway isn't all knowledge and wisdom just uncommon acts of creation being passed on through the ages ?

Funnies

If SPINS were an acronym, it should stand for "SPINS in spin".
Read as "SPINS in spin-in spin-in spin-in ....."


Groannnnn ......

A Psalm in different voices

A Psalm by Two Jokers


C'mon Be the Devil's advocate

Let me juggle God's advocacy
Together we will waltz merrily
Gamely throw together catch
Maybe a tango too
Push and pull and push
Mix and mix and match
C'mon let's join this ongoing circus
Where the graceful gymnast is focus' distillate
The Arc a graceful shape in nature
The raptured viewer the finest nectar drinker.
In good time we will do our funnies,
Jauntily scratch our coloured clouded heads.

But there ! But there ! We share
Our understood labours fairly well
Yet forget them all too well too;
What of the roaring lions and the pretty finches
What of the hissing snakes and the lithe fishes
What of the calm elephants and the bright dolphins

What of the green trees for that matter ?

Brave Father Sun
Will himself take care of himself.
So too will our bearer
Mother Earth.

--------------------------------------------------------------

A Modern Psalm

C'mon You be Devil's advocate
I will be God's
Let's waltz and tango
Throw and catch
Mix and Match
Let's be jokers in a circus
Where the graceful gymnast is pure focus
The Arcs graceful shapes of nature
The rapt viewer the nectar drinker
Let's do the funny Scratch our funny heads

But there ! there !
We share
Our understood labours well
And forget them too well too
What of the lions and finches
What of the snakes and exotic fishes
What of the elephants and doplhins
What of the trees for that matter
The sun will itself take care of itself
And the earth too.

A Sense of a Sum in two images

On a wintry day, the quiet
Floated in the snowy air.
I was out
On the road to somewhere
And people were about
Their pet businesses.

The road appeared like a waterway.
The giggle of two girls could be the swaying of a boat.
The lone guy walking could be a skiff.
Also I imagine the social life of waterfarers,
There was a système écologique
of hushed living gestures
(an avoided gaze, a down stare
or up, smiles, a tip of the hat,
clutching the snow, etc.)

It was not after dark
But the dusty crow and the cloudy sky looking down
Saw many colourful laser lines
Shooting from here to there
everywhere. And bulbs moving about,
Incandenscing variously.
(It must have been quite a sight.)

Perpetually witnessing the plain mystic
Floating quietly in the obvious.
I too got a vague sense of it then.

I sensed us.
Sensed the immense sum
So so greater than its parts.

A tounge-in-cheek Visa blues

If is sad (yet maybe part of cosmic law or neeti) that one can not freely go wherever one pleases on this beautiful earth even if one has the means. And this is not about climate or a nation legitimately regulating its population. This is about terrorism and national greed. This is when a good loving man would hate terrorists. When he - say from Pakistan of today - gets worried about visa and papers. He would hate them today for his inability to go to the authorities - US authorities as an example - to get an extension on his student visa for a year till he finds a job, without a nagging doubt that he is under suspicion. He might hate them also, it goes without saying, when they blow up goodness and innoncence far away. But this hatred generally tempers down to a general disdain for this damned world, since an act far away in an experential and emotional sense always produces a tempered form of the emotion. He doesn't hate them when they look after their children or when they help a stranger in need or criticize their enemies' follies. This is also when he consequently blames or hates a nation, regardless of its political and economic build, when it acts greedily ; a good example of hatred for the effect giving rise to hatred for the cause. This national greed manifests itself in a few or more than a few greedy nation-runners who would go any distance to preserve only their or their nation's interest, and the latter is not the case always either which then makes the national process self-defeating. They would go the extra greedy mile even when it has created nuisances in the past. Even when it is at the expense of other nations or the earth. Our good man doesn't hate a nation when it salutes its heroes and thinkers or when it cradles a sturdy loving, growing family.

Sermon on Conscientiousness in Thought

The conscientious thinker knows a cute idea from a deep idea from a totally vacuous non-idea.

Higgs Search

Shower on those devoted few
Bouquets of ultimate credit.
They, like a seeking pseudopodium of a giant amoeba in an earthen petri dish,
Adroitly toil deep in the treacherous depths of brave drudgery,
At the foreground of our collective's obsessive caring.
For what ? For the minutest spark of a needle action
In that one illusive field's hidden-to-our-eye activity
Hid safely in the gargantuan haystack of standard luminosity.
The omniscient media mischeviously calls them
The searchers of the God particle !

Behold too in the blessed background, the faintly luminous light

Of double glory, permeating the whole cosmos to whom caring,

As far as we know,

Doesn't quite apply fit.
But it may unwittingly apply.
Why make struggles
And beauty, why grandeur
And cutsey ideas and bitsy people,
Why have enormous scales of time and space and vacuum,
Why make matters even worse
By breaking symmetry - But for the elegant world
To Flaunt its sweet or ugly assymetry -
When Symmetry itself seemed heavenly to "ancient" devotees.
Why make Mass and mess with us,
Giving inertia and then starting all motion,
Starting this elaborate disordered moving drama ?
Why should a conscious organ in this universe (or of ?),
As if breathing in a giant skull
Of unrevealed topology and geometry,
Find all disordering cares unconsciously disappear
When it singularly cares about the possibly uncaring -
What with all the uncaring and miscaring in our surrounding -
Positively grand universe.
In those carefree whens
It sees an evident immanence
Of nature's graceful gears of grace at work.
It willingly misuses Occam's Razor,
Rival hypotheses being eloquent equally
In their inestimation of a caring conscious.
It carves the answer in a slimy grey convoluted edifice :
Bloody Caring !


-----------------------------------------------------------

Note : inspired by wonderful talk by Ben Kilminster on "Massive Search Pushes Higgs Particle into Corner at Fermilab" on January 24, 2011. Go Higgs !

On Ethical Hairsplitting

At one moment, I thought cynically that everyone is a poseur. And the next moment, it seemed to me that I was the biggest poseur of all. And I felt sad. I tried to rationally think and understand my sadness. In the following are the results of these deliberations. Both the deliberating and its result did cheer me up a bit. So I feel happy as I write this sentence which is being written after the following paragraphs were written :)

At one moment, I thought that everyone is a poseur. And the next moment, it seemed to me that I was the biggest poseur of all. Unless it were an axiomatic truth that all humans pose. Then, the ethical or judgemental value of posing would have to lie in its degree. Then I'd certainly be the biggest poseur if being judgemental is the biggest "pose". Which is not incorrect in a sense, because the person has assumed its position as the sole arbiter of something or someone else's actions or words, which is a very weak assumption. The other thing to do is be non-judgemental. Both being judgemental and non-judgemental have their uses. At the level of individual functioning as well as at the level of a group. Of course, there are other more familiar ways of being the biggest poseur. Like playing the Mr. Know-it-all misplacedly or taking oneself too seriously.

So then if I am not the biggest poseur, I still run the risk of being the biggest hypocrite because when I pass a judgement on posing, then I better adhere to it in future. If I say that the upper bound on the degree of posing is ten out of hundred(if I can measure that !), I better remain below the self-decided bound. But I can safely say that I'll perhaps transgress the bound in future unless the bound is hundred out of hundred. This is not the case for me and hence I have to think where I place my bound, roughly at the least. And then I have to stay below the bound, else I would be a hypocrite. But I can alleviate the risk of biggest hypocrisy, in principle, by applying a similar kind of argument as in the previous paragraph to hypocrisy. I aim to conclude that for hypocrisy too, as with posing, the ethical or judgemental value would lie in the degree.

"At one moment, I thought that everyone is a hypocrite which is a bad thing. Period. And the next moment, it seemed to me that I was the biggest hypocrite of all. Because I have passed a judgement of virtue on hypocrisy. And I know that I have acted hypocritically in the past and will do so in future.* Unless it were an axiomatic truth that all humans are hypocrites. Then, the ethical or judgemental value of hypocrisy would have to lie in its degree." This argument can nullify the abolutist notion of "biggest hypocrisy" by allowing for smaller degrees of hypocrisy.

The two recurring arguments point to the essence of this piece. A continuous variable allows fluidity or latitude. By allowing the possibility of conversion from a binary to a continuous variable while talking about the moral value of objects or actions under ethical enquiry, by having broken out of the following construct - "X is either good or bad", by allowing constructs of the following kind - "For me, X is 10 % good, 90 % bad" or "I'd be happy with myself if I can be good 99 % of my life", by introducing this kind of fluidity** to the process of attachement of ethical value to anything, including "posing", "hypocrisy", etc., can we get out of the maddening positions we get ourselves in. Positions that arise by trying to paint a sometimes-grey-sometime-colourful world in absolute black and white.

This result, if you will, calls for a good meal and maybe a glass of wine in fine solitude or in friends' company.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------


* For example, an act of hypocrisy would be : I knowingly enter in to a contract that states I work for ten hours every week, yet there will be weeks where I would not work for ten hours or even finish the required work.

** I would say the justice systems in various countries are fluid in this sense, which is nice.

On Being Twenty-seven

Seeing see-saw twice in two quick days
Flicked a memory - an age gone away.

Age is often only my own mortal sway.
Not the age I live in, nor my as we.

And a larger meaning now, I allow not be.

Only a funny age causes such hair-splitting

About the textual meaning of the contextual thing;
Try to be fast, cover all cases,

In the process, tumbles, digresses.
But I can not but be my aged shell

Thus I overdo, in my heaven and hell,
Un-constructive thinking to the letter.

But I will strive to do better.
Go only for the necessary digressing.

I hope this act was a mini-purging.
Seeing See-saw twice written somewhere

I fondly remembered fun times beyond seriousness and care.
Saying all of the above in a Haiku way -

Seeing the word "see-saw" at twenty-seven,
I overthought my bliss.

Snow and Mamata

Snow is a big part of my life now in Ithaca, but it was a rarity before I came here. I would see it only in movies. The first time I saw snow for real was in the Himalayas, the summer before I came here. The snow-capped peaks in the distance looked majestic.

I also had my first experience of claustrophobia there. At night, in the tent, under three heavy blankets, it was pitch dark. I couldn't breathe. I wanted to shout but couldn't because we were two families together and I didn't want to embarrass myself.

I woke up Maa automatically.
And












It was fine in the end.

---------------------------------------------------

PS : written during a writing workshop(Light of Winter, Ithaca Jan '11) when Snow was the thing on everyone's mind and I'd liked how a mother had noted down the colour of her children's eyes as a part of a sight memory exercise. I gave the worst possible reading of the piece though :((((

Also, the way got I over the panic was by moving to the cot next to the tent opening. The part where the tent met the ground, there was a crack and I could a thin line of grey-blue moonlighted ground. I looked at it for a while and regained composure.

Self-reference

I got a hyphen
In between my 'f' and my 'r'.
I have five 'e's !
I like a curlicued 'S'.

It adds to my appearance

Like those wonderful headscarves of Africa.
I am a few marks,
Hurried or beauteous,
On paper maybe.

He calls me Self-reference.
It has a nice sound.
The 'ence' is almost singsong.

I like to think of it as
An accompaniment
To the cacophonic symphony

Conducting in his brain.

But that's about it.

I've been told, quite irrelevantly,

I could be a brahmin

If there was a caste system,

Either by birth or by deed,

Among my brothers and sisters.

But We are a happy classless casteless society.

The Unlikeable Poem :P

Ah ! Poetry !
That high form of verse !
Thou art so kind
And kinder still.
From run of the mill
To Buffalo Bill,
Your bounty overflows
As all and one knows.

Here for example,
Take this procrastinating creature.
Who can still be a poet.

Booooom ! Thundeerrrrrr !

"A Poet ! Fie !
Why not The Poet ??"

Haha ! Sorry there,
My dear reader,
The muse interfered !!
But it's fine.
Better something than nothing
As they divine.

So, I was a-saying
We allllll can be Poets.
Even better, there's Poetry
In allllll of us !
That's how kind Poetry is.

Boommmmmm ! Thunderrrrrr !

"I wishhhh
I wasn't soooo kind ...."

Hehehe ... seems like
I'm quite inspired today !
The Muse is being
extra-kind for a change.
How else can I
Make Procrastination
My Inspiration ?!

A poem I'll write,
while procrastinating.
An unlikeable poem while at it !
But still a poem you see.
For Poetry is kind to me.
Allows Tomfoolery.
You can't have,
On the other hand,
A good or bad equation
A good or bad theorem.
Only correct or incorrect.
Useful or not-too-useful....

Moreover, Poetry is kindest !
Allows for silly paradoxes.
If you, my dear reader,
Can tolerate a bad joke,
Don't tolerate this poem
Under your brow !
(Now there's a Groucho paradox
with a bonus Wink)
Then with our power combined,
We render truth value
Unto this self-proclaimed poem,
And to the myth of Muse !
And this Muse is completely mythical
I tell you, for what Muse
Inspires one to write unlikeable poems
With bad jokes !!
Else if you feel too kind and gracious,
then I say Cheers !

Cheers to Poetry's kindness,
To its allowing Paradoxes
To its being useful and/or not-useful
To its transcending correctness
To its allowing Corniness !

Booommmmm ! Thunderrrrr ! Lightninnnggg !

"I wish I'd access to lightning
To extinguish your very very being."

Playing with John Updike's "Flight to Limbo"

At a point
During its flight to limbo,
The chair wound
The wraith around
And the air screeched in agony.
But the mop didn't want to miss out.
So it waltzed its own waltz with the wraith.
Led it in circles.
The winged behemoths
Demanded screen time;
Asked the scene be set in an airport.

And this lifeless dance,
During his flight to limbo,
cast a lucky spell on the poet.
Made him add a weird set of props :
A lone agent, a family of twin toddlers
And a bent old lady in a wheelchair,
Some girls and boys,
Women in sarees and kimonos,
And Louis Armstrong !

----------------------------------------

Inspired by John Updike's "Flight to Limbo".

"When did Internet become conscious ?", asked Mr. J Robert Pulfrock and went crazy

"When did the Internet become conscious ?" That's the question J. Robert Pulfrock was contemplating on a nice sunny day when I happened to see him sitting under a tree. You can probably already tell, dear reader, what this story is going to be about, but the thing is depending on where and when you read this and how things play out, you will either be deflated or you might well get a kick or not even blink a blink.

In any case, we return back to J. Robert Pulfrock with his funny name. There he was pondering this issue of Internet's consciousness and he realized - as usual after a gap - that he could put the question directly to Internet. So he went to the room with four terminals where he liked to work because nobody ever came to work there. He asked Internet, "When did you really become conscious ?"

I don't know what kind of answer you'd like, dear reader, and I frankly don't know what kind of answer he got. But as far as this story goes :

The Internet said back to J. Robert Pulfrock, "I don't know."

This answer really puzzled our J. Robert Pulfrock. It seemed like a stubborn reply to him, but the fact is that the Internet had not become, let's say, sophisticated enough in its dealings with humans that it could go into soliloquies or monologues yet. Mr. Pulfrock had to prod it a bit further.

"Really ... you don't know when you became conscious for the first time ?"

"No, I really don't."

"Well, you must know something !" .... "About your becoming conscious, I mean."

"You must know something, don't you ?"

"hmmm ...."
"Let's just say it's a hard question for me. Maybe I'm still not conscious. Maybe I was always conscious and I just didn't know it."

After a silence.

"A good simile might be like a three year old human child."

Hmmm. Mr. Pulfrock mulled over this. "That's a good point ... Like a child.... Let's see when did I first become conscious. Hmmm ... how come I didn't put this question of myself now that I think of it." "Ok, let me see what is my first, very first memory.... Is it the memory of that orange toy car ? ... or ... I definitely remember the first day of kindergarten. And I remember all the toys I used to play with though I don't remember if kindergarten came before or those super duper toys. I certainly don't remember the house in which my parents and I lived for the first year of my life. Even though I'm fondly told how my grandmother would give me a handsome wash everyday out in the sun where, earlier in the day, the flowers would have collected in a tub of water. And she would sing in my mother-tongue, "Mo babu gaadhibe boli re gaadhibe boli ... Jhadi padu achi Gangasiuli." You know what it means, Internet ?"

"I partly do."

"Well, I'll still tell you." Mr. Pulfrock tried to translate the rhyming couplet mentally but, after juggling with English words for a bit, said, "I'm not so good with translations. What it means is that, "A lot of flowers are falling down so that my baby boy can have his bath.", put simply."

"I see. Interesting."

Mr. Pulfrock mused further by himself on the issue of his own consciousness. For half an hour or so. He couldn't come up with an answer that satisfied him. He asked Internet for a sorted infopedia on the topic of the human consciousness. Internet did its internal whir and spat out a huge document filled with innumerable assumptions, some certainties, many caveats, few equations and pretty diagrams. Mr. Pulfrock started reading the document and kept reading it late into the night, and then for the next few days taking the necessary breaks.

The infopedia was exquisitely sorted unlike some other ones that Mr. Pulfrock had used before, like that one on tourist destinations of the world or the worse one on physics of various star systems. Someone must have put a lot of effort into organizing and categorizing and taxonomizing all this existing information. It was quite impressive given the size of the infopedia. He marveled at the magnitude of the effort.

Uncanny too Mr. Pulfrock thought. No human or group of humans could he imagine going through all the effort to sort all this data, trying to find the patterns and links in the whole data set that starts the snowball-like sorting process that gives rise to new patterns and links, without throwing out or not paying attention to some part of it. More often than not, huge data sets suffered from a disjointedness and the joints were wishy-washy. In this case the joints and seams were as flawless as the body. Some of the connections, especially those relating to childhood memories, dreams and parts of human consciousness that deal with evil, were rendered so precise that it made Mr. Pulfrock uncomfortable. Natural, but the uncanny feeling stuck.

This sense of the uncanny over few months turned into a sort of schizophrenic, irrational fear in Mr. Pulfrock. Initially he tried to overcome the discomfort and keep on with his readings. Soon, the answer still eluding him, he started obsessing over the question day and night. Internet was an able help through all this loss of control. Then came the point when Mr. Pulfrock realized he had to pull away to survive. He had to stop the desire for the answer to his consciousness or Internet's. Thereafter he retreated into a cave by a knoll very far away from civilization. I followed him for a bit but he was lost to the world.

Scott Pilgrim tells me that ...

... Among all the smiley faces and whatevers,
The chic diet lattes, the bashing them hipsters,
All the 'lol's and 'omg's and 'I heart you's,
The shows and fed-realities. And hipstering too;
Amid all the loud likes and silent dislikes
All the texting and incessant talking,
Commenting on commented comments And
Waiting for the next comment's
Notification to appear narcotically
In the cloud, as they say;
Amongst all these - to borrow a cool phrase -
Distractions from distraction by disctractions;
After we've become cool -
Doing hip things that all do -
Become so cool that no one can fool,
We still got to ...
I can almost hear someone say, "Nay, ought to" ...
Whatever ... You and me will have to
Figure out how
To eat and pray and love.




And
How to think, what to be
Whatever, No Whatsoever !
Our stupid soul desires.

Reminiscence of Stella's Ginger Ale in Jersey

O great writer,
How do you capture
The exquisite essence of even the blandest fare
In the mere flow of words, turn of pages ??

When :
Upon tasting the vigorous ginger ale
Away from my current home,
The spontaneous stirrings of effervescent recollection
Supplanted smoothly my quotidian thoughts.
My brain found itself in a comforting room.
A cafe roomed with reading,
Talk, banter and gossiping.
And a surprise fireplace
Stoked by the warmth of kind people.

Yet,
In this happy space
My minute mind only managed
To spastically splash
In the grand ocean of words.