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.

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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.

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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 !


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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.


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* 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.

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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.