Quests have defined every past stage of life. Love, perfect grades, popularity, acceptance, better grades yet again, mastery over mathematics, driving away loneliness, seeking togetherness, seeking orgasmic conclusions, time - always time, a child, a desire to live the world through a child’s eyes again, more money, better homes, better cars, better jobs, respect at work, more friends, love again. There are quests and there are quests and they vary by age, by levels of maturity or immaturity. We were born to search, hard wired for searching,for blind searching, our targets always moving, the landscape forever changing and adjusting, moving in and out of focus.
And so we muddle through discontent, seeking greener pastures, higher curves of indifference and constant trade-offs and compromises as we progress through our lives, swimming through a sea of molasses of our own creation. We come to the forks in the road and we take them, laying out a road map or a bridge for ourselves as we go along, or, viewed alternatively, perhaps hacking away at the very branch on which we sit. And life happens to us, without our realizing when or how it happened, it just happens. We collect our share of joy, of angst, we make enemies and friends, we get angry, we laugh and then the sun sets and it’s time for a new day.
Every past experience helps us understand how futile our blind efforts are and how we are mere specks in the grand scheme of things but it doesn’t stop us from writhing in agony one moment and exultant the next, always in disequilibrium and disruptive of the equilibrium when we do manage to achieve it. So what do we do now?
Speaking for myself, I appear to have skated through life in excellent form, each transition from the moment a thought took shape within the nooks and crannies of my brain to the time of execution, all in one flawless motion.
We all suffer from this fear of relishing our good fortune. We are not supposed to talk about how lucky we’ve been as we’ve spun the wheels of life or as we’ve dodged each bullet in life’s Russian roulette, for if we talk about it we jinx it. We must be humble, we must count all our blessings whenever we are faced with misery and woes all around us and say a soft prayer that things work out in a similar fashion for all those who we know and love. I am as fearful as the fellow human beings I describe. For ‘skating’ is never as grounded as walking, as the act of planting each foot firmly on the ground, one after another. Skating has an element of defiance, of challenging Him, thumbing our noses at Him, showing him we are better and faster and overall, immune. It is a refusal to acknowledge that He who allowed us to skate might bring us to the edge of a precipice with equal ease and that the brakes on skates are never terribly efficient, especially when our senses are dulled with complacence.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I have reached this ‘edge’. Any moment now, I’ll see the world drop off into an abyss. Am I on alert, will I be able to see it coming? My quest now is for the wisdom, the intuition, and the reserves that would prepare me for this abseiling adventure. Others have gone before me, many have missed their cues, and many have proven themselves expert rappellers. Where will I land? Will I slow down and stop in time as I see the precipice approaching? I seek a stop sign; I seek a sign that says – “Danger Ahead”. Oh and yes, a rope a strong rope! That is now the quest.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Friday, April 28, 2006
Chocolate Soda
This is just an observation; I haven’t quite processed it or thought about it in any deeper or more meaningful way. Perhaps I am still in shock.
If one has been in and around New York City, chances are one will see many an unusual sight. Couples sleeping on the sidewalk, tangled arms and legs, oblivious to the sounds of a waking city, people stoned out of their minds or drunk and wildly gesticulating, pointing fingers at everyone. These are sights one has come to expect and ignore without even a single, slightly raised eyebrow. Nothing can shock a New Yorker they say and they are mostly right. But just when you think you are at your cynical best you see a sight so strange that the only reaction you can summon is an unending stare of complete incredulity.
I was waiting for my bus at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, getting ready to go home. Saw the same people and faces all around and casually glanced at a man who looked somewhat down and out and was waiting on a bench. His grocery store plastic bag was lying on the floor. I first noted it because there were Oreo cookie crumbs scattered all around the bag, on the floor. I remember thinking what a messy guy he was. And then I looked away.
20 minutes went by, the bus still hadn’t arrived and my restless eyes once again turned toward the man on the bench. This time he was eating a chocolate bar, nothing unusual about eating a chocolate bar. So I turned away once again, trying to concentrate on the music strains filling my ears through my headphones. And I waited and waited and decided it was time to glance at my watch again. The bus still hadn’t arrived. Naturally, in my restlessness I caught sight of the man again. This time the floor was littered with 5 half eaten chocolate bars. The man was busy rummaging though his plastic bag. He pulled out a 20 oz. Bottle of Coca Cola Classic and emptied exactly half of it in a swig. He then pulled out a 20 oz. Bottle of Iced tea and did the same. Next came a similar bottle of Slice and he did the same thing. This went on until he had a collection of half-finished soda bottles neatly arrayed on the floor in front of him. The bus was only of limited interest now. Every passenger in my line wanted to see what he would do next. He was engrossed, intent and showed a single-mindedness that was enviable. He then reached for his bag of Oreo cookies again. He started breaking each one into tiny little pieces and proceeded to push each broken piece through the narrow neck of the bottle. Eventually he had emptied two bags of Oreos into his Coke bottle. Once the cookie bags were empty, he reached for his half eaten chocolate bars. The process was the same, he broke the bar into little pieces and kept packing them first into his bottle of Coke, then into his bottle of Iced tea and finally into his Slice.
What was this man doing? My brain was screaming, silent glances were being exchanged with fellow travelers and several heads were being shaken in complete disgust. There was enough sugar in those bottles to send anyone into a complete diabetic coma! Did he intend to consume these frightening concoctions at a later time? Was this a novel hunger management solution? Did he plan to consume enough calories for the rest of his life? Was he headed for a deserted island? Or was it the cure for withdrawal symptoms from some drug?
The man was unperturbed by our stares, we were scarred for life. Even the sight of chocolate bars has nauseated me over the last couple of days. An unforgettable image, a sad image, one that makes you wonder about lives and preoccupations other than yours.
If one has been in and around New York City, chances are one will see many an unusual sight. Couples sleeping on the sidewalk, tangled arms and legs, oblivious to the sounds of a waking city, people stoned out of their minds or drunk and wildly gesticulating, pointing fingers at everyone. These are sights one has come to expect and ignore without even a single, slightly raised eyebrow. Nothing can shock a New Yorker they say and they are mostly right. But just when you think you are at your cynical best you see a sight so strange that the only reaction you can summon is an unending stare of complete incredulity.
I was waiting for my bus at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, getting ready to go home. Saw the same people and faces all around and casually glanced at a man who looked somewhat down and out and was waiting on a bench. His grocery store plastic bag was lying on the floor. I first noted it because there were Oreo cookie crumbs scattered all around the bag, on the floor. I remember thinking what a messy guy he was. And then I looked away.
20 minutes went by, the bus still hadn’t arrived and my restless eyes once again turned toward the man on the bench. This time he was eating a chocolate bar, nothing unusual about eating a chocolate bar. So I turned away once again, trying to concentrate on the music strains filling my ears through my headphones. And I waited and waited and decided it was time to glance at my watch again. The bus still hadn’t arrived. Naturally, in my restlessness I caught sight of the man again. This time the floor was littered with 5 half eaten chocolate bars. The man was busy rummaging though his plastic bag. He pulled out a 20 oz. Bottle of Coca Cola Classic and emptied exactly half of it in a swig. He then pulled out a 20 oz. Bottle of Iced tea and did the same. Next came a similar bottle of Slice and he did the same thing. This went on until he had a collection of half-finished soda bottles neatly arrayed on the floor in front of him. The bus was only of limited interest now. Every passenger in my line wanted to see what he would do next. He was engrossed, intent and showed a single-mindedness that was enviable. He then reached for his bag of Oreo cookies again. He started breaking each one into tiny little pieces and proceeded to push each broken piece through the narrow neck of the bottle. Eventually he had emptied two bags of Oreos into his Coke bottle. Once the cookie bags were empty, he reached for his half eaten chocolate bars. The process was the same, he broke the bar into little pieces and kept packing them first into his bottle of Coke, then into his bottle of Iced tea and finally into his Slice.
What was this man doing? My brain was screaming, silent glances were being exchanged with fellow travelers and several heads were being shaken in complete disgust. There was enough sugar in those bottles to send anyone into a complete diabetic coma! Did he intend to consume these frightening concoctions at a later time? Was this a novel hunger management solution? Did he plan to consume enough calories for the rest of his life? Was he headed for a deserted island? Or was it the cure for withdrawal symptoms from some drug?
The man was unperturbed by our stares, we were scarred for life. Even the sight of chocolate bars has nauseated me over the last couple of days. An unforgettable image, a sad image, one that makes you wonder about lives and preoccupations other than yours.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Land
Bettiah, a dot on the map of Eastern India, in the heart of Champaran – the land of indigo farmers – where Gandhi started his fight for an independent India in 1919. My grandfather was a part of Gandhi’s movement. Someone who was repeatedly jailed for his resistance to the British and suffered many a lathi charge at their hands.
My Dad grew up here, he is proud of saying he had “basic education” here, then a new concept in schooling. He learnt how to weave his own cloth and didn’t wear anything but loom spun cloth – also known as khadi – until he went to college. All these stories of his growing up, in the acres upon acres of fertile, rice-growing land owned by his family, in and out of neighboring homes where everyone was a distant relative, drinking milk fresh from the cow, plucking and eating mangoes and lichis straight off the trees and owning a piece of land, that was so pleasantly known as the phulwari, they provide a sense of nostalgia for me (that’s if one is allowed to be nostalgic about things one hasn’t experienced first hand). This land came alive for me in these stories.
And they weren’t all just stories, I did visit during summer vacations from school. I remember riding in the front carriage of Khalil’s bike as he took me around the fields, the mango orchards and his home. I can still reconstruct our ancestral home from memory. It was a large house facing the community pond. There was a well on the left and a small cottage a few steps away where my grandfather’s younger brother – my granduncle – used to practice his yoga. As kids my cousins and I used to converge upon his cottage so he could give us the sugar candy we call misri.
I have fond memories of sleeping outside in the large courtyard that was surrounded by rooms on all sides, listening to someone telling a story or playing antakshari with my cousins. Some long-lasting impressions were made here.
1981 was probably the last time I visited. As a shallow teenager the ancestral home, its secret corners, hide and seek games of earlier youth had all ceased to fascinate. The heat, the dust, the mosquitoes and the severely curtailed freedoms of movement and attire that a growing girl faced in a place like Champaran had sucked all the fun out of these visits.
Twenty four years later I often think about my roots, my beginnings. We have a family tree that can be traced back to 12 generations or more, my roots go deep unlike most of my acquaintances in this country who often express a strong desire to retrace their roots and aren’t able to. But this knowledge, this realization - what if anything does it mean to me? I have a sense that I must value it but it doesn’t inspire anything other than occasional nostalgia. I feel a twinge of guilt that this may be even less meaningful to my daughter, unless she grows up to be a searcher, a seeker, who feels incomplete and has an intense desire to live and breathe the same air as her ancestors, even for a short period of time. It could happen, she might want to strap on a backpack and say – Mom, I want to visit Champaran - I might even let her go, despite being worried sick, more about a disappointment I sense she may feel than about her safety; the latter being something that’s a given.
I sense she may be disappointed because things have changed. My parents went back home for the first time in several years this year. They had intended to spend a couple of weeks there but were back in 5 days. The mosquitoes and the general discomfort only on the fringes of the major disappointment at a villager squatting on a broken cot in the corner of the courtyard with his goats tethered nearby. This was the flourishing stronghold of our very large and extended family. This is where my grandmother reigned supreme all those years ago; servants, visitors, vendors were in and out all day and now there was a lonely man and his goats! The walls were crumbling, the roof was leaking and sadness reigned supreme. What will things be like when the backpacking bug is upon Anoushka?
We deserted our hometown, we haven’t the slightest connection to it now and it isn’t something that happened with my generation. Dad tells a story of when he first went home after returning from the US, PhD degree in hand. He was conversing with a woman who had attended to him when he was a baby, his nursemaid perhaps. She had lovingly asked if he was coming back for good and my Dad had suggested there was nothing to return to, there were no prospects. Several years down the line, my Dad was older and I was old enough to appreciate things more deeply, I was stunned to hear what he told me the woman had said to him when he had mentioned the lack of prospects, this unlettered woman who had never set foot outside the village, had said “Here my child, there’s land!” Of course the sentence loses a world of meaning in its translation from Bhojpuri. But there we have it – back to the roots – to land. What can one possibly lack when one has land? I often think of her remark. I don’t even know why I do, but I do all the same.
Speaking of land, and as an aside, is something that triggered the above; a highly detailed map that a friend shared with me when I told him my parents were in Bettiah last week. He pulled up a satellite mapping of the entire region. I had never known any geographical details about Bettiah, other than knowing it was in Bihar, in Champaran and close to the Indo-Nepal border. Here it is showcased in great detail with roads, neighboring cities, the whole lot! One can even see Motihari to the east of Bettiah – the birthplace of George Orwell. Have never had a clearer picture of the land of our ancestors. Perhaps Google Earth or other such technology will save us all the hassle of Anoushka expressing the desire (if she ever does) to actually go there! So much is increasingly possible, virtually!
My Dad grew up here, he is proud of saying he had “basic education” here, then a new concept in schooling. He learnt how to weave his own cloth and didn’t wear anything but loom spun cloth – also known as khadi – until he went to college. All these stories of his growing up, in the acres upon acres of fertile, rice-growing land owned by his family, in and out of neighboring homes where everyone was a distant relative, drinking milk fresh from the cow, plucking and eating mangoes and lichis straight off the trees and owning a piece of land, that was so pleasantly known as the phulwari, they provide a sense of nostalgia for me (that’s if one is allowed to be nostalgic about things one hasn’t experienced first hand). This land came alive for me in these stories.
And they weren’t all just stories, I did visit during summer vacations from school. I remember riding in the front carriage of Khalil’s bike as he took me around the fields, the mango orchards and his home. I can still reconstruct our ancestral home from memory. It was a large house facing the community pond. There was a well on the left and a small cottage a few steps away where my grandfather’s younger brother – my granduncle – used to practice his yoga. As kids my cousins and I used to converge upon his cottage so he could give us the sugar candy we call misri.
I have fond memories of sleeping outside in the large courtyard that was surrounded by rooms on all sides, listening to someone telling a story or playing antakshari with my cousins. Some long-lasting impressions were made here.
1981 was probably the last time I visited. As a shallow teenager the ancestral home, its secret corners, hide and seek games of earlier youth had all ceased to fascinate. The heat, the dust, the mosquitoes and the severely curtailed freedoms of movement and attire that a growing girl faced in a place like Champaran had sucked all the fun out of these visits.
Twenty four years later I often think about my roots, my beginnings. We have a family tree that can be traced back to 12 generations or more, my roots go deep unlike most of my acquaintances in this country who often express a strong desire to retrace their roots and aren’t able to. But this knowledge, this realization - what if anything does it mean to me? I have a sense that I must value it but it doesn’t inspire anything other than occasional nostalgia. I feel a twinge of guilt that this may be even less meaningful to my daughter, unless she grows up to be a searcher, a seeker, who feels incomplete and has an intense desire to live and breathe the same air as her ancestors, even for a short period of time. It could happen, she might want to strap on a backpack and say – Mom, I want to visit Champaran - I might even let her go, despite being worried sick, more about a disappointment I sense she may feel than about her safety; the latter being something that’s a given.
I sense she may be disappointed because things have changed. My parents went back home for the first time in several years this year. They had intended to spend a couple of weeks there but were back in 5 days. The mosquitoes and the general discomfort only on the fringes of the major disappointment at a villager squatting on a broken cot in the corner of the courtyard with his goats tethered nearby. This was the flourishing stronghold of our very large and extended family. This is where my grandmother reigned supreme all those years ago; servants, visitors, vendors were in and out all day and now there was a lonely man and his goats! The walls were crumbling, the roof was leaking and sadness reigned supreme. What will things be like when the backpacking bug is upon Anoushka?
We deserted our hometown, we haven’t the slightest connection to it now and it isn’t something that happened with my generation. Dad tells a story of when he first went home after returning from the US, PhD degree in hand. He was conversing with a woman who had attended to him when he was a baby, his nursemaid perhaps. She had lovingly asked if he was coming back for good and my Dad had suggested there was nothing to return to, there were no prospects. Several years down the line, my Dad was older and I was old enough to appreciate things more deeply, I was stunned to hear what he told me the woman had said to him when he had mentioned the lack of prospects, this unlettered woman who had never set foot outside the village, had said “Here my child, there’s land!” Of course the sentence loses a world of meaning in its translation from Bhojpuri. But there we have it – back to the roots – to land. What can one possibly lack when one has land? I often think of her remark. I don’t even know why I do, but I do all the same.
Speaking of land, and as an aside, is something that triggered the above; a highly detailed map that a friend shared with me when I told him my parents were in Bettiah last week. He pulled up a satellite mapping of the entire region. I had never known any geographical details about Bettiah, other than knowing it was in Bihar, in Champaran and close to the Indo-Nepal border. Here it is showcased in great detail with roads, neighboring cities, the whole lot! One can even see Motihari to the east of Bettiah – the birthplace of George Orwell. Have never had a clearer picture of the land of our ancestors. Perhaps Google Earth or other such technology will save us all the hassle of Anoushka expressing the desire (if she ever does) to actually go there! So much is increasingly possible, virtually!
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Writers' Duplicity
It is always fascinating to hear or read words that voice an opinion or thoughts that one has been considering for sometime. I don't fancy myself a writer yet (one day I'll call myself that) but if the words below generally hold true for all writers, perhaps I am a fraction of the way there. Nadine Gordimer's words, noted below, were stunning to me:
Powers of observation heightened beyond the normal imply extraordinary disinvolvement: or rather the double process, excessive preoccupation and identification with the lives of others, and at the same time a monstrous detachment…The tension between standing apart and being fully involved: that is what makes a writer.
- Nadine Gordimer, Introduction, Selected Stories
Powers of observation heightened beyond the normal imply extraordinary disinvolvement: or rather the double process, excessive preoccupation and identification with the lives of others, and at the same time a monstrous detachment…The tension between standing apart and being fully involved: that is what makes a writer.
- Nadine Gordimer, Introduction, Selected Stories
Intelligent Design
This is somewhat dated, had written it at the time Scopes II was in full force in PA. Just never had a chance to blog it.
THE SCENE: White walls, billowing white curtains, white furniture, 90 inch plasma TV on the wall – streaming CNN. Charles Darwin watching legal proceedings, riveted, increasingly agitated. There are others in a club-like setting, some other eminent personalities of the 20th century, mingling, conversing, playing billiards or bridge. God strolls in, greeting people with nods and handshakes, walks up to Darwin.
GOD: (Resting his hand on Darwin’s shoulder) What’s the matter Charlie my boy? Why so glum?
DARWIN: (Shrugs off the hand) Leave me alone!
GOD: C’mon! Don’t be such a grouch, tell me.
DARWIN: (Pouting) You are God aren’t you? So figure it out! You already know what’s bothering me!
GOD: Aww….don’t let it bother you.
DARWIN: They say there are inexplicable “gaps” in my theory!! Gaps, for Chrissake! (raising arms in frustration)
GOD: Now, now, leave Jesus out of this!
DARWIN: Sorry! But how much longer did they expect me to stay in the Galapagos Islands? I wanted to come home. There are only so many gigantic turtles a man can appreciate! So there are a few gaps, so what? Why don’t they close the gaps? They’ve landed on the moon and they can’t close some miserable gaps! The missing link! I would have found it had you left me there. But no you had to bring me here, I was only 73, the world at my feet!
GOD: They will close the gaps, my child, they will.
DARWIN: What do you care? You just love that limelight don’t you? You can’t even keep that smile off your face!
GOD: Calm down child! Enjoy these wide open spaces. Eternal rest.
DARWIN: Easy for you to say! Did you watch CNN today? Oh silly me! You don’t need to watch CNN, you just know! It probably made your day!
GOD: What’s really bothering you my child?
DARWIN: It’s the word “Intelligent”
GOD: A fine word! Why does it upset you so?
DARWIN: Sheer effrontery! They are laughing at me. Discrediting my life’s work. “Intelligent” as opposed to what? Has this ever happened to you?
GOD: Has this ever happened to me he asks! (Rolling his eyes)
DARWIN: Oh, spare me that forlorn look! You sit there, beatific smile in place. Thou Mayst! That’s all you can say. The rest is for us to figure out! Well I did. I spilled the beans, showed them exactly how it all happened. But do they want to believe me? No sirree! They even tried to discredit me on my deathbed…that Hope woman – said there had been a recantation! Why would I recant my life’s work?
GOD: Well, I took care of her didn’t I? She’s over there on the other side.
DARWIN: Thanks! That was so kind of you! (Sarcastically)
[Clarence Darrow, smoothing down his Spencer Tracy coiffure, walks up to Darwin and God]
DARROW: Hey there! Charlie, God, what’s happening?
GOD: Just trying to cheer Charlie up.
DARROW: What’s eating you old boy?
DARWIN: They are after me again.
DARROW: Who?
DARWIN: Those folks you took to task in Tennessee.
DARROW: Don’t tell me! Again? I thought I settled the matter once and for all.
DARWIN: Apparently not. Scopes II they’re calling it. It’s His Own Country after all, your country, Clarence! They are one nation under God! Parents are pulling their kids out of school, saying they won’t send them back until the kids are given the option to study “Intelligent Design”!
GOD: Boys, what can I say. It’s that kid George! Science was never his cup of tea! But he is just so adorable with those big ears and those beady eyes. And he has such an endearing way of chewing the insides of his cheek when that brain of his goes blank. He is just too cute. But I do admit, I have been over-indulgent with him. I have such a soft spot for him, he needs me so much, poor chap! I feel guilty about short-changing him up here (pointing to brain), I know I am always compensating for that (looks down, shamefaced). I let him have his first term. (recollecting with a nostalgic smile) Ah those butterfly ballots and hanging chads! What fun! I really had myself a laugh!
[Darwin and Darrow look at each other in sheer disbelief]
DARWIN: (Shaking head in disbelief)You just love hearing how you made the Earth in six days, don’t you?
DARROW: (Laughing) You are stirring some fine memories there Charles! That chap William Jennings Bryan, strutting around in court, fingers hooked in his waist-pocket, quoting the Bible left and right, had him blubbering! Remember how I asked him if he really believed the Earth was made in six days? (Wiping tears from laughing) He said, he said…well not six 24 hour days…they were more like periods…Ha, ha, ha! Periods!! Poor chap, died two days after the trial.
GOD: That wasn’t very nice of you Clarence! These are my children with special needs, they are…what’s the “politically correct” term….mentally challenged….not much up there (pointing to brain). I help them when I can. They are my children too. You guys could always take care of yourselves. You’ve understood me through science. But these Williams Jennings Bryans, George Bushes, Liz Doles…they’re weak and sometimes, if I don’t watch over them they’re like putty in Lucifer’s hands. You have no idea how difficult it is for me to maintain this delicate balance. (Annoyed) All you ever do is whine, whine, whine!
DARWIN: (Not appeased) But God! They’re going to stop teaching evolution in schools! Do you really want to keep them in the dark?
GOD: Charlie, Charlie, look at yourself! Don’t let them do this to you! Have you lost faith in your own theory? Natural selection my son! What happened to the dodos? What happened to Bryans? And look at the Coelacanth – 400 million years and still going strong – it prevailed. Have faith in the power of living fossils my dear! You were right and you know it!
DARROW: (consoling Darwin) Yes Charlie, God’s right! This time the plaintiffs are those who support you! See it’s a nation divided. You’re plugged into eternal CNN, don’t you recall the map with the red states and the blue states? Only half the country believes He (pointing toward God) said “Voila!” and a “flat” (waving arms, gesturing a flat surface) Earth appeared in six…ahem (trying to suppress another bout of laughing) er…periods! Well Chuck…ever come across any lemmings in your journeys? Seems to me these folks in the red states will go the lemmings’ way pretty soon – one after another, right down that point where the Earth ends! Don’t you worry!
GOD: Yes my boy. This too shall pass just like it did 80 ..er….periods ago in Dayton, Tennessee. Now watch MTV why don’t you? Get your mind off things! You’ll be amazed at the show Jagger and his gang’s still putting on! That energy! Wow! You were down flat on your bed giving that idiot woman the impression you were recanting! (Winks at Darwin and Darrow and moves on, mingling with Einstein next)
THE SCENE: White walls, billowing white curtains, white furniture, 90 inch plasma TV on the wall – streaming CNN. Charles Darwin watching legal proceedings, riveted, increasingly agitated. There are others in a club-like setting, some other eminent personalities of the 20th century, mingling, conversing, playing billiards or bridge. God strolls in, greeting people with nods and handshakes, walks up to Darwin.
GOD: (Resting his hand on Darwin’s shoulder) What’s the matter Charlie my boy? Why so glum?
DARWIN: (Shrugs off the hand) Leave me alone!
GOD: C’mon! Don’t be such a grouch, tell me.
DARWIN: (Pouting) You are God aren’t you? So figure it out! You already know what’s bothering me!
GOD: Aww….don’t let it bother you.
DARWIN: They say there are inexplicable “gaps” in my theory!! Gaps, for Chrissake! (raising arms in frustration)
GOD: Now, now, leave Jesus out of this!
DARWIN: Sorry! But how much longer did they expect me to stay in the Galapagos Islands? I wanted to come home. There are only so many gigantic turtles a man can appreciate! So there are a few gaps, so what? Why don’t they close the gaps? They’ve landed on the moon and they can’t close some miserable gaps! The missing link! I would have found it had you left me there. But no you had to bring me here, I was only 73, the world at my feet!
GOD: They will close the gaps, my child, they will.
DARWIN: What do you care? You just love that limelight don’t you? You can’t even keep that smile off your face!
GOD: Calm down child! Enjoy these wide open spaces. Eternal rest.
DARWIN: Easy for you to say! Did you watch CNN today? Oh silly me! You don’t need to watch CNN, you just know! It probably made your day!
GOD: What’s really bothering you my child?
DARWIN: It’s the word “Intelligent”
GOD: A fine word! Why does it upset you so?
DARWIN: Sheer effrontery! They are laughing at me. Discrediting my life’s work. “Intelligent” as opposed to what? Has this ever happened to you?
GOD: Has this ever happened to me he asks! (Rolling his eyes)
DARWIN: Oh, spare me that forlorn look! You sit there, beatific smile in place. Thou Mayst! That’s all you can say. The rest is for us to figure out! Well I did. I spilled the beans, showed them exactly how it all happened. But do they want to believe me? No sirree! They even tried to discredit me on my deathbed…that Hope woman – said there had been a recantation! Why would I recant my life’s work?
GOD: Well, I took care of her didn’t I? She’s over there on the other side.
DARWIN: Thanks! That was so kind of you! (Sarcastically)
[Clarence Darrow, smoothing down his Spencer Tracy coiffure, walks up to Darwin and God]
DARROW: Hey there! Charlie, God, what’s happening?
GOD: Just trying to cheer Charlie up.
DARROW: What’s eating you old boy?
DARWIN: They are after me again.
DARROW: Who?
DARWIN: Those folks you took to task in Tennessee.
DARROW: Don’t tell me! Again? I thought I settled the matter once and for all.
DARWIN: Apparently not. Scopes II they’re calling it. It’s His Own Country after all, your country, Clarence! They are one nation under God! Parents are pulling their kids out of school, saying they won’t send them back until the kids are given the option to study “Intelligent Design”!
GOD: Boys, what can I say. It’s that kid George! Science was never his cup of tea! But he is just so adorable with those big ears and those beady eyes. And he has such an endearing way of chewing the insides of his cheek when that brain of his goes blank. He is just too cute. But I do admit, I have been over-indulgent with him. I have such a soft spot for him, he needs me so much, poor chap! I feel guilty about short-changing him up here (pointing to brain), I know I am always compensating for that (looks down, shamefaced). I let him have his first term. (recollecting with a nostalgic smile) Ah those butterfly ballots and hanging chads! What fun! I really had myself a laugh!
[Darwin and Darrow look at each other in sheer disbelief]
DARWIN: (Shaking head in disbelief)You just love hearing how you made the Earth in six days, don’t you?
DARROW: (Laughing) You are stirring some fine memories there Charles! That chap William Jennings Bryan, strutting around in court, fingers hooked in his waist-pocket, quoting the Bible left and right, had him blubbering! Remember how I asked him if he really believed the Earth was made in six days? (Wiping tears from laughing) He said, he said…well not six 24 hour days…they were more like periods…Ha, ha, ha! Periods!! Poor chap, died two days after the trial.
GOD: That wasn’t very nice of you Clarence! These are my children with special needs, they are…what’s the “politically correct” term….mentally challenged….not much up there (pointing to brain). I help them when I can. They are my children too. You guys could always take care of yourselves. You’ve understood me through science. But these Williams Jennings Bryans, George Bushes, Liz Doles…they’re weak and sometimes, if I don’t watch over them they’re like putty in Lucifer’s hands. You have no idea how difficult it is for me to maintain this delicate balance. (Annoyed) All you ever do is whine, whine, whine!
DARWIN: (Not appeased) But God! They’re going to stop teaching evolution in schools! Do you really want to keep them in the dark?
GOD: Charlie, Charlie, look at yourself! Don’t let them do this to you! Have you lost faith in your own theory? Natural selection my son! What happened to the dodos? What happened to Bryans? And look at the Coelacanth – 400 million years and still going strong – it prevailed. Have faith in the power of living fossils my dear! You were right and you know it!
DARROW: (consoling Darwin) Yes Charlie, God’s right! This time the plaintiffs are those who support you! See it’s a nation divided. You’re plugged into eternal CNN, don’t you recall the map with the red states and the blue states? Only half the country believes He (pointing toward God) said “Voila!” and a “flat” (waving arms, gesturing a flat surface) Earth appeared in six…ahem (trying to suppress another bout of laughing) er…periods! Well Chuck…ever come across any lemmings in your journeys? Seems to me these folks in the red states will go the lemmings’ way pretty soon – one after another, right down that point where the Earth ends! Don’t you worry!
GOD: Yes my boy. This too shall pass just like it did 80 ..er….periods ago in Dayton, Tennessee. Now watch MTV why don’t you? Get your mind off things! You’ll be amazed at the show Jagger and his gang’s still putting on! That energy! Wow! You were down flat on your bed giving that idiot woman the impression you were recanting! (Winks at Darwin and Darrow and moves on, mingling with Einstein next)
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Fire Breathing Monster?
At 3:00 AM in the morning tiny arms grip me tightly, legs get sprawled around me, her tiny body shaking uncontrollably. I ask what’s wrong and she says, “Please can we sleep with the lights on, please?”
She has usually dreamt up a gigantic spider, a tentacular being of some sort or other creepy-crawlies magnified several times, ready to take over her little world. Nothing I say or do helps. “Mommy is right next to you, honey. The spiders won’t get you. Come to me.”
She shrieks, “No, they will, they’re coming after me Mommy, please, please turn the lights on!”
I have no choice but to sleep with the lights on for the rest of the night. Night terrors, monsters under the bed, in the closet, clinging to the ceiling, invisible ones inhabiting empty chairs in the living room, I am familiar with them too. I could feel their clammy fingers reach out for me till well into my late teens. They are persistent, these monsters.
But never once do I recall imagining myself as a helpless little monster. This one surprised me. She woke up crying inconsolably. Nothing I said or did help, even switching on the glaring lights didn’t. She didn’t tell me what her dream was until the next day. I am still reeling from what she then said. She said she had turned into a fire-breathing monster and every time she breathed, fire came out and people ran away form her. No one wanted to play with her. She kept walking up to people and they kept running away. She told me that all she wanted to ask was if they had seen her Mommy but they kept screaming and running. No one wanted to tell her where Mommy was, she thought Mommy wouldn’t run from her even if she was breathing fire but no one wanted to help. So she sat in a corner and sobbed.
I don’t know what to make of this one. Why would a four year old have such a dream? Could it be something as mundane as her streptococcal infection and the related fever? I am told she woke up shrieking from her afternoon nap at the daycare, she could have been looking for Mommy then. Or was it something else? What knots does a four year old brain tie itself into? And what can poor Mommy do?
Laughing Afghan Girl
Well, she was laughing in the original photograph! Steve McCurry of National Geographic photographed her so well that even though almost her entire face is covered with her clothes and her hands you can so easily tell that the eyes are full of mirth. I have tried often but I can't quite capture it, doesn't mean I'll give up trying. In the original photograph, the left side of her face seems to have been caught in the gloaming, serenely lit. Her eyes are dancing and if you look carefully you can see the photographer reflected in her eyes. One of these days I'll get it right. Until then the posting will remind me how far I still have to go, I must learn to capture the mirth!
Friday, April 21, 2006
Random Thoughts: Controlled Chaos (Repost)
“We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.”
- Dag Hammarskjold
Controlled chaos to me, is akin to the dynamism of our destiny. Our actions and inactions, the choices we make and the consequences we face as a result of those choices. This “chaos” is only “controlled” by a perception of the “frame of our destiny” or the world that Richard Wilbur’s “heart’s crayon” sought to “spangle and fulfill” [see poem below].
Sometime ago, during a moment of lazy introspection on a long bus ride home, I let my mind wander to thoughts about life, destiny and predestination. My thoughts strayed to the, rather prevalent, simplistic and fatalistic understanding of our eastern philosophy. A layman’s interpretation, that implies predestination and our abject powerlessness in the grander scheme of things.
But something within me refused to consider this fatalistic outlook. At that instant, looking back at how my life had shaped up thus far, I wanted to think that I have control over my destiny, that I have never been powerless, that I can forge my own destiny. But again, I did some rethinking and the agnostic in me wanted to say, “What If?” So, I settled on the possibility that perhaps it is all predestination after all; with a twist.
Perhaps we all enter this life with a blank outline of how things would be. Essentially a pencil sketch on a wide-open, blank canvas, unimaginably infinite and beyond comprehension. And we are also given the tools – the paintbrushes, the colors, the painting medium, a palette and then it is up to us to make the choice of colors, of mediums of what we want to express. The essential element is probably the power to choose. And each choice we make dictates what our next step will be. A large and growing, “if-then” tree of choices and consequences, with the branches spreading in every possible direction, without any noticeably discernible pattern.
My stray thoughts, as I read more and learn more, seem to find an echo in the works of several authors and poets who I admire, leading the charge – John Steinbeck, in his East of Eden (page 303). Excerpt quoted below:
“The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel — ‘Thou mayest’ — that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’ — it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ ...
“Now, there are millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.”
Yes, we always have the choice and as long as we have the choice, we have the tools to forge our own destiny, to fill our destined "frame", the apparently limitless, limited canvas with the colors of our choice.
Richard Wilbur, the poet, seems to be making the same point in his poem – At Moorditch, in the final verse:
"Now," said the voice of lock and window-bar,
"You must confront things as they truly are.
Open your eyes at last, and see
The desolateness of reality."
"Things have," I said, "a pallid, empty look,
Like pictures in an unused coloring book."
"Now that the scales have fallen from your eyes,"
Said the sad hallways, "you must recognize
How childishly your former sight
Salted the world with glory and delight."
"This cannot be the world," I said. "Nor will it,
Till the heart's crayon spangle and fulfill it."
So, obviously, my random daydreaming thought was hardly an epiphany or a unique idea but something that has occurred to folks infinitely wiser than me, mutiple times, during the course of history.
Destiny then, I am convinced, is not static or fatalistic. We cannot assign anything to “kismet” or to a nonchalant, laissez-faire attitude that is resigned to it “being written”. It is not written, it needs to be written. It is a dynamic destiny. There is a plan, its boundaries lost in eternity, in infinity, unfathomable and unknowable. And the plan probably encompasses several lifetimes and not just the one that is of immediate concern to us. It is in essence, controlled chaos, where the lines of control, though existent, are invisible.
- Dag Hammarskjold
Controlled chaos to me, is akin to the dynamism of our destiny. Our actions and inactions, the choices we make and the consequences we face as a result of those choices. This “chaos” is only “controlled” by a perception of the “frame of our destiny” or the world that Richard Wilbur’s “heart’s crayon” sought to “spangle and fulfill” [see poem below].
Sometime ago, during a moment of lazy introspection on a long bus ride home, I let my mind wander to thoughts about life, destiny and predestination. My thoughts strayed to the, rather prevalent, simplistic and fatalistic understanding of our eastern philosophy. A layman’s interpretation, that implies predestination and our abject powerlessness in the grander scheme of things.
But something within me refused to consider this fatalistic outlook. At that instant, looking back at how my life had shaped up thus far, I wanted to think that I have control over my destiny, that I have never been powerless, that I can forge my own destiny. But again, I did some rethinking and the agnostic in me wanted to say, “What If?” So, I settled on the possibility that perhaps it is all predestination after all; with a twist.
Perhaps we all enter this life with a blank outline of how things would be. Essentially a pencil sketch on a wide-open, blank canvas, unimaginably infinite and beyond comprehension. And we are also given the tools – the paintbrushes, the colors, the painting medium, a palette and then it is up to us to make the choice of colors, of mediums of what we want to express. The essential element is probably the power to choose. And each choice we make dictates what our next step will be. A large and growing, “if-then” tree of choices and consequences, with the branches spreading in every possible direction, without any noticeably discernible pattern.
My stray thoughts, as I read more and learn more, seem to find an echo in the works of several authors and poets who I admire, leading the charge – John Steinbeck, in his East of Eden (page 303). Excerpt quoted below:
“The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel — ‘Thou mayest’ — that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’ — it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ ...
“Now, there are millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.”
Yes, we always have the choice and as long as we have the choice, we have the tools to forge our own destiny, to fill our destined "frame", the apparently limitless, limited canvas with the colors of our choice.
Richard Wilbur, the poet, seems to be making the same point in his poem – At Moorditch, in the final verse:
"Now," said the voice of lock and window-bar,
"You must confront things as they truly are.
Open your eyes at last, and see
The desolateness of reality."
"Things have," I said, "a pallid, empty look,
Like pictures in an unused coloring book."
"Now that the scales have fallen from your eyes,"
Said the sad hallways, "you must recognize
How childishly your former sight
Salted the world with glory and delight."
"This cannot be the world," I said. "Nor will it,
Till the heart's crayon spangle and fulfill it."
So, obviously, my random daydreaming thought was hardly an epiphany or a unique idea but something that has occurred to folks infinitely wiser than me, mutiple times, during the course of history.
Destiny then, I am convinced, is not static or fatalistic. We cannot assign anything to “kismet” or to a nonchalant, laissez-faire attitude that is resigned to it “being written”. It is not written, it needs to be written. It is a dynamic destiny. There is a plan, its boundaries lost in eternity, in infinity, unfathomable and unknowable. And the plan probably encompasses several lifetimes and not just the one that is of immediate concern to us. It is in essence, controlled chaos, where the lines of control, though existent, are invisible.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
The Campari Girl
An ad that looked stunning, had to try and draw it, but it's tough going in MS Paint!
Fully Engaged
Just when I am beginning to come to the realization that I am not “fully engaged”, that I am not giving my all to anything, a long-lost school batch mate comes along. One with whom I never had any conversations (although I desperately wanted to), and has an hour-long phone conversation with me. I am at work and he is in his car as we talk. The conversation is so engaging that he misses two turns while chatting on the phone. And before we hang up, when I ask him what he likes to read, he says he likes non-fiction and that he is in the middle of reading “The Power of Full Engagement” – I am baffled at what appears to be yet another incident of synchronicity for me.
The one thought that makes me miserable is my inability to be fully engaged in anything. People get the impression that I am committed to a cause, an idea or a course of action because perhaps even my fractional engagement isn’t half-hearted, but there is a constant realization that I could be such a better version of myself if I wasn’t preternaturally prone to distractions and dissipations. I do all the wrong things at the wrong times. I stay awake well past midnight even if I am supposed to wake up before the crack of dawn in order to make it to work on time. That leaves me with no more than three or four hours of sleep. Then I sleep on the bus and get jarred out of sleep at the sudden realization that the bus has entered New York City and that I need to collect my things, get off the bus and walk bleary-eyed to work. Then at work I start downing several cups of coffee in order to get myself to a fully functional state.
I never get home before eight, sometimes nine. I play with my daughter for an hour or two, all the while thinking I should be spending more time with her. Then she retreats to her room to watch cartoons for hours on end and I let her because this is the time for me to get online, converse with friends, check the message boards that I moderate, browse various sites, download music, the list is endless. I am surprised I never get a message similar to the one the guy in the broadband commercial got – “You have reached the end of the Internet, please go back”. And once again, my distractions take me to 2:00 or 3:00 AM at night and then it’s time to get ready for work again.
Notice how there hasn’t been any focus here on my home, my husband, no signs of any cooking, cleaning, laundry, time spent together. It is my secret shame. I do spend time on cleaning the house or doing laundry but leave it for Saturdays or Sundays, which means I never have an easy weekend. On the weekends I am either procrastinating, avoiding the mountain of tasks that await my attention, or I am doing them and working my fingers down to the bone, getting so tired that I am snippy with everyone around me as I ask them not to get anything dirty or messy ever again.
Something is definitely not right. Some deserving candidates need fuller attention from me, most of all my daughter, my home. Don’t think I am forgetting my husband; yes he needs more attention from me as well. He is certainly doing a lot of the heavy lifting-even though he needs to come to terms with his own distractions - his devotion to sports and all its online manifestations, the recently developed online poker habit etc. He drops our daughter off at daycare in the morning, he picks her up at night, and he makes sure a hot meal is waiting for me at home, he takes out the garbage – I can’t thank him enough for all the ways in which he makes my life so much easier than it would otherwise be. He is extremely conscientious about the care and maintenance of the two ladies in his life. I love that about him, I love him. He has given me enough of a long rope to hang myself. As for intimacy in marriage…well that is receding so far into the distance...We might as well be roommates sharing a roof and seeing each other for a couple of hours each day. There is no time for the dance of seduction, for romance, for candlelit dinners, nights out…and time is just an excuse, somewhere in this jumbled mess that we have come to think of as ‘life’ we have sacrificed desire. It rarely emerges. It’s important to us and it isn’t there and there are no clues about how to find it or retrieve it again and time is short, too short. There isn’t much else out there after the onward march toward the twilight years begins; the bond needs to become stronger and unbreakable.
And that brings me back to the matter of “full engagement”. It takes a schoolmate from twenty-two years ago to suggest that I should perhaps consider reading about full engagement, he suggests this out of the blue; he knows nothing about my life or me. I am never one to pick up self-help books, in my arrogance I believe I know all the answers and can figure out the ones I don’t know. Even now I know a recalibration is urgently required, a correction needs to happen before I lose control of my life, I know what ails me, so why do I need to read a book about it?
But I did pick up the book and I am reading it. I need to read it to shine a mirror on myself as each line or catch phrase hits home. I need these words to hammer me back into shape…not sleeping enough, not eating right, not exercising, feeling unenergetic, feeling fatigued, never being “fully engaged”. I have all the symptoms; I am a classic case for the authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwarz. I am probably the worst case they have ever seen.
I am at page 16, R. Will let you know how it turns out. Thanks for the suggestion.
The one thought that makes me miserable is my inability to be fully engaged in anything. People get the impression that I am committed to a cause, an idea or a course of action because perhaps even my fractional engagement isn’t half-hearted, but there is a constant realization that I could be such a better version of myself if I wasn’t preternaturally prone to distractions and dissipations. I do all the wrong things at the wrong times. I stay awake well past midnight even if I am supposed to wake up before the crack of dawn in order to make it to work on time. That leaves me with no more than three or four hours of sleep. Then I sleep on the bus and get jarred out of sleep at the sudden realization that the bus has entered New York City and that I need to collect my things, get off the bus and walk bleary-eyed to work. Then at work I start downing several cups of coffee in order to get myself to a fully functional state.
I never get home before eight, sometimes nine. I play with my daughter for an hour or two, all the while thinking I should be spending more time with her. Then she retreats to her room to watch cartoons for hours on end and I let her because this is the time for me to get online, converse with friends, check the message boards that I moderate, browse various sites, download music, the list is endless. I am surprised I never get a message similar to the one the guy in the broadband commercial got – “You have reached the end of the Internet, please go back”. And once again, my distractions take me to 2:00 or 3:00 AM at night and then it’s time to get ready for work again.
Notice how there hasn’t been any focus here on my home, my husband, no signs of any cooking, cleaning, laundry, time spent together. It is my secret shame. I do spend time on cleaning the house or doing laundry but leave it for Saturdays or Sundays, which means I never have an easy weekend. On the weekends I am either procrastinating, avoiding the mountain of tasks that await my attention, or I am doing them and working my fingers down to the bone, getting so tired that I am snippy with everyone around me as I ask them not to get anything dirty or messy ever again.
Something is definitely not right. Some deserving candidates need fuller attention from me, most of all my daughter, my home. Don’t think I am forgetting my husband; yes he needs more attention from me as well. He is certainly doing a lot of the heavy lifting-even though he needs to come to terms with his own distractions - his devotion to sports and all its online manifestations, the recently developed online poker habit etc. He drops our daughter off at daycare in the morning, he picks her up at night, and he makes sure a hot meal is waiting for me at home, he takes out the garbage – I can’t thank him enough for all the ways in which he makes my life so much easier than it would otherwise be. He is extremely conscientious about the care and maintenance of the two ladies in his life. I love that about him, I love him. He has given me enough of a long rope to hang myself. As for intimacy in marriage…well that is receding so far into the distance...We might as well be roommates sharing a roof and seeing each other for a couple of hours each day. There is no time for the dance of seduction, for romance, for candlelit dinners, nights out…and time is just an excuse, somewhere in this jumbled mess that we have come to think of as ‘life’ we have sacrificed desire. It rarely emerges. It’s important to us and it isn’t there and there are no clues about how to find it or retrieve it again and time is short, too short. There isn’t much else out there after the onward march toward the twilight years begins; the bond needs to become stronger and unbreakable.
And that brings me back to the matter of “full engagement”. It takes a schoolmate from twenty-two years ago to suggest that I should perhaps consider reading about full engagement, he suggests this out of the blue; he knows nothing about my life or me. I am never one to pick up self-help books, in my arrogance I believe I know all the answers and can figure out the ones I don’t know. Even now I know a recalibration is urgently required, a correction needs to happen before I lose control of my life, I know what ails me, so why do I need to read a book about it?
But I did pick up the book and I am reading it. I need to read it to shine a mirror on myself as each line or catch phrase hits home. I need these words to hammer me back into shape…not sleeping enough, not eating right, not exercising, feeling unenergetic, feeling fatigued, never being “fully engaged”. I have all the symptoms; I am a classic case for the authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwarz. I am probably the worst case they have ever seen.
I am at page 16, R. Will let you know how it turns out. Thanks for the suggestion.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Book Impressions: The Year of Magical Thinking: Joan Didion
There are scattered thoughts that beg compilation and order; a friend whose alliterative skills I admire, called it the ‘fettering of fragments’. I have many fragments that could be ‘fettered’ into a cohesive whole. But how does one collect these thoughts, reconcile each long-lasting impression that a person, a place, a piece of writing or a piece of music has on one, in a larger, meaningful context? They seem within reach, yet beat a hasty retreat and recede further into the depths of consciousness as I cast my net about. They emerge to tease and to tantalize in those languid moments of lulled senses, when all frantic activity in the brain has come to a complete stop, and only a sense of relaxation remains as I find myself easing into a dream. I then awake with a start, as if to say, “What was that?” I need to capture it, keep it, but I can’t, they leave me bereft and anxious. Perhaps an emotional landslide or a major event, that shakes the very foundations of ones existence, is necessary before one can begin a collection, or a compilation, in a quest for meaning, for clarity on the seemingly random nature of events.
I finished reading a book about loss, about grief; a retelling of events following the death of a loved one. Joan Didion’s book – The Year of Magical Thinking – has left a profound impression on me. It’s as if she herself was in the process of compiling these scattered fragments, from her past, as she wrote this account and tried to find a larger context for her grief. In 2003, while grappling with her daughter Quintana’s extended illness, that started as a flu, transformed into pneumonia and septic shock followed by an induced coma, she loses her husband of 40 years to a massive coronary. Her book seems to be about understanding grief and unlike other such accounts, it isn’t about “coming to terms” with grief or about “healing” after losing a loved one, it is more about her recollections of a marriage that was best described as one of intense togetherness and symbiosis. Joan and her husband John Gregory Dunne had spent very few moments apart from each other during forty years of togetherness. They were both writers, neither one needed to leave home and go to work or travel separately for work, they worked together in different rooms of the same house, bouncing ideas off each other; a togetherness, not dependence, that seems impossible to achieve in most marriages. She wants to make sense of this sudden tear in the fabric of her existence. She recollects moments from her past, homes in which they had lived, presents they had exchanged, times when she felt she hadn’t understood him or taken him seriously. She remembers things John said, like when Quintana, as a young child commented about the deaths and losses she was witnessing as a child and how unfair it all seemed he had said it all evened out in the end. Joan had interpreted that to mean that all the bad was eventually balanced by the good. Later on, on the occasion of another death of a close friend, the deceased friend’s wife had remarked about John’s comment to Quintana, saying how right he was. That’s when Joan realized that what he had really meant was that sooner or later bad news visits everyone, that it was just a matter of time. This fragment came back to her at the time of her own loss. How brutally stark and true those words were.
Through it all she searches for clues of whether she should have seen it coming, whether he himself had an inkling of death. She talks about her refusal to acknowledge his death, her need to keep him alive, and the blame she inevitably assigns herself irrespective of the fact that the circumstances were quite beyond her control.
Joan talks about her Episcopalian beginnings and rather seamlessly connects this with an education in geology. She quotes an Episcopalian litany – As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. She interprets this as, “the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shores and mountains, the inexorable shifting of geological structures that could throw up mountains and islands and could just as reliably take them away.” She believes this reflects a grand scheme in action that lends a certain inevitability to events. One senses her grasping for meaning while attributing meaninglessness to most things that happen, on ordinary days, at peaceful dinners, during beautifully temperate mornings like that of September 11, 2001, marking the line of demarcation between life and death in sharp relief. A particularly poignant passage is the one that describes her impressions of the Tsunami that wiped out several miles of coastline in the Indian Ocean. She says:
I am unable to stop trying to imagine this event.
There is no video of what I try to imagine. There are no beaches, no flooded swimming pools, no hotel lobbies breaking up like rotten pilings in a storm. What I want to see happened under the surface. The India Plate buckling as it thrust under the Burma Plate. The current sweeping unseen through the deep water. I do not have a depth chart for the Indian Ocean but can pick up the broad outline even from my Rand McNally cardboard globe. Seven hundred and eighty meters off Banda Aceh. Twenty-three hundred between Sumatra and Sri Lanka. Twenty-one hundred between the Andamans and Thailand and then a long shallowing toward Phuket. The instant when the leading edge of the unseen current got slowed by the continental shelf. The build p of water as the bottom of the shelf began to shallow out.
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.
I am stunned at this association, a stillness follows, for the moment, as I absorb the beauty of her words and the thought behind it. The associations she makes in collecting the fragments of her religion, her education and her grief. A massive myocardial infarction, a liver that simply fails, terminal cancer, accidental death, even the drawing away of people, or the ending of relationships, they can all be thought of in terms of the shifting, changing nature of the earth itself, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end – indeed!
Her thought fragments, scattered through her book come together in a delicately woven blanket or shelter that she tries to stretch over her newly acquired vulnerability. One that causes her to stop wearing high heels, for fear that she would stumble and fall, one that doesn’t allow her to turn the lights off at night and one that keeps her away from her husband’s desk where she could see what he was reading or writing the day before or up to the last few hours of his life. The vulnerability is the most obvious symptom of those aggrieved. Through it all she, or rather a shell of her former self, also deals with Quintana’s prolonged illness, reassuring her child that she will always be around for her while questioning the parental need to offer this reassurance even as they know it isn’t true. Parents are ultimately the worst betrayers.
This was an intensely satisfying read, a piece of writing that appears to be superb feat of courage, stunning in its clarity, one that creates “oneness” of meaning for a reader who wants to collect, compile and integrate all randomness in her life into one seamless thought that takes her from beginning to end.
I finished reading a book about loss, about grief; a retelling of events following the death of a loved one. Joan Didion’s book – The Year of Magical Thinking – has left a profound impression on me. It’s as if she herself was in the process of compiling these scattered fragments, from her past, as she wrote this account and tried to find a larger context for her grief. In 2003, while grappling with her daughter Quintana’s extended illness, that started as a flu, transformed into pneumonia and septic shock followed by an induced coma, she loses her husband of 40 years to a massive coronary. Her book seems to be about understanding grief and unlike other such accounts, it isn’t about “coming to terms” with grief or about “healing” after losing a loved one, it is more about her recollections of a marriage that was best described as one of intense togetherness and symbiosis. Joan and her husband John Gregory Dunne had spent very few moments apart from each other during forty years of togetherness. They were both writers, neither one needed to leave home and go to work or travel separately for work, they worked together in different rooms of the same house, bouncing ideas off each other; a togetherness, not dependence, that seems impossible to achieve in most marriages. She wants to make sense of this sudden tear in the fabric of her existence. She recollects moments from her past, homes in which they had lived, presents they had exchanged, times when she felt she hadn’t understood him or taken him seriously. She remembers things John said, like when Quintana, as a young child commented about the deaths and losses she was witnessing as a child and how unfair it all seemed he had said it all evened out in the end. Joan had interpreted that to mean that all the bad was eventually balanced by the good. Later on, on the occasion of another death of a close friend, the deceased friend’s wife had remarked about John’s comment to Quintana, saying how right he was. That’s when Joan realized that what he had really meant was that sooner or later bad news visits everyone, that it was just a matter of time. This fragment came back to her at the time of her own loss. How brutally stark and true those words were.
Through it all she searches for clues of whether she should have seen it coming, whether he himself had an inkling of death. She talks about her refusal to acknowledge his death, her need to keep him alive, and the blame she inevitably assigns herself irrespective of the fact that the circumstances were quite beyond her control.
Joan talks about her Episcopalian beginnings and rather seamlessly connects this with an education in geology. She quotes an Episcopalian litany – As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. She interprets this as, “the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shores and mountains, the inexorable shifting of geological structures that could throw up mountains and islands and could just as reliably take them away.” She believes this reflects a grand scheme in action that lends a certain inevitability to events. One senses her grasping for meaning while attributing meaninglessness to most things that happen, on ordinary days, at peaceful dinners, during beautifully temperate mornings like that of September 11, 2001, marking the line of demarcation between life and death in sharp relief. A particularly poignant passage is the one that describes her impressions of the Tsunami that wiped out several miles of coastline in the Indian Ocean. She says:
I am unable to stop trying to imagine this event.
There is no video of what I try to imagine. There are no beaches, no flooded swimming pools, no hotel lobbies breaking up like rotten pilings in a storm. What I want to see happened under the surface. The India Plate buckling as it thrust under the Burma Plate. The current sweeping unseen through the deep water. I do not have a depth chart for the Indian Ocean but can pick up the broad outline even from my Rand McNally cardboard globe. Seven hundred and eighty meters off Banda Aceh. Twenty-three hundred between Sumatra and Sri Lanka. Twenty-one hundred between the Andamans and Thailand and then a long shallowing toward Phuket. The instant when the leading edge of the unseen current got slowed by the continental shelf. The build p of water as the bottom of the shelf began to shallow out.
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.
I am stunned at this association, a stillness follows, for the moment, as I absorb the beauty of her words and the thought behind it. The associations she makes in collecting the fragments of her religion, her education and her grief. A massive myocardial infarction, a liver that simply fails, terminal cancer, accidental death, even the drawing away of people, or the ending of relationships, they can all be thought of in terms of the shifting, changing nature of the earth itself, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end – indeed!
Her thought fragments, scattered through her book come together in a delicately woven blanket or shelter that she tries to stretch over her newly acquired vulnerability. One that causes her to stop wearing high heels, for fear that she would stumble and fall, one that doesn’t allow her to turn the lights off at night and one that keeps her away from her husband’s desk where she could see what he was reading or writing the day before or up to the last few hours of his life. The vulnerability is the most obvious symptom of those aggrieved. Through it all she, or rather a shell of her former self, also deals with Quintana’s prolonged illness, reassuring her child that she will always be around for her while questioning the parental need to offer this reassurance even as they know it isn’t true. Parents are ultimately the worst betrayers.
This was an intensely satisfying read, a piece of writing that appears to be superb feat of courage, stunning in its clarity, one that creates “oneness” of meaning for a reader who wants to collect, compile and integrate all randomness in her life into one seamless thought that takes her from beginning to end.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Lean On Me
Come sit for awhile, let’s chat
Of your days or nights, this or that,
I’ll listen, I’ll laugh if appropriate,
Or else empathize or commiserate.
I realize you see me as a pillar or post
And all your moorings I firmly host
I am constant, reliable, consistent
You keep coming back, I’m ever present.
But appearances can often deceive,
Hollow oaks aren’t as rare as you believe,
Nor are cracked pillars rare sights;
As their insides crawl with turgid termites
So certainly, come, sit down by my side,
Lean on me, brush all cares aside,
But every so often, do turn around,
Move closer, listen for that hollow sound.
Of your days or nights, this or that,
I’ll listen, I’ll laugh if appropriate,
Or else empathize or commiserate.
I realize you see me as a pillar or post
And all your moorings I firmly host
I am constant, reliable, consistent
You keep coming back, I’m ever present.
But appearances can often deceive,
Hollow oaks aren’t as rare as you believe,
Nor are cracked pillars rare sights;
As their insides crawl with turgid termites
So certainly, come, sit down by my side,
Lean on me, brush all cares aside,
But every so often, do turn around,
Move closer, listen for that hollow sound.
Friday, April 14, 2006
A Glittering Moment...
My silent reverie is broken by the words coming somewhere from the backseat of the car, “Mommy…I love you! I love your eyes, I love your lips, I love your hair, I love your arms, I love your clothes, I love your smell, I love everything about you!” Could this moment be any richer? I feel a stillness come over me, I want the words to sink in, this moment to never end. This fleeting moment in which there is no denying that I am loved unconditionally and completely. If I could distill the magical essence of this moment I would. Actually I can, that’s what memories are for. These words will never leave me, no matter what happens next.
They’ll come back to me when I am feeling unloved and lost, alone in the world, they’ll resurface to reassure me. Who knows what tomorrow will bring, this is the only moment I own. Tomorrow when she finds me on the path of increasing irrelevance, when all she wants is to test the strength of her newly sprouted wings, when I appear like a dilapidated figure, fast receding into my twilight years, when she owns the world and the widening cracks in the pedestal on which she once held me, inspire nothing but a shrug of pity, I will have these words to cherish and relive.
They’ll come back to me when I am feeling unloved and lost, alone in the world, they’ll resurface to reassure me. Who knows what tomorrow will bring, this is the only moment I own. Tomorrow when she finds me on the path of increasing irrelevance, when all she wants is to test the strength of her newly sprouted wings, when I appear like a dilapidated figure, fast receding into my twilight years, when she owns the world and the widening cracks in the pedestal on which she once held me, inspire nothing but a shrug of pity, I will have these words to cherish and relive.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Enneagram 9
Recognizing Nines
Type Nine exemplifies the desire for wholeness, peace, and harmony in our world. Nines are easygoing, emotionally stable people. They are open and unself-consciously serene, trusting and patient with themselves and others. Their openness allows them to be at ease with life and with the natural world. As a result, others generally find it easy to be in their company. They are genuinely good-natured and refreshingly unpretentious. Because of their peaceful demeanor, Nines have a talent for comforting and reassuring others and are able to exert a calming, healing influence in difficult or tense situations. They make steady, supportive friends who can listen uncritically to others' problems as well as share their good times. In work settings, they can be excellent mediators, able to harmonize groups and bring people together by really healing conflicts.
Nines can also be quite imaginative and creative, and they enjoy expressing themselves in symbolic ways—through music, dance, images, or mythic stories, for instance. They tend to look at things holistically, focusing on the ways in which seemingly unrelated ideas or events are connected and part of a greater whole. Indeed, Nines are drawn to anything that affirms the fundamental oneness of the world. Whether they are working with concepts, diverse groups of people, art forms, or feuding family members, Nines want to bring everything and everyone back to a harmonious unity.
In short, Nines are the eternal optimists, always wanting to believe the best about other people, with hope for the best for themselves. They hope that every story will end with, "...and they all lived happily ever after." Healthy Nines will work hard to make things turn out that way. But average Nines will leave it to "luck and a prayer"—and they may be sorely disappointed.
Average Nines focus on keeping their lives pleasant and uncomplicated. They idealize others and live through a handful of primary identifications—usually with their family and close friends. Out of fear of creating conflicts with these people, average Nines hold back their own reactions and opinions and suppress themselves in many other ways. Oddly, Nines can be quite assertive on behalf of others and will work hard for others' benefit, but they can have great difficulty taking actions on their own behalf, or even voicing their own real feelings.
To "maintain the peace," Nines tend not to show their upsets very much, except indirectly— perhaps by eating, drinking, or watching television too much to escape into a more pleasant and comforting world. They also absorb a lot of tension and neglect—even outright abuse—before showing any kind of emotional response. But when their anger has been held back for too long, Nines can suddenly blow up, seemingly out of the blue. Once they have gotten something out of their system, Nines hope that the storm has blown over and that things will not go back to the way they were before.
Fearing that change (and potential conflict) will threaten their comfort and peace of mind, average Nines become more complacent and disengaged. They entrench themselves in comforting habits and routines, puttering around and finding various kinds of busy work to lose themselves in. But the longer they do this, the more difficulty they have rousing themselves to take decisive action or to assert themselves in any meaningful way. They become passive, walking away from problems and brushing them under the rug. Their thinking becomes hazy and ruminative, mostly daydreaming about happy memories or passing time telling comforting stories. They begin to "tune out" reality to protect themselves from anxiety, often seeming "oblivious" and unresponsive as a result. Average Nines use passive-aggressive acts and stubbornness to resist attempts to engage them. But their peace of mind is little more than an avoidance of problems—a clinging to fantasies and unrealistic hopes.
Low functioning Nines can become fatalistic and resigned, trudging through life as if nothing can be done to improve their situation. Engaged in wishful thinking, looking for easy, magical solutions, Nines keep "waiting for their ship to come in," but without some constructive effort on their part, they may wait a long time, indeed.
In brief, Nines want to find unity and wholeness, to create harmony in their environment, to feel spacious and at ease, to emphasize the positive, to avoid conflicts and tension, to resist change and preserve things as they are, and to ignore whatever would upset or disturb them. Nines do not want to have conflicts with loved ones, to feel cut off or separated from others, to be angry, to be upset or disturbed, to have their habits or routines interrupted, to arouse themselves or to be emotionally uncomfortable, or to be forced to face unpleasant realities.
Their Hidden Side
On the surface, Nines appear to be the most easy-going, pleasant people imaginable. They go along with others' wishes, apparently without any desire other than to make sure everyone is at ease and happy. But their hidden side is that they often suppress a huge well of anger that they conceal even from themselves. Nines want to get along with others, but they also want to hold on to their independence and autonomy—they do not want to be "messed with." To the extent that they feel they cannot do the latter without endangering their connections with the important people in their lives, they become resentful and enraged—although they also feel that they can never let this anger out without destroying their relationships. Thus, for Nines to develop themselves and their potentials they must come to grips with their suppressed rage and find constructive outlets for this energy.
Relationship Issues
People are often drawn to Nines as potential life partners for many reasons. They are comforting and supportive, warm and sensual. They adapt well to domestic life and enjoy being with their partner. And they seem to be utterly without any significant needs of their own. They are uncomplicated and undemanding to the extent that others get the false notion that the Nine will meet their needs without needing anything much from them. Therein lies the source of problems with Nines in relationship. Of course, Nines do have many personal needs, but to the extent that they are not being met, Nines shut down and withdraw from the other rather than risk getting into a conflict. Key issues include these:
Going along with others or agreeing to things the Nine has no intention of complying with.
Becoming emotionally unavailable to others: disengaging their attention or withdrawing rather than dealing with issues.
Wanting to feel close with someone in their imagination while asserting independence in their behavior.
The "No Talk Rule"—refusing to discuss the real problems.
Suppression, control, and outbursts of temper—all of which are generally unrecognized and unacknowledged by the Nine.
Emotional "collapsing" as a way of stopping discussion about troubling topics.
To learn more about the compatibility issues of Type Nine and their interactions with other types, click below on the Enneagram type of the other person in the relationship. This will open in a new window.
Type 9 The Peacemaker and type:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
The Passion: Sloth
Nines pay a price for their easygoing demeanor because much of it depends on their staying out of contact with their instinctual energies. Nines do this for two reasons. First, much of their instinctual aliveness is used to suppress their anger and frustration with people and with themselves. To experience their anger directly is extremely threatening to Nines: they feel that their rage could destroy their peaceful world very quickly. In order stay in their unrealistic, idealized world, they must constantly suppress their anger and instincts over and over again. But when Nines attempt to dam those energies, the result is inner numbness and general fatigue because so much of their inner resources is devoted to keeping their anger and instincts at bay.
Thus, Nines end up becoming passive and disengaged. Rousing themselves to take an active role in their lives seems difficult—it will all be "too much trouble" becomes a constant refrain. So they retreat into safe and comforting routines—and the passion of sloth. Understood this way, sloth is not necessarily physical laziness; rather, it is an inner disengagement, a reluctance to show up in one's life with all of one's passion, immediacy, and presence available. The longer Nines remain in the state of sloth, the more they become convinced that they can never do what it takes to engage fully in their lives.
At Their Best
As Nines learn to assert themselves more freely, they experience greater peace, equanimity and contentment. Their self-possession enables them to have a profound effect on the world because they are truly present to themselves. They are intensely alive, awake, exuberant, and alert. They have learned not to give up their power to others or withhold themselves from a fear of self-assertion. They become dynamic and joyful, actively working for peace and healing their world as a result. They have enormous dignity and a genuine serenity that comes from deeply accepting the human condition.
Thus, high-functioning Nines are extraordinarily vital, self-possessed, and independent. They understand that by being grounded in the present moment, they can have both independence and connection with others: it is not an either/or situation. Further, their natural creativity and leadership can come to the fore because they are in touch with their own strength and capacities. People also instinctively trust healthy Nines because they will use their active influence to do what is necessary to create and sustain a truly harmonious environment, one in which everyone can thrive.
Type Nine exemplifies the desire for wholeness, peace, and harmony in our world. Nines are easygoing, emotionally stable people. They are open and unself-consciously serene, trusting and patient with themselves and others. Their openness allows them to be at ease with life and with the natural world. As a result, others generally find it easy to be in their company. They are genuinely good-natured and refreshingly unpretentious. Because of their peaceful demeanor, Nines have a talent for comforting and reassuring others and are able to exert a calming, healing influence in difficult or tense situations. They make steady, supportive friends who can listen uncritically to others' problems as well as share their good times. In work settings, they can be excellent mediators, able to harmonize groups and bring people together by really healing conflicts.
Nines can also be quite imaginative and creative, and they enjoy expressing themselves in symbolic ways—through music, dance, images, or mythic stories, for instance. They tend to look at things holistically, focusing on the ways in which seemingly unrelated ideas or events are connected and part of a greater whole. Indeed, Nines are drawn to anything that affirms the fundamental oneness of the world. Whether they are working with concepts, diverse groups of people, art forms, or feuding family members, Nines want to bring everything and everyone back to a harmonious unity.
In short, Nines are the eternal optimists, always wanting to believe the best about other people, with hope for the best for themselves. They hope that every story will end with, "...and they all lived happily ever after." Healthy Nines will work hard to make things turn out that way. But average Nines will leave it to "luck and a prayer"—and they may be sorely disappointed.
Average Nines focus on keeping their lives pleasant and uncomplicated. They idealize others and live through a handful of primary identifications—usually with their family and close friends. Out of fear of creating conflicts with these people, average Nines hold back their own reactions and opinions and suppress themselves in many other ways. Oddly, Nines can be quite assertive on behalf of others and will work hard for others' benefit, but they can have great difficulty taking actions on their own behalf, or even voicing their own real feelings.
To "maintain the peace," Nines tend not to show their upsets very much, except indirectly— perhaps by eating, drinking, or watching television too much to escape into a more pleasant and comforting world. They also absorb a lot of tension and neglect—even outright abuse—before showing any kind of emotional response. But when their anger has been held back for too long, Nines can suddenly blow up, seemingly out of the blue. Once they have gotten something out of their system, Nines hope that the storm has blown over and that things will not go back to the way they were before.
Fearing that change (and potential conflict) will threaten their comfort and peace of mind, average Nines become more complacent and disengaged. They entrench themselves in comforting habits and routines, puttering around and finding various kinds of busy work to lose themselves in. But the longer they do this, the more difficulty they have rousing themselves to take decisive action or to assert themselves in any meaningful way. They become passive, walking away from problems and brushing them under the rug. Their thinking becomes hazy and ruminative, mostly daydreaming about happy memories or passing time telling comforting stories. They begin to "tune out" reality to protect themselves from anxiety, often seeming "oblivious" and unresponsive as a result. Average Nines use passive-aggressive acts and stubbornness to resist attempts to engage them. But their peace of mind is little more than an avoidance of problems—a clinging to fantasies and unrealistic hopes.
Low functioning Nines can become fatalistic and resigned, trudging through life as if nothing can be done to improve their situation. Engaged in wishful thinking, looking for easy, magical solutions, Nines keep "waiting for their ship to come in," but without some constructive effort on their part, they may wait a long time, indeed.
In brief, Nines want to find unity and wholeness, to create harmony in their environment, to feel spacious and at ease, to emphasize the positive, to avoid conflicts and tension, to resist change and preserve things as they are, and to ignore whatever would upset or disturb them. Nines do not want to have conflicts with loved ones, to feel cut off or separated from others, to be angry, to be upset or disturbed, to have their habits or routines interrupted, to arouse themselves or to be emotionally uncomfortable, or to be forced to face unpleasant realities.
Their Hidden Side
On the surface, Nines appear to be the most easy-going, pleasant people imaginable. They go along with others' wishes, apparently without any desire other than to make sure everyone is at ease and happy. But their hidden side is that they often suppress a huge well of anger that they conceal even from themselves. Nines want to get along with others, but they also want to hold on to their independence and autonomy—they do not want to be "messed with." To the extent that they feel they cannot do the latter without endangering their connections with the important people in their lives, they become resentful and enraged—although they also feel that they can never let this anger out without destroying their relationships. Thus, for Nines to develop themselves and their potentials they must come to grips with their suppressed rage and find constructive outlets for this energy.
Relationship Issues
People are often drawn to Nines as potential life partners for many reasons. They are comforting and supportive, warm and sensual. They adapt well to domestic life and enjoy being with their partner. And they seem to be utterly without any significant needs of their own. They are uncomplicated and undemanding to the extent that others get the false notion that the Nine will meet their needs without needing anything much from them. Therein lies the source of problems with Nines in relationship. Of course, Nines do have many personal needs, but to the extent that they are not being met, Nines shut down and withdraw from the other rather than risk getting into a conflict. Key issues include these:
Going along with others or agreeing to things the Nine has no intention of complying with.
Becoming emotionally unavailable to others: disengaging their attention or withdrawing rather than dealing with issues.
Wanting to feel close with someone in their imagination while asserting independence in their behavior.
The "No Talk Rule"—refusing to discuss the real problems.
Suppression, control, and outbursts of temper—all of which are generally unrecognized and unacknowledged by the Nine.
Emotional "collapsing" as a way of stopping discussion about troubling topics.
To learn more about the compatibility issues of Type Nine and their interactions with other types, click below on the Enneagram type of the other person in the relationship. This will open in a new window.
Type 9 The Peacemaker and type:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
The Passion: Sloth
Nines pay a price for their easygoing demeanor because much of it depends on their staying out of contact with their instinctual energies. Nines do this for two reasons. First, much of their instinctual aliveness is used to suppress their anger and frustration with people and with themselves. To experience their anger directly is extremely threatening to Nines: they feel that their rage could destroy their peaceful world very quickly. In order stay in their unrealistic, idealized world, they must constantly suppress their anger and instincts over and over again. But when Nines attempt to dam those energies, the result is inner numbness and general fatigue because so much of their inner resources is devoted to keeping their anger and instincts at bay.
Thus, Nines end up becoming passive and disengaged. Rousing themselves to take an active role in their lives seems difficult—it will all be "too much trouble" becomes a constant refrain. So they retreat into safe and comforting routines—and the passion of sloth. Understood this way, sloth is not necessarily physical laziness; rather, it is an inner disengagement, a reluctance to show up in one's life with all of one's passion, immediacy, and presence available. The longer Nines remain in the state of sloth, the more they become convinced that they can never do what it takes to engage fully in their lives.
At Their Best
As Nines learn to assert themselves more freely, they experience greater peace, equanimity and contentment. Their self-possession enables them to have a profound effect on the world because they are truly present to themselves. They are intensely alive, awake, exuberant, and alert. They have learned not to give up their power to others or withhold themselves from a fear of self-assertion. They become dynamic and joyful, actively working for peace and healing their world as a result. They have enormous dignity and a genuine serenity that comes from deeply accepting the human condition.
Thus, high-functioning Nines are extraordinarily vital, self-possessed, and independent. They understand that by being grounded in the present moment, they can have both independence and connection with others: it is not an either/or situation. Further, their natural creativity and leadership can come to the fore because they are in touch with their own strength and capacities. People also instinctively trust healthy Nines because they will use their active influence to do what is necessary to create and sustain a truly harmonious environment, one in which everyone can thrive.
Sunday, April 9, 2006
Mirages
I
The fog is clearing, perhaps. There appears to be a growing sense of clarity, of things coming together. At least that’s the way it feels on most days. I feel like a more resolved version of myself. The struggling being within, who was afraid of the world, shrank from the world, is gone. Some days this feeling is pronounced.
These are the days when I feel I could whistle as I walk, if I only knew how to whistle. I look around taking in all assorted sights and sounds, pleasured by everything I see, relishing each sensation. I call it elation, euphoria.
Euphoria, however, isn’t normal. It’s an aberration a disorder of sorts. Medical dictionaries define it as a sense of elation that is disproportionate to its cause. It’s ephemeral, it rarely lasts, or perhaps it simply wilts under extreme scrutiny; an unexamined life having been condemned, rather boldly, as not worth living. So I take each nuance and tear it apart, split each hair, peel away each layer until I convince myself it’s all a mirage.
Mirages terrify, the familiar grayness of everyday existence is so much more comforting and easier to accept. The gray room is safe, no disappointments here, no dashed expectations, the sleep-wake-eat cycle keeps things moving like clockwork for four score or more years. Why would we ever leave? And yet we leave, comfort and contentment weren’t meant to travel hand in hand. Contentment lies elsewhere, out in the distance where the images shimmer and dissolve in the burning sun.
II
Edgar, the piano tuner specializing in Erards, in Daniel Mason’s novel – The Piano Tuner – could have stayed in England doing what he did best: tuning pianos with consummate skill and loving his devoted wife Katherine as best he could. But the jungles of Burma beckoned irresistibly. He believed what he was told about Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll: that the good doctor’s unconventional methods were indispensable to British interests in the Shan states of Eastern Burma. The doctor, much to the chagrin of British military, had successfully petitioned for an Erard piano which was shipped to the jungles of Burma at considerable expense and hardship. Its difficult travel under extreme humidity had, however, rendered the piano unplayable. The doctor was now requesting the services of a skilled tuner of Erard pianos. That’s where Edgar came in. He was briefed about Dr Carroll. He was convinced that the doctor intended to use music to peaceably unite the warring factions fighting for autonomy from the British, or fighting each other. His initial skepticism was superficial, his mind was made up before he knew it was. His wife Katherine also believed that this was something Edgar needed to do, that it was a personal quest without which he would remain unfulfilled. So he sets off for the long journey to Burma enthralled by the sights and especially the sounds along the way.
There are ill-portents along the way. He meets a poet on the train who wants to tell him about the Leip-Bya and a passenger on the boat who tells him how he followed a mirage, an elusive woman behind a veil, into the desert, only to learn that the woman had the face of a deer and sang a song that only he could hear, then the mirage ended and he was left drained, helpless and deaf, unable to hear anything else, ever.
He finally reaches the doctor after many delays, attacks, injuries and illness. He spends many hours in the great man’s company, absorbing his views, marveling at his discourses on art, literature, poetry and even botany. He meets and is entranced by Khin Myo, a Burmese woman who accompanies him and looks after him during most of his stay there. He seeks her company, he is attracted to her, even as he writes letters to the one love of his life, his sweet Katherine.
He works on tuning the piano, reveling in the sounds, the notes, in getting them just right. He spends his days in Khin Myo’s sensuous company, never exceeding propriety. Although he comes close one night when Khin Myo expresses a desire to learn how to play the piano. He asks her to put her hands on his as his fingers fly across the keyboard. Strands of her hair brush his face, a moment full of possibilities, when it ends just as soon as it has started.
He finally becomes a part of the doctor’s larger plan. He is asked to play for the Shan Saubwas. His protests that he is simply a tuner and not a pianist fall on deaf ears. The doctor insists and he plays.
All this is a preamble to my favorite part of Mason’s book. The part that describes Edgar’s choice of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier when he’s asked to play, and the thoughts that went into his selection of the piece.
III
I have talked about the elation I’ve felt on certain days. I’ve tried to delve deeper into the cause, as is my nature. There are scattered events that seem to shine, like characteristic notes in a raag, that define it and set the tone for a larger context. And my raag analogy here, is itself a part of this larger context, as I try to understand, to feed my pattern-seeking brain, bits of information to piece together the rudiments of musical understanding. I have the invaluable guidance of a friend during this process, where each time I think about what he says, a key seems to fit a lock within, opening doors to a beautiful world, thrilling every sense. This tends to happen in every field of interest; if I am wondering about poetry, friends come and light the path with gems about assonance, consonance, enjambment, caesura and thoughts on structure and rhythm, conversations lead to book recommendations that are almost always a soul-satisfying experience.
One talks about floodgates opening up, often in the sense of catharsis, of things rushing out, I wonder if there is a similar metaphor for the richness of experience rushing in, irrigating every single parched corner of the soul. There’s beauty around me that I never noticed before.
In the book, Edgar put his ear to some stones in the river and heard notes he had never heard before. He arrived at Burma, his very own land of lotus-eaters. He wanted to return home to Katherine but accepted every opportunity to stay in on in this languid land of beauty, of music, of haunting sensuality. His senses were filled, the search of which he hadn’t been aware, his eternal quest, was over.
A synergy of sorts happens when a random discussion leads to a book recommendation and a character within the book is eerily similar to a dear friend. Things this friend has been saying, the concerns he has been expressing are identical to those of the protagonist in the book. It makes me wonder what it all means, what is this larger sense and why does it feel as if I am being drawn, inexorably, toward a definite conclusion, a final resolution, the nature of which remains hidden but palpable.
IV
His words imply he has hit some turbulence in life, several things have gone awry. I suggest his music will see him through, restore order for awhile where discord and disorder seem to have taken hold. He agrees but only partially. His passion for music, how he senses and feels each note, each arrangement is enviable and a joy to watch and hear. He says he is luckier than most to have his music but even so there are moments of discontent when a certain arrangement of notes, occurs to him in sleep, he wakes up wanting to capture it, immortalize it, but is limited by an adequate means of transcribing his epiphany. Even now I am not certain I adequately grasp the sense of what he is trying to convey; intuitively I do. I sense the frustration. We have conversations about the order and symmetry, the mathematical nature of music. I question him in wonderment about how it becomes possible to hear each note in isolation. I understand Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni Sa but my ears can never recognize the Re or the Ma in isolation. He mentions “equally spaced notes”, the mathematical beauty of it, where I can try making each individual note the base, one at a time and eventually, with practice, get to hear each one in isolation. I am ecstatic as I convince myself I understood what he was saying. These discussions are enlightening to a musical illiterate like me, more knowledge rushing in with every word, greater joy. A joy that radiates through other aspects of life, rendering many other concerns meaningless and petty.
V
And that takes us to Edgar’s selection of the Well-Tempered Clavier for playing to the Shan Saubwas, in his firm belief that he is campaigning for peace, order and well-being. I will let you read this excerpt from Daniel Mason’s book, for yourself:
He began with Bach’s prelude and fugue in C sharp minor, the fourth piece of Bach’s collections of preludes and fugues known as The Well-Tempered Clavier, or as simply The Forty-Eight after the number of prelude variations, which are arranged into two books, each of twenty four chapters. It was a tuner’s piece, an exploration of the possibilities of sound, and a series that Edgar knew from testing the tuning of professional pianos. He had always called it a testament to the art of tuning. Before the development of equal temperament, the even spacing of notes, it was impossible to play the entire piece on the same instrument. But with equally spaced notes, the possibilities suddenly seemed endless.
He played through the prelude, the sound rose and fell, and he felt himself sway as he played. There is much I could tell the doctor, he thought, about why I have chosen it. That it is a piece bound by strict rules of counterpoint, as all fugues are, the song is but an elaboration of one simple melody, the remainder of the piece destined to follow the rules established in the first few lines. To me this means beauty is found in order, in rules – he may make what he wishes from this in terms of law and treaty signing. I could tell him that it is a piece without a commanding melody, that in England many people dismiss it as too mathematical, as lacking a tune that can be held or hummed. Perhaps he knows this already…Something mathematical, for this reason, is universal, all can appreciate complexity, the trance found in patterns of sound.
There are other things he could say, of why he began with the fourth prelude and not the first, for the fourth is a song of ambiguity and the first a song of accomplishment, and it is best to begin courtships with modesty. Or that he chose it simply because he often felt deeply moved when he heard it. There is emotion in the notes, if it is less accessible than other pieces, perhaps this is why it is so much stronger.
The piece began low, in the bass strings, and as it increased in complexity, soprano voices entered, and Edgar felt his whole body move toward the right and remain there, a journey across the keyboard, I am like the puppets moving on their stage in Mandalay. More confident now, he played and the song slowed, and when at last he finished he had almost forgotten that others were watching.
….And so he began again, now D major, now D minor, and forward through each scale, moving up, each tune a variation on its beginnings, structure giving rise to possibilities. He played into the remoter scales, as his old master had called them, and Edgar thought how fitting a name this was for a piece played into the night of the jungle.
I marvel at the coincidences once again. The protagonist in this novel is exactly like my friend in how he thinks, how he relates to sound. I am quite baffled. These discoveries add to the feeling of elation.
VI
In the book things now take a turn for the worse. Doctor Carroll and Khin Myo make plans to leave the Mae Lwin valley encampment. Dr Carroll asks Edgar to make preparations to leave. Edgar is puzzled, disoriented. He sets off on a raft with the Erard and three boyish companions. He continues to enjoy the sounds of the hammers hitting the strings within the piano, discovering sounds he has never before heard, but conditions start rapidly deteriorating. He is told the legend of Leip-Bya again. He remembers it being mentioned by a train carriage poet earlier in his travels. He is told that the soul of every man lives within a butterfly – the Leip-Bya. It wanders while the man sleeps, visiting strange lands, wandering exploring. He is told that this is the reason a sleeping man isn’t disturbed mid sleep, his sleep needs to last as long as it takes for the Leip-Bya to return and re-enter the body. If it doesn’t death follows. Edgar also remembers the story he was told by the deaf sailor and the things his master said to him. His companions are then shot and Edgar is arrested. He is accused of being a spy. He is debriefed in a manner that leaves no doubt that Doctor Carroll was a traitor to Her Majesty’s interests. Edgar is accused of similar treason for playing for a band of traitors.
The axis of his whole world shifts, his beliefs are shaken, he sees a mirage…
VII
And so I am afraid of this sense of elation, this euphoric feeling that assails each sense, allows me to walk on air enjoying each contact, each sensation, a sensory overload of well-being. Is it a mirage as well? The fear that it is, is strong enough, convincing enough, that there is no option but to let it wilt under the glare of extreme scrutiny. I can’t take it for granted. It is ephemeral, it could well be a mirage.
The fog is clearing, perhaps. There appears to be a growing sense of clarity, of things coming together. At least that’s the way it feels on most days. I feel like a more resolved version of myself. The struggling being within, who was afraid of the world, shrank from the world, is gone. Some days this feeling is pronounced.
These are the days when I feel I could whistle as I walk, if I only knew how to whistle. I look around taking in all assorted sights and sounds, pleasured by everything I see, relishing each sensation. I call it elation, euphoria.
Euphoria, however, isn’t normal. It’s an aberration a disorder of sorts. Medical dictionaries define it as a sense of elation that is disproportionate to its cause. It’s ephemeral, it rarely lasts, or perhaps it simply wilts under extreme scrutiny; an unexamined life having been condemned, rather boldly, as not worth living. So I take each nuance and tear it apart, split each hair, peel away each layer until I convince myself it’s all a mirage.
Mirages terrify, the familiar grayness of everyday existence is so much more comforting and easier to accept. The gray room is safe, no disappointments here, no dashed expectations, the sleep-wake-eat cycle keeps things moving like clockwork for four score or more years. Why would we ever leave? And yet we leave, comfort and contentment weren’t meant to travel hand in hand. Contentment lies elsewhere, out in the distance where the images shimmer and dissolve in the burning sun.
II
Edgar, the piano tuner specializing in Erards, in Daniel Mason’s novel – The Piano Tuner – could have stayed in England doing what he did best: tuning pianos with consummate skill and loving his devoted wife Katherine as best he could. But the jungles of Burma beckoned irresistibly. He believed what he was told about Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll: that the good doctor’s unconventional methods were indispensable to British interests in the Shan states of Eastern Burma. The doctor, much to the chagrin of British military, had successfully petitioned for an Erard piano which was shipped to the jungles of Burma at considerable expense and hardship. Its difficult travel under extreme humidity had, however, rendered the piano unplayable. The doctor was now requesting the services of a skilled tuner of Erard pianos. That’s where Edgar came in. He was briefed about Dr Carroll. He was convinced that the doctor intended to use music to peaceably unite the warring factions fighting for autonomy from the British, or fighting each other. His initial skepticism was superficial, his mind was made up before he knew it was. His wife Katherine also believed that this was something Edgar needed to do, that it was a personal quest without which he would remain unfulfilled. So he sets off for the long journey to Burma enthralled by the sights and especially the sounds along the way.
There are ill-portents along the way. He meets a poet on the train who wants to tell him about the Leip-Bya and a passenger on the boat who tells him how he followed a mirage, an elusive woman behind a veil, into the desert, only to learn that the woman had the face of a deer and sang a song that only he could hear, then the mirage ended and he was left drained, helpless and deaf, unable to hear anything else, ever.
He finally reaches the doctor after many delays, attacks, injuries and illness. He spends many hours in the great man’s company, absorbing his views, marveling at his discourses on art, literature, poetry and even botany. He meets and is entranced by Khin Myo, a Burmese woman who accompanies him and looks after him during most of his stay there. He seeks her company, he is attracted to her, even as he writes letters to the one love of his life, his sweet Katherine.
He works on tuning the piano, reveling in the sounds, the notes, in getting them just right. He spends his days in Khin Myo’s sensuous company, never exceeding propriety. Although he comes close one night when Khin Myo expresses a desire to learn how to play the piano. He asks her to put her hands on his as his fingers fly across the keyboard. Strands of her hair brush his face, a moment full of possibilities, when it ends just as soon as it has started.
He finally becomes a part of the doctor’s larger plan. He is asked to play for the Shan Saubwas. His protests that he is simply a tuner and not a pianist fall on deaf ears. The doctor insists and he plays.
All this is a preamble to my favorite part of Mason’s book. The part that describes Edgar’s choice of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier when he’s asked to play, and the thoughts that went into his selection of the piece.
III
I have talked about the elation I’ve felt on certain days. I’ve tried to delve deeper into the cause, as is my nature. There are scattered events that seem to shine, like characteristic notes in a raag, that define it and set the tone for a larger context. And my raag analogy here, is itself a part of this larger context, as I try to understand, to feed my pattern-seeking brain, bits of information to piece together the rudiments of musical understanding. I have the invaluable guidance of a friend during this process, where each time I think about what he says, a key seems to fit a lock within, opening doors to a beautiful world, thrilling every sense. This tends to happen in every field of interest; if I am wondering about poetry, friends come and light the path with gems about assonance, consonance, enjambment, caesura and thoughts on structure and rhythm, conversations lead to book recommendations that are almost always a soul-satisfying experience.
One talks about floodgates opening up, often in the sense of catharsis, of things rushing out, I wonder if there is a similar metaphor for the richness of experience rushing in, irrigating every single parched corner of the soul. There’s beauty around me that I never noticed before.
In the book, Edgar put his ear to some stones in the river and heard notes he had never heard before. He arrived at Burma, his very own land of lotus-eaters. He wanted to return home to Katherine but accepted every opportunity to stay in on in this languid land of beauty, of music, of haunting sensuality. His senses were filled, the search of which he hadn’t been aware, his eternal quest, was over.
A synergy of sorts happens when a random discussion leads to a book recommendation and a character within the book is eerily similar to a dear friend. Things this friend has been saying, the concerns he has been expressing are identical to those of the protagonist in the book. It makes me wonder what it all means, what is this larger sense and why does it feel as if I am being drawn, inexorably, toward a definite conclusion, a final resolution, the nature of which remains hidden but palpable.
IV
His words imply he has hit some turbulence in life, several things have gone awry. I suggest his music will see him through, restore order for awhile where discord and disorder seem to have taken hold. He agrees but only partially. His passion for music, how he senses and feels each note, each arrangement is enviable and a joy to watch and hear. He says he is luckier than most to have his music but even so there are moments of discontent when a certain arrangement of notes, occurs to him in sleep, he wakes up wanting to capture it, immortalize it, but is limited by an adequate means of transcribing his epiphany. Even now I am not certain I adequately grasp the sense of what he is trying to convey; intuitively I do. I sense the frustration. We have conversations about the order and symmetry, the mathematical nature of music. I question him in wonderment about how it becomes possible to hear each note in isolation. I understand Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni Sa but my ears can never recognize the Re or the Ma in isolation. He mentions “equally spaced notes”, the mathematical beauty of it, where I can try making each individual note the base, one at a time and eventually, with practice, get to hear each one in isolation. I am ecstatic as I convince myself I understood what he was saying. These discussions are enlightening to a musical illiterate like me, more knowledge rushing in with every word, greater joy. A joy that radiates through other aspects of life, rendering many other concerns meaningless and petty.
V
And that takes us to Edgar’s selection of the Well-Tempered Clavier for playing to the Shan Saubwas, in his firm belief that he is campaigning for peace, order and well-being. I will let you read this excerpt from Daniel Mason’s book, for yourself:
He began with Bach’s prelude and fugue in C sharp minor, the fourth piece of Bach’s collections of preludes and fugues known as The Well-Tempered Clavier, or as simply The Forty-Eight after the number of prelude variations, which are arranged into two books, each of twenty four chapters. It was a tuner’s piece, an exploration of the possibilities of sound, and a series that Edgar knew from testing the tuning of professional pianos. He had always called it a testament to the art of tuning. Before the development of equal temperament, the even spacing of notes, it was impossible to play the entire piece on the same instrument. But with equally spaced notes, the possibilities suddenly seemed endless.
He played through the prelude, the sound rose and fell, and he felt himself sway as he played. There is much I could tell the doctor, he thought, about why I have chosen it. That it is a piece bound by strict rules of counterpoint, as all fugues are, the song is but an elaboration of one simple melody, the remainder of the piece destined to follow the rules established in the first few lines. To me this means beauty is found in order, in rules – he may make what he wishes from this in terms of law and treaty signing. I could tell him that it is a piece without a commanding melody, that in England many people dismiss it as too mathematical, as lacking a tune that can be held or hummed. Perhaps he knows this already…Something mathematical, for this reason, is universal, all can appreciate complexity, the trance found in patterns of sound.
There are other things he could say, of why he began with the fourth prelude and not the first, for the fourth is a song of ambiguity and the first a song of accomplishment, and it is best to begin courtships with modesty. Or that he chose it simply because he often felt deeply moved when he heard it. There is emotion in the notes, if it is less accessible than other pieces, perhaps this is why it is so much stronger.
The piece began low, in the bass strings, and as it increased in complexity, soprano voices entered, and Edgar felt his whole body move toward the right and remain there, a journey across the keyboard, I am like the puppets moving on their stage in Mandalay. More confident now, he played and the song slowed, and when at last he finished he had almost forgotten that others were watching.
….And so he began again, now D major, now D minor, and forward through each scale, moving up, each tune a variation on its beginnings, structure giving rise to possibilities. He played into the remoter scales, as his old master had called them, and Edgar thought how fitting a name this was for a piece played into the night of the jungle.
I marvel at the coincidences once again. The protagonist in this novel is exactly like my friend in how he thinks, how he relates to sound. I am quite baffled. These discoveries add to the feeling of elation.
VI
In the book things now take a turn for the worse. Doctor Carroll and Khin Myo make plans to leave the Mae Lwin valley encampment. Dr Carroll asks Edgar to make preparations to leave. Edgar is puzzled, disoriented. He sets off on a raft with the Erard and three boyish companions. He continues to enjoy the sounds of the hammers hitting the strings within the piano, discovering sounds he has never before heard, but conditions start rapidly deteriorating. He is told the legend of Leip-Bya again. He remembers it being mentioned by a train carriage poet earlier in his travels. He is told that the soul of every man lives within a butterfly – the Leip-Bya. It wanders while the man sleeps, visiting strange lands, wandering exploring. He is told that this is the reason a sleeping man isn’t disturbed mid sleep, his sleep needs to last as long as it takes for the Leip-Bya to return and re-enter the body. If it doesn’t death follows. Edgar also remembers the story he was told by the deaf sailor and the things his master said to him. His companions are then shot and Edgar is arrested. He is accused of being a spy. He is debriefed in a manner that leaves no doubt that Doctor Carroll was a traitor to Her Majesty’s interests. Edgar is accused of similar treason for playing for a band of traitors.
The axis of his whole world shifts, his beliefs are shaken, he sees a mirage…
VII
And so I am afraid of this sense of elation, this euphoric feeling that assails each sense, allows me to walk on air enjoying each contact, each sensation, a sensory overload of well-being. Is it a mirage as well? The fear that it is, is strong enough, convincing enough, that there is no option but to let it wilt under the glare of extreme scrutiny. I can’t take it for granted. It is ephemeral, it could well be a mirage.
Saturday, April 8, 2006
Sun Glare - Rt 80 (Exit 28)
There is light all around yet I am as blind as blind can be. I can’t see a thing. The days are getting longer again, the sun gradually rising above the horizon as I head east, squinting, shading my eyes, trying to leave them wide open so I can get accustomed to the blinding glare sooner but nothing works and all I can think of is the car ahead of me into which I could be crashing any minute now. I don’t see its outline, its taillights or anything at all. I feel like stopping right where I am, immobilized with fear, but I creep slowly ahead, clutching the steering wheel tight, hunching over it, inching forward until the bare branches of the trees on the hills come to my rescue, taking away the glare.
I know the respite is temporary, there is only so much the bare trees can offer. They are yet to experience the lushness of spring. Spring isn’t here yet. The clarity of vision will last only as long as the movement of the car takes me away once again from the cover offered by their static existence. I have to keep moving. And most of the times I move blind, using the cues that reside in memory and not in any physical reality. I am programmed. I am sure the other drivers all around me are similarly programmed. They know when to stop and when to slow down in this light induced blindness.
I know the respite is temporary, there is only so much the bare trees can offer. They are yet to experience the lushness of spring. Spring isn’t here yet. The clarity of vision will last only as long as the movement of the car takes me away once again from the cover offered by their static existence. I have to keep moving. And most of the times I move blind, using the cues that reside in memory and not in any physical reality. I am programmed. I am sure the other drivers all around me are similarly programmed. They know when to stop and when to slow down in this light induced blindness.
Impressions: My Name is Red - by Orhan Pamuk
It took me many months to finish reading news-making Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s –My name is Red. It wasn’t an easy read and yet never once did I feel like giving up. It certainly kept me interested till the end. It is a thriller and the back page reviewers have likened it to Umberto Eco’s –Name of the Rose. But it isn’t as fluid as Eco’s novel. Perhaps some fluidity is lost in translation.
However, the book does become pertinent in light of the recent cartoon controversy. It’s about the gilders, illuminators and calligraphers in sixteenth century Turkey. It opens in the voice of a man who has recently been murdered – Elegant Effendi. He was the master gilder on a top secret book that had been commissioned by the Sultan. Elegant Effendi recalls his own brutal murder where he was beaten and his head crushed by a stone, by someone he trusted. His body then dumped into a well.
As the story goes on, the narrators change. Each chapter is narrated from the perspective of either an illustration within the unfinished book or one of the illustrators, calligraphers and the persons involved with them. One of the perspectives is that of an illustrated dog. The dog talks of the harsh treatment he receives in this land due to a prevalent misinterpretation of the Holy Quran. He tells us that the Prophet had nothing against dogs and that people assumed the dog was a detestable animal simply because the Prophet decided to offer a piece of his shawl to the cat and not to the dog.
The story is also told from the point of view of a lonely tree depicted in the center of an illustrated page and a horse that has been drawn running with both his forelegs extended. The illustrated horse questions the reality of this depiction since horses never run like hares.
The debate central to the book is whether or not paintings should be done in the style of the Frankish painters who saw and painted every wrinkle in a face, every item in a room, every fold in the clothes draping the people depicted. The old masters in Turkey were opposed to the imitation of the Frankish painters which was being encouraged by Enishte Effendi who had been commissioned by the Sultan to create just such a book. The ambitious project was expected to showcase the Sultan to the West in a manner that established him in their eyes as the Refuge of the World. There were many detractors in an age where senior artists routinely blinded themselves with a plumed needle so that they could paint from memory, exactly how god intended them to see things, for seeing things with their own eyes and depicting them as they saw them amounted to blasphemy.
Then one of the illustrators turns murderer and several pieces of the narration are in the murderer’s voice yet I found it extremely difficult to start guessing which one of them was guilty. So I kept reading on, trying to discover clues, none were forthcoming.
The murderer strikes again and kills Enishte Effendi, the man commissioned with the completion of The Book. He is killed after a lengthy debate with the murderer about the adoption of European illustration practices. The murderer has trouble accepting it.
The Sultan then leads an investigation. The form the investigation takes is quite intriguing. There are long passages about “signature” and “uniqueness” in the works of art. It wasn’t acceptable to develop unique styles, through centuries of apprenticeship, traditions were required to remain the same, one had to paint n the styles of the old masters. Exhibiting individuality was a sin punishable by law. Yet every artist tended to do make the slightest possible variation to the thing he was illustrating. If his specialty was horses, he drew the nostrils differently, if it was trees, there was something very subtly different about the trees. The investigators found a sheaf of unfinished horse sketches at the scene of the murder and asked all illustrators involved in the creation to draw horses. An old master was then asked to examine all collected drawings to determine which one of the illustrators who had apprenticed with him drew horses similar to the ones found at the scene of the crime. These particular horses were all drawn with torn nostrils, Mongolian horses, whose nostrils were torn to breathe easier in the rarefied Mongolian air.
The Old Master is finally able to single out the murderer although the knowledge isn’t shared with the reader immediately, much violence, intrigue and further discussions follow about illustrators, illustrations and the implications for religion and spirituality.
One particularly thought provoking chapter is the one that’s written from Satan’s point of view:
I, Satan
I am fond of the smell of red peppers frying in olive oil, rain falling into a calm sea at dawn, the unexpected appearance of a woman at an open window, silences, thought and patience. I believe in myself, and most of the time, pay no mind to what’s been said about me. Tonight, however, I’ve come to this coffeehouse to set my miniaturist and calligrapher brethren straight about certain gossip, lies and rumors.
Of course, because I am the one speaking, you’re already prepared to believe the exact opposite of what I have to say. But you’re smart enough to sense that the opposite of what I say is not always true, and though you might doubt me, you’re astute enough to take an interest in my words. You’re well aware that my name, which appears in the Glorious Koran fifty-two times, is one of the most frequently cited.
All right then, let me begin with God’s book, the Glorious Koran. Everything about me in there is the truth. Let it be known that when I say this it is with utmost humility. For there’s also the issue of style. It has always caused me great pain that I’m belittled in the Glorious Koran. But this pain is my way of life. This is simply the way it is.
It’s true, God created man before the eyes of us angels. Then He wanted us to prostrate ourselves before this creation. Yes it happened the way it is written in the “The Heights” chapter: While all the other angels bowed before man, I refused. I reminded all that Adam was made from mud, whereas I was created from fire, a superior element as all of you are familiar. So I didn’t bow before man. And God found my behavior, well, “proud.”
“Lower yourself from the heavens these heavens,” He said. “It’s beyond the likes of you to scheme for greatness here.”
“Permit me to live until Judgment Day,” I said, “until the dead arise.”
He granted His permission. I promised that during this entire time I would tempt the descendants of Adam, who’d been the cause of my punishment, and He said He’d send to Hell those I’d successfully corrupted. I don’t have to tell you that we’ve each remained true to his word. I have nothing more to say about the matter.
…I am not the source of all the evil and the sin in the world. Many people sin out of their own blind ambition, lust, lack of willpower, baseness and most often, out of their own idiocy, without any instigation, deception or temptation on my part…I’m not the one who tempts every fruit monger who craftily foists rotten apples upon his customers, every child who tells a lie, every fawning sycophant, every old man who has obscene dreams or every boy who jacks off. Sure, I work very hard so you might commit grave sins.
Like so, we arrive at the heart of the matter: figurative painting. I’ve heard that some of the miniaturists among us claim that I’m the one behind all this painting in the Frankish style. For centuries countless accusations have been leveled at me, but none so far from the truth.
Let’s start from the beginning. Everybody gets caught up in my provoking Eve to eat the forbidden fruit and forgets about how this whole matter began. No, it doesn’t begin with my hubris before the Almighty either. Before anything else, there’s the matter of His presenting man to us and expecting us to bow down to him, which met with my quite appropriate and decisive refusal – though the other angels obeyed.
This however is precisely what the new European masters are doing, and they’re not satisfied with merely depicting and displaying every single detail down to eye color, complexion, curvy lips, forehead wrinkles, rings and disgusting ear-hair of gentlemen, priests, wealthy merchants and even women – including the lovely shadows that fall between their breasts. These artists also dare to situate their subjects in the center of the page, as if man were meant to be worshipped, and display these portraits like idols before which we should prostrate ourselves. Is man important enough to warrant being drawn in every detail, including his shadow?…”
What a fascinating device used by Pamuk, to turn the pious, religious argument against drawing a certain way, on its head!
All in all, a book that keeps one interested till the end but it is certainly one where there has been some loss in translation. The ending, the resolution of the murder mystery, also fails to satisfy.
However, the book does become pertinent in light of the recent cartoon controversy. It’s about the gilders, illuminators and calligraphers in sixteenth century Turkey. It opens in the voice of a man who has recently been murdered – Elegant Effendi. He was the master gilder on a top secret book that had been commissioned by the Sultan. Elegant Effendi recalls his own brutal murder where he was beaten and his head crushed by a stone, by someone he trusted. His body then dumped into a well.
As the story goes on, the narrators change. Each chapter is narrated from the perspective of either an illustration within the unfinished book or one of the illustrators, calligraphers and the persons involved with them. One of the perspectives is that of an illustrated dog. The dog talks of the harsh treatment he receives in this land due to a prevalent misinterpretation of the Holy Quran. He tells us that the Prophet had nothing against dogs and that people assumed the dog was a detestable animal simply because the Prophet decided to offer a piece of his shawl to the cat and not to the dog.
The story is also told from the point of view of a lonely tree depicted in the center of an illustrated page and a horse that has been drawn running with both his forelegs extended. The illustrated horse questions the reality of this depiction since horses never run like hares.
The debate central to the book is whether or not paintings should be done in the style of the Frankish painters who saw and painted every wrinkle in a face, every item in a room, every fold in the clothes draping the people depicted. The old masters in Turkey were opposed to the imitation of the Frankish painters which was being encouraged by Enishte Effendi who had been commissioned by the Sultan to create just such a book. The ambitious project was expected to showcase the Sultan to the West in a manner that established him in their eyes as the Refuge of the World. There were many detractors in an age where senior artists routinely blinded themselves with a plumed needle so that they could paint from memory, exactly how god intended them to see things, for seeing things with their own eyes and depicting them as they saw them amounted to blasphemy.
Then one of the illustrators turns murderer and several pieces of the narration are in the murderer’s voice yet I found it extremely difficult to start guessing which one of them was guilty. So I kept reading on, trying to discover clues, none were forthcoming.
The murderer strikes again and kills Enishte Effendi, the man commissioned with the completion of The Book. He is killed after a lengthy debate with the murderer about the adoption of European illustration practices. The murderer has trouble accepting it.
The Sultan then leads an investigation. The form the investigation takes is quite intriguing. There are long passages about “signature” and “uniqueness” in the works of art. It wasn’t acceptable to develop unique styles, through centuries of apprenticeship, traditions were required to remain the same, one had to paint n the styles of the old masters. Exhibiting individuality was a sin punishable by law. Yet every artist tended to do make the slightest possible variation to the thing he was illustrating. If his specialty was horses, he drew the nostrils differently, if it was trees, there was something very subtly different about the trees. The investigators found a sheaf of unfinished horse sketches at the scene of the murder and asked all illustrators involved in the creation to draw horses. An old master was then asked to examine all collected drawings to determine which one of the illustrators who had apprenticed with him drew horses similar to the ones found at the scene of the crime. These particular horses were all drawn with torn nostrils, Mongolian horses, whose nostrils were torn to breathe easier in the rarefied Mongolian air.
The Old Master is finally able to single out the murderer although the knowledge isn’t shared with the reader immediately, much violence, intrigue and further discussions follow about illustrators, illustrations and the implications for religion and spirituality.
One particularly thought provoking chapter is the one that’s written from Satan’s point of view:
I, Satan
I am fond of the smell of red peppers frying in olive oil, rain falling into a calm sea at dawn, the unexpected appearance of a woman at an open window, silences, thought and patience. I believe in myself, and most of the time, pay no mind to what’s been said about me. Tonight, however, I’ve come to this coffeehouse to set my miniaturist and calligrapher brethren straight about certain gossip, lies and rumors.
Of course, because I am the one speaking, you’re already prepared to believe the exact opposite of what I have to say. But you’re smart enough to sense that the opposite of what I say is not always true, and though you might doubt me, you’re astute enough to take an interest in my words. You’re well aware that my name, which appears in the Glorious Koran fifty-two times, is one of the most frequently cited.
All right then, let me begin with God’s book, the Glorious Koran. Everything about me in there is the truth. Let it be known that when I say this it is with utmost humility. For there’s also the issue of style. It has always caused me great pain that I’m belittled in the Glorious Koran. But this pain is my way of life. This is simply the way it is.
It’s true, God created man before the eyes of us angels. Then He wanted us to prostrate ourselves before this creation. Yes it happened the way it is written in the “The Heights” chapter: While all the other angels bowed before man, I refused. I reminded all that Adam was made from mud, whereas I was created from fire, a superior element as all of you are familiar. So I didn’t bow before man. And God found my behavior, well, “proud.”
“Lower yourself from the heavens these heavens,” He said. “It’s beyond the likes of you to scheme for greatness here.”
“Permit me to live until Judgment Day,” I said, “until the dead arise.”
He granted His permission. I promised that during this entire time I would tempt the descendants of Adam, who’d been the cause of my punishment, and He said He’d send to Hell those I’d successfully corrupted. I don’t have to tell you that we’ve each remained true to his word. I have nothing more to say about the matter.
…I am not the source of all the evil and the sin in the world. Many people sin out of their own blind ambition, lust, lack of willpower, baseness and most often, out of their own idiocy, without any instigation, deception or temptation on my part…I’m not the one who tempts every fruit monger who craftily foists rotten apples upon his customers, every child who tells a lie, every fawning sycophant, every old man who has obscene dreams or every boy who jacks off. Sure, I work very hard so you might commit grave sins.
Like so, we arrive at the heart of the matter: figurative painting. I’ve heard that some of the miniaturists among us claim that I’m the one behind all this painting in the Frankish style. For centuries countless accusations have been leveled at me, but none so far from the truth.
Let’s start from the beginning. Everybody gets caught up in my provoking Eve to eat the forbidden fruit and forgets about how this whole matter began. No, it doesn’t begin with my hubris before the Almighty either. Before anything else, there’s the matter of His presenting man to us and expecting us to bow down to him, which met with my quite appropriate and decisive refusal – though the other angels obeyed.
This however is precisely what the new European masters are doing, and they’re not satisfied with merely depicting and displaying every single detail down to eye color, complexion, curvy lips, forehead wrinkles, rings and disgusting ear-hair of gentlemen, priests, wealthy merchants and even women – including the lovely shadows that fall between their breasts. These artists also dare to situate their subjects in the center of the page, as if man were meant to be worshipped, and display these portraits like idols before which we should prostrate ourselves. Is man important enough to warrant being drawn in every detail, including his shadow?…”
What a fascinating device used by Pamuk, to turn the pious, religious argument against drawing a certain way, on its head!
All in all, a book that keeps one interested till the end but it is certainly one where there has been some loss in translation. The ending, the resolution of the murder mystery, also fails to satisfy.
Introduction: Find the One Lie!
I was born in the late sixties in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA and for the first three months of my life lived in a tropical paradise. Unfortunately, my arrival was at the tail end of my parents’ five year long stay in this fiftieth state of America and from the tropics the small family of three ventured straight into the Tundras. The next two years of my life were spent in snowy Canada. I can’t really tell you much about the time spent there because, honestly, I don’t remember a thing. The pictures look good, with me in snowsuits, romping around, accepting the snow, relishing it. Far cry from the misery ice and snow now invoke! My pictures bear a striking resemblance to my Anoushka.
The Canada phase lasted two years after which my father, who hails from an extremely patriotic, freedom fighting family, felt the urge to return to the homeland. My parents were terrified of raising smelly, LSD’d flower children in North America and so we moved back to India via Europe. Once again, the pictures show that I had a wonderful time in Europe. My Mom tells me I picked up rocks on the Swiss Alps and having seen Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, imagined myself a moonwalker, proudly displaying my collection saying, “Look Mommy, Look Daddy - Moonwocks!”
I am told I displayed amazing poetic talent as well and my first composition celebrated the Niagara Falls region with the following words, “Green, green grass/blue, blue sky, looks nice, I rike it!” (I couldn’t say “l”). Alas, the muse fell asleep soon thereafter!
No moonwocks, or inspired poetry in Patna, Bihar, where we landed next. After Patna we went further into interior Bihar to a place called Sabour. It was a pleasant place, truly bucolic, with mango trees and flower gardens surrounding our government quarters. My Dad got an award for growing the biggest tomato there, I still remember walking up the stage to receive his award for him.
But this is when the music changes, these were the years when I slowly learnt how to be fearful of all my teachers and shy around all fellow students. The sisters at Mt Carmel Convent School had a tendency to smack the kids with rulers and so I developed an interesting habit of never turning in my examination papers. I used to take the exam but then stuffed the papers into my satchel for Mom to discover after the report card showed mysterious absences, especially when she knew she had dropped me off in class. Those were some trying times for my parents. What can I say, the penguins terrified me!
Idyllic Sabour, where time stood still, was left behind in a quest for a better life and so began the New Delhi phase. My shyness and quirky student habits became more pronounced here, much aggravated by my extreme shyness and fear of teachers. I kept marking my own work with a red pencil, impersonating the teacher’s initials, confident in my seven year old forgery skills. I even sat on my bookcase for several months because my chair had been stolen by the class bully. My younger brother who used to spend his time in my classroom after his kindergarten hours went home making dire pronouncements one day, “Mommy, Didi doesn’t even have a chair in class, she sits on her bookcase!” Took quite sometime to shake off some of this irrational fear and even longer to shed the shyness.
The episode where I lost track of the rest of my Delhi School of Economics, Class of 1987 classmates, during a Jim Corbett park tour, and got hopelessly lost in the jungle, can be attributed to my extreme shyness. I branched away from the others thinking I wasn’t cool enough to stay with them and walked away to a point of no return in the middle of the jungle. Soon as I realized I was lost I started looking around and spotted elephant droppings. I decided to follow this trail back to safety until the ground shook beneath me and I turned to see an enraged wild elephant running toward me. I remember thinking “musth”, that must be “musth” and running like crazy! I kept running, stepping into soft warm heaps at various places, finally stepping behind a tree while the elephant ran ahead. I waited awhile, until I could breathe normally again and then continued along the fragrant trail, all the way back to safety and civilization covered from head to toe in prickly burrs and other stuff. There were a couple of friends who had missed me and were worried about me. How heartening that was!
That was the last memorable experience in India. I left the country in 1988, to reclaim my birthright of US citizenship.
I have been in the US for eighteen years. I met my husband Anil in the February of 1991 and married him on the American Independence Day, July 4th, 1991. Indian weddings are usually characterized by the groom and his family leading a procession (Baraat) to the bride’s home, where the marriage usually takes place, but in my topsy-turvy world I drove my rickety car, family within, as “Baraat” to Rochester, New York, where Anil and I tied the knot. We used the long holiday weekend for a brief honeymoon in Toronto and then it was back to work.
We’ve settled down now to a quiet life in New Jersey, Anil, Anoushka and I. We are wrapped up in our own lives for the most part until at night, before bedtime, the Internet opens up its virtual doors to a wonderful circle of friends and family the world over.
The Canada phase lasted two years after which my father, who hails from an extremely patriotic, freedom fighting family, felt the urge to return to the homeland. My parents were terrified of raising smelly, LSD’d flower children in North America and so we moved back to India via Europe. Once again, the pictures show that I had a wonderful time in Europe. My Mom tells me I picked up rocks on the Swiss Alps and having seen Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, imagined myself a moonwalker, proudly displaying my collection saying, “Look Mommy, Look Daddy - Moonwocks!”
I am told I displayed amazing poetic talent as well and my first composition celebrated the Niagara Falls region with the following words, “Green, green grass/blue, blue sky, looks nice, I rike it!” (I couldn’t say “l”). Alas, the muse fell asleep soon thereafter!
No moonwocks, or inspired poetry in Patna, Bihar, where we landed next. After Patna we went further into interior Bihar to a place called Sabour. It was a pleasant place, truly bucolic, with mango trees and flower gardens surrounding our government quarters. My Dad got an award for growing the biggest tomato there, I still remember walking up the stage to receive his award for him.
But this is when the music changes, these were the years when I slowly learnt how to be fearful of all my teachers and shy around all fellow students. The sisters at Mt Carmel Convent School had a tendency to smack the kids with rulers and so I developed an interesting habit of never turning in my examination papers. I used to take the exam but then stuffed the papers into my satchel for Mom to discover after the report card showed mysterious absences, especially when she knew she had dropped me off in class. Those were some trying times for my parents. What can I say, the penguins terrified me!
Idyllic Sabour, where time stood still, was left behind in a quest for a better life and so began the New Delhi phase. My shyness and quirky student habits became more pronounced here, much aggravated by my extreme shyness and fear of teachers. I kept marking my own work with a red pencil, impersonating the teacher’s initials, confident in my seven year old forgery skills. I even sat on my bookcase for several months because my chair had been stolen by the class bully. My younger brother who used to spend his time in my classroom after his kindergarten hours went home making dire pronouncements one day, “Mommy, Didi doesn’t even have a chair in class, she sits on her bookcase!” Took quite sometime to shake off some of this irrational fear and even longer to shed the shyness.
The episode where I lost track of the rest of my Delhi School of Economics, Class of 1987 classmates, during a Jim Corbett park tour, and got hopelessly lost in the jungle, can be attributed to my extreme shyness. I branched away from the others thinking I wasn’t cool enough to stay with them and walked away to a point of no return in the middle of the jungle. Soon as I realized I was lost I started looking around and spotted elephant droppings. I decided to follow this trail back to safety until the ground shook beneath me and I turned to see an enraged wild elephant running toward me. I remember thinking “musth”, that must be “musth” and running like crazy! I kept running, stepping into soft warm heaps at various places, finally stepping behind a tree while the elephant ran ahead. I waited awhile, until I could breathe normally again and then continued along the fragrant trail, all the way back to safety and civilization covered from head to toe in prickly burrs and other stuff. There were a couple of friends who had missed me and were worried about me. How heartening that was!
That was the last memorable experience in India. I left the country in 1988, to reclaim my birthright of US citizenship.
I have been in the US for eighteen years. I met my husband Anil in the February of 1991 and married him on the American Independence Day, July 4th, 1991. Indian weddings are usually characterized by the groom and his family leading a procession (Baraat) to the bride’s home, where the marriage usually takes place, but in my topsy-turvy world I drove my rickety car, family within, as “Baraat” to Rochester, New York, where Anil and I tied the knot. We used the long holiday weekend for a brief honeymoon in Toronto and then it was back to work.
We’ve settled down now to a quiet life in New Jersey, Anil, Anoushka and I. We are wrapped up in our own lives for the most part until at night, before bedtime, the Internet opens up its virtual doors to a wonderful circle of friends and family the world over.
Internet Embargo
The message was blinking on the screen as she watched, transfixed. The words started swimming around on the page, drifting in and out of focus while she sat, paralyzed. They leapt out at her – HUMAN THOUGHT - growing bigger in her line of vision and taking over completely.
If they weren’t going to be thinking how would she monitor their thoughts? The Grand Triumvirate (TGT) had no tolerance for excuses. “Excuses” were a fascinating discovery. When humans were in trouble, when they hadn’t done or said what they were supposed to have done, when they broke promises or commitments they could use excuses and get away with almost anything. TGT had greeted this discovery of hers with great amazement and equal disdain.
Now they would think she had learnt the art of making excuses from her subjects of study. If the humans weren’t going to be thinking for an entire week how and what could she report back? This could jeopardize the whole project.
The World Wide Web had offered some amazing behavioral insights. She had seen them change and evolve and accept willingly the leashes that bound them to their laptops, computers and various hand-held devices. Laptops had replaced the bedtime book and people on the streets always appeared to be talking to themselves. They had little devices hidden behind their ears and a tiny microphones dangling around their necks. She had ridden with them on trains and buses, noticing their deep involvement with their gadgets. No one paid attention to their fellow travelers in this journey of life, it was a wonder they still needed to get up and go somewhere every morning! People didn’t seem to need or want flesh and blood people anymore. Why, just last night she had watched a news snippet on TV about the International Pornographers Convention and their optimism about the new phenomenon of Pocket Porn. Cell phones could now provide titillation on demand! Well, well! Back home she had learnt about the outcome of such utter dependence on technology. It had taken them eons to recover from its soul-destroying effects.
Her efforts to understand humans had led to her becoming an avid chatter. She chatted around the clock, interacting with people all over the world. Loneliness was rampant. Real relationships had deteriorated or were somehow standing simply because their dissolution was a nuisance that wouldn’t add anything meaningful to the their lives. Clean breaks were just as meaningless as unions. And now it was all virtual. People were virtually stimulating the same areas of the brain that got stimulated during the mating ritual simply by interacting across chat lines. She was very amused with the “a/s/l” inquiries that came her way each day as some lonely soul somewhere, on this vast blue planet, reached out to “touch” someone across high bandwidth cables.
So how was this world going to react to a shut down of the Web and subsequently human thoughts? It did cross her mind that this was perhaps a hoax, but her research validated its authenticity. She was worried for herself. The TGT would demand her return and immediate execution if she failed to send in her weekly report. They would never believe all thoughts were going to be shutdown for a week. They would think it was her ploy to take that vacation to the 12th moon of Jupiter. They believed human tendencies were contagious and disdainfully cited the example of a renegade predecessor of hers who had gone around sporting an S on his suit as he flew around making people wonder if he was a bird or a plane.
She needed to think and fast. The shut down would happen in a few hours. She decided to take a walk on the beach to clear her head. There still was time.
She walked along the shore watching the waves thinking about her future, when suddenly she saw it. It jumped out of the water, a gargantuan beast, before gliding back in. A plume of water shot out of its head. What was that? Could it be? This was wonderful! She had been reading about these sea creatures, there was some data that they were almost as, if not more, intelligent than the humans she had ended up studying all these years. It all came back to her now – The Discovery Channel - she remembered the Whale. They were even said to have a language of their own, a Whale song! Her problem was solved.
She summoned up all her energy, and saw the sands shift beneath her slowly disappearing feet, her legs turning into that mighty tailfin as she slid, smoothly into the calm waters.
She was going to be reporting on whales this week.
If they weren’t going to be thinking how would she monitor their thoughts? The Grand Triumvirate (TGT) had no tolerance for excuses. “Excuses” were a fascinating discovery. When humans were in trouble, when they hadn’t done or said what they were supposed to have done, when they broke promises or commitments they could use excuses and get away with almost anything. TGT had greeted this discovery of hers with great amazement and equal disdain.
Now they would think she had learnt the art of making excuses from her subjects of study. If the humans weren’t going to be thinking for an entire week how and what could she report back? This could jeopardize the whole project.
The World Wide Web had offered some amazing behavioral insights. She had seen them change and evolve and accept willingly the leashes that bound them to their laptops, computers and various hand-held devices. Laptops had replaced the bedtime book and people on the streets always appeared to be talking to themselves. They had little devices hidden behind their ears and a tiny microphones dangling around their necks. She had ridden with them on trains and buses, noticing their deep involvement with their gadgets. No one paid attention to their fellow travelers in this journey of life, it was a wonder they still needed to get up and go somewhere every morning! People didn’t seem to need or want flesh and blood people anymore. Why, just last night she had watched a news snippet on TV about the International Pornographers Convention and their optimism about the new phenomenon of Pocket Porn. Cell phones could now provide titillation on demand! Well, well! Back home she had learnt about the outcome of such utter dependence on technology. It had taken them eons to recover from its soul-destroying effects.
Her efforts to understand humans had led to her becoming an avid chatter. She chatted around the clock, interacting with people all over the world. Loneliness was rampant. Real relationships had deteriorated or were somehow standing simply because their dissolution was a nuisance that wouldn’t add anything meaningful to the their lives. Clean breaks were just as meaningless as unions. And now it was all virtual. People were virtually stimulating the same areas of the brain that got stimulated during the mating ritual simply by interacting across chat lines. She was very amused with the “a/s/l” inquiries that came her way each day as some lonely soul somewhere, on this vast blue planet, reached out to “touch” someone across high bandwidth cables.
So how was this world going to react to a shut down of the Web and subsequently human thoughts? It did cross her mind that this was perhaps a hoax, but her research validated its authenticity. She was worried for herself. The TGT would demand her return and immediate execution if she failed to send in her weekly report. They would never believe all thoughts were going to be shutdown for a week. They would think it was her ploy to take that vacation to the 12th moon of Jupiter. They believed human tendencies were contagious and disdainfully cited the example of a renegade predecessor of hers who had gone around sporting an S on his suit as he flew around making people wonder if he was a bird or a plane.
She needed to think and fast. The shut down would happen in a few hours. She decided to take a walk on the beach to clear her head. There still was time.
She walked along the shore watching the waves thinking about her future, when suddenly she saw it. It jumped out of the water, a gargantuan beast, before gliding back in. A plume of water shot out of its head. What was that? Could it be? This was wonderful! She had been reading about these sea creatures, there was some data that they were almost as, if not more, intelligent than the humans she had ended up studying all these years. It all came back to her now – The Discovery Channel - she remembered the Whale. They were even said to have a language of their own, a Whale song! Her problem was solved.
She summoned up all her energy, and saw the sands shift beneath her slowly disappearing feet, her legs turning into that mighty tailfin as she slid, smoothly into the calm waters.
She was going to be reporting on whales this week.
Short Story
“These are the latest”, she said as she flicked the envelope toward Josie. Angie’s cheeks were tear-stained and her fingers shook as she lit another cigarette. The packet had arrived in the mail today, another set of photographs that Mr Desoto, her private investigator had sent.. It was Joe assisting a long haired blonde woman out of the limousine. The picture was grainy but not unclear. There were other pictures of Joe holding the door open for the same woman or enjoying a meal at a sidewalk café. She had yelled at Mr Desoto for never being able to capture a clear view of the woman on film.
She had spent hours poring over all the photographs she had collected. She had scanned them in her computer and had invested hundreds of dollars in imaging software. It had become an obsession. She had suspected Joe of cheating on her ever since he had become more attentive in bed and had taken to having flowers delivered at the office every other day. Her coworkers were going gaga over the long stemmed roses, orchids and other floral arrangements that had made her cubicle resemble a florist’s. But this was highly unusual behavior. They had been married fifteen years and Joe had rarely showered her with cards, candy, flowers or jewelry in all their years together. She didn’t mind, she saw herself as a practical woman who only yearned for these things when she saw other well-loved women exclaiming with glee all around her.
“You have no need for artifice”, he liked telling her and she had laughed such comments away. So this was puzzling, to say the least.
She had also been noting his late work hours and the sudden proliferation of work assignments that required frequent travel. She has deliberated long and hard and then, on a whim, picked out Desoto Investigations from the yellow pages. Mr Desoto had been tailing Joe for two months now. She was convinced Joe was having an affair. She wasn’t sure who the object of his affection was, but she felt she was close and that the answer was there, staring her in the face, she just needed to concentrate.
Josie scanned each picture again. She felt the color drain from her face. She looked up at Angie and said, “I don’t know what to say Ange. These pictures are not very clear. You can hardly make out anything. Besides, I could never imagine Joe being unfaithful, especially after all these years!”
“Get a hold of yourself Ange, I can’t see you doing this to yourself!”
“I don’t know, Josie, I just don’t know! I really trusted him….never thought for a moment that he would do this to me! The saddest part is that our married life has really perked up! He has been so attentive, so sensitive. I am convinced now it’s guilt!”
Josie saw the tears brimming again and rested her hand on Angie’s, “Maybe she is just an acquaintance Ange! You are letting your imagination run away with you. And this Desoto guy is just making it worse. I think he is a charlatan, a bottom feeder. You have to cut him loose Ange! He is messing you up!”
“I don’t think so. I have really studied these pictures. The woman looks so familiar to me, yet I can’t place her. That hair, her style. I wish these pictures were clearer!”
Josie felt nauseous. She had an insane desire to leave the table at the restaurant where they had met for lunch. She wanted to bolt and was just about to excuse herself for the powder room when the waiter arrived. He smiled at her and said, “Ms Greene! So nice to see you again! Two days in a row. How fortunate we are!”
Angie looked at her as Josie flashed an icy smile back at the waiter, “Why John, you must be confused! I haven’t been here in awhile! Excuse me!” She got up and walked to the powder room while Angie stared after her, with a perplexed John looking on. She ordered herself a martini and told John that she needed a few more minutes.
But instead of reading the menu she pulled out the pictures from the packet again and flicked through them until she came upon the one where the restaurant awning read – Café Un Deux Trois.
That’s where they were today. The blonde hairstyle, the clothes, the shoes, were all pieces of a puzzle that suddenly fell neatly into place. She had been confiding in Josie for many months now, sharing her deepest, darkest secrets and more recently her suspicions about Joe’s infidelity.
She saw things with crystal clarity now. The music changed to a familiar old tune, “When you left me all alone/At the record shop/ Told me you were going out/For a soda pop…” A favorite oldie. She saw Josie walking back from the restroom, steps resolute, a decision reached.
“Angie, I don’t know how to tell you this. Actually I have told you about it, many times. I am hopelessly in love. It started that day at your fifteenth anniversary party. Remember when you had retired early, with a headache? Joe had spent a lot of time organizing the party. He was heartbroken when you left. I found him standing alone on your porch, drinking. He talked about that spark that was missing and one thing led to another….this is it for me Ange, I have found love. I am glad it’s out in the open. We should all try to move on with our lives now.”
The wrought iron chair scraped the floor and fell backward as Angie got up with a start, she walked out of the restaurant with whatever dignity she could muster as Josie picked an olive out of her hair and wiping the martini from her face looked on at Angie’s retreating figure. John was standing nearby, napkin in hand….
She had spent hours poring over all the photographs she had collected. She had scanned them in her computer and had invested hundreds of dollars in imaging software. It had become an obsession. She had suspected Joe of cheating on her ever since he had become more attentive in bed and had taken to having flowers delivered at the office every other day. Her coworkers were going gaga over the long stemmed roses, orchids and other floral arrangements that had made her cubicle resemble a florist’s. But this was highly unusual behavior. They had been married fifteen years and Joe had rarely showered her with cards, candy, flowers or jewelry in all their years together. She didn’t mind, she saw herself as a practical woman who only yearned for these things when she saw other well-loved women exclaiming with glee all around her.
“You have no need for artifice”, he liked telling her and she had laughed such comments away. So this was puzzling, to say the least.
She had also been noting his late work hours and the sudden proliferation of work assignments that required frequent travel. She has deliberated long and hard and then, on a whim, picked out Desoto Investigations from the yellow pages. Mr Desoto had been tailing Joe for two months now. She was convinced Joe was having an affair. She wasn’t sure who the object of his affection was, but she felt she was close and that the answer was there, staring her in the face, she just needed to concentrate.
Josie scanned each picture again. She felt the color drain from her face. She looked up at Angie and said, “I don’t know what to say Ange. These pictures are not very clear. You can hardly make out anything. Besides, I could never imagine Joe being unfaithful, especially after all these years!”
“Get a hold of yourself Ange, I can’t see you doing this to yourself!”
“I don’t know, Josie, I just don’t know! I really trusted him….never thought for a moment that he would do this to me! The saddest part is that our married life has really perked up! He has been so attentive, so sensitive. I am convinced now it’s guilt!”
Josie saw the tears brimming again and rested her hand on Angie’s, “Maybe she is just an acquaintance Ange! You are letting your imagination run away with you. And this Desoto guy is just making it worse. I think he is a charlatan, a bottom feeder. You have to cut him loose Ange! He is messing you up!”
“I don’t think so. I have really studied these pictures. The woman looks so familiar to me, yet I can’t place her. That hair, her style. I wish these pictures were clearer!”
Josie felt nauseous. She had an insane desire to leave the table at the restaurant where they had met for lunch. She wanted to bolt and was just about to excuse herself for the powder room when the waiter arrived. He smiled at her and said, “Ms Greene! So nice to see you again! Two days in a row. How fortunate we are!”
Angie looked at her as Josie flashed an icy smile back at the waiter, “Why John, you must be confused! I haven’t been here in awhile! Excuse me!” She got up and walked to the powder room while Angie stared after her, with a perplexed John looking on. She ordered herself a martini and told John that she needed a few more minutes.
But instead of reading the menu she pulled out the pictures from the packet again and flicked through them until she came upon the one where the restaurant awning read – Café Un Deux Trois.
That’s where they were today. The blonde hairstyle, the clothes, the shoes, were all pieces of a puzzle that suddenly fell neatly into place. She had been confiding in Josie for many months now, sharing her deepest, darkest secrets and more recently her suspicions about Joe’s infidelity.
She saw things with crystal clarity now. The music changed to a familiar old tune, “When you left me all alone/At the record shop/ Told me you were going out/For a soda pop…” A favorite oldie. She saw Josie walking back from the restroom, steps resolute, a decision reached.
“Angie, I don’t know how to tell you this. Actually I have told you about it, many times. I am hopelessly in love. It started that day at your fifteenth anniversary party. Remember when you had retired early, with a headache? Joe had spent a lot of time organizing the party. He was heartbroken when you left. I found him standing alone on your porch, drinking. He talked about that spark that was missing and one thing led to another….this is it for me Ange, I have found love. I am glad it’s out in the open. We should all try to move on with our lives now.”
The wrought iron chair scraped the floor and fell backward as Angie got up with a start, she walked out of the restaurant with whatever dignity she could muster as Josie picked an olive out of her hair and wiping the martini from her face looked on at Angie’s retreating figure. John was standing nearby, napkin in hand….
Home?
Sometimes she didn’t want to go home. There were spaces in her life that called out to her, comfort zones that soothed. There was a collection of shoes underneath her desk at work and a special corner of her bookshelf reserved for her latest purchases; an ever-growing collection of books, delivered and fondly arrayed there. There she sat, immersed in her work, occasionally glancing out at the busy streets below where the snow was falling or a sea of umbrellas floating by, in perpetual motion, as she tried to decide whether to take a walk to the local delicatessen for lunch or to skip lunch entirely and stay dry. The lunch hour was usually spent glancing out at the hard-working guy on the eighth floor of the building across the street. He liked to put his feet up on his desk, every now and then, as he took a break from his computer screen or paced around his office, gesturing wildly as he made a point over the phone. On the floor underneath him was a dance studio that sent her thoughts reeling to a dream world of dance and music where she would live out the music trapped within her soul. And on the days when the sun was shining brightly, the rays glinting off the tops of art deco buildings, she felt right at home walking around the block, observing tourists and travelers, beggars and bums and the guy dressed like a chicken handing out flyers for the newest chicken joint. It felt alive, she felt alive, efficient, on top of her game, this was home indeed…or was it work?
Pounding the pavements in her high-heeled boots she often thought about the home of her childhood where she sat with her Dad, hearing and assimilating his dreams for her. The memories were hazy now but she clearly recalled his vision of a successful daughter reaching the highest heights amidst a lively city like this one. The home of her memories was a warm, safe place where dreams were built. Now she was living these dreams. Their dreams had become her own, this setting of their dreams was hers, this world belonged to her. It made the arduous trip back to a place where she could rest for the night extraneous and meaningless. She had yet to live the dreams she had never dreamed for herself.
The line at the bus terminal was like home too where the same faces greeted her each day. She never knew their names but she knew how their bosses had treated them that day or what their husbands or kids had said to them the previous day; this is where she became a repository of information on strangers’ lives. It was a welcome part of the day. It held the promise of a comfortable bus on her favorite seat by the window where she could lose herself in a book until the words on the page started swimming around, the book slipping from her hands as welcome sleep took over. It was two more hours of comfortable escape.
Then the bus ride would end in a vast parking lot, where she was drawn like a magnet toward the silver car she loved as it called out to saying, “Come in, the seat is warm, your music’s waiting!” She would slide her favorite disc into the CD player and sing at the top of her voice, matching every note until she reached the place where her creditors mailed bills. The place where dishes piled up in the sink and dirty clothes in the hamper. The place where everything simply piled up. There were corners of this place she had never visited. Was this home? If this was home why did she feel like backing her car out of the garage again, to be anywhere but here?
Perhaps it was a painful reminder of the things at which she had failed. Every now and then she tried to add a touch or two to one specific corner or the other: a tiny vase here, a picture there, a rearrangement of the furniture or undertaking a backbreaking housecleaning event. She would then sit back and enjoy the fruits of her labor in the comfortable chair that had lovingly been christened “the thinking chair” by her daughter. The house now fragrant and sparkly clean, the clothes ironed, the dishes done, no toys on the floor, no crumbs in the carpet, blankets, pillows, cushions and throws artfully arranged. For one tiny moment in time her world would be in equilibrium. An extremely transitory event that ominously indicated that all hell was about to break loose yet again. As soon as the Barbies got pulled out of the toy basket, their clothes and tiny pointy boots discarded with a vengeance, as soon as the dynamic father-daughter duo trooped into the house with snow or mud-covered boots leaving footprints all around and as soon as the purplest of grape juices got spilled on the freshly spot-removed carpet, the moment would end. She tried to resign herself to this inevitability and repeat the mantra about the futility of all resistance, but it never helped. The peace always got destroyed as soon as she started screaming like a banshee, asking her loved ones to respect the sanctity of her homemaking efforts!
Oh, what was the use! The weekend over, she would retreat into the world of her desk, her computer, her office collection of books, of shoes, of jackets and sweaters hanging at the back of her swiveling chair and the familiar figure in the eighth floor office of the building across the street, and the dancing students below him. She would be home again!
Pounding the pavements in her high-heeled boots she often thought about the home of her childhood where she sat with her Dad, hearing and assimilating his dreams for her. The memories were hazy now but she clearly recalled his vision of a successful daughter reaching the highest heights amidst a lively city like this one. The home of her memories was a warm, safe place where dreams were built. Now she was living these dreams. Their dreams had become her own, this setting of their dreams was hers, this world belonged to her. It made the arduous trip back to a place where she could rest for the night extraneous and meaningless. She had yet to live the dreams she had never dreamed for herself.
The line at the bus terminal was like home too where the same faces greeted her each day. She never knew their names but she knew how their bosses had treated them that day or what their husbands or kids had said to them the previous day; this is where she became a repository of information on strangers’ lives. It was a welcome part of the day. It held the promise of a comfortable bus on her favorite seat by the window where she could lose herself in a book until the words on the page started swimming around, the book slipping from her hands as welcome sleep took over. It was two more hours of comfortable escape.
Then the bus ride would end in a vast parking lot, where she was drawn like a magnet toward the silver car she loved as it called out to saying, “Come in, the seat is warm, your music’s waiting!” She would slide her favorite disc into the CD player and sing at the top of her voice, matching every note until she reached the place where her creditors mailed bills. The place where dishes piled up in the sink and dirty clothes in the hamper. The place where everything simply piled up. There were corners of this place she had never visited. Was this home? If this was home why did she feel like backing her car out of the garage again, to be anywhere but here?
Perhaps it was a painful reminder of the things at which she had failed. Every now and then she tried to add a touch or two to one specific corner or the other: a tiny vase here, a picture there, a rearrangement of the furniture or undertaking a backbreaking housecleaning event. She would then sit back and enjoy the fruits of her labor in the comfortable chair that had lovingly been christened “the thinking chair” by her daughter. The house now fragrant and sparkly clean, the clothes ironed, the dishes done, no toys on the floor, no crumbs in the carpet, blankets, pillows, cushions and throws artfully arranged. For one tiny moment in time her world would be in equilibrium. An extremely transitory event that ominously indicated that all hell was about to break loose yet again. As soon as the Barbies got pulled out of the toy basket, their clothes and tiny pointy boots discarded with a vengeance, as soon as the dynamic father-daughter duo trooped into the house with snow or mud-covered boots leaving footprints all around and as soon as the purplest of grape juices got spilled on the freshly spot-removed carpet, the moment would end. She tried to resign herself to this inevitability and repeat the mantra about the futility of all resistance, but it never helped. The peace always got destroyed as soon as she started screaming like a banshee, asking her loved ones to respect the sanctity of her homemaking efforts!
Oh, what was the use! The weekend over, she would retreat into the world of her desk, her computer, her office collection of books, of shoes, of jackets and sweaters hanging at the back of her swiveling chair and the familiar figure in the eighth floor office of the building across the street, and the dancing students below him. She would be home again!
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