One cannot always sustain

One cannot always sustain one mood, that is well known and clear to all. Politics, the deafening roar of death that must take on others........the death that kills others......we have been there, in the vicinity of such nights. Before, at a younger point in the day, we were filled up with ourselves, the world was generally bright, we were not silly to be idealistic but occasionally reckless enough to dream. Then came the long night of a merciless siege and we were marooned.

That is a lot of politics for one post, and besides what is the use of visiting this kind of politics anyway. One is left with the distaste of dusty mirrors in long forgotten halls and attics in houses where no one visits anymore and no one lives. Old melancholic songs, little ditties that are difficult to hum, poems forgotten, loves hushed up, the distinct memory of a distinct memory, the probability of having written these lines before, the night outside, the same same.

It is quite certain now that old friends will never meet again, how is it possible anyway and who will take such trouble? The last time that friends met, if only the tremors of time could have warned people, given them a hint that now is the last time, after this no more, regret if you want, think of a smile, a parting glance for after this there is only misery, only parting, only tragedy. Where is politics, unless there is a politics in parting too, the politics of parting and fading away forever?

One must be a realist they taught, idealism gets you nowhere, yes read but be sure, sure of yourself, for when nights end, when nights reach an end suddenly, then the next day is too bright anyway, besides the merchants have gone, the small shops have shut down, the old neighbourhoods have changed, people migrate, some have left their countries altogether, there is noise, it is deafening, there is so much clamor, there is no space for poetry anymore.

New writers were discovered, war & peace happened ages ago, this is not even solar pessimism, that too was abandoned, now is the time for lyricism, of a new kind, of a new song, for evenings come abruptly bringing fatal nights, nights of revision, of hushed lips, of those nights that are unending, those that end later, leaving a mirage, a litter of thoughts, only for them to lose sight of themselves among these new books, new monsters. And then these thoughts too are difficult to sustain, to reach a certain end, for beginning demands a certain closure, a break. And then everything ends suddenly, like certain meetings and even the viability of these paragraphs seem dubious, so utterly utterly unnecessary.

What about you sir?

"They didn't know how to take a walk. They walked through the heavy rain and stopped in front of a hardware store where the window display featured piping, tin cans, large bolts and nails. And Macabea, afraid that the silence might already mean separation, said to her new boyfriend:
'I just love bolts and nails, what about you sir?' "

Lispector, The Hour of the Star

Batuba Jantiram Lecoli

"If I could describe the inner life of a dog I would have reached a summit", wrote Lispector once. However she also wrote to tear language away from all restraint, to the extent possible and thus describe those states of mind which language usually fails to do. Talking to her dog Ulisses in a language that Lispector invented which she claimed only her dog could understand. Quoting her biographer Moser "She explicitly makes the link between nonsensical language and precisely those realms of life that are impossible to define and describe". And Lispector herself "I enjoy speaking this way: it is a language that resembles an orgasm. Since I don't understand, I hand myself over: tilibica samvico esfolerico mazuba! I am the water of a lovely cistern".

Discovering the holy name is not permissible for the Jewish mystic, for it can belong to no human tongue. Her biographer claims that this senseless babble that she created was the culmination of her 'search', for true words. She said once, " I restrain myself, as if holding the reins of a horse that could gallop off and take me God knows where."

Lispector is I guess not the only one who invented a personal language to talk or communicate. Myself included, I know some who would speak at those hours where intimacy and knowing melt into a state of knowing and recognition or awareness. At those instances only a personal language can bridge enormous chasms. When I read these words, everything seemed familiar. This language or intimate words do not interest me from any mystical dimension of hers which I doubt but from a personal aspect as it is not entirely an idiosyncratic expression. To import any transcedental angle would be to give it a dimension that it lacks.

Below, an extract of Lispectorish, from her biography.

Angela....Batuba jantiram lecoli? adapiu quereba salutria kalusia. dacoleba, titban, ziticoba, letuban. joju leba, leba jan? Tutiban leba, lebajan. Atotoquina, zefiram. jetobabe? jetoban.

This will not do

this will not do
this alone night
you somewhere and I sit here fuming
tracing the first letter of your name on my palm
again and again
to undo the sea between us the gap words lost

hearing a tune I heard late last night in my head
I hear it again and again a serpent tune
like your name constantly in my head
I erase your name letter by latter
in anger and surprise
to undo the sea the silence between us the heaviness

this is nothing but revenge this hatred you also call
love this step by step murder of my love
like marks in my skin your name digs deep
you serpent strange music enemy whore
I cross your name off letter by letter
in anger and dismay
to undo the sea the silence between us the waiting the love

Monsieur le vivisecteur

Musil, dissecting like an anatomist, analysing each emotion, an empiricist at work, analysing the analysis.

"This is how it looks from the inside looking out......and from the outside looking in?
so now I look from outside to inside, and summa summarum, this movement from outside to inside and from inside to outside gives me the contemplative peace of the philosopher.

I love the night for she wears no veil; in the day nerves are tugged to and fro till they go blind but, at night, beasts of prey take one in a stranglehold and the life of the nerves recovers from the anaesthetic of the day and unfolds within; a new sensation of self emerges that is like stepping suddenly in front of a mirror that has not received a single ray of light for days and, drinking in greedily, holds out one's own face."

The prose written during the night, the emotional closeness of night seems weak and limpid when examined during the day. Says Musil again "Monsieur le vivisecteur....that is who I am! My life: the wanderings and adventures of a vivisectionist of souls at the beginning of the twentieth century".

Musil's prose is distilled, it is clear liquid. The only loser is the reader if the thread is not visible. Musil, poet-philosopher-scientist-analyst-historian, "brain-man perhaps" he says. However, "all words are so ambiguous, so resonant in meaning, so double-edged in feeling, that one is wise to steer clear of them."

Musil, Diaries

Miscellaneous

Horacio Castellanos Moya's Senselessness was the most outstanding novel I read last year. It was such a great breath of fresh air, cliche apart. New Directions are publishing another novel of his called She devil in the mirror which will be available soon. I hope to read it soon.

It seems that everybody is on the Bolano bandwagon. Even people who normally desist from such pursuits are reading 2666. In some quarters Bolano excites irritation. This posthumous success does not meet the approval of literary establishments in certain quarters. I think I liked reading 2666 as much as I liked his TSD. However, as some maintain, it is in his shorter fiction that Bolano scales dizzying heights. I think Amulet and the unforgettable collection called Last evenings on earth represent the real music of his prose. I confess I haven't yet read his poetry collection called The Romantic Dogs. Another short novel called The Skating Rink is coming out soon courtesy New Directions. At Three Percent, Chad Winters writes about this new book.

The real highlight it seems is the publication of The Tanners by Robert Walser. I wrote about two of his books that I read a couple of years ago. However, when I go into Walser mode, then I hate blogging for he makes everything seem superfluous. But it is my intention to read this book.

Why This World

A biography can never be intimate. It remains an account after all, a sort of history, a sketch of milestones, dates, events. The person in question is beyond the objectively verifiable veracity of events. A biography is a construct.

Moser's Why This World, an account of Clarice Lispector's life is a sympathetic study, an appreciation. If Lispector's husband faded into distance after years of marriage, writing apologetic letters to her later, it is not possible for the determined reader to get to any proximity to her scheme of things. Lispector was shrouded in mystery when well known, unknown when not really famous.Some thought she was a man. Lispector perhaps did not deliberately create that aura, that mystery. That was partly because of who she was.....an outsider in Brazil, Jewish-Ukrainian, even though she was only one when her family fled pogroms in the Ukraine. Her accent made her stand apart. Then the great danger she presented, the physicality of her charm, her attractiveness, her prose, her dangerous mysterious closed prose.

If Lucio Cardoso, who she loved had not been a homosexual, Lispector's life could have turned away from the voluntary exile associated with being a diplomat's wife. With Lispector, the twin faces of acceptance and rebellion, domesticity versus individuality found flower in her first great novel. Moser sketches her childhood from family and close confidants, their troubles in the Ukraine, their poverty in Brazil, the pain of displacement. She denied standing outside the glittering gloss of Rio. She belonged to Brazil, she insisted. Near to the wild heart leads to the recognition of a conflict but no solution, and later novels heighten the pain and mystery. Her own neuroses lead to psychotherapy, divorce and other loves, they lead to insomnia and a burnt scarred hand.

The acts of love are questioned constantly, she self aids herself with a certain dated mysticism, outright rejection, affirmation in faith, then there is the impossibility of bridging the gap, yes, words are there but words are merely words. Later on it gives us Agua Viva, benzodiazepines, strange and childish insistence on attention, very demanding behaviours too. When the edifice on which we base our lives start to crumble, and loved ones vanish so easily, then words present a certain refuge. Her beauty was intimidating, her intelligence formidable, the questions she asked difficult.

Moser's biography leaves gaps and I felt we really do not know Lispector after a few hundred pages. Her construction is based purely from her novels., which is not satisfactory. The woman who was an insomniac couls sleep as well, that threshold can never be known, that hour between wakefulness and drowsy numbness. However, this book is a good point to start an acquaintance with Lispector. It should be carried on by reading her novels.

The Hour Of the Star

Within 95 pages is achieved what other writers usually take hundreds to do. The novel is not perfect, it has 13 titles, A hora de la Estrella one amongst them. Lispector takes the fight away, one is surrounded by pounding screaming demons, till all energy is sapped. The young no one, asthenic anorexic poor girl from the north east of Brazil, in the energy sapping bulimia of grand Rio, the star glazed glitter of 1960's Copacabana, the beach, the crazy crazy world of being no one, poverty, sharing apartments, lives dreams and stories, and then everything ends at the hour of reckoning.Life punches you in the stomach says Lispector. Go away, be rather dead.

The Hour Of the Star, this great novella was written by Clarice Lispector towards the end of her life. It was written after The Apple in the Dark and The Passion according to G.H. In this novella, Lispector questions the relationship between the author and the text, a narrative objectivity does not always create a polyphony within the story telling context. The narrator exists apart from the writer? The girl needs a voice, needs a voice. She has seen her, she. People can catch your eye crossing busy streets, even if they are the least eye catching. She tells her story. In the end it achieves nothing, for Lispector thoroughly believed that writing changes nothing.

The Hour of the Star is a brilliant achievement, a novel written by a novelist whose cabbalistic mystical tendencies were well known. She had famously wanted to go beyond man in the absence of god. She retreated to a different position towards the end, when this novel was written. This novel was written on scraps of paper, on cigarette packs. It not only helped spread her aura further but also secured her mystery in the pantheon of Brazilian Literature. There was only one Clarice and in Brazilian literature, only one Lispector. It is a matter of debate whether her prose is more beautiful than she herself.

The mountain was mourning

The mountain was mourning, (and mountains do mourn)
their clay is bitter, in the hours of parting).
The mountain mourned: for the tenderness
(like doves) of our undiscovered mornings.

The mountain mourned: for our friendliness, for
the unbreakable kinship of the lips.
The mountain declared that everyone will
receive in proportion to his tears.

The mountain grieved because life is a gypsy camp
and we go marketing all our life from heart to heart.
And this was Hagar's grief. To be
sent far away. Even with her child.

Also the mountain said that all things were a trick
of some demon, no sense to the game.
The mountain sorrowed. And we were silent.
leaving the mountain to judge the case.

Marina Tsvetayeva

my hours my witnesses

my hours my witnesses
you have seen
how i have carried the hot tinder flame
of my love, the tides of her moments, her moods
like a sacred relic tied to the dark corners of
my silent grotto

how i have lit the dark recesses of
my unrequited passion
with the promise of words alone
how i have unlayered dismembered
the hope of of those promises the passions
of those sunsets
you have seen
the agitation of my heart
as it grieves and wounds and thrashes
against the tides of unbecoming unresolving chains


i know the hot touch of my fingers
have asked for the mooney mounds of your skin
the hooks of your skin
you have seen
i have asked but asked seldom

my hours my witnesses
you have seen
i am ragged with desire, for the
water of your mouth the burning
incense of your thighs
i am willing to pray to seek intercession with
saints holy men scripts amulets
unjudge everything and uncast myself
at the altar of your high temple
you have seen
how dark this fever how unwilling to recede
this ache pain numbness want

my hours my witnesses
you must testify
to this defeating promise
to the tides moons moments of
her moods whims
i tie her like a sacred relic to the inner
layers of my skin want moods desire
you have seen
my hours my witnesses
you have seen

only a son can write these lines

only a son can write these lines
to his mother only a son can
perpetrate this lonely crime
the crime of leaving far behind
leaving estranged the moons and moments of his childhood
and your youth
to leave you picking the touch left behind
on the doorhandles on the staircase
under the poisonous bloom of a magnolia tree
you seek the hidden noise of soundless feet
you seek them in shade in sun on the steps
of a cool veranda on the window sill near the
favourite sofa where you paraphrased shakespeare
and taught the difference between
sensitivity and negative capability
when you taught that ripeness is all
and we are merely as flies to wanton boys
and you said that knowledge is suffering
and so is love you said
but these lines that you will never read
and these words that i will never whisper
and your night that i will never live
and my night that i will never show you
will all end all end in vain
and you did me wrong to take me out of grave
you said and awakening is painful you added
i am living in reality what you paraphrased in fiction

The end of the road

It has been nearly three months since I wrote my last post here, one that I tentatively called This dying blog. However, I have not even once felt inclined to blog again, a term that I clearly differentiate from writing, for these are two different things. It does amaze me as to why I have suddenly moved away in such an indifferent way from this blog, for no matter how trivial my blog is or was, it was still an act of creation. The reasons for this ending are as hidden at times as the beginning of this blog but some of them are not so.One hides the vivid from the obscure but these chimeras have their own space and time and they have a predilection to strike one unawares.

I differentiate true writing from blogging for writing is a calling and no real writer can fend off this monster love while blogging at best is a pursuit and sometimes quite a trivial one. And then it summates and makes you wonder as to the real reasons behind this act, this act of vanity for if I don't miss blogging, then it confirms my ideas of dilettantism though I never had any doubts about that. Ellis Sharp, perhaps the best British blogger, wrote at his The Sharp Side that the average half life of a blog is three years and I think he is nearly right. I have been around here for nearly that time though I was never prolific or regular by any means. However, one cannot generalize and speak about the motives of everyone who blogs for that would be an exaggeration and an unwarranted one at that.

I think blogging is an activity wherein one does involuntarily let slip in the odd prejudice, the temper and aggression behind the facade of a nice looking Internet page, a page mixed with some half-baked insights, that music, that feeling, this music, that thing and yet, one does slip in the temper behind the careful opinion not actually sublimated or lived through.One reveals without revealing and says without much hiding. There are some blogs that try to steal authority, basing feeling on rhetoric, opinion on a well written paragraph, a novel, a fine poem or a movie badly watched. One must distinguish between blogs that create authority from ones that are purely authoritarian, an example is the fine blog Lenin's tomb, which is basically a blog that speaks, speaks with authority but is not based in authority. There are many blogs in the British space which have now neatly merged with the mainstream, representing the same hallowed thoughts and old ideas, speaking purely from a position of authority, creating the authority of those some texts that we have grown with and refusing to show a mirror to the establishment. The rest is generally considered subaltern for it does not represent the establishment.

However, my road ends here. I do like walking occasionally and sometimes I have lapsed into carefree running but the shadows that had started to lengthen in April have now eclipsed that space which I had kept for words. Sometimes 'emotions mount the hermitage of collected remembrances' and the heart caves in. The weather, the climate, known and unvoiced atrocities, the lingering solitude after a sad song, the train of remembrance, the smoke rings of memory, other tics, some habits, the voices of a few people I recognize here, the moments when I was actually close to some kindred spirits here, these I will cherish forever. But no more new words. Just the memory and desire of, the recollection of some such thoughts in a fictional kingdom, of a subaltern memory, of an unauthenticated, unauthorised desire.

This dying blog

As the few readers of this blog may have perhaps observed, this blog is dying, may be slowly but dying nonetheless, much to my dismay. It is not intentional, it was my desire to write about books read and unread, about poems and other vague songs, if not philosophy but attempt to philosophize. However, the material aspects of my life prevent a coherent attempt, the practical ways of life are getting in the way of the 'real' life and the loser is always the mind. It is not possible to live the life of the mind or that of the heart either. The days of medieval travel are over, there is no Ibn Battuta outside of Ibn Battuta, modern travel is a big hassle too. What one is left with are obscure and embarrassing attempts at writing, and I remember my posts on the carnage of Gaza early this year. I think my attempt was obscene but that is the crux, this blog in itself was an attempt to understand through the act of writing what I was reading and seeing around me but the results were getting poor and the will was sporadic and the words were petering out and everything was desultory.

The last so many 'poems' that I have posted here were going only in one direction and I have posted one below too and I think the poems were getting messed up with the rhetoric in my head and I realized quite long ago that I was writing only one poem but occasionally disguising it. I have been reading stoically but have not felt bothered to write about a single book that I have recently read, evidence of both my own malaise and the unmoving nature of what I was reading. Reading 'good' books has made me cynical I thought to myself but I think I was looking only for one kind of writer, say a Genet or a Goytisolo as I could see through the narrative deceptions of almost every one! However, I know this is a phase which will eventually pass, fall like sand from straw sandals, wane and die eventually.

I have got to know the blogs of a few people here and I think some are quite talented and innovative while some are courageous to think of writing. The quality of writing matters to me after the act of writing, for me the act of writing is getting in the way of more serious questions, the sea, the trees, the desert not seen yet, the hearth, the nomad unmet till now. There is shrill music in this world and injustice and no act of writing can change it. This was known to only a few people in the past, I mean those who actually write and lived by a few people some decades ago, like Genet, like Goytisolo, whose anger is tempered by fiction that the gods have bequeathed to them. I will continue to follow the blogs I read regularly and attempt to comment whenever an intelligent comment can be left behind.

I will not obliterate this blog for it reminds me of the few people I have met in this most unreal of places. I do hope that I will return soon to this debased act of writing. I pray that when that time comes, I will be able to actually transpose real memories on to this ethereal page and not construct desires and label them as memories. Till then funeral pyres.

do you not know?

do you not
do you not see
that when the moon glitters
when it shines
when old and new moons shine together
when it is night
when the moon is alone
when at night
in the heart of silence
in the palpable silence of the heart
when old and new moons shine together
at night
with their sorrow their loss
when the moon burns
in its solitary grandeur
with its wasted vanity
when old and new moons shine together
do you not
do you not know
that I remember you all night?

who knows

the nostalgia of those pavements
the worn out nostalgia of those worn out pavements
the sweet pain of this nostalgia
the timeless melancholy of those pavements
who knows who walks those pavements now
hand in hand or heaves a sigh or
throws away a page torn from a diary
hesitantly on those pavements
a page scribbled with a hundred I love you's
who knows if the page flutters aimlessly or
someone stoops to pick it up who knows
the thought of those pavements
the harsh murmur of those pavements
the loud noise of those pavements
who knows how the breeze blows
how the sun sets on those pavements now
the littered memories on those pavements
the trodden years on those pavements
who knows who walks those pavements now
whether their shadows lengthen too in the afternoons
the solitude of those pavements after dark
do the pavements too remember the ceaseless echo
of some footsteps the thoughts of those steps
do you remember how we walked those pavements
do you remember
do you know what remembering is

The day has ended

The day has ended
and the night is spreading its shadow its moon
the moon its rictus
the rictus its shadow
the shadow its longing
the longing its bitterness
the bitterness its pain.

The day has ended
and you are leaving
leaving behind a space and a silence
the silence its noise
the noise its echo
the echo its shadow
the shadow its longing
the longing its bitterness
the bitterness its pain.

The day has ended
and the night and you are hand in hand
leaving your shadows spreading your moons
stealing my silence
the silence its place
the place its shadow
the shadow its longing
the longing its bitterness
the bitterness its pain.

Under cover of Night

To slip into your shadow under cover of night.
To follow your footsteps, your shadow at the window.
That shadow at the window is you and no one else;
it's you.
Do not open that window behind whose curtains you're moving.
Shut your eyes.
I'd like to shut them with my lips.
But the window opens and the breeze, the breeze
which strangely balances flame and flag surrounds my escape
with its cloak.
The window opens:
it's not you.
I knew it all along.

Robert Desnos

go

go
go and wear the medallion of my patience
wear the medallion of my patience on your lapel
show it or flaunt it or
else throw it into the sea
when you walk along the sea shore
with your new footprints in the new sand
under the new moon of your new life
ignoring funeral pyres along the shore

go
go and unremember the poems we read together
discard the amulets of known times
forget the melancholy we shared
the discreet nostalgia for old trains and attics
and lonely wooden barns
and the pain of a lonely owl hooting

you don't know what kneeling is
or what an altar looks like and
what remembrances are
you don't know even now that
when the moon sinks into the sea
a feverish haunting throbs
go ride the riptide to infinity
go

I will never forget

I will never forget that image
the hopelessness in your eyes
the pleading fever in my arms
the restless ache in my fingers
the unslept night in our eyes
and all this human pain so human
so created so worthless
that image when we parted when I left

then I think of travellers banished
and unmitigated separations
unplanned treason unthought of betrayals
but you and me could still have saved
so many nights and days
for our sorrows were worldly
and impious subject neither to melancholy
or doom

I will never forget the exact image
the meaningless tears as they fell unhesitant
the longed for turning back
you etched in stone in vain
hoping that I would change my mind
and learn that being left behind
adds to the face to the eyes
the colour of death of restless repeating death.

The Daily Moods of the Final Certainty

"I want to try to do a film about myself: what it would be like if I weren't successful. Ia'm trying to find out what kind what kind of person I'd have become. I would have always have tried to earn my living from culture, but let's assume I hadn't had the chance to make films or do theater, then maybe I w'd have directed radio plays. That's what the film will be about: a young man who does radio plays. He'd probably have the same health problems I do, because they go back to an earlier time, and the psychic dislocations would probably all be about the same, they'd express themselves differently. Or certain things would be real obstacles to him that aren't to me. I a'm really excited about it now......I definitely want to make the film. "The Daily Moods of the Final Certainty".....that'll be the title".

Fassbinder, Feb 1974

she lies in abandoned solitude

her body lies in abandoned solitude
on the beach,
in an uneasy solitude
motionless and limp she lies in restless unease
added to the world's limitless solitude.
though she killed herself, she
really died at his hands

he had left her, he had abandoned her to
die in an uneasy restless solitude.
she killed herself,
she who was alive yesterday, who was alive
last night,
now lies on the beach in an uneasy solitude.

she took her own life after he took her life
away, after he left her.
there she lies
betrayed and used,
her dead bare back sullies the fierce solitude
of the beach, as she lies uneasy in death.

soon the tides will wash her sad body to
a cold sea, consign her forever
to a limitless solitude.
a back without scars, eyes without lids
in a cold sea,
she will burn forever

he crushed her heart, he ate it
he left her abandoned her.
she killed herself though she really
died at his hands.
her black tresses will anchor her forever
to an unforgivable unforgettable solitude.


Note: The above lines were written after seeing this photo posted by Roxana. It is complemented by a perfectly neat poem written by Swiss and Roxana has translated it into Romanian. The above attempt only conveys an impression. The reality is known to Roxana alone.

Little Viennese Waltz

In Vienna there are ten little girls
a shoulder for death to cry on
and a forest of dried pigeons.
There is a fragment of tomorrow
in the museum of winter frost.
There is a thousand-windowed dance hall.
Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this close-mouthed waltz.

Little waltz, little waltz, little waltz,
of itself, of death, and of brandy
that dips its tail in the sea.

I love you, I love you, I love you,
with the armchair and the book of death
down the melancholy hallway,
in the iris's dark garret,
in our bed that was once the moon's bed,
and in that dance the turtle dreamed of.
Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this broken-waisted waltz

In Vienna there are four mirrors
in which your mouth and the echoes play.
There is a death for piano
that paints the little boys blue.
There are beggars on the roof.
There are fresh garlands of tears.
Aye, ay, ay, ay!Take this waltz that dies in my arms

Because I love you, I love you, my love,
in the attic where children play,
dreaming ancient lights of Hungary
through the noise, the balmy afternoon,
seeing sheep and irises of snow
through the dark silence of your forehead.
Ay, ay, ay ay!
Take this "I will always love you" waltz.

In Vienna I will dance with you
in a costume with a river's head.
See how the hyacinths line my banks!
I will leave my mouth between your legs,
my soul in photographs and lilies,
and in the dark wake of your footsteps,
my love, my love, I will have to leave
violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Poem to the Mysterious Woman

I have dreamt of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make
your dear voice come alive again?

I have dreamt of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my
chest
as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many
days and years, I would surely become a shadow.

O scales of feeling.

I have dreamt of you so much that surely there is no more time for me to wake up.
I sleep on my feet prey to all the forms of life and love, and you, the only one who
counts for me today, I can no more touch your face and lips than touch the lips and
face of some passerby.

I have dreamt of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much
with your phantom,
that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom
among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow that
moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life.

Robert Desnos

So must I write a poem?

So must I write a poem every time you leave me,
every time you go and leave me behind?
For this would leave me wordless,
as our partings are too numerous, too long,
and our natural destiny, it seems.

Must I write a poem every time the hour fades
into longing, with silence marching in
as your steps fade way, each fading step
in step with each silence that each step
gives?

I cannot leave our meetings to serendipity.
I do not trust chance encounters outside sad cafes,
your hair astray and my fists shackled,
you lost in reading a poem
and I lost in my loss.

There is no meaning in suffering. Try remembering
what has happened and the flowing tides of time
will stop. Then other lovers will resume their trysts,
suns will set, the time to part will come for others
too, but my loss is mine alone.

I must learn to trace my words in the shadowy
shadows of the moon or the henna that has dried
on your palms. I must try trusting fortune tellers
and hope that the sun that has set and the moon
that stung have not done so in vain.

your hair blown across your face

your hair blown across your face
I see the white of your eyes from a distance
I see the hair blown across your face
and how you blow this sunset to pieces

how your hair shades your face
and what I would give to live in that shade
under the shade of your hair
blown across your face

witness this blown sunset
witness too the falling shadows
after the shade after the visible white of your eyes
have shaded everything that lives inside me

and now the peripheral night is gathering its gloomy shade
but what can it know of a face that is shaded by hair
what does it know of shade and hair and your face
and the visible invisible white of your eyes

your lips too are covered with the blown strands
of your hair that has blown this sunset to pieces and
has shaded every shade into nothingness and how silent
everything seems now and how loud this silence is

The above hastily and unrevised lines were written after seeing the latest pictures posted by Roxana.

how will you ever know

all night I will burn
all night I will run like a fugitive
all night a barren moon will tear my skin

your touch raised my fever
your words crossed water and air
your unsaid words and your imagined touch crossed water and air

and now you leave
and now you have left me
and now you fall like sand through my dry fingers

what do you know of my world
what do you know of my day and of my night
what can my day know of my night and my night of my day

and now you have left
and all I have is the sound of your words
and the music of your naked feet as they run across my naked floor

how will you ever know of the ache
how can I ever tell you of the ache that you have given me
how can this ache be hidden from the world and from me and from you

and now you have left me
and all I have are the shadows you have left behind
and all I have are the shadows you have left and your beautiful sad smile

but you will never know of the ache
how can I ever tell you of the ache that you have given me
as you left me and you fell like sand and your touch vanished and
my fever my rose

Das Ebenbild aus Despair-Eine Reise ins Licht - Peer Raben

2046 Main Theme (With Percussion Train Remix) - Shigeru Umebayashi

Remorse

I was tagged by Roxana to "post or write a phrase or words that ring true". This is difficult as my memory is an arch enemy. What rings true now may sound hollow tomorrow especially when it is day time, for day time reflections are different to those at midnight. However, the poem below, called Remorse, is one that I admire and to some extent one that does not usually betray me. I also take this opportunity to play, as Roxana says, this game and tag Atenea, Alok, Marta and the elusively brilliant Decoys to come up with their favourite words, if they will.

I have committed the worst sin of all
That a man can commit. I have not been
Happy. Let the glaciers of oblivion
Drag me and mercilessly let me fall.
My parents bred me and bore me for a higher
Faith in the human game of nights and days;
For earth, for air, for water, and for fire.
I let them down. I wasn't happy. My ways
Have not fulfilled their youthful hope. I gave
My mind to the symmetric stubbornness
Of art, and all its webs of pettiness.
They willed me bravery. I wasn't brave.
It never leaves my side, since I began:
This shadow of having been a brooding man.

Borges, J.L.

When we met last

When we met last,
surrounded by your world,
I smelled you, your rich smell.
I was reminded of a perfume that
she would wear, that rich smell
on your neck was like hers too.

When we met last
I saw her face in the shadows
saying nothing, nothing. I remember
only the images of those days, the orchard
trees where we loved, a setting sun,
the drive back to her house.

When we met last
her smell was pain again.
I had thought I had forgotten her
but I remember everything, each line
on her fair palm, her hair a sieve
for the sun, her gestures, that flight, that run.

When we met last
I nearly died, such was the rush
and roar of her smell. And now there is nothing
of her, only your smell.

Sysiphos At Work - Peer Raben

In the Mood for Love

She walks her walk and so does he, she walks sinuously and sensuously, and he sees her walk sinuously and sensuously. She agitates the earth as she walks, the leaves shake on the trees, water in a still lake shrugs, he watches her as he blows a smoke ring where she cannot see him, beyond the unlit staircase. He misses her just as she goes up the unlit dark staircase, she has left many things behind, a form, a sinuousness, a sensuality, a sense of time lost, time unused and bereft of dazzlement, unused and agitated by her sinuous walk up the stairs, by her sensuality that has agitated the unlit staircase.

She walks with purpose and without, she teases the indifference of the universe, and he sees her walk with purpose and without, he witnesses her teasing the indifference of his world and the universe. She lulls the unlit staircase as she climbs it into further darkness, she hypnotizes the lamps and the shade in the narrow alleys into a narcosis of will as he watches her steal the universe and his world of indifference, as he smokes, as he lingers in the corners, in the shade, as he dissolves his smile into nothingness as he just walks past her on the unlit staircase when he faintly acknowledges her with a faint smile, as she walks away with a sinuous indifference and with tragic sensuality, stealing the universe and his world of more indifference.

He will stays where the shadows stay long and grow longer, after she has walked into the room with a sinuous and sensuous melancholy, disturbing the fan and agitating the carpet, disturbing the lake and the trees and the leaves, as she sits with tragic indifference after walking sinuously and sensuously into the agitating room, as he leaves it, acknowledging her faintly with a faint smile, as he leaves and she enters. Whether this is before or after he passed her on the unlit staircase he does not know and neither do I, as I witness him pass her as she passes him past the dark corner under a melancholy lone street lamp, where he was smoking, just a little away from the unlit staircase where she passes him by as he acknowledges her faintly with a faint smile. But all this is just by the way.

( The above lines are a loose recreation, based on two scenes from In the Mood for Love. It should perhaps be read whilst listening to Yumeji's theme or after it. You can find the theme below.)

Yumejis Theme - In The Mood For Love

I waited for you since yesterday's morning

I waited for you since yesterday's morning,
that you won't come they probably guessed.
Remember what beautiful weather it was?
A holiday weather!
And I walked coatless.
Today you are here, and they have arranged
an utterly gloomy and cloudy day.
It rains, and it's getting unusually late.
The rain drops are running down the cold terrain,
unsoothable by word, unwipable by hand.

Arseny Tarkovsky ( Translator Irma Raush)

Zionist White Phosphorus

The Israeli white phosphorus that burned Palestinian earth and sky recently should not be seen as a physical act of aggression alone, a chemical intending to burn skin and bone. It goes beyond arrogance, beyond any justifiable retribution that the Palestinians had invited on themselves. It reflects a crazy insistence on the part of the Israelis in annihilating the memories of Palestine, to put to fire the script of Palestine and to burn those who fire rockets as acts of resistance. The use of white phosphorous, the incendiary fire in the skies, with carte blanche approval from its western allies, signifies a new breach, a new step towards which Israel has taken this stateless people, this land that was stolen from them, the mention of which is considered anti-Semitic by a new brand of moralizers who know sycophantic erudition alone.

The Israeli white phosphorus that crazed Gazan sky and earth recently was not an act of war, for war is fought between enemies who can hurt each other, not between a modern army and helpless women, children and men. The occupied must resist an occupation, must resist, must sings its songs, must write its history down, even when its skies are rendered afire by white phosphorous, given carte blanche to by the people who will write a new road map. Anyone who has been silent in the face of this aggression is intellectually dishonest, brutally partisan and the time has come to write about the bombed homes, hospitals and schools. Any other opinion about the atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians since being robbed of their entire historical land will be obscene, not unjust.

While the Israelis are burning Gaza, a young Palestinian boy in the West Bank has picked up a stone, his aim is the huge wall that separates his third world concentration refugee camp from the Zionist settler in his first world kibbutz camp. The settler has just finished fondling his Uzi and is taking aim at the boys head. The bullet that whizzes through the Palestinian air misses the head and pierces the heart of the boy. He is thrown and lies mangled on Palestinian earth, the stone dropping from his fist and falling near his feet. The Zionist settler, satisfied, glib with his aim, raises his head towards the sky, thanking the God of his chosen tribe. The dead Palestinian boy is now a stone himself. His wailing mother, who will be informed soon of her loss will beat her chest and the young boy will be buried under an indifferent earth.

Certain Oriental sages have written that in times past, this young boy's blood would have dug rivulets under the earth and formed rivers of blood and many such rivers would have flooded many islands of the oppressors. But in our times, oriental prophecies don't come true. However, it is hoped that the young boy will rise again from the dust and pick up another stone. And, in spite of the superiority of the settler god, it is hoped that the stone will gain speed and pierce that settler wall.

Dostoevsky and the Holbein Christ

Below an extract from Ippolit's confessional monologue called "My Necessary Explanation", from The Idiot.

'Depicted in the painting is Christ, who has just been taken down from the cross. I think that painters have usually been in the habit of depicting Christ, both on the cross and when taken down from it, still with a nuance of extraordinary beauty in the face; this beauty they seek to preserve in him even during his most terrible moments. But in Roghozin's painting there was no trace of beauty; this really was the corpse of a man who had endured endless torments even before the cross, wounds, tortures, beating from the guards, beating from the mob while he carried the cross and fell beneath it, and, at last, the agony of the cross which lasted six hours. To be sure, it is the face of a man who has just been taken down from the cross, that is, retaining very much that is still alive and warm; nothing has yet had time to go stiff, so that on the face of the dead man one can even see suffering, as though he were experiencing it even now; but on the other hand, the face is not spared at all; here there is only nature, and this is truly what the corpse of a man, whoever he may be, must look like after such torments.In the painting, the face has been horribly lacerated by blows, swollen, with terrible, swollen and bloody bruises, the eyes open, the pupils narrow; the large open whites of the eyes gleam with a deathly, glassy sheen. But strangely, as one looks at the corpse of this tortured man, a peculiar and interesting question arises: if this is really what the corpse looked like when it was seen by all his disciples, his chief future apostles, by the women who followed him and stood by the cross, indeed by all who believed him and worshipped him, then how could they believe, as they looked at such a corpse, that this martyr would rise from the dead? Here one cannot help being struck by the notion that if death is so terrible and the laws of nature so powerful, then how can they be overcome? How can they be overcome when they have not been conquered even by the one who conquered nature in his own lifetime, to whom it submitted, who cried: Talitha cumi- and the damsel arose, "Lazarus, come forth", and the dead man came forth? Nature appears, as one looks at that painting, in the guise of some enormous, implacable and speechless animal, or, more nearly, far more nearly, though strangely- in the guise of some enormous machine of the most modern devising, which has senselessly seized, smashed to pieces and devoured, dully and without feeling, a great and priceless being- a being which alone was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was, perhaps created solely for the emergence of that being! It is as though this painting were the means by which this idea of a dark, brazen and senseless eternal force, to which everything is subordinate, is expressed, and is involuntarily conveyed to us. Those people who surrounded the dead man, though not one of them is visible in the painting, must have felt a terrible anguish and perturbation that evening, which had smashed all their hopes and almost all their beliefs in one go. They must have parted in the most dreadful fear, though each of them also took away within him an enormous idea that could never now be driven out of them. And if this same teacher could, on the eve of his execution, have seen what he looked like, then how could he have ascended the cross and died as he did now? This question also involuntarily presents itself as one looks at the painting'.

First Meetings

We celebrated every moment
Of our meetings as epiphanies,
Just we two in all the world.
Bolder, lighter than a bird's wing,
You hurtled like vertigo
Down the stairs, leading
Through moist lilac to your realm
Beyond the mirror.

When night fell, grace was given me,
The sanctuary gates were opened,
Shining in the darkness
Nakedness bowed slowly;
Waking up, I said:
'God bless you!', knowing it
To be daring: you slept,
The lilac leaned towards you from the table
To touch your eyelids with its universal blue,
Those eyelids brushed with blue
Were peaceful, and your hand was warm.

And in the crystal I saw pulsing rivers,
Smoke-wreathed hills, and glimmering seas;
Holding in your palm that crystal sphere,
You slumbered on the throne,
And - God be praised! - you belonged to me.
Awaking, you transformed
The humdrum dictionary of humans
Till speech was full and running over
With resounding strength, and the word you
Revealed its new meaning: it meant king.
Everything in the world was different,
Even the simplest things - the jug, the basin -
When stratified and solid water
Stood between us, like a guard.

We were led to who knows where.
Before us opened up, in mirage,
Towns constructed out of wonder,
Mint leaves spread themselves beneath our feet,
Birds travelled by the same route as ourselves
And in the river upstream,
And the sky unrolled itself before our eyes,
When fate was following in our tracks
Like a madman with a razor in his hand.

Arseny Tarkovsky

Parfyon Roghozin

We meet Parfyon Roghozin in the train that reaches Petersburg in the early hours of a cold morning. We meet Prince Myshkin and the lecherous Lebedev too. But this post is just an attempt to see who Roghozin is, not the Prince for he is too well known. Roghozin is swarthy and dark, his features coarse writes Dostoevsky in the beginning of The Idiot, the first part of which, many acknowledge, is Dostoevsky's best prose. Roghozin has inherited a few million roubles and belongs to the merchant class. It is quite evident that he moves in different circles compared to the Prince. But he declares that he is in love with the fantastically beautiful Nastasya Fillipovna and intends to marry her, come what may. Thus it assumes interest for us, we must know him more.

Roghozin makes a fantastic entry again, a few hours later with his gang of goons and lecherous thugs, half drunk or dissolute and throws a hundred thousand roubles at Nastasya's feet. Go burn the money, says Roghozin, I am all yours he means. And the scene, of one remarkable dramatic interest, the kind that Bakhtin calls carnavialistic parody has Lebedev call this an atrocity. Roghozin will do anything to have Nastasya, even kill, even burn money for what do the others know of passion? He fears the meekest man, the Prince himself, who by now offers to marry Nastasya. The Prince too is in love, in love with Nastasya Fillipovna, who has a face worth killing for, worth leaving this world for.

Roghozin does not figure much in parts two and three of The Idiot, though we have him possibly stalking the Prince, for the prince is followed by dark eyes. Most of these two parts, Roghozin is mentioned briefly, he exists only in shadows, he follows the Prince like a shadow. For that matter, the beautiful Nastasya Fillipovna is a shadow too. However, the Prince decides to meet Roghozin and pays him a visit, a visit to Roghozin's melancholy house. It is as dark as Roghozin and here a strange thing happens. They exchange crosses, the Prince declares him a brother, though this does not prevent Roghozin from harboring thoughts of murdering the Prince. We see Roghozin once again but only towards the end of the novel, the dramatic intensity of whose last fourteen pages or so is far better than most five hundred page tomes.

Roghozin has killed Nastasya. The perfectly murdered perfect face lies shrouded in silk. Only a corner of her feet are visible. Roghozin invites the Prince for a vigil, for after all, the loss is his too. They stand a cold vigil, a death and a love vigil, a haunting night, a murderous night, a strange night, a strange few hours. The Prince lies next to Roghozin and his tears fall on Roghozin's face. The tears are now exchanged after the crosses have been exchanged, the brothers in arm are now brothers in vigil too. Everything is finished, love killed and gone. All the characteristics of a menippean satire have been fulfilled, literature, as Bakhtin says, has been carnavalized.

Not much has been told of Roghozin, for if the Prince is meek and delicate, Roghozin is swarthy and determined to act. To the Prince's christ like love, Roghozin brings passion, a physical intensity. To the beggar prince, we have Roghozin's millions, to the Prince's charms, we have Roghozin's lecherous dissolute gang. They are opposites of each other and yet they love the same woman. One must give way, one must yield. Roghozin kills Nastasya Fillipovna, elevating this to a tragedy, but not after its many comic routes. The Prince is intense, they call him an idiot, Roghozin is a mystery, who knows him? And yet the two are linked inextricably, first by the cross and later by tears. The last pages reveal the passion of Roghozin and the Princ accepting it calmly.

Even though the scenes of drama in the first part of The Idiot are legend, the pace frenzied, the drama manic, the essays that Bakhtin has written in his Dosteoevsky's Poetics are no less brilliant. Bakhtin's exploration of carnival literature, skandal-catastrophe and satire, his elucidation of these frantic drawing rooms scenes as menippean satire allow us to understand the genre in The Idiot. But I am concerned with Roghozin, for the Prince is too open a book. Roghozin has Holbein's Christ in his melancholy house, he doesn't say much and yet he chooses murder and Siberia. Why does he kill Nastasya? Dostoevsky's world of polyphony does not allow him to exercise authorial control, Roghozin is his own master, the world is dialogic not monologic. But this passion and this murder are fantastic deeds. Dostoevsky called himself a realist not a psychologist but isn't Roghozin a dark man indeed?

Roghozin has laid Nastasya Fillipovna on the bed, covered with melancholy shrouds. Silken throws are scattered I imagine everywhere. The deed is done, the crime perpetrated. Only the vigil remains. Roghozin is somewhere in a wasteland, carrying with him the cross of the Prince and the memory of the knife that has penetrated Nastasya's heart. The melancholy love is with him too, the shroud, the silk and the hopeless ecstacy of love requited and unrequited. Only in this unrealized love is the passion fulfilled and love elevated to more than desire but dream.

What Tarkovsky offers

What Tarkovsky offers us is a return through an image, through a succession of images, a series of returns through a succession of memories. What he offers is not what he actually gives, for the giving would require a participation, a privy knowledge of his world. What we thus acquire is what we see through a series of images, for he gives us the opportunity to return, to peel the hard crust that has formed on our skin, the hard surface that is indistinguishable from the indifference that age has given or defeat has acquired. We thus see his world through a number of images and we allow them to be transposed on our skin, our minds and our memories.

We do not simply allow him to take us through the unlit corridors of his childhood but we see in the unlit mazes of his mind the unlit corridors of our childhood too; we see in the unlit mazes of his memories the long winding stuff that we thought we never had, for we were never exact enough and smart enough to think properly, for our thinking was only an attempt to prevent thinking, to prevent us from getting lost in those mazes that are suddenly lit, that blinding memory, that blinding moment.

We learn to see as we follow him, past the peeling walls or the magnificent desk, those sepia photographs, those memories in sepia, are you sure, am I sure, was that true, did it happen? The breeze, the wind, the breezy clothes line, the trees have shed their leaves, the trees are in blossom, leave them alone, those leaves too will fall. These memories are mine, this is how it happened, she turned away as I see it, that is how the preparations for her heartbreak were made, did you hear it, that is when her heart broke.

Longing, desire, regret and hope are all in the same frame, in the same moment, the moment the swing begins, the swing of memories, past the silent courtyard, the vegetable garden, the table, the desk, the cups of tea, the few spoons, her youth, his old age, your childhood, her youth. Past the peeling walls, the unlit corridors, the table, the desk, her smile united with regret, her youth anticipating decay, your boyhood waiting to leave everything behind, the garden, the trees, the leaves, the clothesline.

That breeze has shaken you, those unlit corridors are taking you to places that you have forsaken, that hedge and the green fields beyond, the wafting cigarette smoke that so troubles you. It has taken his memories to remind you of your own, as he takes you through his maze, past his clothesline to your unlit corridors past your clothesline, the place where you decided to abandon the holiest of gods, where in the middle of the night you perpetrated the silent murder, which you can see now as the clothesline billows, as she waits, as the cigarette burns to extinction.

I wish I was silent too

how desperate this silence is
how useless these words
I wish I was silent too.

how madly my heart beats
how maddening this heart
I wish it was silent too.

how slow this night how silent
how frosty everything frost everywhere
I wish I was silent too.

everything so sad so silent so desperate
how silent the night how slow
I wish it was the last day.

when will the day of reckoning come
how slow in coming how silent everything is
I wish I had no hope.

how silent this silence is and how loud too
how loud everything is the silence speaks
I wish I was silent too.

Dostoevsky's polyphony

It is known reliably that Dostoevsky dictated the last great novels he wrote, dictated them to his wife Anna Snitkina whilst pacing up and down in his room, pacing back and forth in a long and productive period of frenzied activity, the products of which had seldom been seen in the European literary tradition. The novels of this period including the Karamazov story, The Devils and The Idiot made and gave us what is now called a polyphonic novel, a literary entity that took long to recognize and to differentiate from the standard monologic narrative. The great critic Mikhail Bakhtin, in his fascinating study on Dostoevsky's poetics calls the great writer's narration as Dialogic and his work as a great polyphony, the kind of which the European novel was not acquainted with.

Dostoevsky fascinates me for on side there is the predominant nationalistic Slav, up in arms, very rhetorical, very imperial and at times narrow minded to the point of being feeble minded. And then on the other hand we have the narrator who talks of theology and society, of crimes perpetrated in the heart and in the space of the physical world, of those gruesome things that constitute life everywhere, of a great cacophony of sounds and sights that we find in his novels. He does not describe nature ever nor is he one to describe the physical environment around his characters say in contrast to Turgenev. The most important thing that hits the reader is the dense physicality of dialogue, of words, of action suspended because of the dialogue itself, of a great scene set up before the reader, of a vague terror that is about to befall the main characters. The genius of Dostoevsky lies in making the reader see the dialogue virtually with a physical force, for what happens happens to the reader too, for we end up being instruments in this narration too.

Dostoevsky is the master of the scandalous scene, scenes that make the reader cringe in disgust at times. But these are powerful scenes, scenes of great enormity and import, for what is transpiring is of phenomenal importance, for what is happening is of a physical nature, the changes that are taking place inside the minds of his characters are spilling on to the pages of the text we hold in our hands. Thus we are in the midst of drama, each scandalous scene is great drama and we can say with ease that his great novels are filled with a succession of dramatic scenes, each making us think and change along with the characters and cringe and feel the pain of the happening moment. Thus his last great novels are only great drama for the narration leads to drama, to a scene of importance followed by a whimpering end, an anti-climactic denouement, they are written with a frenzied intensity, with dialogue in abundance, with verbosity of a kind that is frankly unrivalled in literature.

There is virtually no nature description in Dostoevsky unlike most other writers. As we get used to this dense world of drama and dialogue, we realize that any nature descriptions will be perverse, will be contrary to the task in hand, will run the risk of marring the narrative. Thus such outer descriptive narration will be an antinomical antithesis of the inner world that is being described, a world that gets formal expression through speech. This world of speech is thus laid out in front of us either through a narrator who knows things at first hand or through a narrator to whom things have transpired and who is now narrating the events to us through a certain perspective. This is indeed distinctive in Dostoevsky for it gives a certain degree of participation to the reader who in the case of such ambiguous narrative is a kind of participant in this ambiguous narration.

There is formal monologue in narration, a device that reaches a pitch in The Idiot when Ippolit reads out his explanation, thirty pages of monologue that stand out in all literature as the supreme example of a scandalous scene, the kind that Bakhtin describes as a scandalous-catastrophe. The reader along with the other cast is held hostage by a major or minor character, most or all of whom are either drunk or about to get drunk; someone or the other is about to denounce the other and create a public scandal, a public outrage or even a minor or major crime and all this happens so quickly and so openly that it comes as little surprise when the events are quickly forgotten and life resumed again, as if this scandal was the very thing needed. There is an abundance of such scenes in Dostoevsky, in all his great works including the whole of The Devils ( which is a succession of scandalous catastrophes, intrigue and terror), Karamazov Brothers and the fantastically written The Idiot, whose first part is perhaps the best that Dostoevsky ever wrote. The soiree scene at Nastasya Fillipovna's house is the scandalous-catastrophe at its manic best.

Bakhtin calls Dostoevsky's world as pluralistic. This is true for in his novels, the writer stands distanced from his created characters, who hold opinions and have values that are entirely different from those of the author. The novels are thus not author-centred but are independent of the author where multiple voices jostle each other for space to launch their own tirades and speak for themselves. This characterizes the polyphonic novel and is different to the monologic novel that is usually known to us. The nature of the discourses and the fact that Dostoevsky allows a contradictory stance and flavour to permeate all of his works creates a polyphony. If we read his private diaries, Bakhtin's thesis is correct for here we have a nationalistic militant Slav and in the novels we have a multi-variegated tapestry of colours, each brighter and not less vociferous than the other. However, this novel, so advises Bakhtin is not a philosophical novel or purely a mystery play or simply a novel of ideas but an ideological novel, wherein the hero has to live with some ideas and in the end becomes an idea.

In my future post of a similar nature on Dostoevsky, I will attempt to describe what Bakhtin calls the carnival in Dostoevsky and reflect on his heroes.

Southern Dawn

It is only the rebel, the outcast, the "different" Western writer or poet who has tried to talk of a Palestinian narrative, their pain. The "great" ones have been usually blind. Below is an example of a poem by Pasolini, valid now and valid when it was written.

I was walking near the hotel in the evening
when four or five boys appeared
on the field's tiger fur,
with no cliff, ditch, vegetation
to take cover from possible bullets--for
Israel was there, on the same tiger fur
specked with cement-block houses, useless
walls, like all slums.
I happened on them at that absurd point
far from street, hotel,
border. It was one of countless such
friendships, which last an evening
then torture the rest of your life. They,
disinherited and, what's more, sons
(possessing the knowledge the disinherited
have of evil-burglary, robbery, lying--
and the naive ideal sons have
of feeling consecrated to the world),
deep in their eyes, right off, was the old
light of love, almost gratitude.
And talking, talking till
night came( already one was embracing me,
saying now he hated me, now, no, he loved me,
loved me ) they told me everything about themselves,
every simple thing. These were gods
or sons of gods, mysteriously shooting because
of a hate that would push them down from
the clay hills like bloodthirsty bridegrooms upon
the invading kibbutzim on the other side of Jerusalem ....
These ragged urchins, who sleep in open air now
at the edge of a slum field--
with elder brothers, soldiers armed with
old rifles, mustached like those
destined to die the ancient deaths of mercenaries--
These are the Jordanians, terror of Israel,
weeping before my eyes
the ancient grief of refugees. One of them,
sworn to a hate that's already almost bourgeois ( to blackmailing
moralism,, to nationalism that has paled with neurotic
fury ), sings to me the old refrain
learned from his radio, from his kings--
another, in his rags, listens, agreeing,
while puppylike he presses close to me,
not showing, in a slum field
of the Jordan's desert, in the world,
anything but love's poor simple feeling.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Abd el-Hadi Fights a superpower

In his life
he neither wrote nor read.
In his life he
didn't cut down a single tree,
didn't slit the throat
of a single calf.
In his life he did not speak
of the New York Times
behind its back,
didn't raise
his voice to a soul
except in his saying:
" Come in please,
by God, you can't refuse".

Nevertheless-
his case is hopeless,
his situation desperate.
His God-given rights are a grain of salt
tossed into the sea.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:
about his enemies
my client knows not a thing.
And I can assure you,
were he to encounter
the entire crew
of the aircraft carrier Enterprise,
he'd serve them eggs
sunny-side up,
and labneh
fresh from the bag.

Taha Muhammad Ali, 1973

What the Zionists want

The outcome of the present Zionist atrocities unleashed on the Gaza strip will ultimately end in legitimizing the mass killings of Palestinian civilians that also include children and women. The fault as noted earlier lies with the Palestinians for they are nameless, stateless and thus without any rights. The stateless person does not actually exist. For the Zionists and their benefactors to actually not allow the Palestinians to resist, to fight and claim the land that was stolen from them, to besmirch their resistance and to attach to their resistance the label of terrorism is the ultimate victory of the Israeli state. From all this, the ultimate victory will only belong to Israel, for in essence, what Israel is fighting for is an extreme ideology, in which God has been given a role too. From a secular democracy to a theological ideology, everything is immersed in an identity that claims a threat to its existence from a people sandwiched between an artificially progressive Arab states, progress based on desert mirages and that of Israel, a mini America, God's promised land, sponsored by right wing ideologues and their war machines.

After the present genocide is halted, to be resumed at a further date, there will be peace initiatives followed by new maps of peace to nowhere followed by a flurry of non-activity and more frustration. The Arab states will donate their hopeless money to re-build what Israel destroys on a regular basis, the allies of the Zionist entity will call for peace initiatives while Israel will continue to rebuild settlements of extremist Jews in the West Bank, home of Abbas and his gang, the place from which not a single rocket has been fired at Israel and yet the settlements are being build. Who is sincere about peace?

The other players in the area like Iran and the rhetorically naive Hezbollah will continue to exploit the Palestinians for their own purposes and innocent Palestinians will continue to perish. The endgame will culminate in the creation of an Eretz Israel by which time the Palestinian entity will be the substance of myth, nurtured only in poetry and song, some tears and some faded old maps. There are not even many Mahmoud Darwish' around to write about this pain. The fountains of sadness are sprouting blood, the insane cries for help are falling on deaf ears, at this time poetry and Literature seem superfluous, including my naive post. The futility of resistance, the futility of memory, the futility of death and cries and blood, that is what the Zionists want, that is what they will achieve. In the annihilation of the Palestinians lies not their victory but in the annihilation of the memory of Palestine, the will to fight and dream. That is what the Zionists want, what they will achieve.

A futile protest

From the Embankment and along the river, then ending at Trafalgar, people have protested today against the insane atrocities of Zionism and its benefactors. People had also protested years ago before the Iraq occupation.

The shoes strewn on the street above, thrown in disgust by the protesters will not protect the Gazan's but it is a token of protest, of anguish against the double standards that construct our world view, the weltanshauung that modern Europe has inherited and the insane occupation that the Palestinians have to endure, year after year.

Gaza

The crime of Gaza

The current atrocities unleashed on the Gaza strip must not be viewed as a crisis but as a systematic destruction of the feeble body politic of the Gaza strip. Any one viewing it as a crisis is a partisan observer. The war, unleashed by the homicidal murderers of Israel, backed by the US and UK, and supported by word and deed by all the others, including the "moderate" Arabs, is nothing but a continuation of the occupation that is eating away at any civilized remnant that Israel's Western backers might still have. There is shame in this war unleashed on Gaza, a war that pits unarmed civilians against the inheritors of the holocaust, now aided blatantly by the perpetrators of the holocaust. The French and the Germans, the new fascists in place in their capitals and the countries that civilize the uncivilized, the US and the UK, are putting the onus on the Palestinians. What a shame!

The fault lies with the Palestinians because they happen to be there, the murderer murders because he has the murder weapon, the victim should have stayed home, why rush out in the open, why not stay indoors, why ask for rights, what freedom? Isn't occupation better, isn't humiliation better, why not stay tied with civilized Israeli's than roam free as nomads, as birds? Every child, every woman, every man killed in Gaza is a terrorist because they are Palestinian. The war has not lead to any humanitarian crisis we are told because the Palestinians are not human. Listen, listen the world! The Palestinians asking for freedom! A blind man asking to see, to see colours!

The other Arabs, soaked in technicolour oil, floundering in protecting their regimes are as brutal in their silent complicity as the Western powers are blatantly one-sided. The Palestinians can only hope for anarchy, for anarchy to spread in this area so that all become one: The unjustly killed family with the brutal dictator with the modern war machine with the crusaders from the West with the dead intellectuals from everywhere. Since there is no justice in the world, the Palestinians of Gaza should not hope of it. The fascist Israeli's and their shameless backers will never cease to stop till Gaza is itself a large grave. There is no hope for them and no chance of a separate state.

It is night and she is lonely

It is night and she is lonely
and I am lonely like her,
between her candle and me are two empty tables
in this winter restaurant.
Nothing disturbs the silence between us.

She doesn't see me when I catch her plucking a rose
from her breast and I don't see her when she catches me
sipping a kiss from my wine...
She doesn't crumble her bread and I don't spill water
on the paper tablecloth.
Nothing disturbs the serenity between us.

She is alone and I am alone with her beauty. Why doesn't frailty
bring us together? I ask myself: Why not taste
her wine? She doesn't see me as I watch her
crossing her legs and I don't see her watch me
when I remove my coat. Nothing of me disturbs her
and nothing of her disturbs me, we are in harmony
with forgetfulness.
Our supper, each of us alone, is delicious.
Night's voice is blue, I am not alone
and she is not alone as we listen together
to its crystal.
Nothing disrupts our night.

She doesn't say:
Love is born a living creature
and becomes an idea.
And I don't say:
Love has become an idea...
But it seems to be so.

Mahmoud Darwish