The depth of darkness and The trembling void of light

Natbas

About two days back, I started a collection of short stories by M. Gopalakrishnan, Munimedu [link]. The first story of this collection, 'Night' is in my mind for now.

The story is simple enough. There are three people, a mother and her two sons. One of the sons is in a paralysed state and his younger brother takes care of him. Reading the story, which is narrated from the point of view of the paralysed brother, you get to feel that this man is the centre of the story, not only his own but also that of his mother and brother. Narrative wise, this is a good choice, because that paralysed person is self-centred and hates to be left alone.

And left well alone he will be because this story is set on the night of the nuptials of the younger brother. The young man is in the closed room with his wife, and the paralysed man, Thirumalai, sent to sleep out of his room on a raised platform (Thinnai), can't sleep. He forces his mother and brother to attend upon him with his incessant coughing and complaints of breathlessness. The story ends, not with recriminations or any moral judgments, because everyone knows what it happening here, but with the understanding of the inevitable withdrawal of love and its reapportionment that the marriage is meant for.

This is a brilliant story and I am not doing justice to it with my notes. The authorial voice is totally absent; the story starts with the brother outside his home; he calls his mother and then his brother. The mother knows what is happening here, but the brother, Ganesan, doesn't, and his nobility which shines all through the story, makes a good contrast for the dark and damned end to it. I translate it here, without giving anything away:

"Ammakizhavi turned away slowly. Wiping away her tears with the back of her hand, she glanced at Ganesan. She could not see his face clearly, it was dark with the fallen shadows of the lamp. Ganesan's face was motionless with the depth of darkness and the trembling void of light. A great terror gathered itself and welled up her stomach."

M. Gopalakrishnan is a poet and you can sense it in 'the depth of darkness and the trembling void of light'. We seldom think of it, the two being the same to most of us. But darkness is definitely deep, and the absence of light not so - it is more like a glimmer, like the unseen ripples of a lake on a dark night - its insistent and not so silent movement hints at darker things underneath.

Thank you, Kartikey

Two or three days after a friend had stumbled upon this blog, and with annoyed surprise, asked me how long I've been posting here, it was a happy coincidence that Kartikey resumed writing in his blog - and posts from his site, found their way here. Thanks, Kartikey.

Though I had studied English at school, and have read a considerable number of books, I rarely get a chance to talk to anyone in English. For all practical purposes, it is very much the language of books. Since I started to write in Tamil a couple of years back, I find it very difficult to put my thoughts in English. I've been writing less and less, and have come to a stop. Time is a big constraint, though.

Kartikey's posts here are gentle reminders to me to resume, and I am naturally grateful for his presence in this blog. Seeing his posts recently, I feel it is important that I should acknowledge how much his posts mean to me.

So here it is.

Better days might yet come.

A Confessional

A sociopath feels the need for people as much as he feels to be rid of them. He is used to his own thoughts, their comforts and unsurprising insights. But people disturb, and when they don't surprise, shock. And a sociopath, unless he cuts himself off from all company and cloisters himself in a psychotic cocoon, cannot live without people, he needs them at least to get away from the claustrophobic effects of personhood.

All this makes for strange reading, but for about a year of so, I've been closely involved with a group of people, and while it has been a rewarding experience, i am in a state where i don't know which way to turn. I would like to get back to being myself, to turn back to the  slow passage of time, the weak pull of people. But these days, I feel the outward pull more and more, I spend a lot of time and energy to fulfil what in effect is other persons' needs, and the hollow feeling deepens with each engagement, and each further outward movement.

So ends the confessional.

Whenever I see a post here I feel guilty, because I should be writing here. I don't seem to have the words these days.  I don't converse in English, either at home or office, and it remains a language acquired for reading- and writing long, contentious mails that end up in tired acquiescence. And then, I am deeply preoccupied with writing in Tamil, and fact is, everything I write in English sounds wrong. Probably you knew this already, but these are days of my awakening.

So I start off with a few sentences like this, and when I hit a roadblock, I don't seem to have the will or energy or even the wherewithal to go beyond it, I click select all and delete the whole thing. If it is paper, may be the feeling will be worse, because your failure is a physical presence, but with the computer, you are just a click away from closure of whatever you want to be closed.

I started out to write this post for kartikey, whose talks on music I read, but don't comment, because I don't seem to have the right words that would sound both true and appropriate. I do listen to some classical music online, so I find his posts helpful.  Thanks Kartikey,  I started out writing this post with the intention of thanking you, but could do this only at the end of the piece. Thanks again.

This is something that comes with Windows, and I am bookmarking it here just in case I forget it later.

I suppose people who designed this would be aghast to see the purpose to which I have put their application, but I am grateful nevertheless for the fun. Thanks a lot for the Math Input Panel : it generates complicated equations to go with pictures.

Paarotfish is one thing I can't do without. In fact, I dread the day Twitter changes stuff and Parrotfish gets irretrievable broken. Hope it is not soon. Without the embed.ly twitter extension, my timeline looks impoverished. Parrotfish is a must have on Twitter, I don't know why it isn't more popular.

Smoothdraw is a fine paint application to have in your desktop : Smoothdraw

One installs and removes so many programs, and uses and forgets so much, I am going to bookmark that sort of thing here for future reference.

Film has an immediacy that is not available to any other medium. The impact of what would have taken prolonged debate, and possibly breathtaking oratory that might not have been appreciated by the general public is today encapsulated in a single image, or a shot.

image credit : Mail Online

More from the Reviews.

"To depict a woman naked is to show her as Aphrodite, asserted St. Clement of Alexandria, the second century apologist; a good Christian should be horrified at the idea," writes Catharine Edwards in her review of "The Art of the Body". The human is not to be confused with the divine.

The ancient Greeks and we in much of our history, I think, would have been filled with awe at our first sight of the nude feminine body. Outside the sculptures of our temples, one wonders what we made of the encounter. But today, our conditioning is that of film, and the naked women might not evoke in us visions of the divine - our thoughts go to the dark films, the sensuous and suggestive forms and movements of our actresses, and the false throb of faked climaxes. We have gained much with photos and films, but the frozen sculptures with their limited means of production and privileged status as objects of worship held for us more wonder. The naked feminine body is no longer capable of invoking feelings of exaltation in us, there is something subterranean and sinister in our passions. Thanks to the subterfuge of enacted dramas compulsively and helplessly endured day in and day out.

The dissolution of the still form into transient images is a matter of regret, but the sculpture as a evocative and representative artifice is itself incomplete when compared with words, as in Odyssey:

Tyro began, whom great Salmoneus bred;
The royal partner of famed Cretheus' bed.
For fair Enipeus, as from fruitful urns
He pours his watery store, the virgin burns;
Smooth flows the gentle stream with wanton pride,
And in soft mazes rolls a silver tide.
As on his banks the maid enamour'd roves,
The monarch of the deep beholds and loves;
In her Enipeus' form and borrow'd charms
The amorous god descends into her arms:
Around, a spacious arch of waves he throws,
And high in air the liquid mountain rose;
Thus in surrounding floods conceal'd, he proves
The pleasing transport, and completes his loves.

A prose version of this:

"[Odysseus sees the ghosts of heroines in the underworld :] The first that I saw was high-born Tyro, daughter of great Salmoneos and wife of Kretheus son of Aiolos--such was her twofold boast. She fell in love with the river-god Enipeos, whose waters are the most beautiful of any that flow on earth; and she haunted his beguiling streams. But in place of Enipeos, and in his likeness, there came the god [Poseidon] who sustains and who shakes the earth. He lay with her at the mouth of the eddying river, and a surging wave, mountain-high, curled over them and concealed the god and the mortal girl."

Water is all movement, and a wave more so, but a surging wave arches high and conceals the divine and their human lovers in their embrace. With words anything is possible : because its form is ever in the making, it is in a constant state of renewal and this half comprehension of the incomprehensible is what is perfect about it.

Book reviews make a better read than books themselves- because when one is past a certain age, knowledge is not of much use, and what knowledge one acquires is no sooner gained than is lost in a haze of general ideas. So it happens that I prefer to pore over book reviews than drudge through book length details. This is poor advertisement for my sort of reading, I know- but it gives me much pleasure to even go over a list of book titles, sometimes even reviews carry too much of a weight.

I have on hand, an old issue of Times Literary Supplement (February 17, 2012)- and these are the first few books:

• "Joseph Roth - A Life in Letters" translated and edited by Michael Hoffmann
• "Ben Jonson - A LIfe" by Ian Donaldson
• "The Homeric Hymsn - Interpretative essays" - ed. Andrew Faulkner
• "Facing the Gods - Ephiphany and representation in Graeco- Roman art, literature and religion" - Verity Platt
• "The History Written on the Classical Greek Body" - Robin Osborne
• "The Art of the Body - Antiquity and its legacy" - Michael Squire
• "Widor - A Life beyond the Toccata" - John R. Near
• "Superstition as Ideology in Iranian Politics - From Majlesi to Ahmedinijad" - Ali Rahnema

and so on.

What is in all these books, you might ask. Questions, and room for speculation - which will be spoiled if one earnestly sets to reading these books.

"We were outfitted for life, only for death to greet us. We were still standing in bewilderment at our first funeral procession, and already we were lying in a mass grave," Joseph Roth is quoted as having written. These words evoke a person, to whose image no amount of details will do enough justice. It is enough to know for our present purposes, another quote of Roth : "I have hit upon a method to cheat my faith, which forbids suicide. So I will die with my pen in my hand". Enough, we have a person, details are disturbance.

The same goes for Ben Jonson, too. We have one of his contemporaries write about Jonson, "He is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others, given rather to lose a friend than a jest, jealous of every word and action of those about him (especially after drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth..." Ha, a person you say, and the reveiwer helpfully notes from the book that Ben Jonson was a daunting presence in the performance of his own plays, making, "Vile and bad faces at every line... to make players afraid to take your part". And to top it all, there is the nugget that after Jonson had been and back from Scotland, he had a character in his latest masque announce, "One of our greatest poets- I know not how good a one- went to Edinburgh o' foot, and came back". The reviewer adds, spoiling the fun, that 'greatest' here means 'largest;. Any further reading is sure to be less enchanting.

Geoff Dyer's "Working the Room" is a brilliant book. Collection of essays and reviews published between the years 1999-2010, this cleverly contrived work of 400 pages is a delight to read. Cleverly contrived, since the contents are neatly divided into four parts : Visuals, Verbals, Variables and Personals : photos, words, music and memories. If only we could put our confused preoccupations into some such meaningful order, it might look like there was some purpose in what we did.

Dyer starts out with this quote:

There are writers for whom no forms exist; too clever for novels, too sceptical for poetry, too verbose for the aphorism, all that is left to them is the essay - the least appropriate medium for the foiled.
- Don Paterson

I' hope to write about Working the Room on and off for the next few days.

image credit : Amazon.com