Frank Sinatra, "When the Wind Was Green"

The art of traveling,
is to live your days at the most idealized stage;
is to absolve your qualms of doing something which you normally do on the sly.

For me it was to renounce my daily duties, mortal responsibilities.
And my daily courses were almost the same:
reading without worrying about the protraction of my writer's block;
writing without fussing over the precision of words, the consistency of logics;
dreaming without dreading its boundary.
So time squandered away greedily.

One day I went to an old traditional garden in a slightly unopportune time,
for the supposedly wholesome atmosphere has retreated to dogged hibernation-
desolation seeped in.
Everything could be in a most unwelcoming dilapidation,
but their enticement swept over you as if tickling by fuzz.
For a second it even seemed favorable to be dead than alive.

It all happened to me as a tourist,
who exerted my liberty of being someone I illusioned.
Wearing bluffing disguise in this guileless world,
yet a masked-face can hardly smile wider before a drop of rain was sensed.

Every auspicious journey belied numerous dealings with god.
Just like sublimating your excuses for eating sweets.
Multitudes of candy you wolved down unawaringly,
and you promised to deserve your punish afterward.

Great blows of stomache ensued expectedly.
Because the end of a journey consolidated your constant role of an anchorless tourist.
The world itself is a crystal ball which lures you to give touches,
and once your fingerprints mar its beauty,
you will be condemned for your involuntary blunder.

So they gather not a whiff of impetus to push you over.
As every place you go there is a magnifying-glass that forces you to reality.
Broadcasters are provided too if such matter did not reach you accurately.

After an ambitious journey of swaggering my elephantine self,
I went back to my nest again to dream to be a fearless little girl,
in this apparently bumbling world striving to be incorrigible.

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

"How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?"- Thomas Hardy, "Hap"

Comments

Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke...

Felix Vallotton

"He was there or not there: not there if I didn't see him."- Henry James, The Turn of the Screw One sees immediately from Felix Vallotton’s paintings that he must had been a gifted raconteur. The painter was possessed of the natural aptitude of unfolding and withholding the narrative flow at the most propitious timing. Mysteriousness emerges. The viewers are bound to be tantalised. Whilst most of Vallotton’s paintings are about the quotidian, the domestic, beneath them their pent-up energy seethes and trembles, threatening to explode at any moment. It isn’t just the quotidian that he depicted, but the interior dramas. Any reader of Ibsen’s or Strindberg’s plays will know that interior drama can be the most frenetic. A woman leans towards a man, her hand entwines his body in show of sensuousness. She whispers into his ears something that the viewers are forbidden the right to privy to. But one has the eye to deduce, from the slightly wrinkled of the man’s nose and t...

Review: La Jetee (1962)

In Matter and Memory , French philosopher Henri Bergson posits an implausible notion – the pure present: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Since time is a movement , an unending progression, there is not a definite point as that of a present moment, Bergson seems to suggest, but an admixture of the past and the future, the has-beens rapidly encroaching on, and eventually subsuming, the what-ifs. In a sense, and as absurd as this may sound, the present is ever elusive to our consciousness: what we perceive of the now , at the very moment in which it is being registered, is already relegated to the realm of the past. The past seems, therefore, the only reality we have really experienced; the reality that we are predestined to never possess. Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) envisages a future in which man finally discovers the means of triumphing over time’s irrevocable logic: experiments are ...

Musings. Ex Libris

Search This Blog