Musings. Ex Libris

It is all about displaying the interior. I sometimes wonder if a writer were building a house in his head when he is gestating stories. If house-building sounds too stupendous and quixotic a task, at least the writer would be envisioning a room of his imaginary house, and adding furniture or adornments here and there as he plods away his writing. Day and night, the room expands and shrinks. Day and night the writer is flushed with excitement as he bustles about the room, but before long such childlike enthusiasm will flag, and here comes the writer storming out in distress. Time and motion do not desert the room. It is steadily yet soundlessly growing in size, like flowers that suddenly blossom on an arid land. Words are redundant when a story is already narrated by pictures. Pictures are inconsequential when everything is already visualised by words. Edward Hopper did nothing to solve the ongoing dilemma, but further complicated it. Whenever one feels comp

It is all about peopling the void. Crowdedness dispels the paranoia when one is puzzling over a blank canvas. Regardless of how the result will be it is often an accomplishment if every corner of the picture is filled. I can also hear music drifting out of the cluttered image I just finished: the music that is not too uproarious, but loud enough to warrant me a restful night of sleep. An open, empty space and a gaping chasm are enough to introduce disquietude into my otherwise orderly life. My orderly life mainly consists carrying out my role as a paltry nonentity, namely, “filling up the corner.” Every one of us is like a grain of sand who is always at the mercy of the ebbs and flows of sea. Crowdedness is peace, is stateliness, is life. Architecture fuels Berenice Abbott’s passion for photography. Every building is a man-made monster- a monster that is impregnably armoured, a monster that is impossible to tame. At least, we can imagine Abbott thinking, I

It is all about putting your best face forward. Photographer captures the fugitive moment before it flees. Painter, like an envious sister of Photograher’s, constantly resents the ephemeral existence of a mesmerising smile, which often freezes into a stiff, twitchy line even before she applies onto the canvas a tentative stroke. But one day as Painter is doing half-heartedly another portrait and racking her brain trying to recall what ingenious sparks of spirit that just seconds before flash across the sitter’s otherwise stoical face, her paintbrush takes a sudden and willful sweep over the canvas, leaving a faint but perceptible line on the person’s forehead. Disgruntled at first when Painter sees what a careless mistake she has compounded with her clumsy toil, but then, after assessing the screwed portrait at several different angles, a mischievous smile plays upon her lips. The sitter remains the same throughout the process of painting but the authorit

It is all about defamiliarising the familiar. When our eyes are, by no means in any negative way, trained to take for granted a world glutted with colours, hardly we will conceive of something normal as anomalous. But if we now take our unfettered imagination a bit further and let us envisage a world that is essentially monochrome, that every shade and hue are bled out of every object and every entity, gradually and consequently, we will be beholding a fantastical sight that used to leave us sniggering when we were exhuming our parents’ family album. Everything suddenly looks so archaic, and it inspires in us a peculiar feeling that our existence will no sooner be whizzing to an untimely termination. Black and white invariably impart a vague sense of an impending death. William Eggleston’s photography looks like colours that erupt from the hearts of the monochrome figures, like mummies suddenly coming to life. The feeling is electrifying, but not without

It is about putting on the stocking like ripping off the flesh on the leg. The elastic material clings onto her leg, like pesterer that refuses to give up his pursuing, however much obstacles he has encountered along his difficult journey. Maybe a mosquito is happened to be entrapped in that stocking, and suddenly, when waking up from his momentary daze, he finds himself landed on this foreign terrain, which is populated with nothing special but occasional cracks and sparse bushes. The mosquito has no more the driving urge of bloodthirstiness left in him. He is no longer young, no, and his wings are wilting and losing its youthful spark. So he trudges on with much difficulty on this vast terrain, burning with this sole intent of his final pilgrimage: that to find a cosy place so he can lie down his wearied body. It is every elder’s ultimate desire to enter the Big Sleep, and to luxuriate in that sweet stupefaction, which is growing more and more intense every co