Someday . . .

Someday, beauty shall prevail.
A vision, a feeling, that the mind
‘pon perceiving; shall surrender
All its mighty devices
- to the simplicity of the moment
and the joy of being.
Someday, sweetheart, beauty shall prevail.

But it was only, a ,fantasy . . .

Just another sane sentient sapien.

Just another sane sentient sapien.

And by the lump in his throat and by the Mahler that began to play, he could make out that he had hit the epicenter. There – there lurked that fear of being a total non entity in his life, one that ran really deep. He could sense it every time he had to face an exam, a challenge or a trial of wits. And yet, he was hit with rigor mortis every time he stepped forward to take a plunge. The insecurity of being a nobody drove him to run for cover. A life he could  not face head on, head held high? No wonder his thoughts often strayed to the clatter of tumbling pails and tottering to the edge of knowing what could not be known. Every once in a while, he tried it in secret, creeping towards the edge and knowing that he could not know, not go on, any more. All the pain, must be brunt. For now, at least.

The vacuousness of his void was enhanced by the realization that he did not know if anything was supposed to be there in the first place. A birth defect? A character anomaly? He could not tell. Looking around he saw the clockwork was in feverish motion. To what end, he could not begin to surmise; but he assumed there must be one. To him lack of purpose sparked the onset of ennui and decay – he knew that from personal experience. He saw the people, living with focus, determination; or were at least eking it out. What was it, he wondered, that made that poor woman in rags carry that child in her arms and cross the street – to abandon the oft flaunted sense of self respect and beg for deified wood pulp? Her giving her all so that her child might live better? Tears sprang into his eyes, when he felt her fire. A drop caressed his cheek when he knew that the kid was going to become a younger version of the street bum his father had been. Or an unsuspecting woman married into slavery and forced to relive the tragedy of her mother.

Or was it that they do not ask questions? Are these people immune to the clawing? How could they ignore, how do they manage to ignore and live? Do they feel an overpowering sense of aim in their life? Do they know why they are?

They called him an apocalyptic vermin, albeit in a comradely manner. He never did mind that, it was true at times. Those were the moments he felt dead. “Why?” became a earworm – he could find no reason for a next step. A reason was all he needed. A reason to live. A reason, not to die.

Outside the Walls

In this pixelated view of the world outside,
I see beyond these walls,
Green grass, blue sky
And trees as far as I can see;
A lone butterfly flutters by in solitary delight
The trees wave lazily to the tunes of the invisible piper,
The greens sway to his melody -
A puff here, a puff there
And stillness in between.

The grass seems to me,
To be the sole expression of the invisible piper,
Capturing his every whiff,
Dancing to each whimsy;
I just imagine: perhaps you are born just to do that.

Dancing all day, to the gentle breeze
Under the glorious sun,
Proffering a seat to the busy bee
Or moral support to the huge tree.
Just saying – I, a mighty Human, imagine you lack brains.

With never a will of your own
And naught thought for the morrow,
Tall today, soil tomorrow,
Procreation and progeny in between.
Just saying – I, a mighty Human, consider myself superior.

If you could see, you would see
behind these alien walls,
- yes right behind hideous pixelated squares -
You would find a little boy
looking at you; writing,
Writing about you, in fact.

If you only knew,
- Of course you don’t,
just in case you do -
How I wish I was across these social walls,
And have my own place in the sun
Have my own free run,
with the piper whistling in my ears,
Pirouette with the b’flies, hopping from
flower to flower;
Mindless of the day and the hour.

How I wish I could lie, among you;
Smelling the fresh earth and hear the bee behind my ears
My hair swaying to the wind’s soft mutterings
In step and in harmony.
To lie face up at the blue, blue sky
And watch winged angels fly; and chirp
In such sweet tones – I ken not what;
To scamper like a dog
At the erratic rabbit,
In perfect joy and ideal foolishness.

But no.
I am not you.
And you are not I.
Mine is to learn, to work and to live
Thine is to thrive and die.
I cannot be you,
And you cannot be me.
I would rather sing for the moment
Than learn music first.

No, I will not be cruel:
I will not Wish You Were Here;
A child but I am, and for years to come
I will always wish I was There.

A Root Of An Unfocus

Not a night goes by that I,
Don’t stop and ponder on my life strange.
I wonder with heart a-flutter,
Where would I be if there wasn’t that stutter,
Had I waxed a-different on that page.

Corpses of possible presents
Strew the street of shattered dreams.
Bitter, bitter is the regret that I brew,
When through the tortuous nights I do rue,
My bright visions of the could-have-beens.

Had I, had I been otherwise,
Had I done otherwise,
Whither would the road have led?
Perhaps I’d stood the engulfing tide,
With grit and with honor, did abide,
And found myself at home instead.

Inviolate

I would be dumb before the evening star,
And no light word should stir upon my lips
For autumn dusks where dying embers are,
For evening seas and slow, returning ships.
I would be hushed before the face I love,
Rising in star-like quiet close to mine,
Lest all the beauty thought is dreaming of
Be rudely shaken and spilled by wine.

For present loveliness there is no speech,
A word may wrong a flower or a face,
And stars that swim beyond our stuttering reach
Are safer in some golden, silent place . . .
Only when these are broken, or pass by,
Wonder and worship speak . . . or sing . . . or cry.

- David Morton.

I, Enigma

” I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle.”

This is interesting. I’m trying to map the variations of my outlook towards life as a time dependent entity. And doing a very very rough mental spline (cubic, of course; I wasn’t taught otherwise) it seems to follow a rather neat sinusoid. Sure, they keep telling me, change is the only thing that don’t change and that life really is one heck of a roller coaster ride – but not this regular. Please, it is SO predictably boring.

Back  in B’lore, having bored myself out of my wits, I decided to go meta – began observing myself. I initially modeled the curvature of my smile in terms of the solar dose I’d received that day; and preliminary reports suggested a promising direct proportionality. However, it turned out that the data was local: returning home to the sunshine I found that too much vitamin D distorted my colon D’s to something more in the line of a sick sneer.

Observing a wee bit more, I found that the emotional pool was in perpetual instability; and even whimsical factors like a presence , an absence, the presence of an absence etc. can tip the balance. Maybe it is a recipriversexcluson. Then again, maybe not. I tried fiddling around, tweaking the knobs to see where I would hit my resonance – but damn, I couldn’t find a sweet spot. Sure, some things sustained longer; but eventually died away and left me with that pathetic aftertaste.

For the heavily mathematically inclined, my neural projectors came up with the following connect. A picture of the maximum modulus principle popped in : the emotional (dependent) variable is a complex function (as an aside, the count and classification of the independent variables would be the second most Ultimate Question ever), and since it is obviously analytic , it follows that for any domain that we consider the maxima cannot occur inside it. So there exists no configuration of (whatever) variables in which we can corner happiness. However, the modulus in the maximum modulus principle has to be dropped, since it is evident that there is no dearth of scenario where we hit the lows.

For those who did not get the above, please do not bother. These are the side-effects of a Math 601 overdose.

From this I have proposed the following impossibility conjecture: There does not exist a stable boundary condition for which an emotional carrier attains a strictly upper concave orientation of the oral portal ; assuming the absence of external emotional turbulence. Very simply put, you do not need to hire a third party entity to piss you off; a self destruct mechanism is hot wired( self-sufficient, aren’t we … I’m SO proud. ).

Have I managed to truly extract the essence of my attitude? Not really, had I done so, I would have found the gumption to do what I loved ( or at least find out what that was) or found the desperation to call in the afterlife squad. My true calling? – haha that’s really amusing, the line appears to be dead.

Clarion Call

” It is not the critic who counts – not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

- Theodore Roosevelt