Post It

Past calling

Did you really betray your husband?

It's a long story, but yes I did.

Oh before I forget, how would you like your coffee?

Cream and no sugar, thanks.

There on the edge of the world, a stone's throw from the ocean, the evening had swept in the sails of the fishermen, and in the half light, it was still possible to see, the waves gently ebbing. Like a spell, the wind began to gently chant it's litany across the lines of palm trees that fronded the curving shore. Cannanore, in December was a cool place. A town alone, still hugging it's quaint charms, lulled to sleep by it's own anachronisms. I looked at her again, and in the guttering sway and shadow of the oil lamp, I could once again see her mystery taking shape as real as it once had been, tearing up all the answers that had been woven to hold back the questions. And I wondered again as to what I was doing here.

Why do you talk in your sleep?

Maybe because it's easier than waking up and lying?

Are you answering my question or asking me to answer yours?

Look, you left those footprints on the sand. The sea will wash it all away by the morning, as time will erase all trace of our lives, but the point is, right now there is a trail back to where you came from.

I could feel the bubble of emptiness well up deep inside her, and I watched it take shape and sighed deep within. The distance that separated us suddenly became a chasm. And she as if she was dying, suddenly opened her eyes wide and stared startled at some inner echo of her thoughts reflected in mine. Confronting our pasts can be a messy business indeed, and one best left for the life after. But that choice is not always there. And I remembered the old legend thatha used to tell us sitting here in the same place, as we watched the street light up, one gas lamp at a time at dusk, in the days before electricity and powercuts came to destroy our darkness.

Of how every twenty five years, that rock swimming against the current a mile out to sea would slowly surface until the submerged island was fully visible glowing eerie green, like an emerald with a fire within. It would then plunge right back to where it came from until only the dark tip of the rock would remain visible defiant against the waves cresting it. Legend has it that Ezhumalai was Hanuman's gift on his flying trip. And thatha's sure that this island is the legendary piece that fell off, on his way over with the magical shrub that could heal any wound, even one poisoned by unrequited passion. The straits to Ceylon, contained a lot more than just the ocean in between. Mariners had other stories. About strange luminous butterflies they saw swimming underwater. But no story was stranger than the tale about the old inn that had been turned into a coach-house by the British Officer's mess. Of how one day, a night of drunken carousing ended in a brawl that took the life of a young traveller, who with his dying breath promised to haunt us till the end of time for cheating him of his love. And how one day he turned up, as real as a scotch on the rocks, and proceeded to burn the place to the ground. Truth is, the inn had been an empty ruin for a long time before. And people who saw it burn say they saw him laughing, and they could hear voices trapped, crying, asking him to let them out. And the coach-house continued this strange saga. Horses seemed to sicken and die, right on the day of the anniversary of when the old inn burned down, for no discernible reason.

So many different mysteries to ponder over. And I had to wonder about her, I thought to myself musing, at a loss for once. She however sure of her ground continued to notch up the level of intensity until I could stand it no longer and got up and walked over to the window. From here, I could hear the snip and thrust of the gardener's rhythmic shears as he pruned the adjoining hedges. And I laid aside all thoughts of forgotten ghosts and disappearing islands and wondered not for the first time, why time had this knack of suddenly coming to a standstiil. After what seemed an eternity she got up and came to my side, and looked out the window.

Why do you make me feel like you've gone to Timbuktu?

What? I do that to you? I could no longer feign an indifference I was incapable of.

Yes. From the time we first met, you've always acted like a stalked animal.

Yes, I sneered. That's why, I was the one who ran away and eloped.

She lit a matchstick and held it out to me. Go on she said. Play with this fire. Tell me how it feels when you're scorched by it. And then I'll tell you about how passion can burn you till all your real feelings turn to ashes, and all you have left is the raging madness of the pain of having been destroyed.

Her penchant for melodrama I noticed hadn't changed in twenty years. And neither had my distaste for her spindrift notions lessened one iota. And not for the first time, I thought about how much I hated her for being so opposite to everything I wanted to value. For making me spend all those years learning the thousand precise rules of how to remember to forget what it was to hold a dream as real. In all that time, I'd wandered the oceans in search of other edens, only to find that when Eve destroyed my innocence she also left me a prison that stayed with me. And now I was her last refuge, from a life she had kept running away from. Friend, Philosopher, Neighbor and the lover she never took the time to find out about. And the Divorce Lawyer she was here to hire to contest the settlement.

Okay. Do you have a cheque for me?

1980.
We no longer miss the clock at home. Daily routines fill in the blanks. The night ends when the church bell in Burnasherry sounds the matins. And in and around Thilleri where we lived, you could also hear the radios in various houses playing the suprabada geetam preceded by the usual announcement 'Akashavani Kozhikode'. Around noon the Calicut express screeches to a halt at the bus stop behind Prabhat Talkies. You know the day is over when you hear the muezzin calling the faithful to their prayer, and that's when Aleekka comes around wheeling his cart of roasted peanuts. Yet we missed the clock. Something about the way it tick tocked through the day gave us a feeling of being in touch with the times. Srisattan toted it around to several chinese watch repair shops on his trip abroad last year to Butterworth in Malaysia. He even called up Nambiar uncle, who had a small furniture import agency in Kowloon to try and order it from the manufacturer there. However the company had gone out of business six years ago, and the new owners now manufactured a battery operated clock. The clock now remained where he left it afterwards, pale pink wiped clean daily by our servant Madhaviedathy. It's wheels and chains were oiled once a week by Srisattan after he finished cleaning his bike. My neighbor Sanjeev once asked him why he bothered since it didn't work. Srisattan winked and said that one day the kuttichattan hiding inside would go away and it would then start working. We got used to it. Not having it around. Until the day Sunid our neighbor came back for the holidays from St. Laurence. He'd bought a cuckoo clock near Archie's in Ooty from an old piano teacher who had come back from Canada for good, and couldn't bear the bird sounding off on the dot every hour any more. The neighbors came by for a few weeks to watch the bird come out on the hour. Tea would be served in small steel glasses. Not a drop would be left in any of the glasses. Madhaviedathy always checked. She once told me that refined people never finished their food or tea. They always left some to indicate that they were only drinking or eating out of politeness not because they really wanted to. Madhaviedathy knew everything. Even that summer when the well ran dry she managed to keep the house and everything inside as spotless as ever. Madhaviedathy could knock on a watermelon and tell you which ones would be sweet. Not once do I remember her ever getting it wrong. And she had her own secret recipe for fish fries that she never gave to mom, or sharadaelayamma, my dad's sister. She gave them the same answer for each time they asked her what she did to get the kari meen that exact shade of brown each time. When they grumbled good naturedly madhaviedathy would remind them, that she had a daughter for whom the only dowry she could offer would be the cooking skills she had learned from her mother. Because madhaviedathy's daughter would not be going to college like the rest of us after school. She already had plans to move back to her achhammas house and work with her cousins at the textile factory where they were paying forty five rupees a day for handling a manual shuttle loom. Reggie broke down one day as we were fishing at the back of the house. He told me that he was in love with her, and couldn't bear the thought of not seeing her after the year was over. He used to go over to the temple and wait every evening to see her come by and finish her prayers. She never acknowledged his presence. Not once. And he never once approached her. She left for her grandmom's place the day after school closed. And that chapter remained closed.

: 1981 Our old school teacher Netto's son has started a parallel college where the old St. Michaels once stood. We now hung out at Ibrahimka's shop and smoked scissors and drank limesodas while we waited for the afternoon batch to walk past to the college. The twins were discussed almost every day. They came in different buses and had different friends. We never saw them together. One of them was coquettish, the other tall and reserved. All of us agreed that they were the best looking girls we'd ever seen in our lives. That was the year Vathaloor retired as the head clerk at St. Michaels and he was now working at Premier handling the filing and student fee records. Father Cherian had seen to his pension. but Vathaloor had five daughters. The oldest girl was now eighteen. He had about seven thousand rupees in his Canara bank account when he had his heart attack later that year. It wasn't enough to pay for his angio plasty operation in Ernakulam. Reggie and a few of us went to all the houses in Burnacherry that night. We collected a total of six hundred rupees from about a hundred and twenty houses. The school gave a cheque for three thousand. The old boys assocation had a meeting that weekend and at the end of it, they came up with a joint project with the Junior Jaycees to create a tourist guide for Cannanore. Murali's dad who owned the print shop those days agreed to print the first run of a hundred copies for a discounted fee. They needed that as samples to get advertisements from the local business owners. They ended up with twelve thousand rupees for a total of a hundred and thirty two ads over sixty pages. They donated three thousand five hundred to Vathaloor's fund. Xavier who had gone to Mangalore to apply to the law college went to visit his cousin's father-in-law and found out that they had just started to offer angio-plasty at about twenty two thousand rupees cheaper than it was in Ernakulam. Jithu drove Vathaloor over to the hospital the very next day in Duttuattan's van, and Farid's sister who was a nurse in JJ hospital came along with us.

2001 Vathaloor's eldest daughter is now a nun at the Ursuline convent. Nobody seems to have any doubts that she will take over from Sr. Marietta when she eventually retires. She goes by a different name. They call her Sr. Anita now. She smiles faintly when she sees me. Asks about scampy, my dog. I tell her he died three years back. Oddly I feel nervous when I ask her about where the family is now. She pauses for a minute and it feels very long, She tells me that two of her sisters are on campus at the Women's college until they complete their degree. One sister has moved to Bangalore and is working with a charity organization. The other sister got married to a boy from Tellichery whom she met in college. Her dad, Vathaloor died peacefully in bed, a year after the marriage. She said that about two thousand people came for the funeral. After a while she started weeping silently. I got up soon after, shuffled my feet for a few minutes and left without saying goodbye. I turned and look back at her as I reached the door. She had her face in her hands. I never saw her after that.

I finally asked Reggie about the letter. He tried meeting her once on her way back from work. She didn't even acknowledge his greeting. Just kept on walking. He ran into her two years later at a local temple festival when she came to his stall to have some tea with her friends. He stopped by their table to serve them their tea, and told her about the letter he was trying to give her then. Her friends giggled. She asked him whether he had it with him, and he took it out of his wallet. She didn't bother unfolding it, tore it to pieces and walked away without paying for the tea. He told me that he finally burned the pieces on the day of her marriage. He works at Premier College now, doing filing and managing student records. Vathaloor trained him personally during his first two years. He said he has no plans on getting married anytime soon.

The town feels like it's shrunk. All the wide open spaces all around the Cantontment, all the maidans are now gone. They've been turned into army quarters, and where the old brother's grounds stood, they now have a Central school. Near the church, there's nobody playing cricket on the streets in the evenings. The old Michaels boarding grounds where they once had the python in a cage has been razed to the ground and they're building a four storey apartment complex. Overlooking the sea, on Pokkan's parambu they now have a seaside resort called Mascot. A fresh lime soda costs twenty rupees and a plate of mutton cutlets is thirty five. The beaches are more crowded than before in the evenings. At dusk, you can hear the chug chug of boats returning from their day's fishing. Almost all of them are motorized now. You can still get fish biryani at two in the morning if you drive down to the city restaurants near where the boats dock. It still smells of oil and the musty odor of old rotting wood down there. They still give you suleimani for free after the biryani and the tea is as hot as I remember and still scalds your mouth the first sip. People don't stare at you like they used to. You can hear the TV as you drive by most houses. The streetlights are the new sodium vapour type lamps. They cast a rich yellow glow over the green cashew and jackfruits trees in the old Citadel complex. Thiruvepathi mills has closed down for good. The property is in court, and it's now overgrown with weeds and the gates are rusted. I climbed over the wall with the others and went over to the hole in the wall where we used to hide our cigarettes on the way back home. There is an empty wills pack and an almost full book of matches inside there, and a heart shape has been etched just above the hole, with the names Sonia and Raj inside. It's been three years since I quit smoking, but I didn't say no when Bansidhar lit one up for me. The smoke curled blue and gray as we sat there in the dark, in silence until we heard a rustle in the weeds, and then we flashed a torchlight to see if it was a snake. We left a few minutes later and went over to the tea shop next to the Gymkhana club. The next day Bansi left to go back to Salem, and I left the day after to come back to Canada. We've taken photographs of each other to show our families. We've promised to write and keep in touch at least once a year. It's a promise that's not going to be kept.

: -sr

[FOR THE SAKE OF A SINGLE POEM]

...Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your
life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole
lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you
might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as
people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early
enough)--they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you
must see many cities, many people and Things, you must
understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture
which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must
be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to
unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming;
to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents
whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it
up (it was a joy meant for someone else--); to childhood illnesses
that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult
transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings
by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed
along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,--and it is still
not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of
many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories
of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who
have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have
been beside the dying, must have sat beside the bedside of the dead
in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is
not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them
when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to
wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important.
Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and
gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from
ourselves--only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the
first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.



from THE SELECTED POETRY OF RAINER MARIA RILKE
translated by Stephen Mitchell
Copyright (c) 1980, 1981, 1982
by Stephen Mitchell

The key to becoming successful in consulting lies in learning to persuade effectively.

Consultants have to influence without authority, and their only means to this end is to persuade others to consider their viewpoints. Persuasion involves getting others to commit their attention, energy, time and money and they are unlikely to do this unless they clearly can see the benefits of making such a commitment. This cannot be done through arguments or sales pitches as that only creates defensiveness on the parts of those who feel that their position is under attack by those who are attempting to persuading them to change their minds to accept a new or altered position. Persuasion is therefore a process, not an event, and to successfully persuade one must be first willing to have one's own perceptions and behavior altered based on what we will learn through interacting with others as we seek to appreciate and understand the positions of others. This willingness to test one's ideas and revise them in concert with their concerns is the only way to create the right climate to exchange ideas for consideration by factually and unambigously demonstrating that we are willing to incorporate other perspectives into a shared solution.

Persuasion is therefore not a form of manipulation as it's commonly perceived. Manipulation has at it's core some amount of deception. Persuasion on the other hand is based on a process of learning about and altering perceptions, both ours as well as the people we seek to influence. Persuasion is not just about marshalling facts and/or logically demonstrating the fallacies in others positions. It should instead seek to consider it from every angle including opposing viewpoints and be willing to incorporate other perspectives into a shared solution if it proves necessary.

Consultants usually give advice based on judgement, or provide knowhow based on expertise. How it gets used will depend on their credibility and their relationships. Our credibility depends almost entirely on how authentic we are as a person, and our relationships depend on our ability to think clearly about the impact our emotions and actions have on others, and the impact their emotions and actions have on our behavior and how they both interact as a feedback system.

The nature of our credibility and the depth of our relationships manifest itself in the decisions we make about people, and these decisions in turn clearly reveal our internal biases to anybody who thinks through them. It is therefore important that we clearly understand what we really want from others and what they really want from us, and make sure they are both in congruence or else our decisions will end up negatively impacting both our credibility and our relationships due to the unforeseen consequences of being shallow in this regard.

Ultimately all of the above leads to the most important aspect of persuasion viz. emotional resonance. Unless we can strike the right chord, we cannot hope to change how people perceive something. They will continue to block what we're saying, if our pitch creates resistance instead of agreement. But to be able to do that, we have to first tune very deeply into the person we are talking to, see what they are seeing, be willing to accept their position. By doing this, we soften ourselves and allow them to come inside our own inner spaces, and in letting our guards down for this to happen we allow them to feel safe from being manipulated. For this to happen, we ourselves have to be very centered inside to ensure we can go back and forth from their perspective to ours without losing or submerging our own identity or else the resulting insecurity will sabotage the process of seeing where each other can meet to understand the option that's truly better from all perspectives, theirs, our and everybody else's.

Winner-takes-all is a trickle-down process in which a largely invisible majority is influenced by a visibly large minority. Historian Thomas C. Holt writes, "Major activities are born of germs contained in everyday practice." He notes that power can be realized only at the quotidian level, and that "it is dependent…on the reproduction of the relations, idioms, and the worldview that are its means of action. In short, the everyday is where…politics, economics, ideologies…are lived." ("Marking: Race, Race-making, and the Writing of History") I would like to add that the everyday is where our ideas are "lived," where it acquires the force of majority. The zeitgeist is expressed more clearly by the obscure many than by the acclaimed few. It is within the ordinary gossip and buzz, within the thousands of unacclaimed posts, that many a new idea will catch fire and take shape. That's what I set out to do, in coming here. Whether any of what I wrote ever caught fire, can only be judged in the solitude of your own, in the cathedral of your souls. I haven't seen any such evidence, in my sojourn here.

In order to think, act, write and read in a transformative fashion, it is important to remain an outsider. By hovering on the perimeter of the circle of our relationships, acquaintances and associates, it becomes possible to see the full circumference of these associations. Once we move inside that circle and become an insider, we tend to become enmired with what's happening inside. And in time we forget that there is an area external to this circle that is affected by the ripples of our passage. In this effort of remaining an outsider, imagination becomes the transfiguring force. It is the maelstrom that will help us reinvent our perspectives in the process of discovering and/or inventing ideas . Imagination as an active rather than passive metabolism, pressing against tacit assumptions in order to reinvent them.

Our causes should have imagination and yes it should be able to engage our emotions, and yet if it is bereft of ideas, what profit do we gain from acting on them. Even purely personal causes could rest upon assumptions suffused with ideology. Our work has ideas whether it wants them or not. Usually they remain in the background, a quiet chorus behind the starring subject. When ideas do take center stage, the thinking reflected in our actions tends to mirror the reflections born of pensive internal dialogues. This dialogue can often get caught in the corruption of entrenched ideas, and sometimes manifests itself as a bid for authority sorta by borrowing intellectual weight from plagiarised and/or quoted works. Poets might deny such an agenda, but the effect is there whether intended or not. It would be hypocritical to dismiss the self-serving aspect of the company we keep on the page. When I bolster my words with those of Canetti or Heaney, I effectively say, "These aren't just my own trivial concerns; Nobel prize winners have written on the subject." There is no risk in citing those who are invested with legitimacy, and there can be gain: Such inclusions can dismantle resistance to unpopular ideas.

Poetry (and essays) is more valuable, however, when it calls attention to those histories and thinking that would go unremarked otherwise. It also is refreshing to include thoughts that are not favored among the circle so to speak. Any subject certainly could benefit from an infusion of contemporary and/or original thought from other fields. Rather than considering the underpinnings of theories, or the irreducible primaries however, contemporary writing, posts and most popular ideologies tends to rehearse the past. In its prizing of the prized and honoring of the honored, we tend to lose sight that everybody loses, when we turn our back on what's outside this circle.

To resist a winner-takes-all framework, one must read across the field rather than limit one's reading to the successful few. It follows that our impressions should not be gleaned from just "stars" but from an engagement with a much broader spectrum of endeavor. In some cases, I don't know the nature of the thinkers, writers and poets who inform my observations. And I have never let it influence my ingestion of their concepts as precepts that I integrate into my own framework of fully digested ideological principles. That is the only way to arrest the constant battle in our mind with our biases that seek to narrow our thinking into comfortable ruts that can take us along familiar routes. It needs to be resisted if we are to teach our minds to seek new vistas.

Distinguishing between right and wrong is about more than sticking to the letter of the law. It requires establishing the basis for morality first and foremost.

Laws are very necessary to establish the rules that will form the basis for a society, a community or even a family. Laws however are based on a system which has punishment as the basis for deterring those who will not obey the law. We need to go beyond that to designing a system that won't support cheating on laws, where the consequences of being immoral won't lead to rewards. The current systems tend to reward those who commit transgressions, unless they get caught and this is the reason why immorality is smart if practiced without being caught, and morality is stupid if practiced rigorously cos it tends to favor the immoral over the moral when it comes to trade-offs.

Growing up involves shifting from blind obedience to the letter of the law to responsible actions that are based on an internalized understanding of the intent behind the laws. This maturing comes at a price. If we are willing to take risks, we'll stumble and maybe even fall, but we won't always be held in thrall by the fetters of an unquestioned law.

Blind obedience is never a desirable state of affairs. Contemporary systems, the increasing complexity of our interactions, dealing with the consequences of our past actions all preclude the feasibility of defining rigid dogmas to help set bounds to our interactions. What is needed is the evolution of policies that define boundaries of behavior that respect individual rights and can prescribe a structure that can eliminate conflict in relationships.

To understand these rights, it becomes necessary to assimilate and integrate the responsibilities that come with it. To take responsibility is to become aware of our actions.
Becoming aware should not be the shallow cursory attention paid to the range of the moment. It should learn to discern and distinguish between effect and cause and move thereon to understand what possible responses could be considered to set in motion the appropriate chain of consequences. Working backwards from desired consequences to considered action is not a task to be engaged in through spur of the moment reactions. It requires Reflection. And Action. Both should be based on a clear understanding of our values, and how they influence our choices.

The arbitrator of choice in interactions should be based on seeking to identify what can cause eventual degeneracy and/or decay to try and avoid engaging in such acts, or seek to ameliorate the consequences of past decisions that have led us down that path. To seek healthy growth is a directional choice that we can set ourselves without having to do anything more complex than use our own moral compass which we call our conscience. And this is again not as ambiguous as it may sound at first blush. A fundamental axiom first stated by Ayn Rand is that Existence Exists, and the fact that we are conscious is the proof we need that life itself is a value, more ubiquitous than any other. If we are to use this as our most fundamental building block for the superstructure of a moral code, it would provide a solid foundation for our value system.

Once we have learned to identify the structure of our value system, we are then in a position to think more clearly about our choices. Thinking itself then becomes an act of morality. Almost all mentally competent people who understand what the act of thinking involves would have learned the difference between the random chatter that is a result of the reaction of their sensory inputs and the reasoning process that identifies the truths and integrates them into a cognitive framework that can then guide their actions.

Thinking clearly distinguishes between feelings and thoughts. Feelings are fuel that drives all our actions. But our feelings itself are the result of values and thoughts that we don't always consciously hold within our awareness. Our languages are not designed to help us express our feelings in a meaningful way. A Language itself is limited in the realm of concepts that it can help us hold within our minds. We actually know a lot more than our languages permit us to express. This knowing however to become useful needs to get captured as a concept. Unfortunately language is our only means to do so. Which is why, we have to exercise great care in how we use our language. Because this in turn is how we shape our reality. A lack of awareness of this fundamental truth can lead to a wreckage of consensus. And this in turn can lead us to ask "What is the difference between right and wrong?"

I know this has been a rather roundabout route to that question. It is the most important question we can ask ourselves at each stage and in everything we do.

Anybody who respects life, would respect each other's right to live. A deeper awareness of the right to live would lead us to understanding how our actions impinge one another, and how much leverage there is in interactions that focus on individual development that at the same time is not detrimental to anybody else. Acts of cannibalism would in fact be against our long term interests as it would immediately destroy our ability to work together to achieve more than we could accomplish by ourselves. Altruism that is not founded on a win/win position for everybody concerned could also end up being destructive in the long run. A focus on sacrificing one's most precious value for the benefit of somebody else would lead that person to reject it, if he believed in the same altruism since his life would in turn be worthless to him as a value, since he requires a similar sacrifice to convert it into a value. The boundary lines between right and wrong, we are told, are no longer painted bright yellow for everyone to see and obey. In this perspective churches and schools have failed to define the highways of moral life. Lanes are no longer clearly marked, few if any speed limits are posted, stop signs are down, traffic lights are out of order, and cops look the other way. If this is so, it may well be a blessing, and a challenge to mature spiritually. Precisely this uncertainty can also present an opportunity. "May you live in interesting times," may be a Chinese curse, but I see it as a blessing.

The Art of poetry - By Jorge Luis Borges

To gaze at a river made of time and water
and remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.
To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

--translated by Anthony Kerrigan

At the Poetry Reading
John Brehm
I can't keep my eyes off the poet's
wife's legs--they're so much more
beautiful than anything he might
be saying, though I'm no longer
in a position really to judge,
having stopped listening some time ago.
He's from the Iowa Writers Workshop
and can therefore get along fine
without my attention. He started in
reading poems about his childhood--
barns, cornsnakes, gradeschool, flowers,
that sort of stuff--the loss of
innocence he keeps talking about
between poems, which I can relate to,
especially under these circumstances.
Now he's on to science, a poem
about hydrogen, I think, he's trying
to imagine himself turning into hydrogen.
Maybe he'll succeed. I'm imagining
myself sliding up his wife's fluid,
rhythmic, lusciously curved, black-
stockinged legs, imagining them arched
around my shoulders, wrapped around my back.
My God, why doesn't he write poems about her!
He will, no doubt, once she leaves him,
leaves him for another poet, perhaps,
the observant, uninnocent one, who knows
a poem when it sits down in a room with him

Great artists can take their worst experiences and turn it into sublime works. It's thus that they transform us into something more than we were before our encounter with their art. By helping us know our world just a little more intimately than we could have done otherwise. What is good art? What is bad art? Good and bad are subjective only to the degree to which each of us can feel the impact of art in our inner spaces, in how much it can help us reel in our deepest thoughts, in situating our most elusive emotional responses. Good and bad presupposes a standard. A standard based on the axiom, that we exist and not just perceptually. And that our consciousness is more than just our conceptualisations. Anything that dulls our perceptual faculties and dims our state of awareness and induce a foggy stupor in the rush of our thoughts can only diminish our existence. Any experience however that sharpen our faculties, raise our awareness, centers us with it's coherence, also ignites us to higher levels of consciousness even if once again the degree to which the same experience can affect different individuals could differ with their given perceptual and value biases. Yes, for those experiencing art, it is much, much more than just the mere evolution of our senses, of our percepts, of the concepts that we have evolved from our experiences, our sensory encounters. Art is ultimately about experiencing life and meaning, in many more ways than one. And artists map more than their visions. They create new realities in our inner worlds and bridge the gaps between our different states of consciousness. Surfacing our values, driving us deeper into uncharted territories. Where lost and found mean something that we didn't quite expect.