poetry

yesterday the poetry anthologies i ordered online arrived, yay! i've been wanting to get into more poetry for ages.

while browsing through them, i found myself remarking that ever since going into hr, i have left behind other things. my use of language and vocabulary is limited to certain countries, certain professions, certain concepts. there are so many words i don't use, so many sentence structures i don't get to construct. i want a new canvas, a new palette..

Contraband, by denise levertov

The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That's why the taste of it
drove us from Eden. That fruit
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder
for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.
God had probably planned to tell us later
about this new pleasure.

We stuffed our mouths full of it,
gorged on but and if and how and again
but, knowing no better.
It's toxic in large quantities; fumes
swirled in our heads and around us
to form a dense cloud that hardened to steel,
a wall between us and God, Who was Paradise.
Not that God is unreasonable--but reason
in such excess was tyranny
and locked us into its own limits, a polished cell
reflecting our own faces. God lives
on the other side of that mirror,
but through the slit where the barrier doesn't
quite touch ground, manages still
to squeeze in--as filtered light,
splinters of fire, a strain of music heard
then lost, then heard again.

reading lolita in tehran

i found the following entry in my journal, which i opened to write in after a long two years! this might have been my first time to write of books. i thought i would post it here, not just to add to my book posts, but also to remind myself of 'living' literature.

--------
march 2006

"this is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience"

"...has learned that every individual has different dimensions to his personality... Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless... If we had learned this one lesson from Dr A our society would have been in a better shape today."

"...words literally rose up in the air and descended upon us like a fine mist, touching all five senses."

Nietzsche: "whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."

Flaubert: "You should have a heart in order to feel other people's hearts."
"This respect for others, empathy, lies at the heart of the novel... Lack of empathy was to my mind the central sin of the regime, from which all others flowed."

"You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way again." [this is EXACTLY how i felt when i left cairo!]

this was a beautiful book. in many ways. to live like that, to LIVE literature, that is something i am unable to do. most of the time, when i read, it is to escape. so there must be a distinction, separation between fiction and reality. i do not 'inhale the experience' i guess. or perhaps, i inhale and then exhale! whatever, it was beautiful and it taught me stuff, showed me stuff, provoked reactions and made me want to read some books. what more could i ask of a book?
---------

i'm glad i came across this entry, it was nice to be reminded of my enjoyment of azar nafisi's book and prose. i remember that while reading it, i thought it was far better than 'the child that books built' by francis someone, which was also a kind of book-led autobiography. it had none of the charm or engagement of 'reading lolita' however. it has an awesome title though, which i will use someday.. :)

film and arts festivals

march and april host hk's annual international film festival, and the arts festival, yay.

this year's iff is showing 3 idiots as well -a much better choice than previous indian movies shown! browse through the films and book your tickets here.

you can view the arts festival website here, and take your pick of theatre, dance, opera or music performances. enjoy :)

to want and to have

so many things have happened in the past couple of months.. all of them are things i have wanted for a long time, that i have prayed for consistently. to get them now, one after another, has left me a little dazed. i am so thankful for these blessings, and in my mind they are firmly linked to the barakat of ashera, so recently passed.

and yet, what i also feel, is that these things were not granted to me because i asked for them, but because they were part of the bigger picture. this makes me so much more cautious, so much more wary that everything can be lost again so easily; just as i had so little control over obtaining these blessings, i have as little control over them slipping through my fingers.

real life

i read the following paras exactly when i felt the same way. that is always so relieving, so comforting, so inspiring- that i am not the only one who feels a particular way, and that someone else has penned it down so poetically. thank you ck.

"My friends and i had reached the age when we had the great, good fortune to be living out some of the dreams we'd had when we were young. Now, we were discovering the truly hard part: the realities.

Having a new baby made you psychotic with exhaustion and self-doubt. Professional success could make you delirious with insomnia and anxiety. Living abroad rendered you lonely and infantilized. And no matter what road you took, you still had to brush your teeth every morning, pay your bills, do your damn laundry, worry about taxes, check your breasts for cancer, argue with your loved ones about whether to defrost the refridgerator. Nobody, after all, it seemed, was exempt from banality...

Moments of pure bliss were often accidental. Getting something you'd consciously worked toward, on the other hand, was often far more emotionally complicated."

This is from Susan Gilman's 'hypocrite in a pouffy white dress'. it's a book i would never have picked up on my own, and i probably won't read it from cover to cover, but it has enough truth and sass in it to make me mark pages and laugh at humanity!

young at heart?

as i turn another year older chronologically, i feel even younger and more gauche than ever before. while fasting on yaum-e-arafa a couple of days ago, i remember wanting to stomp off to b and mournfully ask why i had decided to fast. i refrained from doing so because it was too 'childish'. and yet, i feel this way all the time. with all the time i am spending amidst children these days, i increasing feel that my own inner child has not grown up. when the kids are squabbling over who gets the last piece of chocolate, i want to yell 'me!' just as loudly as them. i want to curl up and fall asleep in an adult's lap too.

in the past few years, several persons have randomly remarked that they were under the impression that h was the older sibling. he of course, responds that it is but a natural impression, since i am so much more 'immature' than him. and you know, in many ways, i am. i would rather not use the term 'immature' however.. ingenuous, guileless, enthusiastic, perhaps?!

the bottom line is that ever since returning from cairo, i have never actually felt my age. instead, i feel like i am constantly running to catch up.. i have friends who are much older than me, and i also have friends much younger. i treat them all the same. so what difference does a number make really?

india diary: a filmy life

the following three incidents i witnessed struck me as scenes from hindi cinema:

- my phone is not working at present, and when my brother went to inquire, he was told that one of the reasons (amongs other possibilities) is that the service provider were operating several illegal mobile towers, which have now been closed by the government.

- after a long time servant was let go by one family, she started spreading false stories about her 'bad experience' with them, and prevented others from working with them by threatening to use black magic on them. in return, the family fired her son from their business. the next day, his wife showed up at their house to work in the place of her mother in law!

- a family member undertook the services of a 'fabricator' (someone to put up roofing sheets over the yard and other such tasks), who took the advanced money and never showed up to do the work. his phone was always switched off, or he had a multitude of reasons for not doing the work. after someone was sent to his house as a 'threat', he showed up and asked for more money, in order to buy the materials to do the work. while he was being refused anymore money, someone came to take away his motorbike as a further threat!