To cope with it

'learning to see the beauty of one reality(water) and the truth of another(waterlessness).'

'I would perceive the extremity of the problem something like this.You can show reality directly or you can aestheticise it in a different mode or juxtapose the two.In all these modes, the context is lost.The challenge would be to see the area which is so nebulous where you don't know what to do.How to bring art and life together: what are its joineries? The main thing is not to show the fist by imagining that you can change the world.The true area of reality is your own insignificance, your own limitation, your despair which is real, your love for life.'

'The thrust of our creative work should be to see our impotency, to face it, and through that to confront those little truths through which one can make a gesture to reach out towards change.'

Chandralekha

Come on and save me
If you could save me
From the ranks of the freaks
Who suspect they could never love anyone.

Cigarettes and Red Wine

...and I'm the only one who knows
that Disneyland's about to close
I don't suppose you'd give it a shot
knowing all that you've got
are cigarettes and red wine.

just close your eyes, cause,
you never do know
and I'll be on the sidelines,
with my hands tied,
watching the show.

Well, it's always fun and games until
it's clear you haven't got the skill
in keeping the gag from going too far
So you're running 'round the parking lot
til every lightning bug is caught
punching some pinholes in the lid of a jar
while we wait in the car.

And tell me, would it kill you
would it really spoil everything
if you didn't blame yourself
do you know what I mean?

Mann

'I told him I didn't believe in the development of the mind'.
'I wanted to experience things.'

- Chandralekha

my love

"Poems are not . . . simply emotions . . . they are experiences. For the
sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things
. . . and know the gestures 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 have long
seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained . . .;
to childhood illnesses . . . to mornings by the sea, to the sea
itself, to seas, to nights of travel . . . and it is still not enough."

Rilke

Entrance

Whovever you are: step out in to the evening
out of your living room, where everything is so known;
your house stands as the last thing before great space:
Whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their fatigue can just barely
free themselves from the worn-out thresholds,
very slowly, lift a single black tree
and place it against the sky, slender and alone.
With this you have made the world. And it is large
and like a word that is still ripening in silence.
And, just as your will grasps their meaning,
they in turn will let go, delicately, of your eyes . . .

- Rilke

Progress

And once again the depths of my life rush onward,
as if they were moving in wider channels now.
Things are becoming more close to me
and all images more thoroughly looked upon.
I feel more comfortable with that which is nameless,
With my senses, as with birds, I reach up
into the windy heavens out of the oak,
and in those pools broken off from the day,
my feeling, as if standing on fishes, descends.

- Rilke

It is only sound that remains

sound, sound, only sound,
the sound of the limpid wishes
of water to flow,
the sound of the falling of star light
on the wall of earth's femininity
the sound of the binding of meaning's sperm
and the expansion of the shared mind of love.
sound, sound, sound,
only sound remains.

- Farrokhzad

In Broken Images

He is quick, thinking in clear images.
I am slow, thinking in broken images.
He becomes dull, trusting his clear images.
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.
Trusting his images he assumes their relevance.
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.
Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact.
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.
When the fact fails him, he questions his senses.
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.
He continues quick and dull in his clear images.
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.
He in a new confusion of his understanding.
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

- Robert Graves

Come with me,
come to that star with me
that is centries away
from earth's concretion and futile scales,
and no one there
is afraid of light.

The Wind-Up Doll

More than this, yes
more than this one can stay silent.

With a fixed gaze
like that of the dead
one can stare for long hours
at the smoke rising from a cigarette
at the shape of a cup
at a faded flower on the rug
at a fading slogan on the wall.

One can draw back the drapes
with wrinkled fingers and watch
rain falling heavy in the alley
a child standing in a doorway
holding colourful kites
a rickety cart leaving the deserted square
in a noisy rush

One can stand motionless
by the drapes-blind, deaf.

One can cry out
with a voice quite false,quite remote
"I love...'
in a man's domineering arms
one can be a healthy, beautiful female.

With a body like a leather tablecloth
with two large and hard breasts,
in bed with a drunk, a madman, a tramp
one can stain the innocence of love.

One can degrade with guile
all the deep mysteries
one can keep on figuring out crossword puzzles
happily discover the inane answers
inane answers, yes-of five or six letters.

With bent head, one can
kneel a lifetime before the cold gilded grill of a tomb
one can find God in nameless grave
one can trade one's faith for a worthless coin
one can mould in the corner of a mosque
like an ancient reciter of pilgrim's prayers.

One can be constant, like zero
whether adding, subtracting, or multiplying.
One can think of your-even your-eyes
in their cocoo of anger
as lustless holes in a time-worn shoe
one can dry up in one's basin, like water.

With shame one can hide the beauty of a moment's togetherness
at the bottom of a chest
like an old, funny looking snapshot,
in a day's empty frame one can display
the picture of an execution, a crucifixion, or a martyrdom,
One can cover the crake in the wall with a mask
one can cope with images more hollow than these.

One can be like a wind-up doll
and look at the world with eyes of glass,
one can lie for years in lace and tinsel
a body stuffed with straw
inside a felt-lined box,
at every lustful touch
for no reason at all
one can give out a cry
"Ah, so happy am I!"

- Farrokhzad

Window

One window is sufficient
One window for beholding
One window for hearing
One window
resembling a well's ring
reaching the earth at the finiteness of its heart
and opening towards the expanse of this repetitive blue kindness
one window filing the small hands of loneliness
with nocturnal benevolence
of the fragrance of wondrous stars
and thereof,
one can summon the sun
to the alienation of geraniums.

One window will suffice me.

I come from the homeland of dolls
from beneath the shades of paper-trees
in the garden of a picture book
from the dry seasons of impotent experiences in friendship and love
in the soil-covered alleys of innocence.


When my trust was suspended from the fragile thread of justice
and in the whole city
they were chopping up my heart's lanterns
when they would blindfold me
with the dark hankerchief of Law
and from my anxious temples of desire
foutains of blood would squirt out
when my life had become nothing
nothing
but the tic-tac of a clock,
I discovered
I must
must
must love,
insanely.

One window will suffice me
one window to the moment of awareness
observance
and silence.
Now,
the walnut sapling
has grown so tall that it can interpret the wall
by its youthful leaves.

Ask the mirror
the redeemer's name.
Isn't the shivering earth beneath your feet lonlier than you?
The prophets brought the mission of destruction to our century
aren't these consecutive explosions
and poisonous clouds
the reverbration of the sacred verses?

Dreams always plunge down from their naive height
and die.
I smell the four petal clover
which has grown on the tomb of archaic meanings.

Wasn't the woman
buried in the shroud of anticipation and innocence,
my youth?

Will I step up the stairs of curiosity
to greet the good God who strolls on the rooftops?

I feel that 'time' has passed
I feel that 'moment' is my share of history's pages
I feel that 'desk' is a feigned distance
between my tresses
and the hands of this sad stranger.

Talk to me
I am in the window's refuge
I have a relationship with the Sun.

-Farrokhzad(excerpts)

My Lot..

..my lot is
a sky which is taken away at the drop of a curtain
my lot is going down a flight of disused stairs
a regain something amid putrefation and nostalgia
my lot is a sad promenade in the garden of memories
and dying in the grief of a voice which tells me
I love
your hands.

I will plant my hands in the garden
I willgrow I know I know I know
and swallows will lay eggs
in the hollow of my ink-stained hands.

I shall wear
a pair of twin cherries as ear-rings
and I shall put dahlia petals on my finger-nails
there is an alley
where the boys who were in love with me
still loiter with the same unkempt hair
thin necks and bony legs
and think of the innocent smiles of a little girl
who was blown away by the wind one night.

There is an alley
which my heart has stolen
from the streets of my childhood.

The journey of a form along the line of time
inseminating the line of time with the form
a form conscious of an image
coming back from a feast in a mirror

And it is in this way
that someone dies
and someone lives on.

- Farrokhzad

Another Birth

Life is perhaps
a long street through which a woman holding
a basket passes every day.


Life is perhaps lighting up a cigarette
in the narcotic repose between two love-makings
or the absent gaze of a passerby
who takes off his hat to another passerby
with a meaningless smile and a good morning.


Life is perhaps that enclosed moment
when my gaze destroys itself in the pupil of your eyes
and it is in the feeling
which I will put into the Moon's impression
and the Night's perception.


In a room as big as loneliness
my heart
which is as big as love
looks at the simple pretexts of its happiness
at the beautiful decay of flowers in the vase
at the sapling you planted in our garden
and the song of canaries
which sing to the size of a window.

- Farrokhad

'I believe its time for breakfast,'she added a moment later, 'would you be kind enough to attent to my needs...'
Thus it was that she began from the outset to torment him with her demanding vanity.
Refering to her four thorns she said, 'Let them come, those tigers with their claws!'

At the time, I was unable to understand anything.I should have based my judgements upon deeds and not words.She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me.I should never have run away from her.I should have guessed at the affection behind her poor little tricks.Flowers are so inconsistent.
But I was too young to know how to love her.

- The Prince

Image-thought

An artist needs both knowledge and the power of observation only so that he can tell from what he is abstaining, and to be sure that his abstention will not appear artificial or false.
For in the end it is important to confine yourself within a framework that will deepen your world, not impoverish it, help you to create it, excluding all pretentiousness and efforts to be original.
As far as possible all links with life have to be excluded with no loss of truthfulness, discarding only the superfluous trash that appears to be a sign of authenticity, of convincing argument.
For such arguments lie outside the parameters of image-thought, in an area where quantity can never be transmitted into quality.

His diary..

The attempt to present something attainable and specific in the guise of the ideal subverts common sense.
The ideal is unattainable and in its understanding of this phenomenon lies the greatness of human reason.



Never have a second arrow.If you rely on a second arrow you will be careless with the first.Everytime you must be convinced that you have only one chance and that you must hit your target with your one and only arrow.

-Tarkovsky

You think?!

Its Chicago 1912.You are watching the inexplicable battle between two men.Don't trouble yourself about the motives behind the conflict.Rather, get interested in the human stakes, judge with impartiality the methods of the combat and focus your attention on the finish.

Escape the necessities in order to reach an absolute and gratuitous liberty.

To Live Here

Show man the way back to his needs.
Needs which have a moral significance.
They are under pressure from their environment.
It constrains them to do harm to the most human and precious part of themselves.

Silence..

Silence has an identity, as a stretch of time being perforated by sound.

To create silence, create a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence, dialectical.

It is a form of speech, an element in dialogue.

Reluctance

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and wither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question 'Whither?'

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

- Frost

For Ma

On islands adrift upon the waters, I breathe.I am in search of a share in the expansive sky, void of the swell of vile thoughts.

Refer with me, refer with me to the source of all being, to the sanctified centre of a single origin, to the moment I was created from you, refer with me, I am not complete without you.

- Forugh Farrokhzad

Into My Own

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e'er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if I still held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew--
Only more sure of all I thought was true.

- Frost

Sounding the Bell

"The intrepid Spaceman Spiff is stranded on a distant planet!..our hero ruefully acknowledges that this happens fairly frequently.."

- Calvin