Desire

There is life of love
and there is a life of the mind
And there are these lives of thousand desires that we find.
Some life sustains and some it maims
Without any  rational that we can claim
Where were you born?  
Maybe as a nascent thought one sunny morn..
The life on earth was not the same again
With infinite you rising again and again.
Every desire has a time of its own
Breathing every moment the possibility of being blown

There is uncertainty and hope that comes with you  
With every beat of heart racing as it confronts you.

Like a thousand beloved to be attained
You break the heart more then the life can sustain
But then  like a loyal lover you never leave me with disdain.

Is Not Life Like a Moment

There is an innocuous laugh that glances at me
There is some hidden unbridled emotions that lashes at me
There is a look that has stirred something
There is a word which have changed everything

There is an emotion ready to get ignited
There is a feeling ready to be born

There is an old desire to be gone

There is something ready to get burst

And something to get lost
There lurks somewhere a passion which is wild
Making the mind operate like a child


There is a door that I may enter for the last time
There is a emotion that may never return


There is a eye that I may embrace for the last time
There is some memory ready to be erased
There is a moment I don’t wanna loose
There may be a while to capture this moment 

There is a noise that is melody to someone
There is a melody that hurts someone


Is not life like a moment
A moment is where we are born
A moment is where emotions churn
A moment is where everything can be known
A moment is where life may be blown

Indelible Impressions !!

Nobody knows the faces a lifetime passes through.

Or the myriad faces of the many lives that we may live through.
Like a wave, countless faces pass by but impressions are imparted only by some.
There are faces within a face that may penetrate unconsciously without being reckoned.
A face which enlightened a speck of one's life, may mysteriously vanish in the other.
And a  face that once intensified the beat of your heart may become a blurring monotone.

 
Then there may be a face that may have skipped the beat of your heart and may still provide a sound punch whenever it resurfaces.
And there may be a face that may surface for a while but stamp an indelible imprint in the deepest core of your mind.
There may be a face that may recall a bygone era,
And there may be a face that may erase the essence of time.
Some faces seem to be part of you for more than a lifetime and some exist for a lifetime without a trace.

Is  every destined face that we reckon lived by us through in some lifetime,
With installments distributed in the lives to be lived.

Is the specter of destiny responsible for the faces that a life passes through?
With a particular face destined to be seen a particular number of times.
But the impression it creates may decide its destiny in the other lives that we may live.

Is there a logic behind the embracing of a particular face
or is it that certain faces are meant to be embraced.
What is the symbolism behind these meeting of faces?
Is it meant in a way to repeat itself infinitely to loose its essence
To know that this meeting is also a play of the illusion called ‘life’.

Three Vintage American Novels

Recently I read three vintage American novels ( American Pastoral, The New York Trilogy and Invisible) by two great American novelists, who have been pioneers and influential figures for making the American novel prominent in the world of fiction in the last quarter of a century. The first novelist, Philip Roth is considered the greatest living American novelist and the other, Paul Auster is considered a pioneer who has reinvented the genre of ‘mystery’ novels.

Roth’s ‘American Pastoral’ can be considered a vintage ‘American novel’ portraying the construction of an American identity with its dilemmas. The story is a critique of the so called ‘American Dream’. The novel revolves around Swede Levov, who in a sense epitomizes the American Dream. He is an accomplished sportsman,  has a very beautiful wife ‘Miss New Jersey’, is rich with his own business and is still a humble person and a devoting son. He has been a sort of a poster boy for many kids around, including Nathan Zuckerman, who is also the narrator of the novel. Nathan is sort of an alter ego of Roth.

American Pastoral illustrates that cliched phrase 'all that glitters is not gold.' The novel shows the crumbling of the American pastoral of Swede Levov due to the disastrous actions of American political class in Vietnam. It is a sharp metaphorical portrayal enunciating that by  destroying others joyful pastoral, the Americans would also have to face the repercussions.  Here the Levov’s become  one of the victims. The American Dream crumbles.
The end which is not conclusive, poignantly states “'And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”

American Pastoral is considered Roth’s masterpiece and deservedly is also in every list of top novels of this century.

The other vintage American novelist I read was Paul Auster, who  comes as the avant garde, postmodernist, mystery writer but surprisingly also a compulsive page turner. It might seem inconsistent, that a writer who applies the postmodernist concept of blurring the writer and the text would be a lucid narrator. This is where the charm of Auster comes, the text, the author, narrator, story and realism are also subverted to such an extent that the potpourri that arises is something truly post-modern.

I read his two quite interesting works- The New York Trilogy and The Invisible.
The New York Trilogy which is also hailed by the critics as his best work was a great treat to read.
One defining character that can be found in New York Trilogy is the fluidity in the identity of characters and the only constant character in all the three stories is the city of New York. The postmodern character in his novels, takes us into a new class of mystery novels. We find a baffling interplay of fact and fiction, but this doesn’t make it abstruse such as Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire’, rather what makes Paul Auster special is the usage of this seemingly complicated techniques but providing us a lucid real page turner.

Invisible- It is not that easy to review Auster where many shells are there to be uncovered. So I will just provide some excerpts from a review from the New York Times ,

“Invisible” is his 15th novel, and I was afraid that this would be, as I felt with his recent work, another instance of Auster playing Auster — a kind of arch exercise in the clever but cloying metaphysics of textual irony, a cat-and-mouse toying with the fiction and the reader reminiscent of German Romanticism and falling victim to what both Hegel and Kierkegaard called “infinite absolute negativity” (this attack on the German Romantics was one of the few times those two were ever in agreement). One leaves the text and feels that one has been left with nothing. The irony vacuums out the content and, with it, our interest. Like the ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a dragon swallowing its own tail, the book consumes itself, and disappears. But “Invisible” — however the title might threaten the contrary — suggests a new Auster.

It’s a love story, or a series of intertwined love stories, with one young man, Adam Walker, at the center of them all...

Love is always invisible, and in our world of hard-nosed materialists it’s important to remember that our highest good is something we can never really see or grab hold of, much less understand by passing enough people through an f.M.R.I. machine to look at their brainwaves. What we take as the real world is not the world that matters most to us: the substance of our lives takes place in an invisible realm.

For years now there have been two Austers waiting to embrace: the psychologist/­storyteller of novels like “Leviathan,” and the metatextual trickster of “The New York Trilogy.” Freud once claimed that our greatest frustration was that we could never kiss ourselves — well, Auster has knotted the pretzel, he has brought his two loves together (it is, after all, a novel about incest). So if, like me, part of why you read is the great pleasure of falling in love with a novel, then read “Invisible.” It is the finest novel Paul Auster has ever written.”

Norwegian Wood

I recently saw this movie which is a good adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s ‘Norwegian Wood’. Norwegian Wood was the first novel of Murakami that I had read, and after having read his four other novels, I realize that this was the most lucid and synchronous . The density and postmodern touch that we find in his other novels is missing in this novel, but still it was a delicious treat to gulp and this really had made me switch into the mystical world of Murakami. This novel made Murakami a sort of a rock star in Japan which eventually made him to leave the country for some years.

The title of the novel has been taken from a Beatles song. The song in a way perfectly portrays the dilemma surrounding the characters..”I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me”. The novel is about the quandary of love and the madness surrounding it. Being the most elusive thing, it seems so close in a moment and then in another moment, it is the farthest. It seems to be like entering heaven (or rather here is where heaven gets defined) bewitched by  its incipient enthralling emotional trance without any anticipation of the vicious vortex inside it , which cripples one of any understanding of life. And once you are sucked into that whirlpool ,nobody knows what type of a  new person one becomes when emerging out of it. 
 The major difference between the movie and novel is the  starting, the novel starts from the recollection of Toru’s  experiences of the 1960’s whereas the movie is just about this period.

This novel is a lucid portrayal of the puzzles surrounding love or in a sense the tragedy of love. The story is about Toru Watanabe, who falls in love with his late best friend’s(Kizuki)  girlfriend Naoko. The relation starts from consolation to love, but complication arises. The novel is sort of a metaphor for the complications and illogical-ness of love.

Toru falls in love with Naoko, but she is still strongly attached to Kizuki. In one corner of her rational mind she wants to forget Kizuki and get on with Toru, but she and Toru both realise slowly and painfully that love is not rational.  The novel shows the illogicality's that surrounds in falling in love and hence the pain that it infuses. The novel when I had first  read was addictive, whereas the movie somewhat slowly absorbs you into it. In the movie the portrayal of pain is heightened by the music, mainly by the twanging of violins.

The photography of the movie is exquisite and visually striking as it is done by the ace photographer Ping Bin Lee (who also did Wong Kar Wai’s ‘In the mood for love’). 

Music : My First Love

On this eve of Holi, after being soaked in music for a while, I thought of writing a poetic post on music. This is just the first part embracing Rock, I will pour more thoughts on Classical in other posts.

Music : My First Love 

An art that touches my heart 

Which I may never think to depart

Whenever it pierces through my ear,

My mind is always up with a cheer.

A paradox for the mind 

But an art without a bind

The intricacies make it the least intelligible

But the paradox is, its the most accessible.

An art-form which bonds Apollonian with Dionysian

Prose has to be filtered and deciphered 

But music filters through without being dissected

Words inspire, but music uplifts the spirit

A sane mind cannot always deduce its merit

I have been in awe since I discovered it

and realize that I have still not recovered from it,

When the first sound of rock pierced my mind,

giving solace to quick emotions that spurred during that time.

Pumped up emotions with high dose of sentimentality embraces the college years,

the strings of guitar and thumping beats I still endear.

My undergrad days and nights were infused with 'the summer of 69',

some memories still lurk behind that winter of 99.

Rock has an element of noise which portrays aggression,

The youthful symbolism in it displays non-conformism.

The music of Rock makes the mind high when a dilemma or ambiguity besets it,

the restlessness is massaged by the strings winding out of it.

The 60's was the time when it was born,
Existentialist angst spiced it during one morn.

Dylan's 'Like a Rolling Stone' epitomized the generation,
Hendrix theatrics and Pink Floyd's spatial rock garnered veneration.
The Zeppelin's upped the ante by inventing a new genre,

It was that generation that produced most of the gems of the rock oeuvre.

Clapton,Floyd,Morrison and Zeppelin were my daily diet,

Dire Straits and Others also gave me some delight.

Than a few years back the sound of Western Classical touched my heart,

My new beloved bestows pleasure in the remote corners of my brainy part

This is a huge genre  which would require a new entry,

Let me stop this post which was basically elementary.

A Heart in Winter

It seems sort of a  coincidence or say destiny that I have been watching an array of french movies on the variations of  love. In the earlier post I had scribbled about the subtle beautiful movie 'Mademoiselle Chambon'.

 The movie that I just saw yesterday was 'Un Coeur en Hiver' (A Heart in Winter). This seems at first a love triangle between a philanderer, a musical diva and monastic urban guy but it illustrates much more shades.

First half of the movie  goes in the predictable mode  of a love triangle. Stephane (monastic guy) who is a violin maker seems to be a good friend of Maxime( Philanderer) who is the owner of this violin shop. Maxime falls in love with the gorgeous Camille (Emmanuelle Beart). Then things change n Camille falls in love to Stephanne.

It is the love between Camille and Stephane that takes us to a different psychological level. I would rather say this is movie of a man with a cold heart (A heart in winter)

Let me put this complex and intense movie in lighter prose. In a story telling mode-

There was a man with a heart in winter.
He lived in the world of music, producing an instrument of music.
He knew music but considered it a stuff of dreams.
Dreams bcos he built a reasoned wall where feelings cannot touch his heart.
But, there came this beautiful mademoiselle !
A musical Diva, a gifted violinist (Camille).
She  is having this cold affair with Stephanne's friend (Maxime)
But then her musical heart is pierced by the mystical gaze of Stephanne,
the cold hearted man !
There is reciprocity of love in gaze but not in words.
There is emotional turbulence in both,
Camille leaves her ex-lover for Stephanne,
And the day when she is ready to pronounce her love to him
She plays the violin in love for him,
A performance of a woman enraptured by love with emotions pouring through the strings of violin.
A woman completely stung by his love. But the cold hearted guy denies it. The gorgeous violinist is shattered that the  love of her life denies her.
The rejection seems incredulous at first and we are also mystified by Stephane.
It was not that he didn't love her but he didn't understand his own feeling, as he lived in denial of it.
But there was some internal upheaval  happening inside him, 
Dizzying him out and piercing him,
This upheaval was love!
Which he came to realise late through the understanding that man is mortal.

The lightness of the prose above doesn't mean to undermine this complex pychological movie on love. The performance of Stephanne is intense and brilliant. The gorgeous French actress Emmanuelle Béart's performance is exquisite. 

A small clip from the movie