Far and wide, I longed for green

Abyss, cold mountains
Wilderness, scorching deserts
Far and wide, I longed for green
On the way, wrote a poem or two

A boy I met, he smiled often
Another one, he cried the  other's share
Together we played till the breeze lasted
Then came the rain, and the two kites sank

Shook hands with a man named Peace
Laughed with a woman named Happiness
Searched in her persuasive dark eyes
That moment, when evening sun melts in moon

At sea, picked up a solitary white feather
In each other, we found a friend lost
Walked, relived those days we used to fly
Then that wave, and feather said goodbye

Traveling, lot of years went by
Outside my window, found the green under a white sky
Had finally found, could now lie down and spend the rest
Movement had all been the life, thought I
Smiling, I set out again, in search of the magenta sky

(Painting- Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet in 1872 depicting Le Havre in France)

Many times I ask You...

My dear Soul

Many times I ask you- who are you, indeed?

Yesterday’s dream was of serenity and calmness

Today’s reality was of commotion and wilderness, you know

Yet even though when I was lost, you were still steady

That moment today when I tripped on the busy street

Was it because you had to stay and gaze the orange sky?

My dear Krishna

Many times I ask you- where are you, indeed?

Some children are dying of hunger, you know

Some men are still fighting over strips after a century

Yet you say you believe in humanity and not in its penury

That moment today when I saw the homeless man dying

Was it you who said that Karma is always in perpetuity?

My dear Music

Many times I ask you- how do you do it, indeed?

Cars shouted, trains whistled and that carcass from the street

Someone even fired a gun somewhere, you know

Yet you somehow found your way into my dull room

That moment today when I simply sat and watched the trees

Was it you who said that silence is my true beauty?

My dear Poem

Many times I ask you- why do you do it, indeed?

You felt what I feel, saw what I see, dreamed what I dream

Somehow, you even found an obscure rhythm, you know

Yet you remained in anonymity and perplexity

That moment today when I wrote you meaninglessly

Was it you who said that to mean is to simply be?

(Image- Boy with Pipe by Pablo Picasso)

The Man from hundred years ago

As this night moved towards dawn

And I heard rain splattering on the window
I remembered that man from 100 years ago

Every morning he walked on the streets of London
And thought of all the heartbreaks he stored within
Lovers and friends, all had betrayed
Some for money, others for pleasure
A clerk, he earned a little
Just enough for some bread and a bottle
Factories soared all around him
And tall buildings had gone taller

As this night moved towards dawn
And I heard rain splattering on the window
I remembered that man from 100 years ago

Sitting in the chair he felt the nausea
As he watched the men in his office

Wildly chasing the day around him
Is this the advent of a new man?
The kind who thinks, multiplies but not feel?
Or the man was and has been
The fly that swirled in the garden
Thrust into an indifferent cosmos

As this night moved towards dawn
And I heard rain splattering on the window
I remembered that man from 100 years ago

Evening came and he walked home

Climbed three floors and thought some more
Another day entirely insignificant
Was his living a point at all?
When Mother had long gone
And wife had deserted for a richer man
Even the birds that used to sit at the parapet
Had migrated to a happier land
What was there was nowhere
All around just desolation and despair

As this night moved towards dawn
And I heard rain splattering on the window
I remembered that man from 100 years ago

The night had fallen
And he had drank more than his usual
What was and is and shall be
Thought he who is and pledged not to be
This end is an end, better than the beginning
For what started only stagnated

The decision was made and not in haste

All that remained was the final play

As this night moved towards dawn
And I heard rain splattering on the window
I remembered that man from 100 years ago

In a moment’s worth he was at the terrace

Desires and difficulties all had disappeared

God and Devil had dissolved in his soul

And no questions now remained

Stuttering he finally reached and climbed the edge

The last two breaths were not a complete waste

For the cold wind had now wrapped his face

Startled and scared I woke up with a shriek

With a pounding heart and sweat covered face

What I could have brushed as a mere nightmare

Struck me with horror as I rushed to the mirror

A hundred years had just condensed

Face of the man or the man with the face

As the night had reached the dawn

And sun rays had pierced the window

I thought of myself in the present

Heaven and hell, joys and sorrows

Nights and days, springs and falls

This one beautiful life has it all!

(Painting- Wanderer above the sea of fog by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818)

While you are there somewhere

While you are there somewhere and I wait here

World sees another day of hope and despair

Thought of the summer that came and went

The first day of school and my total reluctance

Those teachers who thought I was a queer

While you believed I am just bored

Yes I have always been aloof and strange

Yet every day your hopes made me a simple man

While you are there somewhere and I wait here

World sees another day of hope and despair

The library of thousand books we built together

Has never let me feel alone again

While friends betrayed every now and then

You kept saying- just give, don’t demand

In all those books, I always found you in the end

Though in time there will be neither you nor I

Within the books our world shall remain

While you are there somewhere and I wait here

World sees another day of hope and despair

One day you said to me- time is the trick

And many things in this world to believe in

But let hate and violence not be one of them

We will meet for time shall come a circle again

Unconditional love, purity of man

Have to tell you then I didn’t fail

Lived by your lessons, shall do it again

While you are there somewhere and I wait here

World sees another day of hope and despair

(Painting- Woman with a Parasol : Madame Monet and Her Son by Claude Monet, 1875)

Confounding states stuck in circles

The one who just died and the one who woke up suddenly

Talked all through night incessantly of karma and beauty

And the morning came and there was no motion of sanctity

What got preserved was ultimately reserved for the perplexity

As they went their ways and collided after one roundabout

Thought they met in a dream or that night from another journey

All came a full circle when one hundred years went by

As they met again at the roundabout and thought they had met before

What was seen was never there and all mad men were left with a stare

Every day they wake up to the day before and the one after

Caught between certainties and randomness of their being

Squeezed between timeless memories and progressive dreams

What is there when there is nothing in all the somethings

And in the frailty of simple and implausibility of complex

Those walk on the tightrope or that swim in the infinite green sea

Did they find the value of thoughts and caterings to emotions?

Or maybe all were just caricatures drawn on sands and washed perpetually

Between the crisis of identities and confusions of meanings

Those obscure moments of rain and sun on the glass pane

In all the shouts of dead silence and gambles of centuries

Pleadings of regeneration and tumultuous celebrations of vague

In all the mitigations of music and abstractions of words

Loss of all those paradigms that were never there or fair

Illusions of realities meshed in between here and there

When did we interfere when we were never somewhere

Unsure if there was a beginning and suspicious if there is an end

But then what’s within is what we miss everyday and everywhere

In our countless discussions and numerous fleeting emotions

Where is that consciousness that will wake us eventually

And put it to rest all ideas of God and Man

Why are we stuck when there have been and there will be

Eternal revolutions of time and convoluted visions in sunshine

Sometimes it so happens

                                                          
Sometimes it so happens
that I grow weary of all desires and all disappointments
and get tired of all fears and all fancies

Sometimes it so happens
that I can't listen anymore to all the endless talking
and get exhausted with all modernization and all competition

Sometimes it so happens
that I lose sense of man and all his incomplete solutions
and have no track of all mental stimulation and all creative propositions

Sometimes it so happens
that there is little left in man, woman and all other dualities
and hardly any discoveries in enigmas of relationships and all other ecstasies

Sometimes it so happens
that there is not much in all philosophies and all paradoxes
and in drawing those acute observations and finite conclusions

Sometimes it so happens
there is nothing to find in grand revolutions and petty commercialization
and in lofty ideas of purposes and self proclaimed patriotism

Sometimes it so happens
that I have no spiritual connotations and moral obligations
and no meanings in my poems, like this one

Sometimes it so happens
that I write nothing but except may be
and there is no pen or paper but only thoughts afloat

Sometimes it so happens
that I just sit in this cafe and look at the rain
and wonder if all leaves will get drenched or some shall remain

Sometimes it so happens
that's just my life is all about
and it doesn't matter much to me

(Image- Cafe terrace at night by Van Gogh)

The Absurdist's lens

“Stayin alive” plays on as Moriarty waits on the rooftop for the final chapter with Sherlock and you can’t help but break into applause for BBC’s TV series Sherlock, the modern take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s epic. For me, Professor Moriarty’s reincarnation in the Facebook generation is a digression from a crooked genius in the original to an Absurdist in motion. While Moriarty has the certainty of his inevitable death on the rooftop sequence, he only reflects the boredom his life has been thrust into dealing with the ordinary and in creating distractions to amuse him, Sherlock Holmes being the most recent one. Moriarty listening to Bee Gees while calling Sherlock an eternal naïve for not catching the binary translation of Bach’s tune is a near about Absurdist and certainly as close as this generation can witness one.

Mersault, the protagonist of The Stranger by Albert Camus is a character that confuses you with the decision of what sort of emotions to invest in it. Is it empathy or objectivity or distaste for a total display of callousness and a hardened matter –of- fact approach to life? You are left undecided throughout and that is the whole symbolism Camus wants to exhibit for Absurdism and that’s exactly where the novel becomes an existentialist/absurdist tour de force.  While the source of all philosophical thought is wonder (Aristotle’s inference), Absurdism is distinct for its almost mathematical approach and the fact that it starts with the death of all philosophies. The whole idea of Absurdism centers on the confrontation or constant opposition between two ideals- man’s incessant desire to find a meaning and significance to his life and the universe that is silent, cold and indifferent to a single man in larger scheme of things and whose existence is there without any inherent meaning. Thus, while accepting that human beings inevitably seek to understand life's purpose, Camus takes the skeptical position that the natural world, the universe, and the human enterprise remain silent about any such purpose. Since existence itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This paradoxical situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls the absurd. 

Albert Camus extends the idea in The Myth of Sisyphus “There is only one really serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that”.

What then is Camus's reply to his question about whether or not to commit suicide? What is the Camusean alternative to suicide or hope? The answer is to live without escape and with integrity, in “revolt” and defiance, maintaining the tension intrinsic to human life. Full consciousness, avoiding false solutions such as religion, refusing to submit, and carrying on with vitality and intensity: these are Camus's answers. This is how a life without ultimate meaning can be made worth living. As he said in Nuptials, life's pleasures are inseparable from a keen awareness of these limits.  In response to the lure of suicide, Camus counsels an intensely conscious and active non-resolution. Rejecting any hope of resolving the strain is also to reject despair. Indeed, it is possible, within and against these limits, to speak of happiness. “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable” .

It is not that discovering the absurd leads necessarily to happiness, but rather that acknowledging the absurd means also accepting human frailty, an awareness of our limitations, and the fact that we cannot help wishing to go beyond what is possible. For Camus, happiness includes living intensely and sensuously in the present coupled with tragic (due to lack of inherent meaning), lucid, and defiant consciousness, sense of limits, bitterness, determination to keep on, and  refusal of any form of consolation. Camus is also similar in this to Nietzsche, who called upon his readers to “say yes to life,” and live as completely as possible at every moment. Nietzsche's point was that to be wholly alive means being as aware of the negative as of the positive, feeling pain, not shunning any experience, and embracing life “even in its strangest and hardest problems.

Now, returning to where I started: - rendering an absurdist theme to Shelock’s chief villain may or may not be accurate but definitely is a constructed meaning. Life, an abstract entity like fiction can also be rendered a constructed meaning but claims of a divine purpose or cosmic significance are nothing but a mere escape. Absurdism is one of the most attractive school of thought and resembles closely to Existentialism and Nihilism in its contents but divert significantly at the finer points. Here’s avery helpful chart I found: -

Life is no one single, simple thing, but a series of tensions and dilemmas. The most seemingly straightforward features of life are in fact ambiguous and even contradictory. Camus recommends that we avoid trying to resolve them. We need to face the fact that we can never successfully purge ourselves of the impulses that threaten to wreak havoc with our lives. Camus's philosophy, if it has a single message, is that we should learn to tolerate, indeed embrace the frustration and ambivalence that humans cannot escape.