| | There's a sick cow out on the streets tonight. I know because I can hear her sneezing. It sounds like a boxer cutting loose on a punching bag-sized whoopee cushion. |   |
| | Security: | | | Subject: | Ayumi | | Time: | 03:21 pm |
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| There's the potential for something hidden like a blue egg deep under the lake. Down, down it drifts into the ancient crevasses, lower and lower it floats into the nameless abyss.
Is there a murky beast who with half a gulp will make the fragile hope disappear? Its teeth would miss the hapless shell; it would find itself gnawing its own jaw while the egg bobs down its cavernous interior, untouched, but with what chance of ever being hatched? | | |
| If creativity comes about when one drops the ego, becomes egoless, loses the self, then perhaps I should forget having Lasik eye surgery.
As I've long observed, without my glasses, or my contacts, I become more of an artist. Nothing has too fine a point on it; everything is a blur of color, every object flows into its neighbor, disregards the rules of depth and distance, every hard edge is smudged by a divine thumb.
When I look at people, I can only make out their attitude, the direction they are facing, in general the style and color of their attire. I cannot see the wrinkles of a smirk, the fluttering of nervous eyeballs, a locked jaw. I cannot say that a person is beautiful or ugly, timid or bold, confident or submissive. Only when they begin to move, and before they move out of my field of acuity, can I glean something about how their personalities are expressed in movement. The world of aesthetic possibilities changes completely. I lose my ability to judge a person as a static work of art. I am transformed into a detective who must through the collection of small hints and clues deduce something about the mystery of a man. My eyes, which used to be incisive, sabre-toothed implements of summary dissection, are blunted, melted into something rounder, softer, alchemized to gold. I cannot pose a challenge or posit a demand or communicate a desire with a look. I cannot even deliver a prejudice. There is no aggressiveness left in my gaze. All that remains is a question mark, a void looking for wonder to fill it, a witness to surprise.
Am I really forced to don these dangerous spectacles just to avoid being eaten alive by everyone else roving the streets with razor eyes? | | |
| Not used to always being on guard, suspicious of ulterior motives, manipulation, trickery, masked intentions, deceit. Every gesture of goodwill is inextricably bound to a will to manipulate, to treat as an object, to shake gain out of. I cannot trust anyone. Words are full of congenial thorns which twist and wrench upon grabbing hold, break the skin internally where you can't see it, suck your blood through the vine like a lamprey.
Their brain is an ugly creature. If you could see it, you would want to mash it, burn it, stomp it, bury it, the stinking, frothing mass of control and lust, with no positive capacity for understanding.
The kids learn to turn off their consciousness. Or maybe they are taught by a world of zombies with atrophied compassion. They lose their empathy and the entire nervous system becomes rooted in I Want; no other sensation transmits signals that percolate into action. There is no rule defining the limits of behavior. Anything can be denied, then reasserted at the convenient moment. Running around the morbid lab with people's open hearts on bunsen burners, drained into by vials of caustic chemical, test tubes filled with abuse, they experiment ceaselessly, mercilessly. The aorta palpitates, shudders, screams, contracts, recoils, shrivels, turns into a grey stone. And taking off their sacrosanct lab coats they blink through ogle-eyed glasses and look absurdly surprised at the lifeless result.
Among all the swaggering teenage self-proclaimed "priests" trying to sell me their approval, who viciously denounce me as a "bad man", "no good", full of "bad karma" when I refuse to buy, is there no one who will stand up and say, "No no, this is wrong, this is a perversion of human trust, of our pure belief"? Man or woman, young or old, is there no ethical dissenter? | | |
| Raja: "Tomorrow you come my house, I feed you big glass of Hindi."
...
Looking at my hands in shadow a few nights back, I suddenly realized I was looking at Mom's hands ... | | |
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DIANA PALACE
... the blinking neon sign towered above us. A ... lakh? A lack? What exactly was the sign to convey about the establishment? Something of its posh exclusivity, about the cost of one room per night? About its paucity?
[ Later on the same night ... ]
CRYSTAL MALL
A mall that has it all? Or run by Alan, Albert, Alfonse, Alfred, Almond, Al Capone, Al Cheapo?
They really leave it up to the imagination here!!! | | |
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- rickshaw rage :
- condition of temporary insanity possibly leading to unspeakable violence as a result of continued, unmitigated exposure to the dishonest devices of rickshaw-wallahs
- rupe-rip [ROOP.rip] :
- a surpassingly unfair proposition of monetary exchange; lit. rupee rip-off
| | |
| Ansu (Shanti Guest House, Varanasi): "In India, you know we emotional people, you give a girl some chocolate, make friends you know, then marry no problem!"
And what about polygamy?
Ansu: "If you have money to feed them, then what problem?" | | |
| Exiting the enshrined tomb of Mumtaz Mahal, I am blinded by light. Echoing voices, a fog of stale tourist exhalations lifts like a spring-action curtain, a surreal world stabbing like dozens of pins into my reticent retinas. Even the dull marble reflections are too much. I close my eyes, revealing a warm bed of reds and oranges the afterimage. White air rushes into my lungs. A monument built for love? Such a monument would never last forever. Inevitably, it is or has transformed to become a commemoration of death. The Taj Mahal is as majestic as it is devoid of life, empty.
Far from the temples of Khajuraho depicting all the forms of life in every joyful occupation, the delicate pietra dura exhibits vines, leaves, and flowers only, shapely translucently fragile blossoms opened four centuries ago. If one took this art as representative of the physical world, one could believe the living world was filled with nothing but flowers, that perhaps humans sprang from floral seeds. But the pigeons wallowing quietly around the elevated latticed windows refute this theory. It is just a dream of simplicity, a vision of exquisite, geometric minimalism. It could not have been that the idea of including a little dog in the corner, or a sparrow hidden among the vegetarian designs was beyond the imaginations of the artisans.
This whole structure is a tribute to poles of opposition. It plays with light and shadow, dances between substance and space; in treading barefoot on the solar-heated surfaces of squares I find the interface between life and lifeless. The crowds shifting over these surfaces become the flower petals and fruit, peach, lime, orange, violet, grape, lemon meringue, black cherry, beet red, green tomato, each never resting in the breeze. | | |
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gyrm's journal