Wednesday 12 February 2014

Literatures of Love


Literatures of Love

“ Tell me that you love me”
“ I love you”
“ Tell me once more”
“ I don’t love you”
                       L’ Aventura
Michelangelo Antonioni

LOVE is all a matter of audacity; LOVE is all a matter of unwillingness to suspend our thoughts on our own pleasure, which we alone cannot fulfill; LOVE is a matter of urge to attain the willingness, I mean what we provide, in return. So LOVE is a matter, not only of valour, but of self-seeking. LOVE has, on the poles, idealistic and popular versions: idealistic being a kind of universalisation of the feeling, inclusive of benevolence, mercy, patience, tolerance, fraternity, whereas the popular, as always, lay on the banality of evil.

LOVE is at odds over pessimism. But the outsiders, by all odds would chant, ‘caution’, ‘caution’, taking the popular reading only. Caution does not let off steam of IT to escape, because the popular is gruesome, inflammable with the tinge of morality. If attempt  to occupy a different realm, without signing off valediction,  pressure of the steam inside let loose the blood, blood if let free will call revolt. Thus caution, though presumably keeps the pendulum balanced, essentially renovates the models of relinquished desires hidden, under the crust, but still potent for an explosion. So cautious people, be vigilant, you have hidden a volcano inside; a volcano of temptation, of love, of hatred.

The rationale behind my caution, on indulging in writing about the subject of, and indulging in the practice of preaching IT, the universal temptation, which taunts, tempts and tears everyone, is due to the fear of becoming the voice of the popular, which is what Roopesh Paul engrossed on the title of his film, The Temptation between the Legs. Roopesh, the film director , is a script writer, legitimate enough to talk,( which I am afraid, I am not)  about the temptation, with Indu Menon, the Malayalam Short story writer, both proved, the matter,  the solidified fluid, with the testimony, the life as their white paper. Such a proof after, was Anuragathinte Pustakam, the Book, of love, for love, by love. The book was an example for a simile of burning sensation as Burns wrote, “IT” is like a RED, RED, rose, when our foreheads were not burning, and tongue not parching. It did not dissent to sort of ‘Vegetable love growing v(f) aster than empires and more slow’ or love ‘is a tale told by an idiot, full of furious sound, signifying nothing.’
It was impossible for me to move with the guesswork, oversimplified earlier; not because of the fear, of getting out dated, but for the fear of predation, for the fear of outsiders’ morbid preoccupation with the popular, in the view, since the popular co-efficient denominates my sustenance, as with the majority. The reality, to me, here and now, is the significance of nothingness of the so called love, because nothing does not mean ‘no’ ‘thing’, but means something at least to someone. Let me call it sacrifice, I could hear hail from the chorus of Idealism; let me call it conquest, “great”, the warriors of darkness; let me call it duel, immediately, the fresco of the rustling box, uproar. Let me say, it drives loneliness away, and loneliness in you will be made perplexed. But is it all, and it is more.  To Kamala Das, who composed a foreword to the work,…Pusthakam, IT was not only her thumb impression, the signature, but the print of the palm. The magala- Nisamudden express, a train of love, was the privileged subject of objectified dedication of Anuragathine…
On the week of the Celebration of the day of Valentines, prefixed with my epigraph, at the beginning, the lady Valentines may or may not join the feminists, the celebrators of liberation against the series of rapes, may or may not join those who believe that the celebration of the Day may summon gang rape. It may, or may not be tempting, may or may not open the doors of unanchored vigor for queries. May it be a utopian craving for the balance sheet of future, from the perspective of the past; the past’s redemption of the present or future. Or let me say, it is like the letters Gorky wrote for Theresa.
 Who is Theresa, who is Anna, Who is Fatima? Who are Elsie Moll, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and Susan Gilbert? They were all a part of the book, of love, of history, of literature, the light of LOVE from many lamps, which Roopesh and Indu collected, and published. The book, though not seriously acclaimed, was a nice companion to those who approach love in all its romantic vitality. A less than one percent of it can be disclosed if I narrate, the gain I am not sure, through the story of the lover(s) stolen from the book.
The story of Gorky:
Once when he was in Moscow, Gorky had a neighbor, a lady with man’s body-language, but still a lady; a brunette, with a man’s voice. She approached the writer to send a letter to her home, in the name of Theresa, addressing Boles. The romantic lines of the letter appear to be comic, to a rational writer since he recognized the heroine of the letter as none other than this lady. Later the same lady approached the writer to write to Theresa, in the name of Boles. The recognition, that rings the bells, was the pain of the lover/beloved in her yearns for love to fill the space of loneliness.
The Book of Love is replete with a lot of stories, of the familiar strangeness of love, lust, conquest. As Shakespeare, Neruda, Fitzgerald and so many others spoke, you float on the Laputa… 

This is enough..
The book is all yours…because …I know…each of you are…  already in it…as I am…in our own ways…
Aswathi.M.P.

Sunday 2 February 2014

Sure, because ...Road is not mine alone...

Sure, because ...Road is not mine alone...

I was walking
Walking alone
Alone and unnoticed
Unnoticed but happy
Happy on my metaphors,
Till a bus passed me.

Relieved thinking
My Metaphor safe
I checked,
Noticed a simile instead.
I ran after the bus,
Saw the bus running after me.
It stooped, I stopped,
Checked my Metaphor,
Happily regained
My Metaphor,
Its Simile
Reshaped into
His oxymoron.

Then I saw a plane
Flowed away, in the blue
Oxymoron flew away, in the yellow
Simile flee away, in the red
My metaphor rushed
 After the simile
Beyond the reach of the plane
Transcends the space.

Knowing them,
I checked my Metaphor.
Now the Metaphor never more,
Irony ever more.

I walked before the irony
Irony as my shadow,
As an oxymoron,
As a simile,
As a metaphor too.

I walked ahead
Ahead of me
I walked after me
I walked around me
I walked inside.
I am walking...
Walking alone

Metaphor rushed to me,
Sought my permission
To follow,
 Getting the answer “Sure”
Metaphor relished
In the consuming passion,
Guided,
Under the guise of following,
 Ignoring
My rhetoric, silent:
“Road is not mine alone...”

Aswathi.M.P.