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FROM A BOOK I’M WRITING } To see yourself, do not look in the mirror. Easier is it to remove you from yourself and watch you passing by. Verily I tell you, then you shall see a ghost of a stranger moving by you. Then you shall fall on your knees and tear away your clothes. For, you shall be frightened to see you.
What is written is for all. But what is only for you has to be found by yourself in the moments between the moments. May your eyes be that of a child so that you can look anew. May your body be that of an old man so that you shall be slower as you move. In your slowness and wonder shall you find things most amazing. Nothing shall be hidden from those ones.
Oh brethren, why are you asleep?
NEW OUTSIDERS } In the shop, he came across a glass box. It took him sometime to make out the square and rectangle metal boxes placed perfectly into their fitting spaces in the holding frames. They were all lighters. Zippo.
When he was told the price went above one thousand two hundred rupees, he suddenly had a vision: about the day he’s walking into a busy, glittering Egyptian hotel somewhere in a Persian town, stepping in from the sun, wearing a coffee brown thin tweed jacket with a white filterless cigarette gummed by his lips’ wet grip, with his silver Zippo weighing in the jacket pocket, him feeling the weight against his hip and then slowly picking it out and flipping open its steely lid and the tongue of the flame that sways up and long out of the lighter now licking away his cigarette and the silk shawl of the danseuse who just breezed by so close to him and then the entire hotel itself. He is now standing in a hotel, gutted down.
He put back the silver Zippo back on the rack with a smile. The shop owner had a smirk. “Quite a price to pay, eh?”, the man asked. He nodded and slowly walked out of the shop.
ABOUT AN EVENING } After a few days that made you sweat during the day and even in the evenings, the rains had arrived.
It had arrived on a certain evening that calmed down and slowly got bluer, in a pale manner, that you didn’t notice until you saw the blueness around. Even the deep green leaves of the jackfruit had a shade of blue on them, I thought.
Then I saw the sky.
It was all blue, pregnant with clouds that were holding the rains. It was never a lashing, but a constant drizzle. The darkness grew and still the blueness remained seemingly on everything on earth. The cold was calming and the sounds lulling. The day that ended that way was a little strange. But I didn’t feel like wanting to see the orange light any sooner. I did not want the day.
I had longed for this evening calm and it had come.
URBAN MYTHS } As flies to wanton boys are we to History. It kills you for sport. Or as in the case of Robin Hood, it also waxes lyrical about.
A 550-year-old Latin note hidden in the library at Eton debunks the myth of the ‘good robber’. I’d begun to love the brat all the more after he got the face of Kevin Costner.
“Around this time,” say the words of an unknown monk in the margins of a medieval history book, “according to popular opinion, a certain outlaw named Robin Hood with his accomplices infested Sherwood and other law-abiding areas of England with continuous robberies.”
The comments dated to 1460 are unusual in their negativity. Dr Julian Luxford, of St Andrews University, who made the discovery, said Robin may have benefited from later rewriting of history. “Rather than depicting the traditionally well-liked hero, the article suggests that Robin Hood and his merry men may not have been ‘loved by the good’,” he says.
The note, makes no mention of giving his loot to the poor.
History and urban myths often get weaved into immortal facts. Because we gulp them down. Because our universities want us to gulp them all down just like that. Look at the poor Nero. He’s forever tagged to the adage that he fiddled while Rome was burning.
Hearing on the fire, some accounts say, the extravagant emperor had actually rushed back to Rome to organize a relief effort, which he paid for from his own funds. Besides, there were no fiddles in 1st-century Rome.
History now looks like the curious case of somebody’s butt, in which it keeps swelling and shrinking without any reason.
ETGAR KERET } Like a mosquito in its flight of search for the easily penetrable skin over the softest flesh for its needle, I keep searching for idioms that suit my writing. Privately. In my diaries, that is. Idioms as a characteristic mode of expression, you know.
One of those sketchy entries in which I tried to breathe in a thought went like this: ‘..and kiss you for long while asking you what do you think when I kiss you for long and you gasp with me..’ The search, I think these days, could be to drive in the experience.
Those private searches had taken me through Anais Nin, Murakami, and Carver among others. I thought Nin had the electricity:
The body of Lillian changed as she talked, the fast coming words accelerating the dismantling. She was taking off the shell, the covering, the defences, the coat of mail, the activity.
Today I read a bit of Etgar Keret, the Israeli writer who they say is maxing out his minimalism:
After school, the older kids had an argument about if when you hang somebody and he dies, it’s because he chokes to death or because his neck gets broken. Then they took bets on cartons of chocolate milk and caught a cat and hanged it from the basketball hoop, and the cat screamed a lot, and in the end its neck really did break. But Mickie wouldn’t pay for the chocolate milk, and he said it was because Gabi had pulled hard on the cat on purpose and that he wanted to see it again with a new cat that nobody touched. But everyone knew it was because he was a cheap-ass, and they forced him to hand over the money. Then Nissim and Ziv wanted to clob-ber Tsion Shemesh because he was a liar and the cat’s dick didn’t get hard at all. And Michal, who’s probably the prettiest girl in the school, happened to pass by and said we were all disgusting and like animals, and I went and threw up on the side, but not on account of her.
Murakami, said a university paper recently, carries the scent of the existential realism of Raymond Carver, the master. Which the Japanese Jazz bar freak denies, of course. Keret< I thought< could be stretching Carver’s minimalism. Also Keret’s people, like Carver’s, try to express why they do what they do as they are in the process of detection, figuring out their actions and their purpose for acting. Okay, Keret also wrote the story that became the film, Wristcutters.
Rewarding searches, though.
ON LYING } Been rolling that word in my head for long: lie.
When you lie on something, an event or a journey, or a certain deed or hide a significant detail and then later forget about your construct, you could end up easily giving away yourself. At that moment you stand stripped, gulping, wondering in a snap, sort of in that order: why did I give away and oh here withers all my defence. What should I say now to make my earlier version stand erect, okay let me confess now..
And as you move to the new moment just about to tell the person how much you wish to distance from that lie of yours, you suddenly notice : she had then sneezed and had missed your flaw. Suddenly, you believe in god.
But, pray what is a lie? Did you know that the lies are indeed truths? For, why do you think we lie? We lie to give what others want. We lie because they are not willing to want what we have to offer. May this twilight of reason then gradually unveil to you the truth: the lies we tell, tell us the greatest truths about the liar and the one who is lied to.
Hence lies, are greater truths.
