New Year Greetings with a child's artsmile

When I visited my brother's daughter, a little child, she was entertaining me with her world of interests about the dragon fly sitting on the leaves of a tree, a garden lizard sleeping in its couch of mud hole in the ground, the caterpillar and oh a world, a world really, of things and concerns.!! How much I miss that world of little great concerns! When I started, she wanted to present me with an artwork of her, freshly penciled for my sake just before I came and this is that one. I am staring at this work, wondering what colors have gone into her language. Green, orange, yellow form one layer of her expression. Green margins the layers of pink and red on the bed of black. In between these a splash of thick blue and sky blue buffers the two statements. Yea, a New Year's greetings from a child's mind reads in me multi-meanings coloring suggestions again and again.

Textual deferrance on the Vision

Vedanta talks of ' tat upanishat '. Here upanishat resolves into upa + ni + sat. 'Upa' is to be near. 'ni ' is before; 'sat' is to be. i.e. upanishat is to be in close proximity before or in front of. As a free adaptation we can say ' to be in close encounter with truth'. In the thought level we can say to approach truth is to do many levels of abstraction and attain the ultimate concept by removing the hiding layers of concreteness by the process of abstraction. When such a moment of conceptual realisation occurs, the Vedantins of the Forest-books always indicates such moments as ' this is upanishat'. We can say in other words that the concrete levels screened off the truth or the process of abstraction prepares the aspirant for 'seeing the truth'. This preparatory process consisted of ' hearing, thinking, meditating' -- sravana, manana, nidhidhyasanam --reading, studying, understanding and being totally involved in the concept.

The same epistemological formations were rolled into the concrete model of ' Archa ' , viz.,the temple. The physical screen delayed the vision and deferred the experience and in the mean time giving scope for reciting the canons. The text operates on the 'delay' and ' deference ' till the moment of ' vision' happens. Waiting for the vision is actually going thru the process of abstraction, which process is mapped out in the texts of the canon and hence going thru texts is expected to be of the rigor and value of the process of abstraction. Hence, the recitation of texts before the screen and before the vision. 'I know how to wait ' - so says the protagonist of the novel Siddhartha, by H.Hesse.' Be hungry, be alone, be awake ' so says the Tamil saint. Waiting is an art, not ofpatience, but of acceptance. To live with the creative tension of hope and possibility, and total acceptance of the given moment as an accomplished target calls for unique sensibilities of the soul. But only a poet knows how to loose the balance of mind during waiting, only to encash it as immortality of words.
Thirumangai Mannan, the robber-turned-saint of SriVaishnavism, in great hunger of the concrete visions of the Transcendent Divinity, explored all the templed spaces of theological fervor and in his go-around, he came to the place of Thiruvindalur. It was offtime for the vision, with the curtain postponing the DARSANAM--revelation. The saint became frustrated and in a shrugg-off he comments, ' Indalureerae ! vaazhndaepom neerae !! ' --' Thou Lord of the town Indalur ! Be like this foever rejoicing in thine own vision unto thyself [not giving me your Darsanam] '
Surely, it will not be for the reason that the temple gates are closed in the nonscheduled hours, that the saint is frustrated. But he is waiting in more than one level for the multiple visions of the abstract and his frustration is a way ofdilating the recessed meanings of the tension. The whole transaction of the saint is made unavailable to us not because of the opaqueness of the words, but because we may not enter the enclosure as we should. What we lack in the propriety and preparedness, we may make good by artful sharing of the words, which map out the tension and manipulate the vision.
This was an instance of a devotee already sharing by involvement the canonical space created by faith and textual attributions. To see another instance of a poet proper entering the hyper space of devotion in his own right as a man of poetry, and waiting at the threshold of vision and meeting a like situation of deferred DARSANAM,

' Open the gate, thou gate keeper !God of the wheel and Lord of the oceancommitted ourselves to Him, by devotion,dipping in births daring ports at last , at the edge of time, before the turn around before the towering bell turns the clockwe have entered the portals rich, And open the gates longlive. '[aazhi iraivarkkae aatpattu yaam palkaal paazhir piravi patindhu thurai pukunthu, oozhikkadai naalin ongu mani vaayililae vaazhi ivann adaindhom, vaayiloi ! thaall thirravaai]---tr. of a verse of Thiruloka Seethaaram.

Here the poet awaits confirmation rather than the vision. For him, the vision has been already vouchsafed by the poetic perception of the plural possibilties of the word and the world in tandem. Here he is trying to attain the abstract certainty of the poetically epistemical ' visions' he lodged at the outset.

Some musings on the sonnets of Shakespeare

I was translating some sonnets of Shakespeare into Tamil. I was wondering why the bard thought it so important to advice a young man like me to marry without fail and to impress on the mind of the lad the sanctity of wedding and begetting. Was it perhaps to himself? Was it a soliloquy? Naturally talking about marriage engenders considerations of immortality and furtherance of life which otherwise ends with the individual. People have speculated long about the dark lady, the young man, even a Lord and what not. But why a poet like Shakespeare should dilate so much on a predominantly prevalent theme like marriage for a total length of say 156 or 154 sonnets? I am trying to read in between lines and attempting various interpretations but the persistant mystery seems to be evading.
'Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spendUpon thyself thy beauty's legacy?Nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend,And being frank she lends to those are free.Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuseThe bounteous largess given thee to give?Profitless usurer, why dost thou useSo great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?For having traffic with thyself alone,Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,What acceptable audit canst thou leave?Thy unused beauty must be tomb'd with thee,Which, used, lives th' executor to be'
Was it death or progeny or pragmatic sensibilty which prompted W.S. or none of these but something else? I am having my mind open to any chance hints or insights from the poem or anywherelse.

Who is inside?

The other day I was talking to a friend. She was asking me 'how could you do that?'. Well it is customary in my experience that people do ask me at some time or other this question. They have known me before. They do not expect from that knowledge that I will be able to do that. But really even I do not know that I can do somethings which I have done. Examples will be tedious. You can replace any thing from your experience. The point is why I can't be sure about myself. Sometimes I am tempted to say, as I said to her on that day that 'Nowadays I am not able to predicate anything of me. Rather I am not able to be believing any of my own self definitions. To sound mystical I can say 'I am but a gatekeeper to the fellow inside, whom I don't know about except to the extent that he gives me to know about.' The funny thing is the fellow inside really is me !We are born to the knowledge we profess and we transcend the same in no time.Right from the moment of birth somebody is writing the story from inside out and reading the scenario from outside in. He is calling himself as he was and has been so far many identities changing over and over with time. A small boy with shorts kicking an imaginary football in a wayward pebble thru the streets, taking out the groundnut cookies from the trouser packets and pelleting in as going along and singing some ditties and hooing back to the call of some buddies---is he the same script writer as one just now? May be may be not.

FIRE, the early love of Man

Fire, the old friend of man, is even now fresh and interesting to look at. Manifold forms of energy have not made this raw guest in any way less wonderful. But what was his reception in the days of old when darkness, dampness and dangers from the wild were making his absence acutely felt. He was a God once ! Now may be a utility. Who can access those primordial times and see his world, where men and cattle worshipped him devoutly? If at all we can do that, I think it should be through Rig Veda, the oldest log of subjective reactions to the outside world and the symbolising initiatives toward the abstractions. This god Fire, or Agni as he was called in Rig Vedic times enjoyed not only worship but also teasing and humour at the hands of the devotees.

In R.V.10.79 he is portrayed as a magnificient immortal making visible his might among the mortals. Do you know his might? With a touch of humour the poet says, "he is of two jaws rent asunder, devouring everything in without masticating anything". A glutton impatient even to chew!

His head is in a cavern safely sheltered off. His eyes are wide, viewing all. His tongue gulps in even a forest without chewing. So naturally the worshipper is doubly careful! He stands at a safe distance and raises his two hands up away from the touch of his tongues and offers oblations.

Not only that. He is born of the mother earth. But how he ravages her creeping over her as a child and swallowing trees and even licking out the hidden roots in her crevices.
He was made from the two logs of wood churned to friction. Once he is born, the Fire devours the parents! The poet makes a dig at Fire saying "see! I am so devoted to my parents and respect them. And I am only a mortal. But this one, he devours his parents immediately when he is born and He is called Immortal!"

The poet asks this god, "what wrong, what sin you have committed among the gods, that you are let down like this on the earth here to hunt for your food over dale and vale?"

The symbolisation and the subjective interaction with a primordial natural element being so much suffused with bristling humour speaks of that age in a modern tone and makes credible the possibility of not only fear and mystery, but also humour and certainty and subjective gregariousness with the greater questions of life being the initial conditions of theology.

Homer, the bard of the Mediterranean

Tigris, Euphrates, Nile all these sisters abound around the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Reared between the cradling arms of the two rivers rose and fell the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations. The heaving of the Nile still keeps the beat for the steps of the Egypt however much it may be in a low key. Peeping beyond 4000 BCE all these have poured their fertility into the rise of the Achean, mingled with the Dorian to shape the wonder Greece. Another strain of undulating richness was Crete, from 3000 BCE, beaten down and blossoming up before spreading out to the Argos and towards North into the Troy. All these riches and pains transform themselves into the rarefied realms of literary expression in Homer. Why did he sing that long song? Why does the cock crow at the break of dawn? When Nature brings together certain things, teleology becomes our pet faith. May be we can say, Troy was a sore in the trade links across the Black sea, putting a toll-gate and taxing the plyers dear. And so the Achean confederation joined hands and jumped on the pretext of Helen abducted to put the Troy in its place or if possible, out of the picture. May be it was the reason and may be not. But Homer sings of the trade between the divine and the human, the prehistoric and the historic, the civilisation and the culture or the unconsciuos civilisation and the conscious civilisation. He stands at the juncture and raises his song, the poetic statement at once abysmal and commonplace, ethereal and everyday, superhuman and streetly. I am at an epic in Tamil about Man and hence sojourns with the masters of the word.

Philosophical fallouts of the blocking of the blogs

Sometime back the blogger, the geocities and some other blog hosts were blocked for the Indian viewers. Mine was not visible to me as a surfer. My friends and readers were finding it difficult to access. Of course net-wise people were able to circumvent the problem. But after that I lost my enthu in blogging for the various philosophical ruminations I had been having from that instant. Of course you can say it was restored weeks back and wonder why I should mourn over it even now. I could have taken it in my strides and become happy to internetact with my readers. But the philosophical overtones of the issue bother me even now. Just over the past couple of days I am recovering from that stupor and you can take this as a net-soliloquy, this what I am blogging.

Now what are the philosophical issues I am referring about? First it concerns about the age old value of 'freedom of expression'. Of course as any social issue, 'freedom of expression' can't exist in a vacuum. There is a context always as of any social issue. At the same time no context can be justification enough to cause harm to 'the freedom of expression'. Now in this certain questions can be asked, viz., 'whose expression?', 'whose freedom?'. An anti social element, by the very act that that person has chosen to become enimical to the society as such, has excluded himself/herself from the extense of the operation of the right towards 'freedom of expression'. All the values become meaningful only when the basic foundation-value, viz., LIFE, is unambiguously cherished and actively upheld or atleast not forsaken by thought, word and deed.

The block was said to be caused at the instant of the anti-social activities of some miscreants who were using the blogging for their nefarious acts. Of course as a responsible citizen one has to cooperate with understanding and patience on such occasions. But the block was not of those blogs alone and the time of block-out was not discriminate on purely the basis, to identify the anti-social-content-blogs. Instead the fiasco seems to have resulted from the lack of communication or miscommunication or misunderstanding that resulted from the transactions between the government and the ISP companies. And bloggers had to take it to the notice of the authorities concerned repeatedly and drive home to them what has resulted among the IT public. And of course the government was good enough to clarify the issue and sort it out at last. But that which bothers me is the lack of trepidation on the part of the people or institutions who tread on the people's freedom, knowingly or unknowingly. Actually what should have happened is that the government should have issued a request to the people to bear with the temporary measures taken at the stated instant and the ISP companies should have issued apologies for trampling on the freedom of the innocent bloggers and net-readers inadvertently. I don't know if any such thing happened. As a matter of fact it was blocked and as a matter of fact it was lifted and left at that. Such lack of respect towards the sacredness of the freedom of expression of the innocent citizens defies any attempt of justification or rationalisation. But even these grave ethical lecuna can be kept in abeyance in a climate of terror and anti-social havoc. But now or later, these issues have to be addressed consciously by statesmen, law makers and political scientists. These public ethical issues of grave lacuna are like fissures in the body politic of social confidence, which if left unattended to, weakens the structure in due course. Let us hope our social conscience never sleeps on such issues.

But my dampening spirits were not due to this aspect alone. It goes much deeper in that thinking that such an innocent field of information highway is put to use to causes of pure destruction, a sort of dejection sets in. What this evil, should it be always sharing the tools of life and thought of humanity? Evil has no existence of its own, then where from it retains its strangle hold repeatedly in the history of humanity? The philosophical pop up of the issue teases the understanding and sometimes the misdirected ardour becomes callous enough not to notice the ethical concerns.

Translating the divine girl

karuviLai oNmalarkAL ! kAyA malarkAL !
thirumAl uruvoLi kAttukinRIr,
enakku uyvazhakku onRuraiIr
thiruviLaiyAtu thiNtOL thirumAliruchOlai nambi
varivaLai ilpukunthu vanthipaRRum vazhakkuLathE !
(nAchchiyAr thirumozhi 9.3)

Lovely blossoms of karuviLai !
Flowers of kAyA !
You are showing me the complexion
Of ThirumAl's shining form.
Tell me a way to survive.
The great Lord, full and complete, of ThirumAlirunchOlai
Whose shoulders strong are the playful prop
Of the goddess of wealth, Thiru.
Is it just for him to enter our house
And snatch my lovely lined bangles by force?

When I read this to a friend, his ready comment was, 'it's too literal, do something about it !'. What is too literal and what is in proper idiom changes with the language.
Here, 'showing me the complexion of thirumAl's shining form' tries to translate the original, 'thirumAl uruvoLi kAttukinRIr'. The flowers kAyA and karuviLai, left untranslated with cognate names in English are addressed by the implied speaker as resembling thirumAl in complexion by means of their color and shine.

'ThirumAlirunchOlai nambi' of the original indicates the deity in the temple of the place, ThirumAlirunchOlai. The word 'nambi' means 'one who is full of good qualities,
accomplishments and exceedingly noble'. This word 'nambi' plays a vital role in suggesting a subtle humour to the poem. But the translation is yet to catch that humour.

'whose shoulders strong are the playful prop of the goddess of wealth, thiru' by being overly literal goes too awry from the passing of the proper mood and sense of the original, 'thiruviLaiyAdu thiNdOL'.

What is 'snatching one's bangles by force' as per the target idiom of English?

So the target language changes the poem and the translation, if successful, is but a deception. But this deception has to be made efficient in communicating the original, however. Shall we attempt at a deception now?

karuviLai ! kAyA !
Oh! you flowers and blossoms
of shine and color !
Form of ThirumAl you resemble,
Can you suggest me a way to survive?
The God of ThirumAlirunchOlai,
so noble is He and so strong-shouldered,
Thiru, the goddess of riches, ever rejoices in Him.
Is it right on His part to force His way into our home
And snatch everything, including the bangles on my wrist?

Victor Hugo

It is just amazing what an appeal the French giant is able to make even now. Of course many criticisms have been levelled against Hugo to the effect that the writer is sometimes inordinately eloquent and the interludes become books by themselves so that the reader is left at largesses to manoeuver his way back to the link in the story. But, for myself, I found these interludes very interesting. And moreover as a man of India, southern Tamilnad, in Srirangam I had already been exposed to the epical styles in Ramayana and Mahabharatha and as a result Hugo found his peers in my reception of reading. More so, I think he was writing about the universal men in his characters, which justified perhaps the wide strokes he tended to make quite often. But how can he remain so gripping in his story telling, all the while so abstract in his philosophical observations. A good story telling means being attentive to the particulars and to match this with intense abstractions running to pages and more than that, altering between these two quite often. No wonder I call him a giant.

After I joined my job, the first thing I did was to buy a copy of Penguin Les Miserables and take that to Neyveli where my father was staying at that time and to read out to him pages after pages of cherished text-places. A transport of interests between father and son! Especially I remember the first scene where the priest goes into the woods to meet the renegade, dying of old age but still a terror in the quarters. One thing I found in Victor Hugo was in his novels the arguments and dialogues do act and do act right before your very eyes. I have found this talent in rare instances, may be a couple of them, right now the one other novelist coming to mind is Ayn Rand.
Another feature of Hugovian novels is the choice and the volitional thrust of decisions, which the characters make. The articulations of the deciding process are phenomenal.

Poetry

The world has become too strange to poetry.
Poetry has to blossom in the person and become contagious.
Poetry can never become prose or its substitute
Infirmity in poetical perception covertly touts prose in its place
Poetry always happens
taking inputs from unforeseeable quarters
Poetry is creative irregularity
madness of connotation
A conflagration of words and meanings
Never a guided tour
Being a venture into unchartered regions

Philosophizing

The intrinsic nature of any thing, characteristic, quality, movement, anything existing is called its tatvam in sanskrit. In Aristotilian parlance it is the qua being description of any 'existant'.(is there a word like this I don't know). Opinions, notions, and feelings thrust on us a streaming worldview, continuosly changing, but gripping all the while it lasts. We can become a plaything in the operation of such adhoc factors, we do become in the start and the run, if we don't recurrently take to active understanding by analysis and integration. This phase-lag between streaming concoction of world-views and the tested structuring of knowledge should not become too much. The process that helps clear this lag is what is called Tatva Vicharam or analytical grasp of reality.

Shakespeare for the stage

Shakespeare is so well suited for the stage that without stage we understand Shakespeare poorly and Shakespeare so well illuminates the stage. When my father (R Venugopal) used to tell me that the Bard always had the stage in his mind whether he wrote about social, historical, philosophical themes or any situation for that matter. I thought then that was an overstatement intended as an highliter. But more and more I come to see that was merely a statement of fact.
I am doing some pieces for monoacting to upload to the sites and the Internet Archive and I have already uploaded some items, say, Shylock, Hamlet and some pics of my father on stage in the Shakesperian roles. My own acting acts as an interpretation for the play to me myself. Yea, my Dad was afterall right and it seems more and more true that the Bard lives in the acting rather than in the folios.