I’ll wrap myself in the envelope of hazy dreams
and I’ll mail myself to you
I’ll burn myself with the flames of passion
and I’ll send my ashes to you
I’ll drown myself in the pain of my void heart
and I’ll record my throbs for you
I’ll kiss my image in the mirror of smoky death
and I’ll preserve the corpse for you
Only then you’ll learn to hate me
To despise me with all your heart…………
Perhaps that's the only thing I want
Eka manushera eka rattirey eka shwopner akash boney
Eka manushera eka kNadbei ekla kono ghorer koney
Eka manushero obhiman achhey chilekothhar nirbashoney
Eka taragulo chupi-chupi bujhhi eka manusheri galpo shoney
Eka manushera eka brishtitey ekla ekla bhijtey jaye
Eka manushera golir koney eka kagojer nao bhashaye
Eka manusher boka mon gulo eka i bujhhi thaktey chaye
Eka manushera ekla bhishon – aye aye aye brishti aye
Eka manusher jonye dyakho ekla jagey nodir chor
Eka manusher buker bhitor ekla nachey bhishon jhhor
Eka manusher eka rupkotha dottyi dano tepantor
Eka manusher eka prithibi shyaola pora ekla ghor
Eka manusher galpogulo shuntey bujhhi chaichhey keu
Shomuddurer toter upor bhangchhey dyakhho raater dhheu
Kaan petey shei dhheuer aoaj shuntey tumi pabey
Mon paboner nao bhashiye kothaye urey jabey?
Dik hariye paal chhutiye Sindhobad er bhyala
PNouchhey jaabey thhik jeykhaney ekla loker myala
Dekhbey takhon ekla thakao ekta mojar khyala
Shei khyalatei uthhbey metey khelbey shara byala...
The moon makes me sad every night
She makes me sigh
And the clouds – at times they cover
her body like a purple veil
At other times, she’s naked –
Like a silent fairy
Like a faithful dream….
I’m a night-bird
And like other night-birds
I seek to make love to the moon
But I hide myself in the womb
of the night, for I fear
the creatures of the dark….
The stars are the children of God
And they remind me of eternity
They are frozen in their own silence
Like forgotten sighs and broken promises….
Sorrows are the ashes of life
Life burns, pale and cold –
Like the fire of Babylon
The moon is pale and cold as well
She is a princess – banished
from the kingdom of love….
I love the moon
But she doesn’t love me,
She loves the lonely cherry tree
which stands, sad and forlorn
in a lonesome valley beyond the hills
and beyond the horizon…
And on new moon nights, when
she’s allowed to go back to the kingdom
from which she was banished
The cherry tree weeps in silence…
And I fly to the cherry tree
to drink the honey of his tears
That keeps me alive
And that’s why the moon
doesn’t love me,
She thinks that, unlike the cherry tree,
my love is selfish….
But this isn’t true
For had the moon loved me
instead of the cherry tree,
He wouldn’t have cried for her
on new moon nights,
And I would have starved to death…..
The moon doesn’t understand me
Nobody does
But I love the moon
And I’ll keep on loving her…….
Once there lived a hyena
Beyond the Great Wall of China
It went to a dead lion’s den
And put on the dead lion’s mane
And became an utterly fake king
(I’m not talking ‘bout Deng Xiaoping)
Troubles began soon
Some of them sought the moon
But not the silver spoon
So the hyena ordered rocks from the Alps
And crushed the troublemakers to pulps
Everybody watched the show
And when they had to go
Said “Amen!”
(I’m in no mood to discuss Tiananmen)
A certain big brother outside was busy with oil
And was already perturbed by some other turmoil
Besides, being once bitten by an ally of the dead lion
He feared similar fate in the hands of the hyena’s scion
And so he decided to remain cool
While the hyena’s successors continued to rule
(Don’t think of America, you bloody fool !)
Upholding the banner of equality
They treat all with the same brutality
Except a few who are extremely clever
And wise enough to pay their taxes in silver
But the hyenas are never put to shame
It’s only the mane that gets a bad name
Think twice friends, whom shall we blame?
(If you think I’m defending all things Red
Tomorrow morning you’ll find yourself dead
Lying in the Yellow River’s yellow bed
You better get this notion straight in your head)
Darkness throughout….Occasional glints of yellow-orange….
Cars rolling by…. Jokers and eroticism
Chaos and hysteria…. Madness prevails
Few goblins digging the mist and silence….
They have a few dead fireflies to bury
Clock hands are but daggers – meant to stab time
And Einstein wouldn’t have denied this
Sudden intense desire to shoot down
all the sheriffs and their deputies
Streets getting flooded with blood
Blood – of my strong brothers and sweet sisters
Blood – of all my friends
They’re bleeding to death
I can hear their mortal screams and moaning
at dead of night
Curtains shake
Breeze, Breeze, Breeze
Skeletons hanging down the street-lights
The lights are yellow
The nights are yellow
Fleshes cry for poison and eternity
Bones are silent
Nights are silent
Lucifer loses his faith, and that’s
the worst possibility….
Yearnings embark on their futile voyage
Yearnings for naked solitude…
An owl sits atop the roof of the public lavatory
down below, across the street
The street reminds of forgotten prophets
The graffito on the wall of the lavatory –
it’s a blue sunflower,
But it smells like tears of old Gypsy storytellers…..
Sky becomes sea – dark, morose, thoughtful –
like Tintoretto’s Paradise....
Sea becomes a wolf
Hope loses virginity
Rain loses creativity
High on saintly delights:
Might burst into peels of laughter pretty soon
Blue halo of clouds around the moon:
Green signal to the tears….
Laughter and tears – brother and sister
Both sired by the mirrors
And hence they come hand in hand...
Silent poetry of being….
Teardrops and petals from the womb of night
Tears are the wings of words
Once detached, words become petals
and fall, lifeless, on torn pages of poetry
Blank pages, blank verse…..
Petals of black rose
Never seen a black rose in life
And that’s reason enough to cry
Never begged for love or mercy
Begged for thunderbolts…
Begging for aurora borealis
Would have begged for immortality in future
had future existed
Shadows fall…
Other things fall as well –
Body, soul, flesh, blood, bones, semen,
lives, epitaphs, stories, empires, twilight
sadness, totems, hermits, angels, flowers
butterflies, fears, nightmares, Jocasta
moksha, parking lots, tunnels, ukulele,
benzedrine, hallelujah, roman candles,
sex-parties, stereophony, unrequited love
etc etc etc
Me standing before the mirror
with a cigarette and some
desired bitterness between my lips –
Wholesome, naked, happy….
Me – laughing…..
Me leaning against the balcony
with a cactus, a cat and a few severed limbs
near my feet –
Shattered, intense, sad…
Me – crying…..
Truffaut’s 400 Blows. I have seen the movie thrice, the first time being when I was sixteen, and it never ceases to make me feel disturbed.
I could relate myself very much to the young protagonist of the movie – Antoine, because like him, I myself used to have a trail misunderstandings following me everywhere – at home and at school.
Of course, I have grown out of these feelings now, but still I feel touched by the subtle way the entire film, with all it’s complexities of children moving apart from their parents and the emotional ties and attachments disappearing in the post World War II European societies, with the nuclear families becoming the norm and individualism and existentialism being the catchword, nay, the shibboleth , of the urban middle and lower middle class families.
The character of Antoine is a representative of all the children in such similar situations – childhood being converted into a scapegoat to be sacrificed at the alter of existentialism. It was, and still is, an age of innocence being lost, and morality being spat upon in the face, by children and grown-ups alike. Antoine never thinks twice before giving the false alibi of his mother’s death as the reason for his missing class. Or maybe, just maybe, he does think twice, he does hesitate for a while, signifying the battle between morality and the morbid individualist existentialism…
What Camus’s Meursault, in The Outsider, had while declaring the death of his mother in the famous opening lines of the novel was honesty – naked honesty, and Truffaut’s Antoine had the same honesty too. Because to him, his mother is dead indeed, or may be that she never existed to him, and, looking at the picture from the other side of the glass, he never existed to his mother. This is because he had overheard his mother telling his stepfather that she wanted to have an abortion, only that her mother didn’t let that happen…
Maybe that’s what this state of Being and Nothingness all about… The underlying theme of 400 Blows is existentialism. But unlike Bergman’s Silence, which, too, was shown from the perspective of a child, this one is presented in a light manner. And all the despair and hopelessness and pathos in the movie remains hidden behind a cloak of childish innocence and exuberance. But at times the cloak gets lifted, and we can see the nude flesh, like when Antoine, while skipping his class and walking around the city with a friend of his, sees his mother locked in the arms of her office colleague, walks past casually as if nothing has happened and when his friend asks him “that wasn’t him (your father)?”, Antoine nonchalantly replies – “never saw him before”…
And the scene of three little girls, hardly four of five years old, locked up in an iron cage and staring at the older boys playing at the Juvenile correctional centre – complementing and perhaps supplementing the earlier scene of three grown up women, presumably prostitutes, locked up in the police station, is bound to send streams of slow and ice-cold shudders running through the spines of the viewers. Together, these two scenes represent innocence, being locked up in a secluded cage, staring at guilt and the ennui of hopeless fear, as described aptly by Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du Mal – “C'est l'Ennui! —l'œil chargé d'un pleur involontaire”. This was perhaps the underlying theme of the entire movie. And I say ‘perhaps’ because this movie is like life itself – open to perspectives and interpretations – the objectivity of the flesh and blood
The scene of young Antoine being interviewed at the correctional home is another visual masterpiece. I’ve heard that for this particular scene, no written script was provided to the boy who played Antoine’s part. His facial expressions, the sudden quick glances, the gestures and movements of his hand – everything were real – there was no acting involved.
And one more piece of cinematic magic was the the medley of whirling faces staring down at the rotating chamber at the carnival. This scene reminds me of the immortal lines from The Hollow Men – “Shape without form, shade without colour / Paralysed force, gesture without motion…”. This was a celebration of life and lifelessness, like a brother and a sister, abandoned, standing on the roadside hand in hand and staring at all the geometrically vorticistic movements of straight lines, parabola and hyperbola – men and motorcars…
The essence of the movie is pure humour – something that brings out our smiles and tears simultaneously – like good old Charlie Chaplin staring out of the frame of City Lights – smiling and biting his finger with a rose in his hand. 400 Blows, to me at least, embodies all these feelings – those of smiles and tears, of the stream of never-ending hopelessness and despair, and the absurd happiness creeping out of all these like Camus’ Sisyphus…
The character of Antoine Doinel in 400 Blows is a confluence of Ray’s Apu from Pather Panchali and Bergman’s Johan from Tystnaden (The Silence) and what we get as a result is not merely a product of cinematic genius of the highest order, but an embodiment of life in itself – with mirth and melancholy flowing like an eternal river. Many of the shots, scenes and sequences reminded me of yet another masterpiece by yet another master – Bari Thekey Paliye by Ritwik Ghatak…
And perhaps my vocabulary is not sufficient to describe the last shot of the movie, where Antoine has ran away from the Labour Station and on reaching the sea and realizing that there is no escape route from there, turns back and faces the audience and the camera freezes…It is as if he is staring at the audience, at the people, and his eyes search for their cold hearts…He is punished and caged – not merely by the Correctional Home or the Labour Station, not merely by the unfeeling society, but by the world at large – by the lack of empathy, and the infertile detachment of our existence – imprisoned by the stone corridors of eternity, stone corridors that have no life and no feeling, he has no option but to stare at the lifeless insides of us – the hollow men, the stuffed men – devoid of all feelings and compassion, leading an existence of nullity… All the modern man has is a chain of present-moments – no past and no future, and an intense fear of the unknown, Antoine in 400 Blows, like Johan in Tystnaden explores these innermost fears…The innocence of these little children is something that is feared by the those who have embraced this existentialist mode of living (or maybe, not-living)…for innocence strikes like thunderbolts and declares a jihad against the guilt-ridden interiors of a fading morality… and the cold, lifeless whispers of this fear, of this intense horror wake us up in the middle of dead nights… at the Hour of the Wolf, and make us break into cold sweats…
The Horror…The Horror…
When it was dark and lonely
stars floated on the water
And the moon hid the owl
Under the sleeves of her long
white robe, we set sail
As the darkness rose and fell
with the tides and the wavering
Oars – the eyes glinted beneath
Eyes of fishes, fishes
Fishes never close their eyes
Down by the whirpools,
the jaded out solitudes became
one with God, and clung to the
nothingness, and we set sail
Layers of darkness had gathered
over the night sky, accumulated
throughout the centuries, as little
men and women were busy
knitting the history of the night
Darkness is nothing but the robe
of the King of night, solitude
is his crown, and eternity is his skeptre
We rowed through the night
Silence fell like raindrops from
the starlight,
The stars – they stay
close to the kingdom of dreams,
Dreams floated on around us,
Like the halo around the moon
In the waters we could see
the blazing image of Prometheus
His eyes were burning with the
Passion he had stolen from Zeus
And we rowed on…
The waters trembled between
our oars like the absurd happiness
of Sisyphus when he saw the stone
rolling down
The world rested on our palms,
And hope and faith rested on our
dusty boot-heels,
We were the faithless fanatics
In search of light, love and happiness
Like a drop of rain from the
heart of the steadfast firmament
Waiting for Oedipus to sigh and say :
“I conclude that all is well”
The night, the darkness, the solitude
and the starlit waters revolved round
one single moment – and that moment
of bodhi came down like
all the love that comes down from
the heavens to the earth to proclaim
the Kingdom of Eternity in our hearts...
And God said – Let there be Light
And there was Light, Twilight,
dotting the first pages of the Day,
Green, fading by our borders
Visible through the canvas
of the same Flesh and Blood
That makes up the Divine world
That makes up the tombstones
That makes up the First Light,
the First Sight, the First Sound
We saw an old man
digging the dust for gold
We saw a child
sweeping the blue skies
for a penny
And we saw a primrose
dancing all by herself
We heard the innocence of
the breeze over the forlorn
passes of the Himalayas,
We heard the mournful songs
of Philomela, songs about
long lost kingdoms and dreams…
Such were the first Sights
and Sounds of the Day that
was destined to fly on the wings
of the nascent Hope…
We thanked Pandora as we rested our oars
The shores were new and green
(I)
Across the desert is Ithaca
And we wait for Ulysses to cry
Meanwhile, a little black kitten crawls
towards the dry pages of my
gypsy nights…
I’ve never stepped on the same
moment twice
and Heracletus will know that best
Ten million rhapsodies dance by
the bonfire…
Fairies, whores, angels, fireflies,
Buddha’s drooping eyes,
Good old boogeyman, busy reading
120 Days of Sodom by the fireplace,
Hunchback of Notre Dame sharing
a cigerette with Dorian Grey as they
discuss the prospects of
immortality ,
The blind priest searching in his
pockets for a loaded revolver,
The slaves in the galley cheering out loud
as Giordano Bruno’s getting burned,
all tied up at the stake,
But we shall not protest,
For that’s the way Zarathustra Spake…
(II)
Know what, folks,
I’ve lost the key…
It’s a punishment
I’ve sinned…
I had fallen asleep when the
Crystal-gazing lady and the
Phantom of the Opera were
dancing a tango together…
But don’t worry, we’re all waiting
for the rain,
And that’ll come for sure…
(III)
My heart bleeds oil and tar, I know
But that’s all a part of the deal
I made with Mephistopheles while I was
gambling with him at a small tavern
off the minefields of Elysion…
(Had I won I would have owned
Gethsemane, but never mind)
I was banished to the East of Eden
where I met Adam and Eve
Busy making love since the
time the Bible was written…
But I managed to flee
And here I am, standing in
front of you,
seeking explanations
for not waiting for me
and moving along…
(IV)
I’ll let the fire burn
And I’ll let my one winged
parrot chirp on…
(V)
Ahoy there!
(VI)
N.B. the Flying Dutchman sets sail tomorrow….
The primal desire is to be alone
To live and die in silence…
Loneliness in the womb
Loneliness in the grave
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…
Oh, how I wish for the footsteps
To be silent…silent like the flowing time
Silent like the waves, the stars, the
moth eaten reality…too silent
to be called deafening…
And too lonely to be called
anything but love…silent love
Lonely tears… soldiers of desire
Dreams, lights dimmed out…
I crave for these… smile is
Not a lie…nothing can ever be
too distant to be called untruth
And even laughter can be
hollower than the desert...
The foggy midnight darkness
The lonely train in the empty
station…the lighthouse standing
tall… unkissed… the petals wilting
and the moonlight waning…
Paperboats floating in the
Evanescence…in search of
Dreamless lonely eyes…
Torn pages full of poems,
Unwritten…
Lyrics of the forlorn dusk …
The flute keeps on playing
in the country dust..
Little insects – they too
dive at the candle flame
And a candleflame can be
all alone, like you and me
I love you, my sweet sorrow…
Oh, how I crave your lonely
lips…your sad eyes…your
lap…for me to rest my lonely
tired head… I’ll wait for you, baby
For you to find me alone enough…
I'll wait till the dawn of eternity
finds me and my absinth ...
...all alone...
I build up my nights,
and I drown in them
The vacant maze
of civilazions
slip,
between my fingers
The fire burns beneath my
teapot, and it burns elsewhere too
The cigerette sings
a lullaby to me,
with her coiling smoke-stream
Faintly hoping that it would affect
me, anymore
But my own songs
are written in charcoal sketches
on the blank backside
of the ticket of the bus
which leads to the station
of eternity…
I don’t give a shit to that
My skin and my cock
feel the same
And am too tired to sleep…
Written words…written words…
why the hell do you march
in a column
like scared soldiers,
waiting for some godforsaken
Napoleon's orders?
Can’t you guys be a bit
more chaotic than this ?
That would make me
more comfortable
with my verse
Eternity has got stuck
on the cob-webs
and a lizard might
try to swallow it up
clumsily, before long
But why do I even care?
I live this moment alright
and I feel it too
But will I feel the
next one?
Pray why the hell
should I care ‘bout that
either….
I’ve attained nirvana
at the rustling
bee-bones of my leaves…
And moksha is just a
few gas-stations away…
Closer than the stars
for sure
They return to me at the sunset
All my lonely tears
I do not know where they come from
I do not know what they seek…
But sure as hell they come
Like the sad songbirds…
The rest of it is all empty, hollow
Hollow like my sleepless eyes
Emplty like my dreamless nights…
The moonlight’s too shallow a sea
For me to swim and drown
The stars are too morbid and numb
To sing to my vacuous heart…
My bedroom mirror's too cracked
For me to look at my own soul
And my pains are so deep
That I don’t feel them anymore…
…………………………………………………
This is my epitaph, brothers and sisters
Please don’t pee on it
Bibartoner pothhey ekhhono shandhhyopherii ?
Pao ni? pao ni ja khnujchho? aro koto derii ?
Kuasha dekhhchho na? Awbogahoner shomawye
kromosho otikranto...dhulidhushor mukhawrotaye...
Bondhu, aajo ki shawngopawney hao ni klanto?
Aaj o ki ankhhiputey...shwopniil atolanto?
Ekhhono proshnochinho? Ekhono shongyahara?
Ekhono spordhhito ghumchhut ektara?
Biliin hawar kaal eshechhey to kawtobaar
Kawto raatey bejey gyachhe shiimahiin hahakar...
Tobu raatghumey chupisharey aajo kaar hatchhani...
Isharaye boley jaye...Jani...Jani...S-h-o-b jani...
