[1] Before & After

Before knowing you, desire Was a steam locomotive chugging In and out of the grand concourse Of my body.

After finding you, I see it Steaming and stamping inside, Waiting for your light feet Now roving in my veins, To embark and depart Into those strange weathers Of my interior.

[2] Hymn

Rain, and an overcast Sabbath morning. I am not a believer. I am only sure Of these things I now know:

Your laughter that kept me awake, And then roused me from my sleep Last night; the nave of your ribs In which I kneel and call your name, The copulas of your breasts in which I hear distant thunder, and this bell In your belly, I toll with my tongue, In thanksgiving, in want.

[3] Ark

This house is the ark. These are the animals Of land, air, and water.

However entwined with You, I can’t tell which One of us is Noah!

[4] What He Said: (after Kuruntokai)

From the dense groves of waving palms This evening, I, Mayon, The dark-bodied god of herdsmen Drive the thirty-two grazing White cows across the hills and vales, Chewing on the white flesh of a tender Coconut, towards where jasmine beads The dark stand of her hair.

With that borrowed title, and a strong exhortation by Uber, the Joyceian, to hold forth on my bookish perversities in exchange for a lifetime of free psychoanalysis on email and instant messenger, I jump into this archeological dig on books:

Total number of books I own:

Extending that Borgesian notion that a poem doesn’t really exist until a reader reads it, to the notion that the real ownership of a book happens only at the instant a reader consumes it, and that ownership is a moot & trivial issue otherwise, I would prefer to invoke the total number of books I can, if I am so inclined, beg and borrow, to read: something in the range of couple of million volumes held by the libraries at Georgia Tech, Emory University, and the Dekalb County Library System. Praise the Lord!

However if anyone of you does dare to pay me a visit in my squalid (in A.H’s opinion) sub-cave, you would find books numbering, perhaps a few hundred, arrayed in these continually morphing leaning towers, three book shelves, my large bed, the beside table, under the bed, on the floor etc.

Given this general architecture of my modest library at home, a variation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle seem to always hold, in that I can’t seem match, without exertion of effort, simultaneously the position of a certain book and my desire to look something up from it. For example before writing this, I wanted to find, and quote from, Borges’s Collected Non Fictions with foreseeable results. Thus you, kind reader, had to put up with my unreliable memory for quotes.

Last books I bought:

A few hours ago, for real cheap, i.e., by paying $ 4.75, I bought the following:

Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light ~ Leonard Shalin Do Fish Drink Water? : Puzzling and Improbable Questions and Answers ~ Bill McLain Blood & Guts: A Short History of Medicine ~ Roy Porter For Two Nights Only ~ Tom Holt (a Monty Pythonesque comedy; nights with the silent K, say nee!)

The last book I read:

Extending that to last few books I read, since I have fallen into this bad habit of grazing simultaneous from numerous volumes (here the eye grows misty thinking of those distant college night when a book, for example Vikram Seth’s brick ‘A Suitable Boy’, could get undivided attention from the self until it is finished) they are:

In the Skin of a Lion ~ Michel Ondaatje (a novel set in the immigrant slums of Toronto, the loves of a man and two women, and also a young girl and a thief who later show up elsewhere: in that haunted Italian villa)

Moments of Reprieve~ Primo Levi (more recollections by this graceful master, of those radiant moments he experienced among the barbed wire of Auschwitz)

Chinamen ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (a chautauqua mixing fact, fable and memory on the chinamen of her family)

Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White ~ Frank H. Wu (readings towards self investigations on identity)

Strangers from A Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans ~ Ronald Takaki (background research towards that grandly titled novelistic enterprise,The Blank Slate)

Books I am currently reading:

Selected Poems ~ Octavio Paz (journeys between the twin poles of love and politics, between the constant erotic and the restless landscape)

Selected Poems ~ Galway Kinnell

Self Interviews ~ James Dickey (free style talks by the original barnstormer for poetry)

Itinerary: An Intellectual Journey ~ Octavio Paz (the closest Paz came to autobiography)

Photography Speaks – 150 Photographers on their art ~ Brooks Johnson (ed) (eye candy, and a place to rest the word weary eyes)

First memory of a book:

These must be various comics (long live Uncle Pai! praise Tinkle, Indarajal comics etc!) I had avidly consumed in primary school, in that measly one-hour weekly “Library” period at the school library, as well as those borrowed from the lending library on summer mornings, here again sadly limited to only one meager comic a day. Perhaps such early limitations were the precursors of this latter day piggish greed for print?

Five books that mean a lot to me:

Here again, I would like to reformulate this sub heading as things that have significantly expanded the limits of my self-consciousness:

The Hindu [that quintessential daily newspaper out of Madras, redolent of filter coffee, idili sambar, and bearing news in that C. Rajagopalachari’s grandfatherly type of English (a result of mixing Queen’s finest with Tamil Brahmin ritualism?), which educated me in the voodoo secrets of the English language. I used to read it from top to bottom, all the classifieds included, every afternoon after borrowing it from our neighbor lady, in those long years of primary school, in the beginning hardly cognizant of most of the secret symbols of a language that was yet to become my own]

Swami and Friends ~ R.K. Narayan [this was first complete, i.e., unabridged and simplified, English novel I read, circa 1989, when I was eleven years old, from a copy bought from Wheeler’s, and given to me by my father on the platform of Vishakapatnam railway station. And since one needs comforting throughout, even after on claims to have grown up, this book made the journey across the blackwater in my carryon case, into this voluntary exile. It is also the oldest book, ownership wise, in my modest library, and is now held with a rubber band between two pieces of cardboard. Also less said about the virtues of such deeply sentimental books, the better it is!]

The Golden Gate ~ Vikram Seth [first encountered in that sparsely populated literary section, banished to a dungeon like lightless room of the Central Library (C.L) at my alma mater, this novel sung in tetrameter and sonnet, was a mindfuck, and without doubt changed my notions of what can be done with the English language. It was also important because encountering Seth was the dim spark that lit this vague hunger for writerly heaven within the self. Also if what one reads and imagines is what one mimics many years later in life, then I seem to have followed Mr. Seth’s route – a sickly PhD, that curly marsh of deltas, that waxes and wanes, and this consumptive passion for poetry]

Lust for Life ~ Irving Stone [there was a life before I knew anything about Vincent Van Gogh (and art in general), and there is this illuminated life afterwards]

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character ~ Richard P. Feynman [a hero of mine, even though I don’t understand a jack of his Nobel Prize winning theories in theoretical physics (this in spite of heroic efforts of K3 to initiate and enlighten me) talked these superb, and deeply playful, memoirs into existence. I would be happy, if I could tell one such tale on the way out of here, if not leave behind a mountain of significant work]

Books I am looking forward to consume:

Hannah Coulter ~ Wendell Berry [I shall be buying this recent novel soon, for Berry is, perhaps, the only contemporary American novelist for whose work I care to shell out dead presidents. Also the world will be a far better place if more people get acquainted with his Port William membership]

Convergences: Essays on Art & Literature ~ Octavio Paz [The kind librarian lady, at the Toco Hills Branch of the Dekalb Library System, has already retrieved this volume for me. The first essay by the maestro is on poetry and translation. Yippee!]

Books that you think are underrated / overrated:

I haven’t read enough yet, to make such pronouncements.

Also I have to think , to whom I should pass on this disease next...

Rain, and a poet lying dead In an unknown grave.

The telegram to his brother said Heart failure, on the slow frozen Cattle train out of Buytrki.

This pain, these many years later Should suffice for blood of kinship.

No steppe here with its furrowed Black earth, a groomed horse's mane As he called it. No orioles either with Their poetic measure for his lines.

Just a man in a city that is a labyrinth Of laughter from cafes (why are they laughing?), And ambulance sirens (what kept these away so long?),

Listening to the plop of rain on a black umbrella, A sky beneath a sky, writing this crude kaddish Leaning against a ghoulish streetlight.

Osip refers to Osip Mandelstam, a beautiful Russian poet.