"What I want is a view. I want a window where I can see a tree, or even water." "Memory, Agent Starling, is what I have instead of a view." - Hannibal Lecter in 'Silence of the Lambs'

He was obsessed with a certain view. Only in this case he was looking inwards into a room with a table set under a dormer window, right in the middle of a beam of light.

There were two of them sitting there, at the table, reading, and when in their books they came upon a line of beauty, noting it down in leather bound notebooks with yellowing paper.

The smell of ink and paper, the light of afternoons turning into evenings, occasional squeak of a chair scraping against the wooden floor, the hymn of easy breathing.

He saw this as clearly as he sees himself every morning in front of the bathroom mirror shaving, i.e., he saw, and perhaps continues to see only what he wants to see.

The stray white hairs, the high dome of a balding forehead, lines around the mouth, the faint hint of a double chin, the belly that is flabby, the threads of time in other words.

Towards these a certain form willful blindness. The eye sees, and saw only the eye, his and the other’s. And eyes are usually clear chambers of light, rarely dark except in sleep or under conditions of loss.

One of them blinked. That was all it took for this loss to occur. Remember the game children play, the outstare game, where one refuses to blink even as eyes become watery graves.

And then a tsunami in minor scale. And then the disappearance of the tree in the sea. And then even the disappearance of the sea. Memory is what he has instead of a view. Memory was, actually, what he always had.

An email sent in response to an article recieved on Indian Poetry, published in the Hindu.

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C,

Thanks for this piece. I think I encountred both Thayil's and S. Roy's names somewhere before in the Indian blogsphere.

I was doing an accounting at Buoy today as it has been around four years now, and discovered half of the contents I dumped/ archived/ filed/ posted over there have something or the other do with poetry: 300 odd poems of others and 400 odd pieces (I don't claim the label of a poem for any of them) of mine. I think poetry is a personal habit, a way of living. And like most personal habits, I think, it is not amenable to transfer to the disinterested.

So the poets mentioned in this article, and also poets generally speaking, have to be satisfied with this curious habit of theirs to fool around with words mostly in private time and place, and maybe even stop bitching about the reading population not giving a shit about their fingering technique. No, maybe not, poets who are not miserable or who don't suffer don't cut such dashing figures! This makes me think of Faiz's poem, "Love, don't ask me for that love again" in a sarcastic sense. All this lack of fame & cash will remain, unless of course they are (or can become) good operators and log rollers in the shady groves of American academe.

Hope you are well. -S

I discovered last night that Buoy has been here, at Antville.org, for four years now.

Incredible when I think of it, how as I get older the passage of years seem to be more compressed. When I was four years old, I remember this distinct memory of an encounter from pre-school (LKG as it was called in India): I ran into a high school boy, a fifteen or so years old, who lived around the corner from my parent's house, as I was running up and down the stairs of this school complex in play. He then seemed to be a gaint, very remote from myself in thought and feeling, and a sense of wonder fell upon me, wonder as to how I would think, feel and behave if I ever grown to be that big. I suppose somewhere inside my buzzing, and now sufficiently wrecked, brain, I still carry this sense of wonder.

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A regular skipper of stones and blog, who recently added some traffic to the miserly webcounter (it now says 53,095 hits) down on this page, made me reflect, very briefly, on the purpose of this exercise. So a bit of history, for kicks and yawns: I began putting together words, marks of punctuation etc into sentences around five years ago to mark time, to ease my way through this wormhole of self exile. This was at Diaryland.

Soon I had become more ambitious. I wanted to be able to add photos, graphics etc to spurce up the journal - I am talking about regular small scale narcissim here, which causes one to stand before mirrors thinking, "Boy! I ain't a bad lookin' fella." But, simaltaneously, I was a cheapskate too. I wanted it gratis. At that time, no blog program had anything for free. I tried Blogger, with hosting at Blogspot, and hated the ad bar they had at the top for all all blogs hosted gratis over there, I tired a couple of other places inluding a site that vanished over night, taking away my junk.

This was when I discovered Antville - a site that runs on object oriented Javad based open source software, with features such as ability to classify the stuff I may wish to dump here into categories, image hosting, file hosting and so on. It took me about five minutes to come up with the title Buoy - I wanted Eleph.antville.org but it was already taken, so I had to settle for this inexact term Buoy, which it certainly isn't on most days, good or bad.

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If someone does an archeological dig through the thousand two hundred odd entries filed here, they would discover about three hundred of these are poems by others, great and well known beings and not so well known ones, which I had stolen, borrowed, and archived here, i.e., a nostalgist's map of the belle letteres, a Big Book of Poetry.

They would also come upon four hundred pieces of variable quality and variable maturity, in various states of undress - pieces that for the lack of any better label, I filed away unded My Poems. This adds another data point to why Buoy will have to be a reculse: because its primary concern has so far been poetry; others and mines. And poetry primarly is private, reculsive; the hidden quite voice in an ear and the water in the corner of an eye.

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Since I have been meditating quite a bit on death, I wonder if Buoy's contents will be a sufficient epitaph for my passing?

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