A Spring Morning
Finds him waking up cold. He knows that his innards have already turned to ice. And that his interior weather, in whose steadiness he once took great pride in, has turned capricious; this is the only way he can explain those sudden thaws he experiences between the shopping aisles.
Yesterday it happened between baby needs and baby food; he sat down, his face heavy with this sudden sadness. Is this what it entails, belonging to the tribe - "the tribe Maeve Brennan once called “travelers in residence” — men and women suspended between continents; suspended, too, between memory and forgetting" - whose name he only discovered via reading yesterday?
There is no cost to be liquid again, to allow himself to flow into the shape of a life, of affection, of giving, and of grace. But there is a reluctance now that he must wait out. There is this need to be stone, to live out an ice age before summer arrives, and spring departs.
My Daily Notes
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Geek Policing
There is an interesting conversation/ debate going on over at Sepia Mutiny on the wisdom of authority figures cutting off dorm room internet access to students at certain IITs. Clearly my response to this is very conditional, tending towards the Luddite camp than the Free Love one. When I was at one (in Kharagpur) years ago internet was a rare commodity, and access to it was conditional at best - you had to know hackers who had access to certain labs that were better wired than others - with typical blazing speeds of 50 bytes/second. Email for a long time was via Grex on CRT terminals; ones that glow green and don't do Windows.
While this was frustrating at times (especially when I wanted to access image heavy art pages), I don't think the overall quality of life suffered too much because of this. Further, given the amount of time I waste on internet distractions now, I think such time was better spent then consuming books. Something that would be interesting to look at is the correlation between internet speed and the book circulation numbers from the small but excellent libraries that each hall/dorm has*. An initial hypothesis: these numbers are inversely related.
* Some of the most ferocious readers I have met were those who used these libraries; there were long waiting lists and jockeying for position when the latest literary novels arrived.
My Daily Notes
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A Concert Report
To occupy an afternoon - and he would be lying if he doesn't admit to the hope that he will be spoken to by someone - he decides to go to a choral music concert. It is in a great hall in a hundred year old university building.
He sits between two older Chinese couples, who perhaps are there to cheer their sons or daughters, whom might be in the chorus that will sing this afternoon. The murmur of talk. Occluded light through the stained glass windows. He is pleased to see that the room is surprisingly full. He tries to read the inscription that scrolls around the room at the lintel level. The part closest to him reads:
"...should be disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, evin to a rarity and admiration, things not before discourst or written of..."
He murmurs amen, even if universities now manufacture specialists rather than give wholeness and shape to raw human beings. The choraliers file in; men first followed by women. And then pianist who will accompany human voice, and the young soprano who will sing the solo sections; she dressed in red. It just so happens that he was reading about the color red in a novel. The novelist, Orhan Pamuk, says this about red:
"If we touched it with the tip of a finger, it would feel like something between iron and copper. If we took it into our palm, it would burn. If we tasted it, it would be full bodied, like salted meat. If we took it between our lips, it would fill our mouths. If we smelled it, it'd have the smell of a horse. If it were a flower, it would smell like a daisy, not a red rose."
The music begins - it is all French composers, two - Durufle and Poulenc - whose music he had never seen performed before. The piano leads, and the voices follow. Applause. One of the mysteries of music is that if one has it, one is not alone anymore. The soprano stands up, and hurls out notes of a Fuare's chanson from somewhere in her body, perhaps her feet. The room hushes. Hair crackles. This piece is titled "Apres Un Reve" - he knows enough French to recognize reve means dream. The rest is, well, French. Nevertheless, he is moved. His legs twitch and palms sweat.
But after heartbreak, the music moves to praise, with a hymn. He mouths to himself the refrain - "you must praise the mutilated world" - of one of his favorite poems as Faure's Cantique de Jean Racine plays. And after a break, in which he tries to fit back into his changed self, Poulenc's "Gloria" is performed; of which he can't help humming the tune of "Laudamus Te" ("we praise thee"), long after the concert in over, as he walks back to his room via The Philosopher's Walk.
Music Posts
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