pre winter notes
Morning sunlight falls across the desk again, after many months of being obscured by the foliage of the trees. Now towards the end of fall, as trees disrobe, views open up. I can sit here and gaze into the woods, clear lines of vision into the crystal ball of time: the days gone by, today and the days yet to come. And in that recollection, observation and projection, those paths of the mind harden, a winter road, a cart with wodden wheels creaking along a fog covered road, echoes to water somewhere, frost cracking like a whip, sensations, tastes and illusions.
Buddha said whatever is true has to be self contined and self referential, i.e., to verify if this "something" is true one shouldn't have to refer to something external to the alleged truth for verification. Then if love is the greatest and perhaps the only truth, why do we keep seeking points of references, maps, milestones for verification? Is it because we refuse to see what our eyes see and noses smell, the smoke if not the fire itself, face to face?
Poetry, as Paz wrote, is an obfuscation of language. If langauge seeks to communicate, poetry seeks to go beyond communication, to transcend langauge. In this it become another language in itself, seperate from in which it is written. The essential boiling down of langauge, this purfication in the human centrifuge leaves behind utterances of enrinched uranium that live beyond the shape of the orginial mouth. This then is a ladder into that immortal sky, that heaven.
Of Borges, a couple of nights ago I discovered his other polymath-ic facades, other than poetry, this curiosity to hold the whole world in a burning embrace, where everything becomes food for feasting the soul: oriental occult, kabbalistic teachings, Homeric sagas, tangos in the slums of Buneous Aires, grammar and evolution of a couple of languages, Rimbaund, all this drinking of rivers at the edge of the sky.
Last night I was caugth unawares watching a Bollywood movie filled with cliches. But then Bollywood fare to a large extent is synonmous to false idealization. In this case it was the cliche of unsullied villagers, almost one dimensional in their overflowing sweetness and naivety. This perhaps is because the function of cinema is to provide the masses an audio visual dream world to escape into. And from the responses and the talk of the other viewers who were watching last night trivial dream world, I think the imaginative life of most mostpeople is close to zero. Give me the orche stick paintings of the prehistoric cave men at Lusacx, France over the drivel that streams out of Bollywood gutters!
My Daily Notes
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