He goes among razed city blocks, where buildings once glistened like coals in the morning and evening fire and embraces the scattered flowered pushing forth from the cracked concrete, as he lays face down. A flock of blackbirds, which were clotting the wires strung from wodden poles, rise and whirl, in ever widening circles, to the beat of time, to the echo of memory, to the silence with which tears fall, snowflakes fall.

He makes himself small, works with his hands mowing lawns, finds enough to eat, every evening finds himself a place to sleep, usually under an Interstate exit ramp. The only thing he fails to do is to reduce his emotional and intellectual noise to a zero, and fails to become silent. And in this failing, he suffers.

The song rushes forth, its kneel splitting the saragossa flecked waves, of that year's yearning.

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!

Carolina Wren Blue Jays Cardinals Doves

Also spend time botanizing. The tree with the most lovely name: Carolina Silverbell. The leaves of wild ginger are beautiful.

In the discussions of conflict and fear today, peaceable ness wasn’t spoken about. The problem of human violence is as much about what the human body and soul holds and learns as much as in the external world. The only winnable war is the war one much wage to refine the quality of the self. All the external wars, beginning from violence that we inflict on one another at personal level, to the violence we inflict as societies on other societies are futile. The question remains how do we resolve conflict should it occur? Again the strongest and the most meaningful way is dialogue, with the self and with the other.

One of the ways, as written in the Gita, to attain enlightenment is through knowledge (jyana yoga). However this is possibly the hardest way towards perfection. Saint Shankara said the way of devotion (bhakti yoga) is surely much easier. And on reflection he is right because through devotion (to an idea, to work, to a person) perfect knowledge is also attainable.

Christian theology is largely so caught up in the idea of salvation that church ceremonies in part, to me, resemble large scale “sin” relieving shrink sessions for the masses. Then the other issue is that of separation of god from human, god as the third person always external, leading to incomplete understanding of the way to reach God. However given that there has also been a rich tradition of contemplatives with the Christian tradition these problems must then be that of the mainstream religious “businesses”.

The problem with mostpeople (e. e cummings’s usage) is that most people don’t think about a single issue which is “external” to them in the course of the day. Thus the sorry state of democracy in this country and elsewhere.