"I like my coffee black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, and sweet as love..." A luxury or a necessity...or both? One luxury that many people overlook...is beginning the new year with a smile on your face and hope in your heart.
Maybe this year will be different.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
-- W.H. Auden
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
-- W.H. Auden
"Brevity"
To a man I did not know, whose soul was writ in water.
An experience that humbles...and yet is forgotten in just a short space of time. What monsters have we become?
I wish I knew who you were, I wish I had made the time... It frightens me when your smiling face flashes before my eyes and in that instant I feel as though I am drowning...perhaps in the depths of my insignificance.
Arrogance and frivolity...competition amongst yourselves. Material wealth and the squandering of our virtues, the bragging, boasting and infantile emotions...It consumes us and buries our senses in a putrid yellow slime. We are taught how to swim and yet we laugh as we drown. We drown in our filth.
A parent should never have to bury their child, a brother should never have to feel that pain.
May Allah grant you the best of the world in which you have entered into...and may you be blessed with peace. Your position is envied and greatly feared, there is little that we can pretend to know.
Adam Desai - I miss you.
(29th December 2008)
An experience that humbles...and yet is forgotten in just a short space of time. What monsters have we become?
I wish I knew who you were, I wish I had made the time... It frightens me when your smiling face flashes before my eyes and in that instant I feel as though I am drowning...perhaps in the depths of my insignificance.
Arrogance and frivolity...competition amongst yourselves. Material wealth and the squandering of our virtues, the bragging, boasting and infantile emotions...It consumes us and buries our senses in a putrid yellow slime. We are taught how to swim and yet we laugh as we drown. We drown in our filth.
A parent should never have to bury their child, a brother should never have to feel that pain.
May Allah grant you the best of the world in which you have entered into...and may you be blessed with peace. Your position is envied and greatly feared, there is little that we can pretend to know.
Adam Desai - I miss you.
(29th December 2008)
Thursday, December 4, 2008
"The Caged Skylark" - Gerald Manley Hopkins
As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage
Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells—
That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;
This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age.
Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,
Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells
Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.
Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest—
Why, hear him, hear him babble and drop down to his nest,
But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.
Man's spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best,
But uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed
For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen.
Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells—
That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;
This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age.
Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,
Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells
Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.
Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest—
Why, hear him, hear him babble and drop down to his nest,
But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.
Man's spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best,
But uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed
For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen.
Into the Cornfields.
The difference between a literary and a journalistic text is often misunderstood. I have opted to assume a somewhat journalistic stance before the commencement of this next piece however, I do not wish to be constrained by the crude dusty chalk lines that are etched around this style of writing...'if by dull rhymes our English must be chained' so to speak...
Frankly, at this point in time, there is little that I do care about and yet I desperately wish I could alter this confining frame of mind...freedom and passivity is actually quite a confining state of being as there is very little one can feel or do when they have reached this 'ultimate' position...Perhaps it really is 'lonely at the top' on more than one level..- if only we had the intellectual capacity and possessed enough patience with our stunted faculties of understanding to appreciate this notion. If we did, we would not continue to pursue that which is ultimately futile, we would not find ourselves racing away from our lush homely valleys into barren grounds that are weighed down with the mottled carcasses of those who once found themselves here...in much the same fashion that we have found ourselves here now..
It is an old tale if one considers it, - Keats touched on it in the ballad entitled la belle dame sans merci, an 'ancient ditty' as Prospero would have it, as the knight sojourns in the foreign land 'alone and palely loitering'... perhaps we are all enthralled by the wild wild eyes of those faery children that wander the earth unrestrained...How do we resist the sweet melodies that charm us like dumb serpents eagerly slithering to our demise? If we eliminate the notion of pursuing that which we long for and yet cannot essentially obtain, would we be happier? Or simply obedient followers of unschooled ignorance? What exactly is success? What defines this, and how does one separate the tangled wires that mesh together to make up this absurd concept? Can we, as limited beings obtain success? Does success define happiness or is it quite the opposite? Why do we constantly grapple with theories that we never actually pay much attention to when human nature overcomes us...? And lastly, are we all essentially servants of Eros when all the glitter, foils and civilised jargon is stripped away? How much can we control in terms of who we are and when the moment arises when one must venture out into the cornfields, why is it so difficult to define how we feel?
She wandered lonely as a cloud, and strained to hear the music, yet still she followed the white noise in her mind and ignored the rusty chains that clung to her ankles. The cornfields. How does one refrain from looking back?
Salt crumbled beneath the stones, and like a newborn her hands stretched out to touch, her nose lifted and her eyes opened, her tongue slid slowly over the parched lips...but she still could not hear the music.
Frankly, at this point in time, there is little that I do care about and yet I desperately wish I could alter this confining frame of mind...freedom and passivity is actually quite a confining state of being as there is very little one can feel or do when they have reached this 'ultimate' position...Perhaps it really is 'lonely at the top' on more than one level..- if only we had the intellectual capacity and possessed enough patience with our stunted faculties of understanding to appreciate this notion. If we did, we would not continue to pursue that which is ultimately futile, we would not find ourselves racing away from our lush homely valleys into barren grounds that are weighed down with the mottled carcasses of those who once found themselves here...in much the same fashion that we have found ourselves here now..
It is an old tale if one considers it, - Keats touched on it in the ballad entitled la belle dame sans merci, an 'ancient ditty' as Prospero would have it, as the knight sojourns in the foreign land 'alone and palely loitering'... perhaps we are all enthralled by the wild wild eyes of those faery children that wander the earth unrestrained...How do we resist the sweet melodies that charm us like dumb serpents eagerly slithering to our demise? If we eliminate the notion of pursuing that which we long for and yet cannot essentially obtain, would we be happier? Or simply obedient followers of unschooled ignorance? What exactly is success? What defines this, and how does one separate the tangled wires that mesh together to make up this absurd concept? Can we, as limited beings obtain success? Does success define happiness or is it quite the opposite? Why do we constantly grapple with theories that we never actually pay much attention to when human nature overcomes us...? And lastly, are we all essentially servants of Eros when all the glitter, foils and civilised jargon is stripped away? How much can we control in terms of who we are and when the moment arises when one must venture out into the cornfields, why is it so difficult to define how we feel?
She wandered lonely as a cloud, and strained to hear the music, yet still she followed the white noise in her mind and ignored the rusty chains that clung to her ankles. The cornfields. How does one refrain from looking back?
Salt crumbled beneath the stones, and like a newborn her hands stretched out to touch, her nose lifted and her eyes opened, her tongue slid slowly over the parched lips...but she still could not hear the music.
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