Friday, July 30, 2010

Hopes

9
You feel the pain,
You shed the tears.
You lose the light,
You prefer darkness.
But you find the moon.
and the moment gives-
You back your lost smile.
You wonder why,
And hope to know it later.
Unaware of the bird of hope
singing somewhere in your mind,
Unseen. 


Dear readers,


I started off "Hopes" with a certain idea about the concept of Hope. My comprehension of hope was as a phenomenon that exists tangible and close to human subjectivity. My concept of hope was; as the realm of existence one enters after an exhausting flow of tears. And I also believed that when hopes break, tears are its aftermath. But as I moved through the poems, as you did as readers, I came across many new lessons. As Tia Terri rightly said in one of her comments, "Hope is what you do not yet possess. Because if you have it there is no longer a need to hope for it." This was a new learning. Something contrary to what I thought and believed. But I can proudly say that my art taught me something. I learned from my art.

Thank you for being part of this learning experience. Hope you continue visiting this blog. Thank you for your comments, and words that do nothing but encourage. Once we entered into the kingdom of hope, now I think, there is no going back; no tears, no desperation. I think so. Hope never ends. But the poems have to end. Surely, they will give way to more literary experiences. I hope you will find it joyful to visit again.

Yours truly,
Anulal.
The Indian Commentator.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Hopes

 8

The hope of the mountains-
Is the rain.
It never waits for your conviction.
But it rains.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Hopes

 7
The moment we met,
I was hopeful,
To be blessed with your smiles.
When separated,
I didn’t say good bye hopeful,
To be blessed by your nearness, again.

Friday, July 23, 2010

Hopes

6
I know well;
like the clouds transform into rain,
Birds transform into songs,
the sea transforms into waves,
seasons transform into fruits,
the sun transforms into time,
breeze transforms into flowers;
my tears, too will be transformed into hopes.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Hopes

"We all need to understand that experience is agony and ecstasy at the same time. Pain and joy holding hands. And pain is not suffering, but part of the Good Fight we must fight in the name of our dreams."---Paulo Coelho.


 5


Separation is a drop of tear
shining bright on the petal
of the flower of life;
I expect no one else
to wipe my tears off, but hope.


PS: The painting above is by Edvard Munch. If you like the painting I used above as an image for this beautiful short poem, you can find more of the same on this web page: https://www.artsy.net/artist/edvard-munch

Monday, July 19, 2010

Hopes

 4
The light in your eyes led me to tears,
but I know this, the tears will lead me to hope, too.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Hopes

 3


Love, I expected you to leave me with death,
but you left me the miraculous gift of hopes.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Hopes

  2
My intention with "Hope" was to begin a new series of i-poems. But I later abandoned the idea, and published one among the finished poems as an ordinary work of poetry, in the previous post, dissatisfied with the quality of those i- poems. I wrote them during the time when I was under a severe mind sleep, or in plain terms, a block. But now, as I went through them once again, I found them attractive, and magical. So I decided to share them with you, my faithful readers. Here, you have the spring of i-poems, once again... Let us call them "Hopes".


Hopes-2
The place I met you was 
an ocean of dreams,
and the place I leave you,
is the land of hopes.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Hope

The hope of the day
is the twilight;
the blood of the evening heart;
to come back after the night.
The hope of the night
is the twilight;
the blur in the corner of the morning eye;
to come back after the day.
And in the hope to see you,
I search all day and night.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Satan.

Satan or the Devil, who is not a being but a spirit creature far from what is human and what is animal, spoke to Eve in Edan to mislead her. He is also called 'the original serpent', meaning the real threat. Genesis 3:1 says:--"Now the serpent proved to be the most cautious of all the wild beasts of the field that Jehovah God had made. So it began to say to the woman: "Is it really so that God said you must not eat from every tree of the garden?"

Revelation 12:9 - "So down the great dragon was hurled, the original serpent, the one called Devil and Satan, who is misleading the entire inhabited earth; he was hurled down to the earth, and his angels were hurled down with him--This portrays the future end of Satan.

Job 38:4, 7--"Where did you happen to be when I founded the earth?Tell me, if you do know understanding."
7 "When the morning stars joyfully cried out together, And all the sons of God began shouting in applause?”--Job 38:4,7 says Satan was there in the heaven even at the beginning of the universe!!!!

The question is, how come the Devil came into being. Satan is born out of God like every other creation. but there is a transformation that marks Satan's present identity: his swerve from 'good' to 'bad', as we understand it. This good and bad binary is the best way to comprehend this transformation in the life of Satan, though the concepts of 'good' and 'bad' have no strict boundaries and they do overlap in many occasions. These concepts of 'good' and 'bad' are just the construction  of  a relative reality. Satan is not the representative of the bad or the good, but of a thought; a thought that believes it could conquer the Creator, God. This thought is the one that attempts each time to envelope even the  infinity and the whole of creation. And therefore this thought is totalitarian. This thought is Satan, sin, and desire.

James 1:13-15 says :"When under trial, let no one say :"I am being tried by God." For with evil things God cannot be tried nor does he himself try anyone 14. But each one is tried by being drawn out ans enticed by his own desire. 16 Then the desire, when it has become fertile, gives birth to sin; in turn, sin, when it has been accomplished, brings forth death."--The death of both physical and spiritual existence.

(A note from my Bible studies)

Friday, July 2, 2010

Renunciation and the Devil--2

[Continuation from the previous post.]

It was in the month of June, I confronted the Devil, in the form of Saneesh's friend. This event includes one of my class mates, Saneesh Raj and one of his friends, let us call him I.L, who visited my University Campus to apply for the M A. English course starting in August. The applications were sold two months before, in June. 

June in Kerala is the month of rain. Rain represents life. I was thinking about avoiding my lunch that afternoon, a common observation when practicing renunciation because most of the time we take in food without feeling hunger, just for the sake of observing a habit. And I was not very hungry.

Saneesh came to me and insisted that I should go to the canteen with him for giving him a company. The guy was adamant and I was forced to follow him. That force was a material pressure than something spiritual. I succumbed. This was an insidious socio-cultural practise in our class. Everyone was supposed to spend their time in a collective mass (whether studying or moving around). This was ordained, by the gods of the department; a new attempt to instill in students, qualities like team spirit, peer group sensibility, and many other things. Exclusive individual efforts in academics and other areas were not entertained. If one chooses not to be part of this collective entity, the one will be put to the life of an outsider's, throughout the course. He or she will be a no one's man. It was hard for me to be an outsider. The law was powerful and it was unwritten, too. Unwritten laws, compared to the written ones, are treacherous and have far-reaching implications. So I went with Saneesh

In the facade of the University he introduced me to his friend, one who finished his B A. English from a college famous for hooliganism in the city of Kannur. The moment Saneesh introduced me to his friend, I sensed a danger. The placenta that connected my physical being to with my spiritual being was hurt, somehow. The introduction included a word that could barely keep me in composure in observing renunciation; a word that had the potential to lure me back to the world of obsessions and possessiveness: "writer." 

“He is the writer of our class!”--Saneesh said.

I was almost insanely obsessed with that word, which I wanted to take up as my future vocation. I sensed a very malicious smile on the face of his friend. His eyes were horribly calm, as if veiling a murder weapon behind them. 

"What writer!?" --I.L. Blurted out with a suppressed laughter. The question, or whatever that was, made me realize that I was in front of an attack, which could have its spiritual harms as well. I knew the meaning that he attached with the word "writer". In Kerala, anyone who is working in government offices, who prepares the land and property official documents is called a writer. For someone like me, who believes in the religion of writing,as a form of art, as a walk way that crosses the heaven and the earth, as a platform for self search, as the one and only way to locate the Great Wisdom of a Lifetime, labeling with an epithet, which implies one of the most unimaginative and dull professions in the world, was like receiving a mortal stab. My heart pounded faster.

I. L talked again and again: "we had a writer in our class too; a fucking son of a writer." He roared with laughter. Saneesh joined his laughter, too. I doubted if Saneesh was realizing my situation, my humiliation or if he is purposefully dragging me into this mud. I think or I want to think, the former to be true. 

"No he is a real writer."-- Saneesh added, but that could hardly stop the laughing sadist from his brutal assaults. I call him a sadist because that was the first time we met, and still he attacked me with all sorts of mockery and jeering, as if taking out a long kept vengeance. I remembered one of the points in Saneesh's introduction of I. L. He was a member of the Communist favoured student's Union. So I kept silence. I could not dare to attack him back, verbally. Their stories of cruelty and barbarism were notorious. The option of not to speak back was not from the intervention of the spiritual self—as attack is the most base of the deeds undertaken by someone pursuing renunciation, the most possessive of the acts, the most animal—but a safety measure. 

We sat around the same table at lunch. I. L continued his sarcasm. Then, he asked my age. I was able to keep a smile on my lips, and did not reply. He asked again. But I was silent, munching away my boiled rise with Sambar and fish curry. He again opened his mouth to ask which was the genre of writing I was interested in. This time I could not maintain my composure, as the question was of a fundamental significance to me. 

"I write whatever I feel like writing."--I said. I thought he had sensed my mind, and that might be the reason for this sudden change in his course of questioning. I expected a better outcome, at least for my temper, which was in the peak of disturbance. But what it all ended up in was a blind vaunt! He said he too was a writer. Won many awards in his primary school, but later gave up writing, for some reason. 

I ate my lunch, trying not to look at his face. I knew that the best way to hurt your enemy is to ignore him, erase him from your attention, or at least make him feel so. But then, I had earned an enemy after all. I knew this well that an enemy was born when your storage barrels are full of possessions. My obsessions were alive and were the main reasons for my embarrassment. 

Before I. L could say good-bye, I had walked away. I know, Saneesh or the sadist hardly knew what I felt, exactly. I had learned that it is hard to follow that path of renunciation, not because of the test of the Devil, but because of the roots of obsession that were so deeper in every one's spiritual and physical self that it becomes almost impossible to uproot them.

I remembered the following lines, which I was sure I never learned by heart, but to my own surprise sprouted in my mind.

"When under trial, let no one say: "I am being tried by God." For with evil things God cannot be tried nor does he himself tries any one." (James 1:13)

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Renunciation and the Devil

Renunciation is a spiritual stand. It makes the material side of life more close to meaningfulness, and perfection. Perfect in the sense, it attaches an indifference to the things and relationships around us between material and non-material beings. This helps to overcome obsessions, and we become more powerful. In other words, renunciation helps to dominate possessiveness and obsession towards things and people in life. This gives us the freedom to move on, and to stop on necessary junctures,too, and leads us to that glorious state of being, which we identify with the word: life. Life becomes a celebration. But life could only realise its mission on opening the doors and windows and on taking the courage to empty our storage barrels. We all possess storage barrels with us, always, in which we store our beloved people, memories, things, obsessed. 

Renunciation is a philosophic idea practised by the ancient tradition. The gurus of ancient India practiced renunciation. In the Biblical tradition, too we can perceive this philosophy. Luke 12:24 says: "Mark well that the ravens neither sow seed nor reap, and they have neither barn nor storehouse, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more worth are you than birds?" Luke 12:24-31 speaks elaborately on the significance of not to store up things or material goods. The concluding lines say that instead, it is the Kingdom of God, that one should seek persistently and all the other "things will be added to you." (Luke 12:31) 

It was when I felt my material obsessions suffocating me I decided to follow the Tradition, as a possible remedy at hand. Like a snake sheds its skin, I too decided to discard the material world to empower the world of my spirit. It takes a lot of courage. And for courage one needs to pray. But sometimes one will be tested either by the Extraordinary or by the Devil. I would like to share one such incident, when I was attacked and brutally wounded by the Devil.  Well, I guess that was not just a testing, of my spiritual strength.

[You can read the experience in my next post.]