Random jottings.

Simon, Ines and David… (The Childhood of Jesus) are back in J.M.Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus!
Coetzee at his best in The Schooldays of Jesus.
Coetzee re-visits Jesus through the young David. Coetzee's Jesus is contemporary (the age of refugees). David himself is the son of boat people who died at sea. (Simon and Ines are not married) There is a sea of difference between Coetezee's Jesus and the Jesus of Kazantzakis, Jose Saramago...

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(In a matriarchal society mother is the chief minister. The father, governor)

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Women are alive and living, enlivening.
But what are men?
are they `Death,'
stalking women?
If not stalking, they are setting fire to themselves
for some causes, or...

ATMs like automatic weapons

only they fire currencies

anyway we crouch.

Banks exist for the filthy rich

for the oppressed

its exit!


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* Even if the narrator is dead, the narrative will go on ?

* Beckettian silence as  response to madness!

* Troubled souls seek God, vain hearts rationalize?

* Birds and Bards sing!

* "Now, as Auden wrote, may the 'words of a dead man' be modified in the guts of the living.' " (Krittika Ramanujan, Preface to A.K.Ramanujan's Collected Poems).

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It was during my days in Tirunelveli that I had the chance to meet Thi.Ka.Si (Thi.Ka.Sivasankaran) and Thoppil Mohammed Meeran.  Thi.Ka.Si would be sitting alone in his room crammed with newspapers.  I used to go to his place after work in the evenings.

Thoppil Mohammed Meeran lived with his family. Very down-to earth.  If Thi.Ka.Si’s was animated chitchats, Meeran’s were contemplative deliberations.  Meeran gave me his Koonan Thoppu as a gift.

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I started reading Dostoyevsky’s works, fascinated by Poor People. It was the Russian master’s first novel. By that time I had already read Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s Anuragathinte DInangal. I was amazed by some similarities between the two works.   They say, great minds think alike.

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Amid the sea of forgetfulness I track down an island from memory. Kavaratti.  

Corals strewn beach, narrow concrete roads, bare –bodied men in lungis riding two-wheeler.  Honest, god-fearing people...

 At home, late night’s silence broken by sniffling of domestic discord. Pain that would leave its tattoo marks on my brain…Early morning visits to the farm with father (Twice weekly-to the chicken farm for the weekly ration of eggs and to the agri farm for vegetables).  The flock of pigeons who arrive at daybreak without fail and amble around pecking at the grains I feed them…Fried tuna fish and parattas from the only canteen. 

 The library. 

And Ernest Hemmingway’s- no, not, The Old Man and the Sea, but  For Whom the Bell Tolls!

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The first copies are full of mistakes. But then one goes back to it time and again, correcting, deleting, adding, grappling with meaning, (meaninglessness) trying, to be exact, to lead it from `darkness to light.' One keeps on improvising, never content, at times assuming this is life..

(In such attempts; chopping, chiseling, shaping words... in an inhospitable terrain, I rarely get anywhere. But can't afford to stay away)

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INTERVIEWER

Do you think it would be better if women ran the human race?

W.H.AUDEN

I think foreign policy should definitely be taken out of men’s hands. Men should continue making machines, but women ought to decide which machines ought to be made. Women have far better sense. They would never have introduced the internal combustion engine or any of the evil machines. Most kitchen machines, for example, are good; they don’t obliterate other skills. Or other people. With our leaders it is all too often a case of one’s little boy saying to another, “My father can lick your father.” By now, the toys have gotten far too dangerous.

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You know, I do not labor to arrive at dizzying heights. High life, High class, High rank,High-profile…

Not the heights, I look for depths. Like in deep love (what Calvary symbolize?), deep sea (like the one on which Christ walked ?).

August 5, 2011/ 0:19 hrs.

(I might have been reading Kazantzakis when I wrote the above lines)

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Genesis:  God made the beast. Then God made man (male, female…)

How inadequate he (she...) is.  To struggle indefinitely seems to be his (her...)destiny. His (her...) deliverance perhaps is in death.

p.s., To be politically correct, I think, is to be clever. Genius has nothing to do with it.

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