01.
Songs.
They are such enigmatic and mystical Beings. They may not be living things but it is not possible that songs do not have life. Even before the musician composes the tunes, and the lyricists writes the lines, the Song exists. In some other dimension, that we cannot perceive. But they exist all the same.
The Muse is the go-between. She inspires the musician; the lyricist becomes aware of the Presence and tries to render it in words. The musicians composes, the lyricist writes, the singers give voice and the audience listens. Each one privy to only one aspect of this Presence. But Her true form is beyond perception. Our limited senses can only perceive very little - the gross part of that omnipotent Presence. Perhaps that is the reason, the saints and the Bhakti Sufi Poets, described their divine experiences, the mystical visions in the form of Songs. The one language that could express the Divine.
02.
Quite a long time ago, when I was still in college (and full of idealism, hope and ignorance in equal measure), I had browsed through few pages of a book on Tibetan Buddhism. I cannot recall what the book was about, nor did I follow much of its spiritual dictums, but one line from the book has stayed with me. A Buddhist proverb :
‘Tomorrow or the next life; which comes first - God alone knows.’
Many years have passed since then, and I have learnt more about life, than what the self-help books promised to decode, but these words have remained with me. A stoic reminder, a grim companion and often a solace.
03.
An Indian village does not offer much amenities. The electricity is undependable, the roads - seasonal (one can either have good monsoon or good roads, seldom both, together), and the nearest clinic is usually the house of the Vaidya/Ayurvedacharya1. The English doctor is a rare specimen usually visible for a few hours in the Panchayat clinic of the major village.
But one thing that the village offers, and I, as a denizen of the city crave for, is the undisturbed glimpse of the skies. In the countryside, one can watch the sky, the vast blue sky dotted with white fluffy clouds. A vision of immense, breathtaking pure blue filling the eyes - from one tapering end to another. The undistorted view of the cosmos.
From my tiny quarters in the metropolis, pigeonholed in an apartment building, I lunge across and over the balcony rails, my face pressing against the window grill, (the black, crude bars piercing through my cheeks), to catch a little rectangle of the dark blue sky. A tiny sliver of moon, hanging at the curve of the corner of my little rectangle is all I can afford.
In the countryside, the dawn comes in different hues, pink, yellow, orange, violet, purple before they merge into white. And then they separate in the evening - a cacophony of colours drenching the twilight sky- each hue like an Apsara2 bringing down the curtain to a wonderful day. A majestic performance of colours. As if the entire sky has become a canvas and the Artist in deep meditation is recreating the Cosmos on the sky.
04.
First love is a strange creature. All of a sudden, in a dream of a lazy afternoon slumber, she emerges from the repressed conscious of the mind. The time that effects us all, decays us, ages us, somehow does not work on her. That memory buried in the depths of everyday mundaneness is still fresh as the morning rose covered in dew.
As I see her, after all these years in an illusion conjured by the mind, a dream that is unreal, I still feel a longing. A shade of a smile passes over my face. I wake up. Not completely. In the realm of half-sleep , the middle ground of fogginess, where a tug of war goes on between dream and reality, I wonder: If it is only a dream, is it still true?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
Read the full poem by Edgar Allan Poe here.
05.
I am reading Haruki Murakami's ‘Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman’. It is a collection of 24 short stories by one of the renowned masters of magic realism. His stories do not seem to be rooted in reality, and neither do they feel any need to follow the conventions of society, writing structure or sanity. As a reviewer put it, they are dreamscapes. They have the sense of of longing and nostalgia, and an unrealness that touches the heart and at the same time is unsettling. Like the narrator is suspended in time and is having an intimate and disjointed conversation. Sample some of these:
The Iceman is about an actual man made of ice with whom the girl (protagonist of the story) falls in love with. In The Seventh Man, the protagonist narrates the story of him having lost a friend to a Typhoon in his childhood. This incident continues to haunt him for several decades, and he is able to make peace only after he returns to the village and finds some of his friend’s drawings in an old storage shed. The Birthday girl is about a woman who spends her twentieth birthday, working as a waitress and is given a chance by the reclusive owner to make one wish.
If you are new to Murakami, some pointers. Start with his short stories. They are like dipping your toes in the water. Murakami can be shocking, upsetting and sometimes traumatizing to new readers. Also, it is safe to go through content and trigger warnings before embarking upon a Murakami novel journey.
You can read one of the very famous short stories by Haruki Murakami here:
And now that we are at the end of the issue #001 of Brief Notes on Life let’s wrap it up with a quote by Haruki Murakami:
”And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore.
Endwords:
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Vaidya /Ayurvedacharya: A Vaidya or Ayurvaedya- Acharya is a physician well versed in Ayurveda system of medicine. Ayurveda is a traditional Indian alternative medicine system based on herbal remedies, yoga, special diets, etc.
Apsara: Celestial nymphs associated with music and dance in Hindu mythology.
On Songs, Skies, a Buddhist aphorism & First love.
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