Magnum Opus

The names where a few, who got inspired and provoked by external stimulus- the results were often masterpieces in creative exhibition!  Be it in literature or arts. 

Lewis Carol was said to have been influenced by strange hallucinations. He was known to have bouts of migraine and epilepsy. Though that provoked the creative genius which lay dormant in him is questionable as much of the idiosyncrasies attributed to him like his alleged pedophilia .That was questioned by his biographers and members of the Lewis Carol Society. Perhaps a less and trivial aspect compared to the fascinating works he produced. Somewhere, I also learned that he chose to be intoxicated for dream like inspirations.

Back home in Kerala, I understood from a few friends who are in the film world and are privy to the stories in that balloon, the strange moments when this person, a bard created his pulsating and immortal verses. He created many of those mesmerisng odes completely influenced by his favourite brand of spirit. It is said that a producer desperate to have a song penned for the shoot that day, lay in patient wait for the poet to venture out of his room with the piece. However when he turned outside, he was more than tipsy and had not penned even a line. It was early dawn and the poet was off to a distant town. The producer volunteered to travel with him to the train station and seek a chance to plead in the meantime on the journey, to pen the song. The poet however, in spite of his inebriated state noticed the poor fellow’s angst and in the few minutes of travel in the car to the train station, penned a song, which was to become a glistering classic in play of poetic and romantic imagination.

It is said that the first sentence and the name of the story decides the depth and viciousness of the story’s beauty.  And they must come first even before ideas and words begin to cascade in free flow. Like, as they say, Victor Hugo wrote the name for his classic, “The Hunch Back of Notre dame” first, else by when he had done with his novel he may have named it, “The Hunch Back”.

Such stories of creativity were inspiring when I once made the exalted attempt (unknown to the outside world) to create a timeless classic in literature. I sat with my lap top and the elixir, good old Bourbon. I sensed and felt abound with words and thoughts at the tip of my fingers, waiting to bludgeon and burst forth like the deluge from the dammed- restrained waters of a grand roaring  river. I saw the world about to realise the precocious endowments that lay torpid in me.

 The first taste of the dryness of the bourbon was stimulating, the gentle electric current of the bite of the whiskey!

I began to type with pompous air. “This is the story untold, never told and will stay untold......

I began to dream, the dream never reckoned by all the great literary and artistic minds put together. And gradually the glass of whiskey was emptied, to be replenished and yet again emptied. The raw bite of the brewed concoction was permeating into every node, prodding and cajolingly me into the wonderland where geniuses dwell. Would not I be one among them ? Like in the Woody Allen masterpiece, “Night in Paris”!

If I confine it to a short story, it may rival the ones of Dostoevsky; it may even consign the Maugham magnum opus, “The Moon & Six Pence” to triviality and eclipse the “Ulysses”. Hemingway may feel like “Death in the afternoon”. Back home, the legends of Mallu literature may turn uncomfortably in their graves seeing their book sales plummeting! The Neolithic western educated Indian expatriate writers may run to the end of the world and their publishers may drop them like red, hot iron. Well can I help, be of any assistance? Why must I be? It’s the world of the creative wizard!

The glass emptied and the cycle repeated gradually, until I put my lap- top to sleep and fell back on to the bed. It was the early morning sun rays fidgeting behind the window blinds that gently lashed in the swirling air of the fan that woke me up hours later. It struck me of the night before and the moment now-the bright morning when the world would awaken and  come alive to a time less masterpiece. Perhaps, I may have to be prepared to be even knocked out by the revealing of the  intensity of my literary maverick. With great anticipation, I switched back the lap top to active and began to read the grand story I perceived the night before.

  It read “This is the story untold, never told and will stay untold .....

Walking on The Moon

 These days the favorite and absorbing pass time is watching movies, I must be averaging about one and one half movies a day. This has been the routine since the past few months. Perhaps I want to make good of the times in the previous years when I rarely sat through a movie.

This may also be a liaison of a kind with motion picture that I once dreamed like Alice in her journey to wonderland. That was long ago, in the teens and thereabout, when fantasies and dreams were many and running berserk. However, all that withered and may even be said to have died still born. There was also a stricture from mother that she may be forced to consider me an outcast if I assay a career in the motion picture world. I could have chosen the field of movies, there were offers from a friend who later made his name as a producer and by the father of a couple of friends who also created a niche in the creative field of cinema. It was literally taking the road often traversed that happened , while on a journey in pursuit of freedom, in 1981, I was asked by a good chum on the train while traveling together, to join him in his hunt in the tinsel world in Madras. But I chose to journey further up north opting to think of the apparent comfort of a conventional placement.And he later became a person of reckon in the film world. Perhaps my choice of the blog picture of a mountaineer standing down far below in awe at the splendour and majesty of a peak has something to do subconsciously with the distance I now will never make in life. A haunting reminder of the many dreams that would stay as pipe-dreams, that, besides the realisation of one’s insignificance in the physical laws of Nature. This is when I would wish that the Hindu philosophy of life- that a second coming, a rebirth, a second chance, reincarnation were true. Well then, I can gain without much ado, a chance to make amends, (sigh)!

I’m afraid I dither and touch on aspects I did not intend to discuss here.

A movie, I watched, “A Walk on The Moon”, gave me a re-look at a subject I often wondered about seeking a definite explanation. Mans’ proclivity in tangoing with “la affaire amour” .Someone once alleged that it was men who displayed penchant for fornication. Though it is indeed a fact, but, is it not true that it takes two to tango and there has to be a woman too?

The movie has the mother of two and a woman in her late twenties intimately involving with a traveling garment vendor. The story is placed in the swinging sixties of the Woodstock era. She was aware of the repercussions that were to follow when if the liaison came into the open. But yet, she went further into it. The family is in ship wreck. And to add to the disaster, the eldest child, a girl comes of age and is driven by rage and anger when she notices her mother’s unshackled moments with her paramour at the Woodstock festival.  She hurls herself into destructive risqué with a teenage boy. The husband who travels often for work is devastated and possessed. The family is tossed about like in the tempest in the raging seas.

Man is not unaware of the upheavals that may blow like a cataclysmic whirl wind when illicit amour surfaces to glare. Apart from the fact that socially approved moral conduct does not have such relationships in its directory, man still serenade with danger. Besides the laws of physical intimacy decreed to man and woman, have we thought why people are more inclined to dangerous liaisons?  In this movie the woman becomes mother at the young age of seventeen ,yearns for marital freedom and to banish ennui from her life. So the reason goes.

Strongly asserting that I’m not advocating unrestrained warmth in men women relationship, I would like to know why the hullabaloo and bedlam about an amorous liaison, or in common parlance- a fling? It is certainly true that Nature has only one intention when metamorphosing the sexes-procreation. It is the consciousness of human mind and his thoughts that have placed restraints and dos and do nots in relationships between man and woman. And amongst them certainly men have de novo displayed penchant for seminal acts at any given time, a proclivity to lecherous habits. A dichotomy when compared with the male of other species. Why?

Trust and faithfulness, often the two characteristics that we hear of, that are comparable and as magnificent as chivalry. And which may in equal measure be applied to man and woman. It will be fascinating to quote here the conversation a friend once had with me on a related matter. “I would not hesitate to jump for a fling if a woman fancies a relationship and I long for one.” said the guy. I said, “Well that depends upon your luck and discretion, but what if your wife thinks on similar lines?” He was full of ire. “I’ll decapitate her,” he said.

Irony

 Indonesia- 'Mosque"after the all round destruction from Tsunami

“Irony”, the word when pronounced sounds lyrical.  And the lexicon says it can mean, “Witty language used to convey insults or scorn, esp. saying one thing but implying the opposite”, or,” Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs”. In either of the case the lyrical tone is shorn away by reality. I guess you may agree.

It is very true of what that it is said of irony, “…..I am a connoisseur of fine irony. ’Tis a bit like fine wine but have a better bite.” And the matter with all brute realities of life- there is always an irony behind, the bitterness of wine! Like the romantic enchantment wearing away to insipid and to some a monstrous reality that was not felt even in the most wild hallucinations ever before. Then one may wonder what fool one has been to expect something else.

What impalpable influences that we call fate, chance, destiny, or just the hand of god (force majeure) that may bring forth the state of irony and often as otherwise in relationships, we know not. Goodness me, what a touchy matter is this thing we term, “relationships”! The ticklish and delicate thing among humans! How friends and relatives become strangers, rather could feign strangeness; people who thrived on the other gather the wherewithal to condescend the other; philanthropist turns mendicant. And, I think that the fact about what we call natural law is that the matters we yearn most in life, happiness and peace of mind, are best got when we give it to someone. Ironical indeed! And grossly unjustifiable and cruel is irony when the noblest heart often bears the heaviest cross.

Mr. P was a senior technician for an offshore oil exploring company and his line of duty was on the oil rig off at sea. For the past twenty plus years he was alternating every three months between the works on the platform at sea and back home with his family. A church going Christian and a jolly good fellow that was he! His thrift was often plummeting into parsimony and trifle annoying even to his children. Though he married both his kids away and had no indebtedness’s and commitments, he was miser than a miser can be, he never spent. Though earning a fat sum in US dollars, he and his wife lived frugal in their beautiful house. They walked the good distance to the church and bearing sun or rain. He did not believe in spending on a cab, though his wife was overweight and would have difficulty in walking afar. It was after much persuasion that he bought a scooter, though owning a car was not even little significance financially. He always asserted that he and his wife were saving money for their life after retirement.  Though his retirement benefits from his multinational employer behemoth was enough for a generation or two. They had carefully charted their needs, and wants post retirement. A grand tour to the “holy land” and Lourdes in France topped the list of priorities. And, he planned to put in his papers after one more stint of three months with the Company. So on the penultimate day of his last vacation at home before he retired, he went out to church on that Sunday morning rather curiously on the scooter and his wife on the pillion. Returning after the holy mass, while negotiating the roundabout on the street towards his house, the vehicle tripped over a stone and turned turtle. Mr.P and his wife fell on their back and should have borne nothing more than little bruises. However, he hit his head on the culvert, went into a coma and died the next day. All the money, he saved without a fabulous meal, travelling second class, bearing sun and rain and spending the lonely days and nights every quarter far at sea for twenty plus years, the life saved for  living tomorrow- ironical the end was a different script.

 I see quotes as the safest way of expressing myself where I’m not capable of being expressive. And it was a relief of sorts when I stumbled upon this Mark Twain court on irony.” In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”