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 .....