dusk
mist
rain
fire
song
night
crescent
porridge
corn
furrow
blood
lotus
andromeda
birth
lumbini
sumer
orchid
serendip
alif

-Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

It was a dark and stormy night.Rafael smelt the encrusted coffee curled around his kneecap. Around the vicinity of the stain, the indigo dirt blue of the jeans now tended towards the pale afterburn glow of the acrylic. The music throbbed within his interior cranium like he was connected to it in a blue blue blue night mask of muslin and silk jewel rustblack carbon it being the blue blood raging in his veins as he strained his arm his neck his back his spine his calves his skin in cold starlight calm light years out of his mind. The needles called for celebrations. The autumn was nigh. The Velvet Underground drew on Jean Genet for inspiration. These words are solely for my own gratification. Attention in this instance is dead shorn of desire black and unwelcome.
Will you be mine
Will you be mine
Sang the minstrel of his love
As violins screamed of lost maelstroms solemn Afrikan serums mindfucked and alone crying on wet and cold blue bathroom tiles in dirty downtown Tokyo













An iota of winter and frozen sweat. Six nine six nine six nine six nine six nine six nine six nine went the groove whistling in the cobalt black night. Fog whispered around the street lights. Cars cruised by in alien abandon at speeds nearing 623 kmph. The air reeked of decarbonated ultrapure ecopetrol, and his girlfriend’s Moroccan perfume. Salvador would have approved.

the stillness of the night is punctuated by the silent music of fifteen white winterland birds flying noiselessly by. they maintain perfect synchronic order against the faint glow of the sleepy half moon,effervescent in the darkness of the idle starlit night.a faint buzz of electricity and stasis lurks in the background.

Joningsberg is a beautiful little town in the cold northern fringe of Sweden.the Sun shines warm in the summer, and you can leave the frost memories of winter far behind, carry your suntan to the beach and soak in the sweet Scandinavian sun all day in an air of stillwater tranquillity interspersed now and then by one more wave breaking itself into nothingness against the sloping sand of the seabed crystal clear and aquamarine reflecting the laid back white of early morning clouds in a dreamless azure beyond

Alis and the equinox


1

Sunrise, like the sunshine in her eyes, shone into the room, twin rays suspended in dust. Why sleep anymore, she told herself, the clouds float snowflake white, the sky pale blue; night shifts into day, therefore, what else but for sleep to fade away, till the sun sets again, and other distant suns glint like steel in the sky..

2

Where are we, dear reader, and in whose shadow do we wake up? The lady who was lately asleep is Alis. I write Alis a hundred letters everyday, but none of them reach her. Oh no, not another of those mushy jilted lover things, you must be telling yourself. Relax. I do not exist for her. Literally. You see, in a very distant past, all of humanity woke up, on one such mild midsummer morning, and found that men and women had been dimensionally separated, set forever adrift to float on the indifferent fabric of the cosmos, and although spatial separation was negligible, it could well have been infinite, because the dream distance was tangibly staryears long. Humanity just existed in different dimensions, even across the same room. If you were drinking your coffee in bed with your guy, and voila, in a blink of those beautiful eyelashes, he ceases to exist, you are in bed alone. This breach, you find, exists beyond time, you do not even remember him.
You drink your coffee, easy, calm, and peaceful. As can reasonably be expected from as strange an event as this, things did not happen logically. Moments of chaos are difficult to map with any certainty, it is quite pointless to expect things like symmetry, normalcy and logic in how these things happen. Things happened differently for the guys. The difference was small, yet immeasurably significant. The male of the species could still see the female. For your guy, you were still real. But he had just been condemned to this eternal silence because he could now never talk to you. The two of you existed in different dimensions, the breach was total and irrevocable. For you, dear reader, the male since then has been only a vision, a scepter, that wisp of smoke, curling up serpentine from your fortieth cigarette of the day, nothing more, nothing less.




3

The dark-green water reflects the pale blue sky in a conceit of white cloud, violet grey mirror of delusion as the sun rises ever so slowly in the saffron white east. Alis steps into the garden, like porcelain in her jade kimono of red silk. She feels the dew wet her feet as she walks the green green grass underfoot, and rays of sunlight lose their way in the soft goldglint of her hair. Tired of the walk, Alis lies down and languidly inhales from her emerald hookah, rose petals floating on the water as almost invisible water-spiders flit across the frame leaving imperceptible waves in their wake

Selves splinter into infinite lines three-dimensional across the infinite sphere of time and dissolving space, and Alis finds herself one with the radiant truth, which is a ray of light and an infinite vision at the same time. She could be thinking this thought, writing these very words down, and yet she was inherent in all the alphabets of the dreamt, spoken and forgotten languages, and in these seemingly inadequate words could mean all being as had been, was and would be. Her kimono, though red, could be tangerine, jade, turquoise or aquamarine, and yet be red at the same time.


4

I wake up, or perhaps start dreaming, either of the two. Clarification is tiresome. My earflute plays the music of falling cherryflakes on their slow waltz down to the snow, I breath in the sharp tang of pine drifting into my not-too-high skyloft out of the greenforest below. If you want a frank answer, I prefer tea to coffee. Somehow this translucent mountain-stream of amber is aesthetically and spiritually more becoming than the oaken strength and lucidity of coffee, and I contemplatively sip out of my impossibly frail cup as gentle scent-steam brightens up my room with travelling fairy-tales and aethereal mirages of light-shadow gardens across windseas and cloudskies with careful dreams of long forgotten lands of mist and morning snow

5

The afternoon has not been without a hint of discord and doubt. If you smell the scent of flowers all day long, then even fragrance can overwhelm, and you will desire the mundane reality of everyday air, tired of this continual stream of delicate invective. Is not reality abrupt, unexpected, and disruptive? This imagined universe of infinitely languid midsummer afternoons is ultimately delusory, is it not? Will it do if we but dream, and not care to realise them? Perhaps it will, perhaps it will not. I shrug. Drink my tea, red as a translucent rose. It is futile to believe in choices, and to think that you have a modicum of control over your existence. There is what you expect, and then there is that which perceptibly happens. Different realities, or maybe the same. I cannot reliably say, stuck as I am in this shell, this form, me as I conceive myself. The cosmos is not egocentric. It is alien, without, and not within. What is within you is the memory the form leaves on your mind, and the form itself is beyond comprehension, abstract, blue veined and colourless.

Aesthetic space in society today is in a state of rapid and constant flux. In a world where distances, psychological and geographical, are becoming increasingly irrelevant with the presence of technology and media enabling immediate and easy contact between any two points in the world, it is not surprising to find Ali Akbar Khan sahib teaching the sarod to American students in his school in southern California, nor is it surprising to find Michael Learns to Rock, a Swedish pop band, performing live in Shillong in India’s northeast, thousands of miles away from Scandinavia. Cultural boundaries are becoming increasingly nonexistent in this sometimes-overwhelming discourse of the global village and the new shiny concept of a knowledge-based economy. Necessarily and often ineluctably, this sharing of cultural space is intertwined with the economic and political reality of underdevelopment, and thus the discourse of the global village is still to a major extent the discourse of an industrial, civilised and ‘developed’ elite and is intimately connected to the concepts of globalisation and multinational trade. Although a free market economy is ostensibly meant to create and foster new unforeseen chains of value creation dramatically improving the material conditions of its citizens, actuality is more complicated, and the processes of development are often found to be unwieldy, slow and cumbersome. It needs to be noted that the discourse of the free market often takes a degree of infrastructural development in societies for granted.
In pragmatic terms, this can be ascertained by the massive discrepancy in the quality and accessibility of technological infrastructure in say, the four villages of Madhubani in rural Bihar and southern California. In an ideal situation, connoisseurs of Madhubani art would pay in high value dollars for the artwork produced in rural Bihar, and this high yield trade would show an obvious improvement in the quality of life of the women who create the paintings. This rather simplistic chain of production and distribution fails to incorporate the additional factors of bureaucratic and political interference, middlemen and counterfeiters who eat away a major section of the financial pie in parasitic actuality, often leaving next to nothing for the painter herself. Interestingly, though the painters themselves are often known to point out the irregularities in their distributional network in conversation, the artwork itself never makes an explicit political statement, and the subjective content continues to draw on its traditional symbolic and mythical framework.
The connection between aesthetic experience and its grounding in socio-economic reality is a much argued one, and one risks oversimplication in trying to establish a direct, explicit structure of production, distribution, profit and reproduction. Let us use a book as an example. For instance, when we use the phrase ‘means of production’, we are thinking simultaneously of the author, the publisher, the bookseller, the ink used in the book, the machines and workmen in the press, and of course, the reader who is buying the book. This structure has to necessarily incorporate within it the psychological and political aspects of the system, besides an economic pragmatic analysis of the material means of production. The history of a book is finally shaped by the printed text it contains, and an analysis of the book as a material object serves to make the history more complete, but cannot be sustained as an end in itself. Bibliography helps us understand the temporal and spatial contexts in which the text was produced, but how important are these contexts in the final act of the reader’s response to the text?
What is taken for granted in the argument above is the connection between the text and the processes which culminate in its production. This connection, of course, needs to be questioned and ascertained in detail before the reader accepts it. Does the text exist in an autonomous space beyond its immediate social context, or is meaning indelibly connected to the time and space in which a text was created? Experiments in 20th century drama have continually tried to deal with this conundrum, and the first example which comes to mind is Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Vladimir and Estragon exist in a landscape literally empty of detail, chronology, memory and history, and perhaps significantly, life for them becomes a meaningless limbo of endless repetition with a sense of being irreversibly separated from the identifying contexts of time and space which man uses to try to comprehend the ground reality of his existential condition.
The early and middle years of the twentieth century saw two analytical approaches towards the temporality and autonomy of a text evolve. One of these approaches was that of the so-called French school, primarily articulated in the thought and writings of philosophers like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. This approach draws centrally on the Kantian idea of a transcendent metaphysical space where the ‘meaning’ of the text resides, autonomous and independent of all else. The author performs a generative function in the creation of the text, but once the act of creation is complete, the object, the text exists in a space independent of material reality. The reader can understand and respond to a text detached from authorial identity and the material contexts of production and distribution. In a sense, this way of thought can be called Neo-Platonic, in that it assumes the existence of an independent metaphysical sphere of truth and meaning detached from the mundane appendage of base reality. However, this metaphysical space is also a simultaneous articulation of the discourse of the alienated individual, and the meaninglessness of the disembodied text is a reflection of the perceived incomprehensibility of the processes of perceived reality in the world around.
The second approach to the question of the text was articulated in the thought of intellectuals from the so-called Frankfurt school centred around the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany.
This approach grounds itself in an attempt to understand the functional reason for a work of art to exist, and thus reasons that art can and should be understood as a subjective and interpretive statement of the artistic individual about her psychological and existential realities. Adorno, in his Aesthetic Theory, establishes the distinctions between true and high art and so-called mass produced kitsch on this premise. He rejects the validity of pop art as, according to Adorno, it fails to paint a progressive picture of reality because of its inherent articulation of the mainstream discourse of the lowest common denominator, and thus an implicit failure to subvert and expose the chinks in the armour of the repressive status quo. True art is revolutionary, in the sense that it seeks to subvert and change the injustice of the world around by the very fact of its articulation within the subjective and intellectual framework of the artistic text. The work of art exists in a unique position due to its subjectivity and aesthetic complexity which takes it beyond the reductive scope of mere analytical and discursive reason. In a sense, this is an exaltation of the metaphysical space which an artistic text creates around itself, and simultaneously an articulation of the need to appropriate this exalted metaphysical space towards a culturally and politically functional end.

all in the golden afternoon
full leisurely we glide:
for both our oars, with little skill,
by little arms are plied,
while little hands make vain pretence
our wanderings to glide.

there are clouds of veiled allegory lurking everywhere. its the fkin bane of consciousness. i wish i was ten years old again.least i could read Alice in Wonderland and not continually obsess about what Alice drinks from the li'l bottle irresistibly marked 'drink me'. the junkie mr.hyde wants some codeine in his bloodstream.dr.jekyll feels his private daemon haunt the halls of his eerie Edwardian mansion again.electronica resounds amidst the casually strewn wood panels, dead bats, mahogany and molten fragrant meat. the horses gallop full tilt across the twilight desert as the riders calmly sip on their saki and rice cakes within their geisha tents of gelatine and fluid vanilla muck.neo maps minds. the latitude and longitude are all that finally matter. did you hit that down the line smash with me on your mind?

ergo
troilus and cressida
dr.jekyll and mr.hyde
lanark

she comes up unseen as i wait absent minded on the street. i get on the auto.that's that, then.we never see each other again. or maybe we do.the paths of memory and kismet are mist shrouded and opaque as ever.the crystal ball is red as a translucent rose.

ah
yohoho and a bottle of rum
tell me then
fair indigo
what is the true secret of the unicorn?
the moon rises on the east. the toast turns on the stake. zeal, honour, stealth, sulphur and sundust conspire to make me see their point of view. my intelligence melts in my veins, my eyelids glow a pale blue.and dinner is served.

the denial of truth is evident in the convoluted nature of the narrative.no sorcerer worth his salt this side of the bay of bengal would vouch for the veracity of what appeared within those dreaded pages of eccentric esotericism. there could be anything to it.if you have managed to come with me this far, navigating this stolid mirage of more and more and more subterfuge as i try to sabotage you into a lull of fetid nothingness of neverland necromantic truth;

is there anything that needs or remains to be said? silence is always more preferable. the tales of the universe are by desire and design better left untold,unhinted at, to be framed in leisure on idle midwinter afternoons playing idle bagatelle in the miniatures of million hued mirrors in the mystical labyrinths of my mind

this is a tale from an unreal time
in the faraway realms of Shey
men and women walked the streets
as if burdened by the liquid and heavy air around them -
in a mist which always hung opaque
a year
of perpetual winter and snow
a light steam rose from the street
twisting between the passing feet
and the sky was black with flecks of scattered steel /

the water from the tap felt like ice
pipes creeping their frozen network across the opaque city

and yet the trees grew tall in untended backyards
leaves white as crumbling snow
flowers a magic pink
the radio played jazz
wine flowed free
in lonely lofts with the city sleeping
blue like the fallen Nile/

and death
lurked in the evening air
with a cosy leather charm
beguiling in its warmth
as evil guitars sang of lost loves and absent friends
with the sun shining pale and sharp
on life chlorophyll and dreams of passing dusk/

the jailhouse sang dank and musty slush
as sleeping pavements saw light
with the crabmeat sweet and dark
marat cleaned the guillotine
sade sharpened his quill
elvis left the building
and eichmann gassed a few more in belsen.krakow.

auschwitz.kashmir.nagasaki.here.now.

commune free! shouted the students
drunk pale unfocussed stark and unclean
soon finding themselves caught
back in their stupor of numb yellow cornflake dread
while the spider moved like Legolas
its web heavy as snow/

mist lingered under sleeping eyes behind curtains
and within the bowl of stale lemon soup
as hansel wooed gretel
ate candy lost his way
the spider moved closer
the fog hung heavier
in a paradise
eternally harmonic in the rampant debauch of an angelic choir alone
in its hauteur and sublime incomprehensible joy
armies frozen in their boots
socks soaked in saline blood
athletes unable to stop
running the last miles to Marathon
while infinite rockets sink into the crimson sun
and planets implode into ashes spun silk and rust/

orange smog clouds the sky
all else pale before its insistent chemical glow
stray bitches howl at the invisible moon
as moonlit tsunamis rage in laser neon blood saltlust
in gardens of delight here and now
cardboard covered windows broken in stealth and blood drenched haste
in a Superman like swish of sky blue cape and embarrassing red underwear
energy cruising the atmosphere
fluid tomahawks of hypersonic grey/

stray farmers heard praying for rain
dead in a deluge
as drought is followed all too soon by six months of unceasing rain
the snake goddess paints herself into the courtyard
her eyes broken like an empty husk of corn
the key is bent into abstraction
sought endlessly but useless if mistakenly found
metal fuses into metal
blood coagulates into rust
the city dreams its unbroken dream
the sun sets
the moon rises
ashes spun silk
yellow flecks of dust