the mirror stage

The Burning Poem of Intention: Your Plays

2009-09-18T06:16:00.001-04:00

(my first Sikhi poem...draft. Hope I don't say anything offensive.)

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The Burning Poem of Intention: Your Plays

My mind has been mortgaged to illusions:

I have put chandeliers into a borrowed house of straw.

A hearth in a house of ice.

Blown with flies and dust. I decorate myself with string, with blood, with death itself.

In this dark there is a rainbow reflected. You

Like a diamond gleam in everything, even the sparkle

Of the ice as it melts, the honeyed straw.

They will fall away.

But you… are the sweetest of scents. You permeate

every thing every space every living breath every inter-space

with grace.

Originating everywhere, never fading, constant, clean. Perfect.

Though it sweeps under leaves and over roofs, into lungs and cells, out noses.

Though it folds itself between the pages of books, and mixes with the mortar of bricks.

Though it makes up the blinding lights of stars themselves, we will not smell it.

We ignore this beauty.

We can see nothing, unless we breathe deep the depths of you.

Your plays have, in this way, bewitched me.

I will set this house on fire and step out of its door with love for you.

My bare soul feet clean of the melting “I”.

It will fall away.

The companion that grew with me, inside and without me,

You, are tear and smile. Foolishly,

I had thought you were far away.

This partner, this friend that consumes me with a holy fire

My soul burned towards the stars.

And who makes it cool with no other desire.

You who could drop a match into my very being, snuff and strangle.

You who enter into the deepest recesses of my body without a sound.

You who put me in motion with the grace of your natural moves.

Your plays have, in this way, bewitched me.

I see you sometimes:

You in the cell of a leaf,

in the atom swinging,

in the cold breeze of a derelict room,

in a warm heartbeat,

in a rug on the floor,

a sudden storm,

the sky at night,

the everything.

We cannot describe the gifts.

How then the giver? And

How the giver who is: giver, gift & hand held out.

Every clotted sigh,

every line of every letter on this page,

my fingers, my thoughts: this is all you.

Your plays have, in this way, bewitched me.

Lover who makes me, sister who breaks me: I am lost.

I know that I shall be called into the dark, kicking over a lamp.

I will set this house on fire and step out of its door with love for you.

My bare soul feet clean of the weary, melting “I”.

Cinders and ash will fly up, blue and final

With nothing

The fire will light my road to you.

Ghazal 4 (stone radif, for Hitesh)

2009-04-19T12:57:00.000-04:00

We sharpen, we wane, we pound and crush, we do not move to stand alone as stone

We are altars and baths, garlanded, smoothed, worn with blood, milk and love as stone.

In this house so solid and so cool I listen to songs of solitude but you

Lean against the wall, collapsing like a reggae king: rock-stone.

These are the built foundations of Jah-law and Jah-love.

Our kisses set lips as lime between the stones of this fortress.

Your body, smooth and tight, a seam of gold in a dark, hot mine-

A candle set inside a fist of salt, glowing through that solid stone.

You light my way: your feet cast golden angles like an open door. We lean in, become The acute kissed source of talk-talent, as echoes fly like prayers inside of our stone-love.

But because the firmament is not firm, and the heavens are not fixed, the meaning

Sun will glint between us on a given day when, breath-stirred, the stars align to stone.

We are eternal, yet we wear to dust under the soft touch of children. Our forms reborn, our memories burnished away. We yield to innocence, for time will also visit stone.

Love changes form, as waves carve caves from solid rock and sculpted forms run smooth

But light from light refracts, gold cleaved from gold is gold alone, and stone is always stone.

Ghazal #3, 2nd draft with change.

2008-12-04T13:04:00.000-05:00

There we were, floating on the sea, the tide scrubbing us clean
Of all the loneliness that has now rested back on me, like a crow.

Now I feel dirty, distant from the innocence of a blackboard, unused,
That cold slate taste of chalk we had as kids licking beach stones clean.

But I think of the purity of your sweat on me like rain, the whiteness
Of ancient trees. Some things must be worn into beauty, corrupted clean.

People fold to profane rhythms of the earth, but God shapes this:
We are ambergris upon the water, with time the foul can be fragrant.

The Ghazal opens a pure passion. Numb, lovely, beyond love and hate. A quiet
Sunlit courtyard entered after a long journey, these final steps swept clean.

You stand up naked, brown back shining in the afternoon light, leave me lain
Glistening under the fan. When you’ve wet your black hair who will be clean?

Ghazal #3 (draft)

2008-11-19T04:33:00.001-05:00

There we were, floating on the sea, the tide scrubbing us clean
Of all the loneliness that has now rested back on me, like a crow.

Now I feel dirty, distant from the innocence of a blackboard, unused,
That cold slate taste of chalk we had as kids licking beach stones clean.

But I think of the purity of your sweat on me like rain, the whiteness
Of ancient trees. Some things must be worn into beauty, corrupted clean.

People fold to profane rhythms of the earth, but God shapes this:
We are ambergris upon the water, with time the foul can be fragrant.

You stand up naked, brown back shining in the afternoon light, leave me lain
Glistening under the fan. When you’ve wet your black hair who will be clean?

Year of the Dog. Prose piece from October 2004 I think. I just found it.

2008-10-26T12:36:00.001-04:00

The Year Of the Dog

First of all, I must admit that the prospect of returning to the United States after an absence of 17 years was something I looked upon with both excitement and trepidation… after all, though somewhere deep In my childhood memories I had Nabisco and the Price is Right, Crystal Lite and Bubble Tape, the media maelstrom I was presented with on my recent holiday trips back to New York, and now, living in Cambridge, was of a new echelon altogether. I was not prepared at 8am, for example the Lil’ Debbie commercial where a crowd of children chime in in broken and brassy harmony to persuade each and every one of us to buy pastries called “ding dongs” with the air of demented cherubs. In fact, at this hour the commercial scared me so much I had to turn it off and run into the other room and reach for the radio dial for solace. As we all know TV, not the eye, is the window to the soul, or at least to the superego of a nation: meeting the US through commercials, talk shows, and entertainment news, sitcoms galore, Roll up Roll up! Bad enough for me, an itinerant transatlantic scholar, but I really despair for the mental cohesion of those international students adrift in an alien culture and foreign language confronted by dancing peanuts with monacles and low carb’ bread, (a contradiction in terms, n’est ce pas?). It’s enough to tug at the edges of sanity. And the peanut goes tappity tappity tappity…

In any case…let us illustrate, dear reader, a moment in the chasm of cultural intelligibility: Our Hero (me. I’m writing this, so I may as well take the opportunity to be the hero, eh?) leans back on a bank of red cushions, beer in hand after reading all day (ha!) like any good Harvard student (ha!), to enjoy what the evening’s fine selection of programming has to offer her. “Give Kids What They Crave!” Cut to children screaming in near falsetto…”mine tastes like a cheeseburger!!!”…choruses of mock excitement verging on chemical orgasm as pyjamad ten year olds holler their corporate delight over microwaveable pastry packages of colored filler oozing with synthetic flavoring!! Our hero sits up, beer still in hand and considers the underhanded politics of advertising to children. Mutters underneath her breath…”markets, million dollar markets created out of clogging ten year old arteries,..” clenching her bottle and raising it aloft she decries lost innocence, filled with revolutionary zeal and utters a phrase at once eloquent and concise:

“BASTARDS.”

She settles back into her political armchair, feeling she has accomplished her civic duty in a suitably noble, concise and empty fashion and is now done with polemics for the evening.

And then it comes on, the most supremely ironic placement, the crème de la crème of the talents of blasé commercial programmers…and she wonders, “surely this is a mistake, surely the irony of this juxtaposition would escape no one, or is there some kid at the controls playing with everyone’s head???”…

“Delicious, and healthful! Specially designed New puppy food for a strong digestive tract, good immune system, and healthy shiny coat…help your best friend to live a long and healthy life with a balance of natural protein and carbohydrates, vitamin enriched, and with a real meat taste he’ll love.”

In the moments before the opening strains of the plug for Growing Up Gotti, our hero sits dumbfounded and silent.

“I’d rather eat the dog food.”

Why Not: Living With Indians (Draft)

2008-10-26T11:46:00.002-04:00

The following is a draft of an article that will be appearing on the IIT website, written for my pleasure and the pleasure of others...I'm a guest writer. I also wrote a more focused piece for the IIT newsletter drawn from some of this on why people go or go back to India entitled Going (Back) to India that will be appearing in the Singapore Alumni issue in November. Look out for it! Please feel free to add your comments...they are really appreciated.

Why Not: Living with Indians

Ham Honge Kamiyab

“I mean what sort of message does this send the global community? We’ll be a laughing stock. They’ll only be let go in smaller batches later on… It’s all about politics. Only in India.”

Having just wolfed down a meal in a local Bangladeshi canteen, I stood on a street corner in Singapore’s Little India as two friends of mine loosened their ties and discussed the recent re-hire of Jet Airways employees. And then there was the Nano fiasco.

“Well, at least they’ve found somewhere in Pune, and they did come out quite strongly about the situation in West Bengal.” I added hopefully.

The conversation moved onto other things. All of us are professionals, with jobs, but do we want to manage another business? There’s an opportunity kicking around. Why not! And then inevitably, a note of homesickness enters: “Sometimes I just want to pack it in and go back to India, yaar.”

“Anyway, the jalebis here aren’t very good...too thick”

I’m going to preface this and remind or tell you right now that I’m a Videshi. Yes. A firengi, a non-Indian, and armed only with a limited batch of insights and experiences in what I have seen to be, and know to be a hugely diverse country which few are fortunate to truly know and understand. Personally I’m as lost as anybody else, if not more so.

For a variety of reasons I have a lot of Indian friends with all kinds of backgrounds, though mainly urban. I have an Indian boyfriend, I studied a bit of Hindi and Urdu, I love Bollywood, and I look pretty good in a salwaar qameez, but in the end, I am half Scandinavian, half Italian, and brought up in the UK. At a distinct disadvantage then, to write about India. But somebody asked me to, and so that’s what I’m going to do. I guess they thought it would be interesting. In the end this is just a collection of things that I have learned from and about my Indian friends then, in the past couple of years, and subject to all the usual caveats and fine print.

“I’m not Political”

The first time I went to India was for business, and I ended up getting far more than I had bargained for. In the middle of an MA in Chinese Literature and Arts I spent a summer interning for a regional bank and was posted to Mumbai for just four days. That four days was at the end of July 2005 and because of the terrible floods, they turned into a fortnight.

Caught in those floods I spent a lot of time reading Indian newspapers, both local and national, and bearing witness to the extremely well written and rapier sharp critique of politicians in the area for their failure to prevent loss of life. Everyone seemed to have an opinion. A rhetorical and well-reasoned opinion, and I began a consequent love affair with Indian editorials. So as I started to have more Indian colleagues and friends, the fact that people, especially young Indians, described themselves as non-political was strange to me.

I have cases in point. Firstly, Orkut. Yes, I know it’s hardly a measure of the feelings of the intellectuals of the nation, but it is popular, popular amongst Indians, and popular amongst young Indians in particular. The most common answer for political affiliation on Orkut is “I’m not Political”, and it is markedly different from the kind of thing you’ll see on other social networking sites like Facebook or Myspace where political figures have pages and fan clubs. The thing is, there’s a dissonance here between what’s written and what’s experienced. The vast majority of people that I have interacted with who claim to be “apolitical” on Orkut have extremely strong opinions on local politics at the very least, if not national or international politics. Why is this, I wondered?

Needing a guinea pig, I argued it out with my boyfriend after he had completed a particularly heavy tirade on Raj Thakeray and other local political figures.

“Why do you say that you are not political” I asked, “when it’s clear that you are? You obviously really care about this.”

The response I got was that there’s basically a conflation between being political and being affiliated with a party among young Indians, and especially since a lot of what goes on with party politics is split along ethnic or religious lines, if you want to avoid fist-fights it’s best to stay out of it. Jaane Bhi do Yaaron all over again.

But as Indian cinematic and artistic representations so clearly illustrate there is a tension between saying “Leave it alone, pal” for the good of saving your own skin and acting heroically in the spirit of the fathers of the nation and in participation within the world’s largest democracy despite the odds, even if it means being locked up or hurt. In popular culture one need only hold up the popularity of a firebrand film like Rang de Basanti against the wise council (and funny bits) of Jaane bhi do.

And then of course, political leanings when exposed out of the Indian context are all relative. I was naturally surprised when a very good friend of mine, a moderate, fun-loving Muslim from Kerala out-ed himself to me as a “conservative”. Things didn’t add up in my head at all. I asked him a few questions about religion in school, gay and women’s rights, fiscal and foreign policy to ascertain the depth of my misunderstanding, and discovered that he was probably among the most liberal of my Indian friends. I confronted him with this, and asked how he could call himself conservative. “Well, I’m not Communist,” he said. Kerala is, of course run predominantly by Communists. Lesson in political relativism learned, and the stability of labels suitably downgraded, we went on to discuss the American Occupation of Iraq.

Love, Hate and SRK on the Global Stage

Love and marriage are hugely important parts of any culture, and especially so in Asia. And it strikes me that among modern Asian countries this is especially so in India. Running concurrently in Indian society you have conservatism, eroticism, backlashes, varying degrees of misogyny and feminism. I’m not going to get onto the gender issue, dowries or the sex-education bugaboo because we’ll be here all day. It’s nasty, it’s serious and it deserves its own article. I’ll save that for another time. I’m also not going to jump on the bollywood bandwagon and talk about the crore rupee wedding industry, the glamour and tradition, and the culture of romance in modern Indian life either. Instead I want to talk about something much more glitzy and yet much more mundane: shaadi.com.

One of my best friends, an educated, feisty and independent woman can be found searching for a husband for her sister-in-law on shaadi.com, despite the fact that she herself had a love marriage. And this isn’t casual surfing either. It’s targeted. It’s traditional. Caste, family, education and complexion are all considered. I point out that Shaadi.com is racist. “I can’t get on Shaadi.com”, I say. She shrugs. She herself never thought she would be engaged in such a thing, nor that she would want to stay at home and take care of her new baby for the past year and a half, nor that she would spend so much time out of her day bitching about her colleagues who were predominantly “females” when she did go back to work. She never thought she would find herself doing all these things when not 3 years ago she was to be found in the shortest of short skirts on the back of her DJ husband’s bike. She has become a victim of what we call “householder syndrome”. We theorise that at about the same time as she started lactating all the traditional vedic instruction that she received growing up congealed somewhere in her brain, and despite her continuing predeliction for the bottle-rocket, and an absolute determination to avoid gaining the Indian “marriage-belly” that can verge on the impression of permanent pregnancy, she’s become about 50% more conservative. So it seems that shaadi.com, that high-tech Indian cyber yenta won’t be going anywhere soon.

Meanwhile, in pursuit of my own romance, technology can only be described as my nemesis: India may well be hurtling towards economic advancement but even in Mumbai internet and especially mobile phone networks are so poor that my tender heart-to-heart with my boyfriend in Borivali ends up cut off at “Namaste”. Whether this is part of a shaadi.com style plot to prevent inter-racial marriage or not is anyone’s guess.

“Indians are the most prejudiced people in the world. If there’s no one else to hate, we’ll start hating each other”. From love to hate. The preceding was announced by a US educated Mumbaikar friend after a drunken discussion on Asian politics, and drunk or not, few will deny it. When the green, white and saffron are unfurled, every Indian may be your brother, but when it comes down to it, it’s not just the Raj Thakeray’s of the world who will carve up a neighbourhood by language or shades of brown. Hell, even Shaadi.com does that.

One of the things that unites a people like no other however, and this is true of all diasporas I think, is missing home. There was an article in Times of India some time back about the relationship between NRIs in the US and their home country, which, it concluded, was composed of an ever-fluctuating sentimental parabola of complaint and homesickeness driven by a rich web of factors. Some of these were purely selfish (availability of domestic help and fresh paneer etc.), some more complex and profound. As another friend of mine, musician Angaraag Papon Mahanta says:

“Wherever I go…India pulls me back…I love the human, crazy freedom nature of this land. ”

What we’re talking about I guess, is cultural, the deeply felt pull of Sanskriti, which I don’t want to flatten into a box-sized trope a la Swades, but nevertheless a homesickness that transcends the cultural divisions that typically divide Indian communities, and which I think everyone can see and feel to be real, even among those who have chosen to live and work abroad, and especially in a time of opportunity. What is actually missed may vary, of course. The interesting thing is that, certainly from an outsider’s perspective, this holds true even for those whose families are predominantly settled abroad, and even in the case of those raised in another country: with the expansion of Singaporean businesses into India and vice versa it has been surprising to hear some of my Singaporean Indian friends talking about “going back”.

In some ways this becomes akin to the way that the Chinese diaspora, the “huaren” or “huaqiao” understand their relationship to both “Chinese-ness” and the mainland, despite the fact that in the Chinese case this is often a discussion complicated by the political past and infused with racial rhetoric.

For all the unifying power of homesickness however, the Rajasthanis in Singapore will still mutter under their breath about the Tamils, the Bangladeshis will wonder about the Assamese and I will stand in the corner and stay out of it.

If we are going to talk about love and hate, marriage and class war, then we have to talk about the drama King, Shah Rukh Khan. With a furrowed brow as distinctive and iconic as Elvis’ curled lip, and status to match, it’s not surprising that SRK inspires strong feelings. He’s ubiquitous. A brand. But is he a brand that we like?

Singapore certainly seems to like him: his image in cardboard was stuck up outside of Mustafa’s for weeks in advance of the Zee carnival during which the King himself graced us with his presence. Which, considering last year’s showing at Zee, just goes to show how far the NRI community has come in organizing itself in Singapore over the past year. In fact when rumours initially circulated that “a Khan” was going to be coming to Zee, I and many of my friends dismissed SRK out of hand…”He wouldn’t come to Singapore just for that” we all agreed. We resigned ourselves to Salmaan (sorry Salmaan fans). And then proceeded to nearly wet ourselves when we learned he was turning up. Speaking for myself, the Fair & Handsome bit aside, I am a fan, not quite a screaming groupie of a fan, I’d be more likely to faint in front of Aamir Khan, but a fan nevertheless. And yes, I realize that to many of my more intellectual Indian friends this is all a bit passé. All I can say in response to that is that everyone needs a guilty pleasure, and since I get little to no joy from the US or UK top 40 and Hollywood films are usually a “miss” with me, Bollywood seems to fill in the craving for cultural empty calories that others can’t reach, and besides, SRK is an ur-phenomena to be sure. Like any public figure he seems to inspire a spectrum of emotions, from desire to hatred, but one thing can be said for certain: he’s everywhere. Like God, except that role is already taken by Amitabh Bhachan.

KBC?

And in the words of SRK, and in the light of the credit crunch’s economic impact on India, we might ask: “Kaun banega crorepati?”

As the Sensex does a less than graceful swan dive this week, the answer might seem to be that apart from those people who already are, “koii bhi nahi”. And the fear that the multinationals who lined up to get into Dalal St. are heading back the way they came is solidifying, certainly. But as I think about why people go to India for business at all, foreigners or Indians, it becomes pretty clear that those reasons will more than likely stand over time, and that therefore this story isn’t quite over.

What reasons am I referring to? Up until recently, India was being touted in the international business press as a sort of new frontier for foreign investors. A fast developing economy, with inexpensive labour and significant natural resources…but is that all there is to it? I would say no. Let me preface and say that I am not an economist, but I suggest that there is a link between the reasons that foreigners (whether from other Asian countries or Western countries) go to India and the reasons that multinationals jumped on that particular AI flight: looking for a radical outside, that is, something “out of the box.” When people want to see things from a different perspective, when they want a different solution, whether that’s a “life solution” or a “business solution”, for better or worse, they look to India. It’s a kind of ideological outsourcing, something like Esquire writer A.J. Jacobs’ experiments with outsourcing his life to a team in Bangalore.

This is surely simplistic, and very often ignores the complexities and foment that brings those ideas to the fore, but it nevertheless seems to be true. What will happen and how people, tourists and business people alike, will view the situation if we ever live in a global society that is truly alive to the day-to-day realities of life in many Asian countries including India, is anybody’s guess, but for the moment India exists conceptually it would seem on the knife-edge of possibility and risk, but also as an ideological space.

Let’s connect this back to Angaraag’s reasons for return, and the search for the perfect Jalebi here for a minute. While most Indians I know think that the foreign preoccupation with India as a “Land of Colour” is misguided, visitors, NRIs and traveled resident Indians alike seem to agree that there is an alternative logic at play in India, if not several. This is a place where buckle makers in the slums of Dharavi can sell to Walmart, a man’s life savings in bonds can be eaten by termites while in a bank safe deposit box, and Dalits may actually pay for the opportunity to clean out sewers in goldsmiths’ arcades because they make a mint on the gold shavings they pan out, especially with the price of gold going up. This alternative view is clearly not dependent upon some sort of belief in the country as a land of ghee and honey.

Dalal St. has, at the best of times been the story of global markets, global confidence, and local tug. Confidence however is evidently extremely fragile in world markets in general and especially in India where the rumour that “we could truly be a superpower” was just beginning to be believed.

However, I suggest that for better or worse, the symbolic power of India, as simplistic as it may be, as inaccurate as it may be, does have a sort of un-planned-for reality behind it and will not disappear. And because of that, on the economic front there is reason for hope. I know that as soon as an opportunity turns up, there will be Indian friends of mine who whether they have jobs or not, will leap into the void, and in the most unexpected manner, screaming “why not!” all the way.

I’m just fortunate enough to have a ringside seat.

The Ground

2008-10-22T06:00:00.000-04:00

I love the ground whereon he stands
The ground beneath those shoes that
Walk. Walk him along to work, party,
To beds and beds and beds.

I love the ground whereon he stands.
His love is hard just like it, buoys up
Heads and shoulders, hips, hips,
Thighs and shins just like it.

I love the ground whereon he stands
Each pavement crack a fingerprint whorl
The mark of something past, something
Painful, man-making and man-made.

I love the ground whereon he stands
And his shadow whose belly hovers
Along it with promise of some great
Union between ground and him-

Written by nature and far off down
Past years of cigarette butts and
walking in those shoes to the beat of a
hot heart. I love the ground whereon he

Stands, because silently
It touches him, and me.
Because it owns us both.
Because in those measured
Squares named and unnamed
It is his.

Love Song for a Friend

2008-10-19T06:40:00.000-04:00

Come at your chosen speed, dear one
The door is open.

The hinges flex like your
Palms outstretched
to break my fall.

Such is a love song
For a friend.

Linked in and Locked Down in the safest space
My head on your shoulder
We will gun it, high 5

Into the future
Or the past.

With drinking, shouting, laughing
All the way.

With a yielding to each other
Over time and over again, you
Might be late

But

Come at your chosen speed, dear one,
Because the door will be
Open still.

Ghazal #2

2008-10-17T10:03:00.000-04:00

The sweetness of dates after sunset, the memory of
My teeth in the flesh of your neck, sweet as sugar.

There is no frost in this city to glow quiet
Only broken glass, fractured cubes like sugar.

City light enters in through barred windows to cross your face
Like the sun following as you ran through green canes of sugar

Your wildness in the setting sun sparkled gold, diamonds on
Your lip from my lip transferred, from my glass these grains of sugar.

My toes dug into the white sand on the beach, waves pulled out.
The hand of nature piles up, sculpts men like dust, like sugar.

To dust we may all return, to tombs to life to tombs we
Dissolve like salt in the sea, as stirred in your tea, the sugar.

Now in this city I’m alone, in the quiet, in the noise, days go
Bitter or go slow, go like years too poor for sugar. Or before it.

It’s said that love’s like sugar, there is no sweeter. But a
Meal of sweetness will make you hate the taste of sugar.

Ghazal 1

2008-10-09T13:46:00.000-04:00

Ghazal #1

You say my dreams they will come, they are in my hand
But tell me, how can I sleep when my heart's in your hand?

The big sky is thick with bluish cloud like the quilt
wrapped round your shoulder, clutched in your hand.

The wanderer walks on paths laid by God
Like a drop of sweat skips down cracks in your hand.

Wandering we, in dream mountains, climb
Peaks of my talk and your talk, my hand in your hand.

The plane flies its path its journey prepared
Your journey’s a bird: warm, alive in your hand.

The reader reads in sequence, a line understands
We live in parallel like heart, life line in your hand.

Viet Eats God 1

2008-07-20T07:08:00.003-04:00

My friend Viet: banker, philosopher, student, historian...brilliant when sober, genius when stoned or drunk. Profound thought, extreme intelligence, college in Arizona and experience in the midwest of the USA, Vietnamese cultural roots, bold ambition, and English as a second language (although near perfection). Put all of these in a blender and the following is what you will get.

I give you sayings of Viet from session 1am-7am 20th July.

1) "I never really thought about Africans...."

2) "I tell my friends who have converted, if God's so great, tell him to come here and tell me what's up....we can have a chat."

"I mean even with Buddha, you know... Sometimes I got to temple and I am praying and it's like Buddha, you're not doing anything. You've got to start socializing."

3) On "poking" on Facebook: "You're poking me from the other side of the internet...I don't even know where you are!"

4) "The internet is a highway without exits"

Sentence

2008-07-09T12:38:00.000-04:00

I remember the curve of your back dear and
The smell of your skin when you smoke

People are asking me to make decisions.

And you know as well as I that my desires
Are too thick and wide to pave a straight road
A path to travel.

This is not Oz.
Welcome to the Jungle.

Part of me can’t dance; part of me can.
Part of me kisses someone else.

But my mind always goes back to your
Back pockets and your keychain, your soap.

Your eyebrow cocked.
Your ass on a bar stool.

The last breath of a rotten youth cured.

After sometime of breathing deep a different air
Like some wandering senator on a lost weekend
I realize, as he might never do:

That my fingers are yours, dear
My breath is yours
My toes are yours
And I cry your tears.

My wedding band runs through the net of my veins
Like no simple ring could ever do, it binds me to you.

Here, it is dark and leafy and far from your white skin.

People are asking me to make decisions.

I want to stay here, I want to be with you, I argue with myself
And I’m losing.

But you’re a solid ache that is always with me: I love you as I love no other.

I carry you in my body.

It is a malediction.

It is a kiss.

It is a sentence:

A pulling to a thousand pieces.

Clouds to disappear.

Monsoon to drown me.

We are not apart, and never will be.

Whether I like it or not: it’s love.

why i'm voting republican ;)

2008-06-21T03:02:00.000-04:00

Spread the word!

Six:Ten

2008-06-19T04:44:00.000-04:00

Six: Ten

Your hands were so small.

They surprise me: cold and thin, like ice melting.

Delicately, joyfully handing me a cup of coffee. Free and easy

We

Driving too late at night in this too wide city.

You know, I said,

Love was supposed to save me.

You can’t hide, sweet six, you might as well give up.

It is a lie, it is a truth, and we argue it laughing while someone pisses by a tree.

You’re old enough now to say it with some authority.

And so am I:

Love was supposed to save me.

We wait for it like waiting for a train or a bus
And then it will run over us.

Now, instead, it folds itself like origami:

I can fold you up and put you inside me,

But will you fit in that wet centre, so full of nothing

So full of secrets?

You turn up your own volume, fill out every space

Even though you’re Six, so thin as sticks.

But baby,

Love was supposed to save me.

Now it’s
Just eating me alive.

I want to hide in the crook of your arm.

Shelter between your ribs, behind your too-full-lips.

And you can laugh at my mistakes
And you can make me laugh in turn
And fill me with fireworks
And sweetly swear in the dark
Within me or without me.

Because love may still save us
Like the dawn sneaking up in your rearview mirror

When we are happy, hollow, sleepy,
We shall have to see.

Valentine (for Jason)

2007-03-07T02:50:00.000-05:00

New poem here I wrote for Jason for Valentine's Day...yes, we are back together again, and I am THRILLED.

___________________________________________________

Valentine

The mussel holds a female split.
Trees bend like flesh and branch apart.
The tenderest soul is tinder lit
The sign of all that grows is in the heart.

Boy, eating sugared balm from off my lips
Your shoulders graze soft snow that falls
Freezing freely, then melting in our heat.

That said, the dark whistles tight along you
And sings over your head, close. It is night
In the city, and cold. Close, you should know:

I have haunted your hunting ground complete

Savored the taste of your foot in the mud.
The ankle that drove it in, the muscle and the bone
The rhythm of you repeats, metes out a heavy thud.
You were never alone long, no: I followed.

I am the knight on horseback and the horse and highwayman.
I am the cab that takes you out, and brings you home again. And this
This can be our urban legend. Something elegant
written on a napkin

Or sculpted into ice in a public garden after dark…

A dream of red chambers and black stone.

In the car park there is no winter plum
To bloom red in fragile clots, make polka
Dots in snow: Our gloves are sore from
Frostbite.

We can only admire each other,
Full fine as any brush or branch.

Now, we stand together, and know
The curves beneath the coats by heart

And even without seeing, I know that I am right.

Just as in the orange light I know
That plum is red and snow is white.

NEW BLOG: Les Madeleines du Memoir

2006-07-17T12:39:00.000-04:00

Hiya everybody.

I am posting to inform you all that i have a new blogger blog called Les Madeleines du Memoir. It's a food writing and recipe blog. Anyone who knows me well knows that i pride myself on being an excellent, and experimental cook...now I have an outlet for my recipes and food reviews, a good practise place for journalistic writing, and something to divert me between job applications. I hope you will all visit, comment and maybe try some of the recipes!

love,

SR

evening occult

2006-02-07T00:23:00.000-05:00

THis is what i did this evening

it's gonna be part of the installation at the art party on the 24th

see

Boston Art Party

for details.

Nomad

2006-02-06T03:42:00.000-05:00

Last night I had the strangest dream,
Maybe it’s always been this way with
New buds to push out the old, clothes
Rolled in piles in the white morning
Of someone’s apartment on the 3rd floor.

Last night I had the strangest dream
That the coffee I drank and songs I knew
When I was younger were flowing out
A hungry inch from pinched brush to
Pinched paint brush and pen. Only then

When I slept with him, curled up against
His flat back, smoothing down his shoulder
Did I fall into sleep and dream that
As I get older the dreams keep coming
True. Only not maybe like you expect them to.

Last night, the dream I had was strange.

It filled me up, a cool rush that replayed
In snatched stepping to a pace, as I strode
Down the street I felt it making all time a
Nothing. It’s rhythms compressed light.
The sun of summer beat on my hairline

The snow I knew in piles at night.

In the dream I had I could touch the
Spring he brought with him, so soft,
The swinging of a tree, I could touch
My Christmas party in a room cramped
From living. Beijing factories. Witches breathing.

The thousand times I waited for a moment
With someone
alone.

Last night, when my arms wound round his waist
Covered in a sheet and the smell of paint I dreamt
That I
Was home.

poem for Sabrina 11/20: I wanted to bring you Neruda

2005-11-21T00:45:00.000-05:00

I wanted to bring you Neruda

Something warm, yielding: page by page of vanilla paper a
Soft Something nourishing to your bed
Side. I considered John Donne and dismissed him
Out of turn, too wordy I thought, too pained.

Plath was out of the question.

I wanted to bring you Neruda.
Pages of light and lushness, plants to grow around tickling your toes
In the hospital bed. A forest of loving flowers lifting their faces to
Yours. I pushed aside Lacan and Freud for him…pulled
Volumes from the sunlit shelves bringing up wisps of dust.

He wasn’t by the bed side either
Where I had thought he might sit forlorn with the petals of a rose between
Ivory teeth of pages.

A volume of French Renaissance poets seemed dismayed.

I wanted to bring you Neruda.
But I couldn’t find him in the towers of paper lined up like messy soldiers by
The unkempt sofa.

I brought instead the words of a friend between green stiff covers
Because only a few can speak like Neruda of loves and of lovers
Of friends and leaves and light. I would have brought you Whitman
Had I come at night, but since a cold wind blew down the doors
Numbered in gold on Auburn streets, since the high blue sky of early winter
In purpose had no peer

I brought you Shakespeare.

life, love and morning

2005-11-05T11:11:00.000-05:00

so once upon a time i started something about what had happened in the past year...making the snowflakes fall or something like that. Last night I was sitting in my office, revising for my Urdu test on monday when I decided to re do the calender on the chalkboard since it was fast reaching the very end...we put it up in September with 2 and a bit months of information on there, and now it's November so. So i started wiping away the weeks of exhibition openings, the chocolate tastings, the little marker for my birthday, drew little cartoons on thanksgiving and christmas and began to feel quite odd. Christmas is coming soon! WTF???

Last Christmas i was embittered and tired, still with Will, by a thread. I remember sending a package on New Year's Eve of cds and hotchocolate and other paraphenalia. This was a package that he never received...all the cd cases lovingly sketchd with psychadelic patterns and a card with many kisses. It arrived back to me about half its original size from being around the world and wrapped with rubber bands and tape in June, i think, or august. It was a strange little visitor from the past. And now i wonder what would have happened if he had received it. would it have bought us a few weeks more?

What have I done this year. So many things. When I put the calender up i suddenly felt as if i had done nothing and was met by this gaping vaccum. but actually it's not true. So much has happened. It has to be said that this has not been a year of stellar academic acheivment but it has been a trip, to be sure. Poetry readings and activism, falling into depression, fancying people, falling in love, painting, fucking, writing.

and a partridge in a pear tree.

anyway. Now is the time to work on the CV and life and essays and hope to god it all comes together...but first....i think i will take a little nap.

Exhibition Case/Shop Window/Television Screen: CHina on Display week3: World's Fairs

2005-10-03T19:16:00.000-04:00

Exhibition Case/Shop Window/Television Screen

About two years ago now I was laying in bed watching a late night documentary in a last ditch effort to try to sleep after a night up working, insomniac fashion. The program was called “Travels with a Gringo” if I remember correctly, and was on this occasion concerning our young and very socially conscious host’s trip to a silver mine in South America where a crew of miners daily crawled through tiny darkened tunnels and breathed in toxic fumes that were killing them not so slowly, crumbling away their lungs to nothing, in order to obtain silver for trade. The host and the camera crew duly followed the team into the pits of mountains where they would have to pause to try and breathe and discuss what was going to happen when they couldn’t get into the deposit line anymore. The tale was engrossing, sad, painful, but that wasn’t the part I remember. At one point the mining party and the camera crew that followed were sat in semi darkness in a tunnel deep in the mountain, bathed in sweat and gasping for air, chewing coca leaves while waiting for rocks to be moved so that the passage could be cleared. Our socially aware “gringo” turned to the miners and began telling them in Spanish that this film was going to be shown in Britain, in Europe, perhaps all over the world. The implication, I believe, was that people would see the program and care about their plight…that perhaps the lives of the miner could be bettered. One of the miners looked the camera dead on and said, “Do people like watching this sort of thing over there?”

What are we seeking to gain anyway? Is it a view of lives unraveling that makes us feel magnanimous if we offer a few dollars of aid? What the miner meant, I think, was partially about what the intent was of watching him and his friends struggle and die to eke out a living, what kind of vicarious thrill or sense of Schadenfreude was being enacted, or at least, these are the question that I thought of when I thought about what he had said, but also, why would people want to watch something that is just life? Just real life. Tragic, happy, drunken, confused, dangerous, dirty, dramatic, mundane. This is what made me think of this instance two years ago when considering this week’s readings.

In The World as Exhibition, Mitchell argues that Europeans and Americans sought endlessly to create a replica of reality, a picture that would encompass all in one imperious and imperial vision. This might also be thought of as a constellation of that “Universe of Symbols” discussed in the introduction to the discussion of the Louisiana Purchase Fair. It also makes me think of how the television functions in today’s society as both of these things, as a sort of constant world’s fair at one remove…pictures encompassing and representing with a conceit of reality by virtue of accuracy, trueness to life, and all this to such a degree that television and cinema like all truly circulating and potent cultural phenomena influences lifes expectations and the way we live, just as Mitchell argues the World’s Fairs altered the epistemological frames, symbologies and view point of Fair goers.

In thinking about our South American miner, as he looks through the TV and into the living rooms, that is, past the digital velvet rope that cordons “us” from “them” something else occurred to me in connection with exhibition and the World’s Fairs. Something about how the “natives” experience the fair, what looks were directed at the specimens of Europeans or Americans, perhaps just “the White Men” in their Native Costumes as they filed past conveniently for view. If the World’s Fair, as the grandest type of exhibition, the crucible of a universe of symbols that allows the existence of a certain sort of cultural order, has a narrative, can that narrative be read against the grain and if so how?

Mitchell’s article about the Egyptian view of the Europeans begins to consider this question, but I would like to know more about how those gazes functioned and how that dynamic worked…what of those Filipino guardsmen who strolled about with St. Louis schoolteachers? What did they think of the fair? What did they think of St. Louis? Or what indeed became of Columbus Chicago? This is one further aspect of the literature produced on the world’s fair as describe in Hinsley’s piece on the Colombian exposition…the extraordinary discrepancy between the scene portrayed and the interpretation given in the literature below in for example the “portrait” of the “turk” and his family. The caption is extraordinarily racist and strange, but even more it just seems so bizarre in reference to the picture. The man in the picture, although he looks posed, looks determined, half looks at the camera with a confronting gaze. The caption seems to be the American photographer reassuring himself from behind the lens as to the jocular, not quite real, not quite serious status of the “primitive” “brown man”…that is…unable to quite make the scene fit a picture by photographing it, he has to tidy up the edges with literature, place the image firmly into a “symbolic universe” so as to render it comprehensible.

All the talk of the camera and cameraman being the ultimate unseen, voyeuristically partaking in pleasures of the screen does raise one important additional point in this connection, however, before we throw up our hands and throw the camera out the window. All too often the anonymous male gaze of the camera is understood to be an imposing and dominating factor, a machine that changes behavior, changes images, renders them up to a (Western) god of photography/pictures for exhibition of a real that undermines the subjectivity of the people portrayed. I want to argue that while it is true that the cameraman often aims to go unseen in a fashion, to be unpresent, and to record people going about their business authentically there is indeed agency in the sideward glance, in the look away from the camera, and inn the getting on with your life that the “subjects” of the photograph rarely get credit for. A look directly into the face of the camera is powerful indeed, but are we so egotistical as to assume that this is the only way in which subjects can b rendered real?

Thus too an approach which does not conform to the requirements of the world’s fair can still be seen as an approach with its own agency and consciousness of power. The Chinese displays are endlessly contrasted with those of the Japanese contingent at the various Fairs of the Fair Fever at the turn of the 20th century, and the strategy employed by the Japanese curators is analysed and understood to be a political one. While it is true that the approach of creating a space incomprehensible to the symbolic order of the exposition did not necessarily serve US?chinese political relations well, the way in which those displays were mounted does warrant attention, in that they represent a different epistemological space, and perhaps can give ideas about alternate modes of exhibition and the understanding of same with regard to Chinese art. It is interesting too to compare the US political stance vis a vis China to former discourse about Japan. Endless articles appear today asking if “cChina is the New Japan?” (what an odd question) and by virtue of the question itself the conclusion is made to some degree, as before, we identify something of the “Yankee” spirit in the entrepreneurial dealing of the mysterious east…”with luck and pluck they may go into business for themselves”

That the “East” and particularly the ultimate other that is still so often constituted by the aesthetics and cultural values of China is still engendered as a market place in European and American pictures of “real” life should come as no surprise in the era of late capitalism, when the “imperial” gaze of the camera has become as ubiquitous for Indian and Chinese tourists as for travelers from the US. Paris, that endless labyrinth of mirrors, and maze of simulacra was host in 1997, I believe to an exhibition of Chinese goods at one of it’s major palais to commerce, Printemps, for example, and such eposition have it would seem, moved from the educational to the truly commercial sphere, or else frayed and bled into the kaleidoscopic pictures of television news. But if we acknowledge that the symbolic universe, and indeed the World’s Fair is, to some degree, alive and well at the dawn of the 21st century in the form of brothel holidays to Thailand, Fox News and the Department Store, what of the exhibition space, the museum. In the series of essays Cosmopolitanisms by Homi Bhabha et al. a convincing argument was made for rethinking the city, walking against paths, zig zagging across squares, walking on the grass in theoretical as well as physical terms. The same principles must be applied to exhibition.

Last week discussion of the trend for nostalgic curatorship was discussed in some of our readings…curatorship that would seek to create an exhibition as it really happened if such a thing can even be entertained. While there must be room for this kind of psychological play too, such a nostalgia would doubtless find it’s dead end in the curatorship of most Chinese art from before the late 20th century, besides creating of the past a picture, a cinematic other to be studied, and of the people who lived it objects to be viewed at a safe distance and with air conditioning. Taste makers, experts have always been at the forefront of defining the category of Chinese Art, or Japanese Art, and this is likely to remain a continuing trend, but to form a sort of heteroglossia of back steps, misreadings, rereadings, and gaps in this visual universe for the viewer to inhabit, and to acknowledge that the viewer makes the exhibtion as much as the exhibition influences the viewer, in a sense to put the viewer on display is perhaps the only way to circumvent the totality of hegemony in favor of personal agency. The viewer become the exhibition as they internalize it and it’s values long after the installation comes down and it’s pieces broken up, long after the Filipinos develop small pox and the “turks” (interesting to note modern usage of that word) are sent home because, after all, “some memories don’t fade”.

There are a great man questions that remain, as I have outlined above, but one that is particularly “beautiful and piquant” is this:

What would an anthropological exposition of Americans in their natural habitat look like?

PAN 9

2005-09-25T21:07:00.000-04:00

last night i had the strangest dream...

New Poem: V for Vaudeville (draft 1)

2005-09-01T15:53:00.000-04:00

The cinema died in celluloid swells that sparked my skirt,
Dyed in dyes that flaked off between my fingers where it made soft roses (hidden)
in the white of my hands. That dye like a butterfly.

From sepia canyons the light wove in throes and fits to hit hard the soft surface of a dirty mountain stream.
Not clean
Like some book or show but filled with mud, silt, sand,
leaves
feces.

I pulled my skirt up and ran the way that dogs do:

To Fro To Fro

Pell mell they say.
Oh hell.
Oh leather.

On the other side I saw the dark coming on like Dor-
othy, the Emerald city.

THERE IS: NO PLACE

Noplacelikethoserubylips noplacelikethoserubyslips
But as the clouds gathered green, I watched the sunset
Of the screen in waves of
Blink ing
light.

The cinema died that night with a one-two punch, a whispered kiss.
Pomp, Romp & Ceremony as I made it down the quiet hall alone, a weary traveller in some solemn steamy dream with no C for Cinema only V for...

The credits rolled a final time in step as, beautifully,
Tragically, with a car chase, a final sigh, a fandango, a top hat scream, dropofblood like a black pearl

(Perfect, never drying)
Cinema lay dying.

A silence. A cut.

It died then, in the moment I found you ,
down the town below
in those theatricals, hands singing like tough birds
Belly like fish, and the eyes of a shorn whore
Vellum Vaudeville reborn in fetish garb:
Oh hell.
Oh leather.

(Mary, Joe and Sade. A rebirth of entertainments gored, gone and dog-eared).

You whiteness, fleshed, no longer flat and light as light as light on screen had been.

You, the new god in stereo with a seraglio of cigarettes, rubbers and loves.

When push comes to shove you will make it XY XY XY: high, dry
the unlikely hero of flesh and blood.

No poison will harm you,
And your fingers burst through the gloves of some high fiction, as they reach through me.

This is not film
This is just Noir
This is not cinema
This is just verite

There may be dancing in the final scene but
That tango will be for you and me alone
For no eyes in space will keep time
When your eye look into mine.

And you light a cigarette in your own style
Forever undirected.

dream brother study 1

2005-08-30T02:24:00.000-04:00

this is what i did today.

Interlude

2005-08-16T14:38:00.000-04:00