Un-belonging

I Ask My Mother to Sing

BY LI-YOUNG LEE

She begins, and my grandmother joins her.

Mother and daughter sing like young girls.

If my father were alive, he would play

his accordion and sway like a boat.

I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,

nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch

the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers

running away in the grass.

But I love to hear it sung;

how the waterlilies fill with rain until

they overturn, spilling water into water,

then rock back, and fill with more.

Both women have begun to cry.

But neither stops her song.

I read this poem while sitting in my balcony in the warm winter sun on a Saturday morning, sipping a milky-sweet coffee. And what happened to the women at the end of the poem happened to me. My eyes filled with tears but I didn’t stop reading. The love and the loss seeps from Lee’s words and you resonate with the sense of longing and displacement in a way you would when you have lost something you loved deeply – a place, a time or a person. Or maybe all three.

The love is transmitted through the act of singing; as you notice that Lee who has never seen the places sung of, can still describe them with the beauty and detail that can only come from really seeing. And one really sees only things one loves – be it a flower or a painting or a science experiment. In this case, I imagine Lee visualising the scenes his mother and grandmother sing of and then placing each word on the page gently-“how the waterlilies fill with rain until / they overturn, spilling water into water, / then rock back, and fill with more.”

It is a simple sight, and yet it captures the essence of cycle of existence – filling with water, which sustains us, but being overturned by the weight of the very same thing that sustains us, and then springing back to reach out to it again. How wonderfully silly the waterlily and by extension each of us are. That we keep yearning for the very things that keep testing our endurance and will one day most likely drown us. Perhaps it was that realization, that we are helpless in the face of our natures, that brought tears -tears of contentment and acceptance that one cannot change what we choose to be hurt by. Just as we cannot change what we choose to love.

Perspective

Sad

By Jeremy Radin

It is sad to tip the kettle over the cup & discover
there is no more tea in the kettle. It is sad when the
diner is closed. It is sad when the hawk seizes the
rat & sad when the hawk misses. It is sad when the
child encounters too early. It is sad when a mother
apologizes. It is sad when the aphids have chewed
holes in the lacinato kale. It is sad when there is a
shopping list taped to a refrigerator. It is sad in the
morning, Bach or no Bach. It is sad in winter &
depending on the city sadder in summer. It is sad to
finish a book & sad to not finish. It is sad to make
love imperfectly. It is sad when the body is ready
but not the mind. It is sad when [ ] has left the
group chat. It is sad when the wrong thing dies. It is
sad when it is three in the morning & the wind is
howling & the moon is like a burning umbrella oh
god who will put up with me

This poem is like one of those moments when you just sigh – a long deep sigh – because the enormity of something hits you, but you can’t put your finger on what exactly. The pit of your stomach knows, you just can’t bring it up enough. Like after sharing a really beautiful and intimate moment with someone you burst into tears because you just know it is the last such moment. And you can’t decide whether to be grateful it happened or angry it’s over, but either way it’s somehow sad.

This poem is another example of how to use language to say difficult things with sensitivity, grace and balance. It opens up old and painful wounds for the narrator and yet does it with gentleness and love, so that even pain can seem desirable. The words clung to me because they reminded me again of something I’ve grappled with for a while – that no matter what you do someone is going to be sad, depending on whether they’re the hawk or the rat. The entire poem oscillates between different states of sadness, from the mundane (“It is sad when there is a shopping list taped to a refrigerator”) to the profound (“It is sad when the wrong thing dies”) as though there is but one state of existence, and it is sadness, which of course stems from the same source as happiness, just like love and hate are the same thing.

And so there is no escape for sadness. The people or things who bring us the greatest happiness (the tea, the book) also bring us the greatest sadness (discovering there is no more tea in the kettle, finishing the book). The things in the middle which bring us but little joy or sadness are like noise which hums in the background, but which we never fully tune in to, which never really make us feel alive. So let us embrace sadness, the poem seems to say as it reaches its climactic end and unravels into what sounds like a cry, a plea – “oh god who will put up with me” – the sentence left incomplete as if that’s what sadness is – a state of incompleteness.

The art of losing

One Art
BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Every day I fight to make sure I control the world enough to not lose things – my keys, my time, my sanity, my silence – in an endeavour to have small victories, so that when the big losses come – dreams, loves, homes, cities, the ones you cannot control – it doesn’t feel so bad. The gratitude journal still has entries to make.

On some days though the small losses pile up and make it impossible to see the larger picture. On some days it seems like you’re only losing and no matter what you do, you lose. You feel helpless. So you take a step back and let things go. Like a kite in the sky, pull only when it’s looking up otherwise let the string go.

It wasn’t any line about this poem, but the whole poem that smacked me in the face when I read it, as if Elizabeth Bishop over 40 years ago wrote a small part of my life in her diary. Good poetry does that – it has a way of making every reader feel that it is personal. The elegance with which she builds up from the small losses to the big ones, so that when she speaks of the big ones, it’s like a little prick in your heart rather than a slap – you understand, rather than feel sorry for the narrator. As opposed to this piece where I’ve put my emotions up front. Clearly I have yet to master the art of losing.

Simulated Annealing

Do You Speak Persian?
By Kaveh Akbar

Some days we can see Venus in mid-afternoon. Then at night, stars
separated by billions of miles, light travelling years

to die in the back of an eye.

Is there a vocabulary for this—one to make dailiness amplify
and not diminish wonder?

I have been so careless with the words I already have.

I don’t remember how to say home
in my first language, or lonely, or light.

I remember only
delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you,

and shab bekheir, goodnight.

How is school going, Kaveh-joon?
Delam barat tang shodeh.

Are you still drinking?
Shab bekheir.

For so long every step I’ve taken
has been from one tongue to another.

To order the world:
I need, you need, he/she/it needs.

The rest, left to a hungry jackal
in the back of my brain.

Right now our moon looks like a pale cabbage rose.
Delam barat tang shodeh.

We are forever folding into the night.
Shab bekheir.

I read this poem today morning and you know how sometimes you feel like a piece of the puzzle snaps and clicks into place somewhere inside you? Yeah, that happened.

I have been going through a rut, writing-wise, and it seems like my own words are shallow and meaningless. And that has been disheartening because words, my own and others, have always pushed me through difficult times. I think though that this happens in periods of uncertainty sometimes; the lack of clarity in thought and action forms a self-sustaining and unproductive loop. Instead, if we just take one step and do something – anything – or write a few words – about anything – it can become a self-sustaining productive loop where actions (doing something or writing words) drive thought, which drives further actions and leads to clarity. So today, I am going to build on the energy given by the little “aha” moment I had after reading this poem and resume writing, by writing about the poems that I have been reading, that have helped me sort through the thought soup in my head.

Why did this poem speak to me? Well the first thing was the resonance with these lines.

Then at night, stars
separated by billions of miles, light travelling years

to die in the back of an eye.

Wow! We have been discussing topics of light at work, especially about the light from certain stars and how we don’t “see” all of it, because its not in the visible spectrum, and so in some way that light “dies” at the back of our eyes. That was one cause of the resonance. But also the desolation captured in the words “to die in the back of an eye”, the pathos of the light traveling across unimaginable distances and time, only to die in the back of an eye – the futility of the endeavour – brings perspective to one’s own life. How small our own defeats compared to this?

Anyone who has lived away from the people they love knows, how one of the things that keeps one grounded is, ironically, the sky and the thought that your dear ones lie under the same sky and see the same celestial bodies.

I have been so careless with the words I already have.

For so long every step I’ve taken
has been from one tongue to another.

The loneliness captured in these lines – for when you live away words are all you have, and a few careless ones can be the difference between “I’m here” and “I’m gone for ever”. You take one small step from one tongue to another, but one wrong step and suddenly you are a language-orphan, grappling to communicate in a tongue that feels alien and remote.

Sigh! This poem has captured my heart and more importantly has liberated my words – words which have enabled me to frame the uncertainty and put it up on the wall so now I can stare at it every day until it unravels itself and the path shows.

Reincarnations

It has been cold in Gandhinagar, and for the past week I have been dreaming of a childhood favourite, seviyan-sabudana kheer. I don’t know if the combination is really a thing, but it was in our home; the warm, creamy milk sticking to your tongue, while the slippery seviyan and tiny, slimy sabudana slithered down. I can’t tell what brought it on, but on it was, and so this morning all preparation was in place. The full-fat milk was procured, the sabudana soaked and boiled to speed things up.

At breakfast I opened one of my favourite companions of silence, The Marginalian and before I could start the article I wanted to read, I got the gift of this poignant poem, which speaks of the liberation of believing that one deserves and accepting love and happiness.

“so that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years
you simply don’t want to
any more
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.”

Perhaps the first thing we need to do to move in the direction of accepting love is to know, accept and love ourselves and Rilke speaks about this when he argues for the importance of solitude, juxtaposing solitude and love, as Maria Papova quotes in her essay,

“Don’t let your solitude obscure the presence of something within it that wants to emerge. Precisely this presence will help your solitude expand. People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult, as is true for everything alive. Everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way and against all opposition, straining from within and at any price to become distinctively itself. It is good to be solitary, because solitude is difficult, and that a thing is difficult must be even more of a reason for us to undertake it.

To love is good too, for love is difficult. For one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us, the utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation. With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. This learning is ever a committed and enduring process.”

As I reflected on this interplay between solitude, love and creativity, the article pointed me to another one of my companions of silence, On Being and a conversation on Rilke that Krista Tippett had with the translators of his book, Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. Perfect, I thought, I would listen to it while cooking my kheer.

So the pot of milk went on the fire, and Krista Tippett’s warm voice filled my kitchen. The conversation began with a discussion on Rilke’s perspective on “loving the questions themselves” and being comfortable with the mystery that is this life and world. The speakers brought the perspective of interacting with life and the world, and I imagine it as being in a “game” of sorts, playing with life and the world, and the point was to keep playing. It moved on to Rilke’s thoughts on the genders as being counterparts, a position which according to Joanna Macy the world has still not reached. I am inspired by the clarity and simplicity of this idea and makes one wonder why people find it so hard to accept this equivalence.

As the conversation proceeded, the milk thickened and the seviyan roasted in ghee. The aroma was exciting and familiar, the sweetness of milk and the earthiness of wheat and ghee. When the milk was ready I put in the seviyan and the almost cooked sabudana to allow them to soften and convert to slimy deliciousness. The sweetener would go in at the end. Usually it is sugar, but it is winter and I decided to use jaggery because of its bold cane flavours. I knew I was taking a risk because jaggery is acidic and can cause milk to split, but I thought I could control it by putting it in at the end.

Krista, Joanna and Anita moved on to solitude and love that I had read about earlier. The milk thickened further, the seviyan softened, the sabudana blended in, and I put in the pieces of jaggery. It melted quickly and the milk turned brown. The smells were inviting and things seemed to be almost there, when the milk became grainy – Mr. Murphy had invited himself in. I should have been disappointed, but I didn’t have the energy. I knew what I had to do – keep cooking it down until it thickened and became like halwa. It would take another hour, and I accepted that there was no more kheer in the offing, turned the fire down, made myself some coffee and sat in the sun with it, as I listened to Krista and Anita speaking of how Rilke’s ideas on solitude and love had helped them through their respective divorces.

Rilke speaks of love not as a merging, but as about being oneself fully when he says “For love is not about merging. It’s a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another.” He urges the young man he is writing to, to know himself, become himself, before merging with anyone else. Joanna spoke of how in a 56 year long marriage, she held a world within herself and was in some ways a stranger to her partner. How difficult I thought to myself and yet how liberating an idea.

As the conversation proceeded to how the speakers saw the relevance of Rilke’s ideas in the current world – which was at the middle of the pandemic – my thoughts stayed behind on solitude. I stirred the pot as the split milk thickened, and became like a mix of chana and khoa. I watched and waited and thought about whether one becomes oneself or someone else in solitude. And how does one find the “world within oneself”; are the elements which constitute this world always present within and we unearth them, or do we create them anew in solitude? What is this world? Is this merely what we think and feel and like and dislike, and what is our purpose?

The kheer became halwa, with a wonderfully grainy, yet creamy mouth feel and the rich flavours and textures of milk, jaggery, sabudana and seviyan brought me comfort. One can’t go wrong with certain combinations of ingredients – like flour and fat, and milk and jaggery; they always combine to create taste and comfort. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the final product isn’t what you planned it to become – milk, jaggery, seviyan and sabudana would together always be delicious. But you have to have milk, jaggery, seviyan and sabudana.

Komorebi

The sideways glance of a secret lover
long ago lost, filtering through faces in the crowd,
meets yours across the long room.
Your longing creates a web of emptiness on the dance floor.

His eyes dig into desires in your undergrowth,
as if one brush of the air from his gliding fingers
falling on your dry skin, and you would,
still, crumble into the shadows.

A stolen conversation in forgotten words,
in corners of virtual worlds –
a word here, a picture there,
sometimes spoken, mostly imagined –
and the light whips into your insides,
where darkness had left you dry.

Picture Credits: A friend.
The title “Komorebi” is a Japanese word meaning roughly “sunlight streaming through the trees”, an image I have been obsessed with forever. I wrote a poem on this theme a couple of years ago as well, but then times were different, I was different.

Home Life

“There’s an earthworm in the house, and its bleeding!” 
My 10-year old calls out this morning.
So what, I think to myself, yet another earthworm.
I continue my sweeping, undeterred.

“It’s bleeding so much.” he cries in a pained voice.
I don’t respond, and then my sweeping brings me to that spot –
A trail of thin red blood, as if from a cut on a human finger.
I am surprised at the redness.

“Take it back to the earth,” his father says,”he will survive.” 
Thus begins the rescue mission – a paper placed in its path,
The worm creeps slowly onto it, turning the paper red;
My son waits patiently for the worm to settle on its magic carpet,
Then gently picks the paper up, carries it outside slowly,
Places it in the mud in the garden, hoping it survives at home.

My son returns and washes his hands.
I have a string of instructions for him –
But I pause, and stare at the blood trail;
I remember it’s important sometimes
To take a moment
To give life a chance
To be.

Sometimes …

A single word,
An entire poem,
Sits at the bottom of my screen.

Sometimes

Like
Perhaps

Reeking of unfinished sentences,
Of unspoken circumstances,
Of probable realities and likely falsehoods.

Sometimes

Has hope
Even when one doesn’t know what comes after,
A twist in the tale
Or an obvious end?

Sometimes …
Hiding stories within its bosom

It hurts, sometimes, between a 6 and a 8.
Sometimes I feel so angry.
Your actions are so confusing sometimes.
The sky, the sky is so blue sometimes.

Sometimes …

Sometimes I feel I would be better alone;
Sometimes I want to laugh the way we used to laugh,
Just sometimes,
Not always.

Sometimes I want too much.

Sometimes I can’t believe I’m so lucky.
Sometimes I can’t believe its true.
Sometimes I know its not,
And still, sometimes, I keep on.

Sometimes is what life always is,
Sometimes it becomes death.

I am not nice.

Everyone wants a girl who is “nice”,
A girl who will make them “very very happy”.
To which I smirk and say, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, but I will not make you happy.”
So you can forget “very very happy”.
Because I am not nice,
I am fire.

If you are malleable like clay, I will make you strong,
If you are brittle like wax, I will melt you.

I may warm you, with gentle waves of truth,
Or burn you, with sharp stabs of the reality to your soul.

I may open your eyes to the glorious vistas of the world,
Or I may rub your face in the emptiness of your self.

But one thing is sure,
I will not make you happy.
I will shake you and make you uncomfortable
I will make you question everything you know
I will make you want to hide.

Because I am not nice,
I am fire.

Desires in the time of Coronavirus

I found some dried figs in my fridge a few weeks ago which have been in there for several months. I had bought them on one of my travels; it was so long ago that I can’t remember now where it is from, although I do remember that it was very highly recommended by the local people, which is why I bought them. I have always had mixed feelings about figs – they are great for baking a fruit cake, but too sweet to eat otherwise and so I always end up having too many figs in my fridge.

When the lockdown started, things we usually eat started becoming harder to come by. It became difficult to step out into the bigger markets to buy meat and fish, so we started cutting down our trips and rationing our meat and fish. I have been craving mutton for several months now, but mutton was even harder to come by. To distract myself, I rummaged through my pantry and fridge and made a mental list of everything “interesting” that I could still cook with whatever I had. All I needed was a little creativity. The figs were a little tricky – its not the season to bake fruit cake and I couldn’t find a recipe with dried figs that interested me. And so I decided that the figs would be eaten the way they were meant to be eaten – as fruit!

One morning as I continued to miss a good mutton curry while chopping the figs up to put in my oatmeal, I thought about why I didn’t like figs. I realized it was because I was so overwhelmed by the sweetness of the figs, I could never taste its other characteristics. Figs have a deep and complex flavour and a unique texture – a flavour which, if one could moderate out the sweetness, was very interesting. So a few chopped up figs in bland oatmeal, balances things out nicely and makes both fig and oatmeal enjoyable. Of course, it didn’t make me crave mutton any less, it made me appreciate figs more.

Each day now is an awareness of every ingredient I have and how their unique characteristics add flavour to the food I cook. It is about being thankful for that one ingredient when so many have nothing. I take every ingredient and add a different experience to today by creating something new, just being sure to throw out every ingredient that’s rotten.

And if you’re incredibly lucky – like it happened with me today – sometimes you will find the one ingredient that you felt was really “missing”. Yes, mutton!