When under ether

----

Dashal, Himachal Pradesh, Oct, 10

----

The silence that broke the noise was a violet-green on her eyelid as it made the great journey into ether and then all the surrounding space, bringing a sort of peace and closure on the inherent stillness that is the essence of us petty humans. Its nocturnary now, the owls are making their appearances on the trees looking at the moon and wondering about patterns and pictures, the wildernests of our earliest subconscious mentalities...ingrained like cups of rice...harvest in full bloom.

Now, the winter has arrived to bring a sort of whiteness into the hearts of us Himachali's metaphorically through snow. The illusion of black on white, now wiped clean, like a clean slate waiting for a new word or a drawing of a bird perched on a tree.

Dream Brother (Jeff Buckley)

There is a child sleeping near his twin
The pictures go wild in a rush of wind
That dark angel he is shuffling in
Watching over them with his black feather wings unfurled

The love you lost with her skin so fair
Is free with the wind in her butterscotch hair
Her green eyes blew goodbyes
With her head in her hands
and your kiss on the lips of another
Dream Brother, with your tears scattered round the world.

Don't be like the one who made me so old
Don't be like the one who left behind his name
'Cause they're waiting for you like I waited for mine
And nobody ever came...

I feel afraid and I call your name
I love your voice and your dance insane
I hear your words and I know your pain
Your head in your hands and her kiss on the lips of another
Your eyes to the ground
and the world spinning round forever
Asleep in the sand with the ocean washing over...

PS. Was walking back, the moon was full power staring at the mountains, the snow was a brilliant white, shining back... :)

Epiphany

Jai Rumsu Devata and then Snow.
A white Vashisht.
An important day.

Sky over 11

On. All systems go. Hinterland is home.

Excerpt: Ardh Satya

Chakravyuh mein ghusne se pehle,
kaun tha mein aur kaisa tha,
yeh mujhe yaad hi na rahega.
Chakravyuh mein ghusne ke baad,
mere aur chakravyuh ke beech,
sirf ek jaanleva nikat’ta thi,
iska mujhe pata hi na chalega.
Chakravyuh se nikalne ke baad,
main mukt ho jaoon bhale hi,
phir bhi chakravyuh ki rachna mein
farq hi na padega.
Marun ya maarun,
maara jaoon ya jaan se maardun.
iska faisla kabhi na ho paayega.
Soya hua aadmi jab
neend se uthkar chalna shuru karta hai,
tab sapnon ka sansar use,
dobara dikh hi na paayega.
Us roshni mein jo nirnay ki roshni hai
sab kuchh s’maan hoga kya?
Ek palde mein napunsakta,
ek palde mein paurush,
aur theek taraazu ke kaante par
ardh satya.

----

Before entering the circle of deceit, who I was, and what I was, I would not remember. After entering the circle of deceit, (there was) between me and the circle, only a deathly intimacy that I never realized. After leaving the circle of deceit, even if I am set free, the design of the circle of deceit, will hardly be different. Whether I kill, or die, am killed or kill (the other) these questions will never be decided. When a sleeping man awakes and steps forth, then the world of dreams may never be seen again (by him). In that, the light of Decision, will everything be level? On one tray (of balance) is impotence, and on the other is Manhood, and exactly at the needle point, a half-truth.

----

From a scene in the film "Ardh Satya". Written by Vijay Tendulkar. The image emerged because of S's WH Auden poem... so makes for good accidental poem tennis.

The Labyrinth

Anthropos apteros for days
Walked whistling round and round the Maze,
Relying happily upon
His temperment for getting on.

The hundreth time he sighted, though,
A bush he left an hour ago,
He halted where four alleys crossed,
And recognized that he was lost.

"Where am I?" Metaphysics says
No question can be asked unless
It has an answer, so I can
Assume this maze has got a plan.

If theologians are correct,
A Plan implies an Architect:
A God-built maze would be, I'm sure,
The Universe in minature.

Are data from the world of Sense,
In that case, valid evidence?
What in the universe I know
Can give directions how to go?

All Mathematics would suggest
A steady straight line as the best,
But left and right alternately
Is consonant with History.

Aesthetics, though, believes all Art
Intends to gratify the heart:
Rejecting disciplines like these,
Must I, then, go which way I please?

Such reasoning is only true
If we accept the classic view,
Which we have no right to assert,
According to the Introvert.

His absolute pre-supposition
Is - Man creates his own condition:
This maze was not divinely built,
But is secreted by my guilt.

The centre that I cannot find
Is known to my unconscious Mind;
I have no reason to despair
Because I am already there.

My problem is how not to will;
They move most quickly who stand still;
I'm only lost until I see
I'm lost because I want to be.

If this should fail, perhaps I should,
As certain educators would,
Content myself with the conclusion;
In theory there is no solution.

All statements about what I feel,
Like I-am-lost, are quite unreal:
My knowledge ends where it began;
A hedge is taller than a man."

Anthropos apteros, perplexed
To know which turning to take next,
Looked up and wished he were a bird
To whom such doubts must seem absurd.

The real living, breathing, seeing Hinterland becomes a possibility.
Today. :) Purpose, finally. Purple. Its all purple in this blue in green, colours collaborating, artists collaborating, phases of colour with Reich's score on top, the seeds are sown, the intagibility of the fruit is like the brook's morning raga...

Girl (Soil, Himachal Pradesh)

Blue in green, nature with the intervention of mankind, brought to life in Soil. Of those extravagant moments in a time out of time, lapsed in a momentary unconvention, breaking the little metallic pieces of our snazzy homes, the twinkle in her eye brought back time...and then brought back hope. Time to come home...

Hearts Adjacent

Shot through the Fog
Breaking Winter up by shooting numbers from the clock/The cat sleeps on the atlas in Alsace Lorraine, dreaming long grass and birds on the wire/I have memories no deeper than this glass and some besides that stretch history twice/In a super 8 film colour haze, a scratched nostalgia that runs through my cogs - shot through the fog; time taking care of whatever I cared about/ So you are lost somewhere in here - your body, a raft,spinning towards the falls/Your death claimed me too - there were two throats in the noose but mine now swallows whiskey, mine is not now bruised/The black mouth of this month, bruised lips, black ice, forms a sickly smile across London's sky.
----
Certainty
There are more people alive now than have ever lived - I read that somewhere and instantly thought it impossible but if it were to be true, I wonder that, if we keep living this fast, no-one will have time to die/I've met people whose lovers died in war and I've wondered what this helplessness could be like - one minute there's a whole life entwined with yours and the next, just a space and scattered clues/When I watch old films in which animals appear, I get sad because those animals are certainly dead now - and that certainty prompts my private epitaph and I have to say it out loud : "That dog is dead, that cat is dead, that horse is dead..."
----
Piano Magic, a wonderful new discovery.

Forgetfulness by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones. Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag, and even now as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay. Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue, not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall, well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Animated Poetry

Start. Point the six lines to an arrow, bring the curtain down with a flame insignia at the centre, point of kilter, the name of the sound is given to the blade of grass, that cosmic messenger, our hearts pointing heavenwards, like trees waiting for some sort of sign from a being that can only speak and understand Visra, the language of the dead. They came with dafoodils on their collars, pelicans in their wallets and white hinterlands in their hearts, they looked for a home, they looked for a refuge in the hills, and those autumn-time tea's on the verandah looking at the Himalayas without perspective.

The Probability of an Epiphany. Cues - Joy, Charlie, the age of aquarius, once in twelve years, the remergence of If and its infinite possibilities, India Fraterna, Improbable Fire, Instant Friendship, Impermanent Feedback, Idiot Face, Imperceptible Future, Ishtaaq Firoha, dot dot dot. Really...how weird all this is, the way life moves and time moves always revealing new shapes and colours, new probabilities, new failures and new hope. Its the age of aquarius, I am connected in a lunar sort of way into the whole once-in-twelve-year's epiphany-thing. Which road, which path, which way forward, why which, why how, why when?

The Best Cigarette by Billy Collins

There are many that I miss
having sent my last one out a car window
sparking along the road one night, years ago.

The heralded one, of course:
after sex, the two glowing tips
now the lights of a single ship;
at the end of a long dinner
with more wine to come
and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;
or on a white beach,
holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

How bittersweet these punctuations
of flame and gesture;
but the best were on those mornings
when I would have a little something going
in the typewriter,
the sun bright in the windows,
maybe some Berlioz on in the background.
I would go into the kitchen for coffee
and on the way back to the page,
curled in its roller,
I would light one up and feel
its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work
little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress,
signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century
it was moving forward.
That was the best cigarette,
when I would steam into the study
full of vaporous hope
and stand there,
the big headlamp of my face
pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

The Amphibian

And ten more kollisions for 10.10.10. / p

Accent of Time

The quirky world of Gemma Correll.

None in words.

VS Arts declares...

VS Arts opening his heart (art) out in protest to the common declarations by scientists the world over, about the world getting over. He declared that the earth will continue to live on and on and we could go visit him and his stall of paintings in Vashisht in 2013. Its his guarantee. How he spoke on camera, theatric denouements thrown in for effect, silences, those eyes looking away to Sai (as he cleans the xillum). It came as no surprise that I am now in the heartland, Hinterland is omnipresent, visceral, like the soul's last look back at the illusory world of the mind. It was 11.10, then, its 12.12 now.

Circular Inconsistency, Vashisht

Life is back. Vulnerability is back. Inconsistency is back.

More Kollisions

Look here, K.
And today I dedicate the Kollisions to M, for her wonderful spirit, for the stories she told me today, for that constant shaking of her ponytail, her ragas, her showdown with a gay Hitler-fanatic, that punchline, the beers at Satya's, remembering Athlete and Trading Air, those moments later at her place listening to the wonderful Kalapini Komkali, her stories in New York, her two weeks of magic, my one week of magic, how cosmically it all came together, one day before I leave for the hills.

Eyeless

Lyric - Slipknot

And then there were those things, the other things, the things of the mind, the nothings of the heart, the camera-tilt of the supereye, the threadless machine we once called Industry, that white-lining on the satin that never untangles from its source, that limitless light within a drop of water, the rain pouring down for ten seconds, and the water looking at the sun in macrovision remembering the moon's sudden disappearance in the last four days of summer...

The hills come rolling this time of the year. :)

Life is too short to wait for things that might never come.

XX1008

It is never easy to put words to what is essentially a subterranean process, or to speak about my work as though I am separate from it. To me, the act of creating these works is a process of evolution, a process that I go through along with the materials I use. And I use the word evolution, not in a linear sense of development, or progress, but as a tangled process that involves chaos, contradictions, emotional fluctuations, transformations and tangential leaps.

Is deterioration as beautiful a process as creation?
Is reality less real than artifice?
Is chaos the perfect symmetry?
Does death point a knowing finger at life?
What does a malignant bloom look like?

I go in search of the answers to these questions, and my sculptures are born along the way. - Sakshi Gupta
---
I'm enjoying the inconsistency of Sakshi Gupta's wonderful art.

01.10.10

A good start to 10.10. Today I think of the minds limited ways as opposed to the hearts unlimited ways, like that duality in nature, the consistency of the seas as opposed to the inconsistency of the hills. Its 01.10.10. Consistency of the clock throwing everything else out of balance.

Sans Soleil (Opening Shot)

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.

Three days, almost...

...and I'll be back in The Inward Arc - Transvisionary Centre for Art & Aesthetics with Joy. In a few days I'll be having nice chai in that gorgeous electric blue woodenhouse, watching people walk by, hearing Cheengu cheengu, cheengu, watching Joy write those filmnames with yellow, blue, red chalk, todays screenings at Inward Arc... writing with so much care, his supramentality in his paintings, 108 ways of seeing, Om-Sheela, such positivity and then Sai Baba Mahadev passing by, coming up, we light up, then hot spring, then Chauhans, Guraans, oh Je Taime Vashisht!!!

The Business of Mourning (Andrew Tracy)

Film culture today seems rather akin to the model of an expanding universe, traveling ever further outward while that which is known about what it already encompasses becomes increasingly infinitesimal. As ever more discoveries, old and new, become ever more available to an ever more passionate, articulate, and interlinked cinephile community, the giddy thrill of discovery is accompanied by a palpable anxiety about the integrity of the medium itself. Even as images flood to us as never before, we remain fearful of their being taken irretrievably away. Gorging on cinema, we’re continually beset by a sense of loss, warily eyeing each new technological bogeyman as if it heralded the end of the purity we’ve imagined for ourselves.

The digital daemon, on both the filming and viewing side, is only the latest in a long line of developments that lay dormant for years until a certain set of conditions allowed them to bedevil our perpetually distressed consciousness. As with so many of its “revolutionary” forebears, the noise it’s generated from commentators informed and less so is primarily a lot of guff—which is not, of course, to say that it has no implications for cinema’s future. Like any other tool, digital opens up some options, precludes others, and allows some to remain the same. It’s another agent of change in a medium that has been predicated on change from the beginning. “A transitory blip in the history of the visual arts,” Kent Jones dubs it in his excellent collection Physical Evidence—not a lament, but a recognition that cinema only came into existence in the first place through the intersection of some profoundly disparate and arbitrary forces. Digital is simply another forking path for a bastardized medium that will proceed on its own merry way largely irrespective of our fervent hopes and wishes.

Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be concerned about where it’s going. Thing is, though, that all the anxiety about the future of the medium, and the experiments being undertaken within it, can only be articulated in terms of the past. Whatever else they are, the frequently cited standard bearers of this “revolution”—your Miami Vices, your Zodiacs, and Inland Empires—are pitched at a thoroughly familiar level of cinematic comprehension (yes, even the Lynch). Textures have changed; intentions have not. And while the former certainly conditions how we perceive the “film” in front of us, the familiar frameworks of understanding built into the latter push us continually back into the concerns of the past. Perpetually backwards-looking as we are, the best we can hope for is to better order that past in order to comprehend our still-unknown present.

All of which is to ask the simple question: is there any “filmmaker” who faces the shifts within his chosen medium with such blissful unconcern as Chris Marker? Marker’s swearing off of film for good in the Nineties had nothing of an iconoclastic air about it. As new developments tend to do, video had accentuated a preexisting condition rather than initiating an entirely new one: in Marker’s case, making the affinity of material and metaphor in his work all the more identical. “These images are not the substitute for my memory, they are my memory,” Alexandra Stewart intones in Marker’s perpetually surprising 1982 master text Sans Soleil. Though Marker has been supplanted from his own experiences by the record he’s kept of them, pushed even further away by the interpolation of the filmed records of others, it can be said that his aesthetic is founded precisely upon losing images—losing proprietorship over them, seeing them taken away and transformed by each successive incarnation. It’s a condition he highlights through the many winking mediations in his work, such as attributing the text of Sans Soleil to the letters of one “Sandor Krasna” and articulating it through the inimitable voice of Stewart.

Like his fellow recluse Godard, Marker is forever concerned with the meaning of the image, but where Godard’s palimpsests overload those images with meaning both visual and aural, the meaning of Marker’s images is being forever stripped away, and any trace of his “authorship” with it. Recall in Sans Soleil “the Zone,” his friend’s image device which renders the political struggles of the Sixties as abstract images of colored electronic movement, creating an impression of struggle, an emblem which Marker says is “more honest” than the traps of context and explanation. Material and metaphor: the Zone is both an active transformation and intervention into the image and a representation of the operations of time—a relentless process to which Marker blissfully consigns his own images at the end of the film.

Yet Marker is not indulging in some postmodern vanity about the absence of meaning. Meaning is the structuring absence of his entire project—the grin of his images is merely the meager visual evidence of the unseen cat. Marker is not a “creator” but an arranger, ordering the trace remnants of a felt but invisible past with the tools presented to him in the present. “I’ll have to give these images to my friend Chris one day, see if he can make any sense of them,” says Laura (Catherine Belkhodja), the protagonist of Level Five; “Chris, the editing wunderkind,” she slyly adds. Marker’s last feature, and his first on video, divorces him even further from the visual and verbal text he’s devised. Ostensibly the video records of Laura’s attempts to reach her dead lover by completing his computer program reenacting the Battle of Okinawa, the last and most ferocious conflict of the Pacific War, Level Five forgoes any idea of cinema as a “pure” medium, placing it instead as one element within a vast media interface, a resource to be accessed within a larger project of memory reclamation.

Yet even as it opens with a quotation from Gibson’s Neuromancer, the ubiquitous ur-text of such speculative fictions, Level Five’s vision of ultramodernity has a charmingly musty air about it. The menu screens, multiple monitors, and overlaid graphics that delineate Laura’s physical and virtual workspace seem like visions of a future conceived in the past. Rather than inadvertent quaintness, however, the bluntness and functionality of the instruments at her command retain a seductively mythic quality: a dream of labyrinthine interiors, of unending possibilities for connection and evolution seems to lurk within the unadorned casings and matter-of-fact command functions.

Marker understands the romance of technology even as he slyly undermines it. Laura likes to taunt the computer by substituting nouns for verbs in her command orders, leading to such perplexed declarations from the poor unit as “I don’t know how to shoe,” “I don’t know how to baguette,” and so on. The expanding media universe in which Marker situates his perpetual concerns provides no answers, but rather sharpens the pertinence and pathos of the questions. Just as in Sans Soleil he fantasized about a visitor from the future whose total recall makes him nostalgic for forgetting, Marker’s ventures into new media simply provide more means of entry to the unrecoverable, unalterable, and unknowable past that fascinates him. Marker’s “future” is not a projection of speculation and fantasy, but an abstract space shorn of the necessities of living in the present: a space literally out of time, a space whose removal from the helplessly chronological experience of time allows the possibility of accessing that already passed time which is the sole source of meaning.

Marker can thus be said to be both the most and least materialistic of “film”-makers. Film for him is not the simultaneous Holy Grail and lying whore which pains Godard so, paradises lost and regained with every strenuous effort. Where Godard’s invocations of classical music, painting, literature, and poetry compound his images with extrinsic doses of cultural capital, a reactionary striving for Truth within his loved and hated medium, Marker’s unconcern with the discrete qualities of his material blends them into a whole which is both seamless in its presentation and dizzying in its conceptual and stylistic leaps. Even as Marker ceaselessly draws attention to the fragile, exclusionary, and distorting properties of the filmic image, those images stand in equivalence to all the other evidence with which we seek to make some sense of the cinematic century and the post-cinematic one that follows it. Marker’s catholicity blithely forgoes any essentialist propositions about the “innate” qualities of the medium employed. Film, video, computer —all are simply extensions of our searching, questioning, occasionally lying eyes and ears.

To deny that each progressive extension entails a loss as much as it does an advance would be foolish; to proclaim that our consciousness of that loss would be effaced as well at least equally so. There has never been a pure state from which we have fallen, but it is the unyielding belief in such a state that drives us to create meaning out of the partial and unspeaking fragments that we possess. Nostalgia is a powerful force, and nostalgia for that which we never had is perhaps the most powerful of all. The intentional or unintentional task of the new media will forever be to articulate the loss, imagined, or actual, of that which preceded it, and in that business of mourning find the only justification for its existence. As Sans Soleil’s images enter the Zone in its final scene, dissolving into meaningless patterns of light and color, Stewart wonders “Will there ever be a last letter?”—a question whose optimism is as pointed as its rue.

Abstrakt Kollision

AbstraktKollisionFreshness. Featuring Hierarchy, Rocky Road, Rebel, Skeletal Error, Core, Saraswati, Alpha, Entra Trenata, Dryday, Crossroads, Digital Destruction, Digital Sunrise Pt. I, Exodus110, HorseWithFrenchBun, Mixedfeelings, Sevenhundredyearsback, Severesky, SkeptikSky, Trikon Mithi, Visible Path, Watersecrets

3, 2, 1 Room 1, Inward Arc

Cosmic Intelligence Transmitting Images To My Head. :)

11:47 to 00.02 (Moondance)

Magic every night. We have wands and we wave them in the sky letting the Moon do her dance. Peaking quietly, half-moon in waiting. Looking. Seeing the stupidities of man and probably laughing at Inspector Jigantar, Constable Babantar and Driver on our way to the wine shop. A wonderful evening of Wooten baba's sonic love, Gary Willis, Vadrum's Barber of Seville, of talking in Visra after S left, seemed like for hours on end as our minds relaxed unable to fathom the Visceral world of the void sentence, a tendency to be nothing for a few minutes, to let the mind sleep, our own unique form of meditation, of that slip of the tongue "Kudrat Ka Mela", Omo (inhale) & Azu (exhale), such moments captured and scripted for future film ideas... then those 15 minutes going back home, looking at the moon over the bridge to the sound of Truffaz's "The Dawn". And then that final moment, car parked, I thank Shiva for life, for everything and as soon as I say that, watchman appears from nowhere and greets me like he has never before, Shiva sending cosmic vibes via the human form. Transcendent. There are so many things that are completely out of our grasps. Or maybe I'm reading into everything too much. Moment-unanalysis needs to happen. So, time to stop thinking, time to live in the absence of thought, the abstrakt kollision of Visra.

The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov, designed by John Gall.

Moon & I: Monologue

11:39, time out of hand. I stop to think of the cosmic being, the living, breathing earth, look up at the sky and the Moon makes her appearance again from behind the passing black clouds, every once in a while, like a smile, looking at all those men in exile, waiting to make it to the other place where everything will be understood, where everything will be simpler, where love and warmth will find their way. Prior to that, a string of events...
Meeting M, diverse-enthusiast, I was introduced to his life, of his love for cars, his dream of producing a film called "0&1", of doing K2K (Kanyakumari to Kashmir) in his Gypsy, getting NDTV to cover it, he has charted out his life on the blueprint of his mind, its all clear. And that wonderful ending to the evening when JG made fresh Dosa's and Coriander Mint Chutney. All in all, the magic stayed another night, keeping me company day after day as I understand and constantly think of topics like impermanence, the body electric and the oneness of life. I'm waiting here, I seethesea.

And with Tagore, the sun... :)



Last Poems #13

The first day's sun
questioned
the new appearance of being –
Who are you?
There was no answer.

Years went by.
Day's last sun
asked the last question from the shores of the west
in the soundless evening –
Who are you?
There was no answer.

----

Rabindranath Tagore wrote until the end which came for him on August 7, 1941. This poem is from Final Poems recently published. They are translated from the Bengali jointly by Wendy Barker Saranindranath Tagore, a great grandson of the venerable Tagore.

According to the authors of Final Poems, this poem is the most famous of Tagore's later poems in the Bengali language. They point out its similarity to the Creation Hymn of the Vig Reda (c. 2000 BCE). This hymn begins with the unforgettable line, "There was neither nonexistence nor existence then."
It ends with these lines:

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence
was it produced? Whence is its creation? The gods
came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who
then knows whence it has arisen?

Whence this creation has arisen – perhaps it formed itself,
or perhaps it did not – the one who looks down on it, in
the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does
not know.

Question (By Tagore)

God, again and again through the ages you have sent messengers
To this pitiless world
They have said, 'Forgive everyone', they have said, 'Love one another --
Rid your hearts of evil.'
They are revered and remembered, yet still in these dark days
We turn them away with hollow greetings, from outside the doors of our houses.

And meanwhile I see secretive hatred murdering the helpless
Under cover of night;
And Justice weeping silently and furtively at power misused,
No hope of redress.
I see young men working themselves into a frenzy,
In agony dashing their heads against stone to no avail.

My voice is choked today; I have no music in my flute:
Black moonless night
Has imprisoned my world, plunged it into nightmare. And this is why,
With tears in my eyes, I ask:
Those who have poisoned your air, those who have extinguished your light,
Can it be that you have forgiven them? Can it be that you love them?

Language of the Dead

Notes

AHER/I's concept of Notes. And how he uses it to document the advice he needs to give to young musicians, of disciplining them with key words like Time, Professionalism, Duty, capital T, capital P, capital D and of XY1-1111 and how he documents magic on the phone, those moments that often escape from the grasps of time, poems, sightings of the moon, of moments of love and warmth, of those kinetic moments post-Gx-genome, of ideas and thoughts in Visra. How differently we all see the world, how differently we utilise our minds and our hearts, how strange all this really is. Its beyond belief. The violin could be three notes lower and we would never know what hit us. Really...

11:11 & The Moon

After a wash of Nu Taq K, I stepped out from J-Ganter's place to see the headless moon, my eyes like two little windows. And discovering the music of Jagjit Singh again, 17 years later and I still remember the nuances in those heartfelt songs. I remember those tapes I had of "In search" & "Insight". And I'm constantly thinking of that one annoying little thing, of my file (life) and if the "increasedeleteescapedefeat" procedure is being carried out on it, my ascii heart still in waiting. Driving back, looking at the moon at 11:11 through my window and a strange poem rests on my head and heart.

I miss much,
the eternal touch
of that girl from Kutch.

----

Three minutes later, the sound rings from the pixel transmission centre of friendship or a brotherhood, of a moment waiting to be held in my fingertips, fists clenched around plastic, the heart and the bubbles, bringing the lungs to the forefront of that second when the water is dreaming, when all the air rises, enters and is finally let out, fumes in unison with the mind's psychotropic ways...

On "Exodus110"

File: Exodus110, If_en_blafen_sho & If_shan_bashen_Ko
Visra, the language of the dead, and the stories of two friends Ifenblafensho & Ifshanbashenko who meet "here" (on earth) and then "there" (in heaven) where they talk in Visra and everything is understood. The language of the heart finds no boundaries in translation or communication, it transcends all boundaries. It lives after death when all language has disappeared, when the time has come only for the soul to speak, only for love's most deepest contact, a real contact of two souls. Not like in these times when love has to be so carefully evaluated and analyzed before it can be accepted and reciprocated. Ifenblafensho & Ifshanbashenko are waiting to move to that space of superconsciousness, where we can say hello to our departed German friend.
Ifsoroha is here, now. Right here, right now.

Peripetics by Zeitguised

Peripetics from zeitguised on Vimeo.

‘Peripetics or The installation of an irreversible axis on a dynamic timeline’

Zeitguised made a piece in six acts for the opening exhibition at the Zirkel Gallery. It entails six imaginations of disoriented systems that take a catastrophic turn, including the evolution of educational plant-body-machine models and liquid building materials.

Length: 5000F/ 3min 20s
Sound Design: Zeitguised with Michael Fakesch

23rd September. I remember the day fifteen years back. On the thirteenth floor of Barton Centre, Ebony Restaurant. With a million thoughts of love and that auroral image of A. I'm not there. I'm here. Now. Period.

Bizarre Banalities of a day

A day that started with that strange moment after my haircut when I felt Mahesha, the auto-driver had the same eyes as mine.
Of later, when the mind said to the heart, "Dont be silly" and the heart replied, "C'mon Billy". To document some moments in point form. She has her own string section (and J-Ganter replies "She comes with strings attached"), possibility of opening scene in a film. Of the man who transcribes Viscera and understands its deepest meaning in the spell check, of J-Ganter's txt "sorry for me is waiting for you"...and talking of txts, that midnight rally, those Navratilova-esque safe shots and that moment when the ball hit the net, over and out, of the ascii-magic of computers and how the processing unit converts all the 1's to 0's in the deletion procedure, of looking at the time at 11:11, car-clock colon's blinking in 4/4, re-discovering Kailasa's Jhoomo Re, reaching home and as I'm going to sleep after an exhausting day, the time 00.00, my ascii heart erased of all the potential of a real love, all metadata in the recycle bin, all one's converted to zero's. Its time to leave. Really. To disappear...

To end with that lovely quote from Sans Soleil. I'm paraphrasing here -
"Only banalities interest me, I have chased it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter"

JVS

The Life of Jigantar, ex-cop, dramaturgist.
In the ongoing series of documenting the language of Viscera, the language of the heart, the two friends Babantar and Jigantar meet up to see what's happening in the world today only to be surprised by the sonic un-intelligence of the corporate world only to be consumed in total unfiltered entertainment, sifarha va jigantar trifola gulpetaga begum. This is the beginning of the avant-garde.

Back.
*Insert Grunge riff here* :)

To...

I need to throw this knife out the window,
My hands are turning red, the blood rushing to my head
My heart like an anchor, holding my thoughts like a thread.

I need to throw this strife out the window,
My face is holding unwanted genetic information
And traces of that ultimate descent into subjugation.

N. Singh, the man out of time

A very heavy day. Full of information, sensorial, arterial, visceral. Of all those things that happened, I loved that phone call with TV, of pink Giraffe's, of Benares meets Diesel cherippu, classic articulation, my friend for life, that long call with DT, the way I became that floating string back in the air, that vulnerable kite, flying about with no direction or purpose, of how I can never base anything on life, of expecting absolutely nothing, being now and surrendering to nothingness, like that leaf flying about...this will be my life as I know it. Impermanence is the only thing I can count on. And ofcourse the ten fingers of my hand, the ten seconds that we have, nothing more, nothing less.

Then...

An epic evening. Unexpected. Chandrakanth, Inspector Jiganthar and me finally connect like three dots. Energies overwhelmingly powerful as we discuss ideas for a set of experimental films to be shot in the language of Viscera, subtitles open to receive topics ranging from Love, Fear, Loss, Disappointment, Anger, Politics. Of two friends talking in an unknown language, sometimes saying nothing, just listening to music. The electricity in the room was quite brilliant, Jean-Luc Ponty exploding through the Yamaha speakers, until we were disturbed by an uninvited visitor at 11pm, the cult of N. Singh. As soon as he entered, aural transfers went berzerk. He broke time. A third party- application. He would be that uninvited guest who roams around the city disrupting time and breaking connections by bringing his life's problems into the lives of others. He spoke with no filters revealing his innermost problems to strangers. After an uncomfortable confrontational episode, he left and we returned to the room to talk. Chand told me about N. Singh's wife who has apparently gone nuts. Then, from that thought, Chand was reminded of this very strange story of a boy who he once knew, who was in a coma for about five years, whose brain was operated (experimented) on fourteen times, his father and how he met him, man in white and white who was around the neighbourhood looking for a Xerox place, accidently landing up in Chand's office. A man part of the criminal intelligence outfit Octopus. All these people, their characters and their lives were out of a film. Of how Chand tried to teach painting to the "mentally withdrawn" child as he made labels on the painting with tags like sky, earth, river. Of how the brain is so fragile, a little out of balance and we have absolutely nothing. This boy has lost all memory and the only things that still remain are those basest of human experiences, the sun, the sea, the clouds, of how he would get up, lost, and want to leave to see Chand and not realise he is in his presence, of getting him out of the studio, circling the neighbourhood and coming back to calm the mind, of how he lost it totally due to his hate for his parents, breaking everything in Chands studio. Then those strings of serendipitous moments, both Chand and me saying "Who" at the same time, those brilliant sparks going off between Prax and me, as always, a type of visceral extravaganza everytime we meet. God is great for giving me this. And so much more. How can I ever be unhappy?

And in the end, as the three of us looked at the mic facing the wall, the only thought that crossed our minds is "When is the wall going to speak and say something, how much longer can a mic wait...?"

Three-point trajectory (Development)

Idea for a film:
Naseeruddin Shah. Aging pianist. Lives in an old wooden house, high ceilings, sculpture, art, steinway grand piano, Chopin notations scattered everywhere, culture, books, films, music. Invites his compadre, experimental artist Om Puri over for dinner to celebrate a re-union of sorts, a meeting after many many years, and Om's new love, a 25 year old film student. Possibly Deepika Padukone. Cool, contemporary, avant-garde outlook on life. 2 hours, one evening. Shot in real-time. Dinner, music, dialogue and possible chemistry going off between Naseer and Deepika as he begins to re-imagine Chopin at twelve o' clock, midnight. Of the meaning of love, insecurity, infatuation, age-difference, confrontation, sincerity, of a long-term friendship, impermanence of love and other things of the heart. What a young girl could do to shake the equation of an ethereal bond between two aging friends. Is love really required? How do you decide what's more important, a friendship or a (fleeting) love? Answers to the basest of human questions. Is art the bringer/giver of presence? Is the elusive artist more attractive than the artistic lover?

N. Gopu - D. Okat (Exchange)
NG
Wow, interesting subject, bro. Very interesting...I can totally picture it in my head. Art, love and all that you have mentioned. Quirky characters, intelligent dialogues, some deep philosophy at midnight. You should definitely get down and work on this man. And since you are in this frame of mind, have you seen Jules et Jim?

DO
No whats that...
I sent the idea to a friend and this is what she added to it...
----
Very nice, but would tweak the central idea/characters a little since the young woman/mentor love angle has been done to death. What if during this reunion between the two, the neighbour (young woman who lives alone) has locked herself out and has to spend a couple of hours with them in naseer;s flat till her spare keys arrive. This way everyone is starting from point A. No one has any prior stake on the woman hence each one tries to out do the other.

Makes any sense?
----
Nice, no? Remember Srika saying "NICE" and that granmom type of chin...

NG
Oh, I didn't know the young girl would be a protege.

My two cents, bro..

In my opinion, if you take the second idea, there isn't any 'conflict', no? So it becomes fully character driven, which is also nice. I didn't like this 'outdoing the other in a span of 2 hours' idea much da. Then it would be just better to keep it like a conversation between 3 intellectuals, on the topics you've mentioned, without introducing any romance. Just some chemistry at the most... Plus, I feel, locking herself out by mistake seems too forced. It would take you some effort to establish the premise here, but, with your version, its all there.

I like your take man, without keeping a protege mentor relationship, though. Om puri dating this girl who seems too good to be real. This way the woman also feels comfortable to open up on such topics...

"Is love really required? How do you decide what's more important, a friendship or a (fleeting) love?"

It would be more dynamic if Naseer and this 'couple' talk on such topics..Naseer getting more and more fascinated by this woman, as she puts forward her perspective on different subjects.

Also, in the second version there isn't really a scope for introducing topics like "meaning of love, insecurity, infatuation, age-difference, confrontation, sincerity, of a long-term friendship, impermanence of love and other things of the heart".
There wouldn't be any 'confrontation' or 'insecurity', no?

This is a superb subject , bro..Loved it. Keep working on it man..

Fin, for now. Building procedure to begin. *Halo*

Little-ities

Ethereal bond, circa 1977. I love my brother for all that he is. x
----
And then later
Impermanence (Live at the Electric Crystal Table, 150910)
"In impermanence, lies all of life", I realized as I wished S Babantar (the spirit of Aryakaanthe) goodbye. Of the solar and the lunar, Shiva's calling, that Kundalini awakening, of the cosmic way and how strange everything really is, our bodies, our minds, the tricks they play, the moments they wear and tear, of our deepest sincere emotions flying on a thin string of kite, flying about with the possibility of sudden death, of love and how it can end immediately with no prior warnings, of that minority of Army X coming back full circle to impermanence as its dressed in white waiting for the red to stain it once and for all.

I'm coming to terms with many things. Of them I love my hearts band, those trumpets, violins, string section, pizzicato overriding the electricity of the music, those flourishes of guitars, open chords, those sweeping voices riding the clouds on those darkest of nights, that band I'd like to call it Impermanence.