telling lives

wat’s a lie doin there on my bed?

memories alive, messin around with my head.

tell me a life, temme where u’ve bn.

i am jack’s shattered dreams.

look who's black

Can’t u see my fingers

spread out like that?

Today I am an eagle, black.

The lammergier’s done n gone,

alone, by the lilied lake I slept on.

I dream of a lonely hill-top meadow

lashed by sleety winds

from this grounded, unkempt lawn.

You lost me at go.

My arms spread out so,

go a little faster and I might just take off.

See my fingers spread out like that?

Wider still in your helmet black?

Not I, not I, it was the wind that blows,

there was nothing left in me

but that howl, deep n long.

Did u think it was anguished?

Was my face contorted?

I could not tell as I wept bitter tears

that weren’t there.

Not I, it was

the wind that blows thru me.

Alone, on the ferry,

they watched me from afar,

my fingers spread out like that

against the waters purple, going black.

N u remember nothing Pablo?

Nothing at all?

Not Lila? Not Paola? But ah, the fog.

It is a strange ailment, is it not?

It is, I guess, best dat u forgot.

How can I be so

messed

up?

He’s a hippie now,

for some time;

still stuck on

figs n spiders n birds,

still bad with butterflies.

The more things change,

the more they remain the same,

but I seek a break from the past;

u wouldn't even recognize me, again.

The gap goes wider.

N that, that’s an ant-mimic spider,

n this, a beautiful fig tree.

I know not wat I’m tryin to escape,

but i think bus-stops become me.

Fine, i‘ll be kind:

may u seek wat u find.

The sun’s goin, the rain’s stopped,

memories burst upon me in flashes.

Everything glitters,

with raindrops under the streetlights,

including my half-plucked eyelashes.

It begins to drizzle as i walk away;

the dogs, at least, are happy to see me.

N I, I run not lookin back,

with my fingers spread out like that.

The sky’s a bruised purple prune;

this is june, ten days old,

n u say april is the cruellest month?

n may, unusually cold?

dead tree-trunk

"At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it... that after awhile you could get used to anything."

- Albert Camus (The Outsider)

The redundancy of courage - Timothy Mo

I stood at the platform, waiting for the bus, resting my backpack against the railing of the staircase behind me as I sipped on the chai in the flimsy plastic cup in my hand. I was going out after nearly a month of being at home, not really working very hard, but the long array of deadlines forcing me to stay put. And standing there, I realised that I wouldn’t have been surprised if right then, a file of people in camouflage clothing, with semi-automatic weapons slung from their shoulders, had emerged from between the buses parked in front of me and walked past.

I had been reading Timothy Mo’s, ‘The Redundancy of Courage’.

It is a book based on Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in the 1970s. Narrated in a voice that is calm, steady and ruthless, it presents minute details and intricate descriptions of events and the people that either perpetrated them or got caught up in them, the two often getting mixed up. Like on a meteor’s disastrous trajectory, the narrator is thrown into the conflict, first on one side and then another, back n forth n then back again, until he comes through miraculously alive; in one piece, though far from unscathed. This lets the author give different perspectives of the events that occurred and you get a comprehensive picture, dissected inside-out. The tactful narration allows a disaffected foreigner to present the invasion as it happened on the ground, the intimate details of the life of the guerrilla fighter in the forest, and, at the other extreme, the view of the whole fiasco from the international scale. N yet it is so much more than just an engaging political history and a first person account of the invasion.

Dostovsky’s Crime and Punishment, to me, has always been about human motives. What appeales to me the most is that he delicately reaches into the innermost workings of the human mind, seeking explanations for actions. Pardon the comparison, but Timothy Mo does just that, on the fly.

In circumstances far more varied and for a whole swathe of people, most importantly, for himself, he lays bare the motives, the drives and the influences behind the actions for all to see. Every action is explained - not justified, but explained - in terms of the cost-benefit ratios and general theories of the workings of the human mind. Theories that work even if you are aware of them. Unembarrassed, unflinching, we see him as an unwilling guerrilla fighter, a spiteful saboteur, an unembarrassed deserter, a victimised foreigner, and what finally emerges is a picture of an ordinary human being who survived.

I stood at the bus-stop platform, prepared to see a man walk by, clutching by the hair, a human head. That’s what Timothy Mo does to you.