Streams And Velvet Skies

First posted on 16^th October 2016

“It has slipped away before you can even grasp a tiny bit.” I wrote these words down with the idea that I would come back to them in a bit and magically find whatever had slipped away. Passing thoughts that could have been a page – of The Book. They needn’t slip away but somewhere I have lost the connection.  Now I’m back here trying to make the best guess, because so many pages can grow out of this embryo which has surely been frozen somewhere.

Maybe we can find a way to trace back how that embryo was created and what triggered the unique coming together of the forces of emotion, nature and circumstance that made this embryo and not a different one. To go back to the origins of a thought-made-word - (or are words self-originating, remember the Bible?) - is like returning to the source of a river and finding there are so many sources, actual and possible. And each of those sources goes back through several stages to water – H2O. And then you pause and ask whether you really want to separate that molecule into its constituent atoms?

Halt! Water alone did not make a river. So much had to happen to that water molecule whereby it is now flowing with its fellows and other kinds of co-travelers on this journey named as this river. You can never really rewind to the beginning. So you do the best you can here and now. Go along with what seems like the best guess. The runaway line was surely about that evanescent phenomenon called Durga Puja whose end is already written in its beginning. I had really meant to write about my first visarjan* but circumstance in the form of my oozing hand intervened. 

Then Mary Oliver jumped in with "The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Artist’s Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life."

I sat up when I read her because I figured that as we evolve we surely have to find new techniques by which true art need no longer be an all-or-nothing phenomenon. It is true that the best bet we go with today is compromise.  And I want to know how Mary Oliver rates her own achievement as an artist. And while she gives us a list of what bothers her on a day to day basis, the line in the article that has bothered me is “self-distraction is the most hazardous kind of distraction, and the most difficult to protect creative work against.” 

Now having been in the IT profession in another lifetime, I know that there are ways a program can jump out to do sundry things and jump back and continue from where it left off with all the data intact. Maybe what it deals with is fairly simple, but hell no. We have gone way beyond those domestic simpleton-computers for which I wrote programs back in the day. Well we are taking this a step further. We are attempting to save an entire gamut of thoughts and feelings and all those live processes, not just dumb data “objects” but a whole dynamic. Surely there are mystical techniques from the ancient East that we can tap into. Yoga, mind-control, putting an entire personality of yours on hold while another effortlessly takes over to answer those calls, fight with those neighbors, take a leak break (in more ways than one for me) and a coffee break, and switch off and switch on again? That “person” who was the devoted slave of their art remains so and all we do is re-activate and continue? Sounds far-fetched, silly? Not! Perhaps it is the new paradigm for survival of the artist in a world that the Chanda-Mundas think they control. If we can gain this level of control over ourselves, the Chanda-Mundas will de-evolve into the dust they came from.

We will need less of the other kind of leak breaks (the Sailesh kind) and yogasanas can put on hold the compulsions of the leaks that are common to all living beings (have you creative folks ever noticed that you actually forget to eat, drink, pee and so on when your creative self takes over? And you don’t even practice yoga?) And whatever court breaks (some of you are familiar with the pesky litigation I have been drawn into) and neighborly-scrap breaks and so on that we need to take just carry on as foreground jobs. And let the background job of being true to ones creative self continue – in active or passive or mixed mode as the situation needs. The artist will claim his due. Like the sea he is unstoppable.

This seemingly pointless post was created to the backdrop of a bunch of musicians (a brass band) being creative. We are creating in tandem and working in sync. It is the mating of  two personas – self and world. Yes an actual consonance of the two. I needed the clarity of the opal moon in the velvet sky up there to put this in perspective!

*I subsequently did create that post  or discovered it was already created