Friday 10 July 2015

WHITE NIGHT PARTS 1 TO 4

 WHITE NIGHT 1

"And was it his destined part
Only one moment in his life
To be close to your heart?
Or was he fated from the start
to live for just one fleeting instant,"

And how could she foresee
the intent in your heart?
How could she divine the secret passion that you hid in your heart,
the passion without a name and without a face too?How would she know who held
her when she sidled close, to  him or to you?

And why did you create the distance to separate your identity in two?
And when she chose one of the two
why did you take away from her the one she chose
to step in and remove from her the one face she believed she loved?

You scripted the story of a fated lover
destined to be close to her
only for a moment
and then to be torn apart?

All this while you kept a chair for her
in your private zone
for her to occupy as if it belonged to none but her.
And when she was halfway close, forgetting a little
the pain of her separated lover,
she, looking with a craving to the empty chair,
why did you keep quiet and watch her come and go?

And now to keep her wondering who
it was she loved and lost
you have already willed her half-way to come to you
and she knows not how and when she was drawn to you.

And strange rivals, one who loved and lived, who you hid in your heart!
and the one she believed she loved and lost,
were you the one whom she loved?
You were playing with embers which were about to die.
Did you so much as this rely
on the rules of playing a game so dangerously close
to the brink of a fatal loss?

A something 'missing' in the order of it all,
a longing for the simple and the true ,
the something which language would not rob
of certainty in the shifting scenario of
avalanche and arid sands,
both dreaded for their extreme
lack of presence,
the presence that must enter and survive in the gap....

Is she the one fated also to be like he,
the one fated from the start
to live for one fleeting moment in your heart?

And here by the old fireplace she sits,
in the dwindling of the edifice of frozen things
creating a distance between her images, symbols and her meanings,
a cavern for her to hide from you what she would not reveal,
a fear: a primordial fear of giving up
what never belonged to her,
the primordial fear of the pronouncement of judgement
on a woman who fails to understand
the storms ravaging all her being,
the men who come and go,
and the loneliness behind it all,
the shadow with whom she is finally left,
the futility of surviving in the dark,
questioning the need to articulate
the fears, the projections of the mind cast on the wall ,
hiding and simultaneously wanting you to know
that the she of the discourse and the "I" who hides are not different; they are the same,
the identical in the world of the real

White Night 2
THE WHITE NIGHT
Through the light and the dark the storm raged and ravaged the heart
of a lonely one sitting by the fireplace
weaving in the dark
the motifs of an art no longer held valid
for the order of the real or the imaginary worlds, long back left behind.

before awakening to the light of the dawn,
before the white night wrote the script
for the destined one to read in the day,
the lonely one has to wind up the spool
of the loose threads and put them in place.

Such ravages, the storms over the mighty intractable seas,
and the the lonely one fell into them
as if out of choice, and survived by the instinct to live.

Now, one tidal wave,as it threatens to sink,
the raft, the oar and the frail navigator,
another taller wave has come to conquer and subdue the one that threatened and surged to swallow the surf and the raft.

One wave rises to swallow another,
rushing forward with a diminished tide,
losing its force and merging with the shore in serenity.

The Real is there beyond the shore,
no language can transmit the desire to reach, the desire to transcend the agitation
once and for all, the Lover whose silence supersedes
the primordial desire for the ultimate word of Love.

 WHITE NIGHT 3
White night spreads over all
finally, the peace
descending over the field of deception,
the fragments they try to read
in the ancient papyrus
that inscribes the will of the ancient goddess.
The truth of being incomplete
is the breeze from the far away land
blowing when the night is white, when nothing is as yet scrawled
over the white surface holding its existence in the dark.

The restless anguish,
its name is the first word inscribed on the sprawling papyrus.
Desire, the primordial unrest transcending the need and the demand,
The white night brings you face to face
with the unnameable, unutterable silence,
a wavelike upsurge;
it annihilates the last line drawn
on the map of all we recognize to be our own.
The desire, elementary, profound like the silence heard in the forest where animals move
in the freedom and the joy of being their own guard,
;
Do they ever seek the God of their kingdom?
Why do I seek you when I should be seeking
either God
or the wild animus I lost
with
the growing up in the wilderness of forgetting and learning?

How can I unlearn the habits I acquired living inside
the walls of deception?
The weariness it brought
and i finally decided to label it unreal and stash it behind the wall.

The Impossible, the undefinable,
and the irony that I could still recognize
when it came and sat on the edge,
the cause of nemesis
or the path to resurrection?

The sadness consumes like a lethal potion
the deep crevices of the heart.
The Impossible, the abyss, I have no single raft
to negotiate the pathway to the Impossible.
The Impossible does not speak
and it is the Real.
Its word is unique.
It comes overriding the waves.

Perhaps the Impossible also yearns
to be heard, to be understood
beyond the bounds of its unified domain and solitary gloom.
Something sinks deep
and carves a space for a thing in the soul
that cannot speak and cannot sleep
while the white night treads the path 

THE WHITE NIGHT 4
The woof and the warp of the complex language
the shackles I inherited from the past,
the shackles that were never on the wrists and the ankles to bind
the primitive forefathers of long ago.

The scourge, the curse, the spell I cannot discard
it will bind me forever until I die
carrying a burden I could not find a spot to lay down
on an empty path.
Everywhere the paths bore the names, the maps, the domains and the territories
of the empires I could not call my own.
The language I spoke
an alien scribe gave it to me from a woe-begone past
of a country none remembers to visit.
The scrawl in that language had a name
for the unnameable, the Impossible,
which Lacan just glimpsed but feared to call either the God
or the Spirit of the Universe
disappeared behind  the unoriginate Time.

The desire lifts me on the wings of Time and infinity;
the eagle's eye, the single eye,
shows me a glimpse of what i had lost,
and lodged as I am in the here and now
proscribed by needs and demands of time,
I still try to fly on the wings
crippled by atrophy
of long disuse.

There is a pronoun called 'You'
in the language I once learnt to use.
It's forbidden for use when I think
of the unnameable in the language I use
on the exchange counter of the international currency I perforce use.

Let me dare and say,
"YOU' as I mean YOU
are unique, an unbelonging,
a severed connection of a lifetime ago,
a subjective feeling entirely,
a feline walk over the roof
when no moon shines in the sky.

When the night is white and has no edge
the horizon unveils YOU to my sight
in full splendor, you dare me
to call you Unreal.

.

Sushama Karnik






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