TWO MOTES IN A SHAFT OF SUNLIGHT

INTERPLAY OF MORE ENERGY
ALONG A RAINWASHED LANDSCAPE



THUS SPAKE ONE MOTE

"I speak from the vantage point of a couple of large scotches on the rocks and apologise for nothing that ensues.I just finished watching David Dimbleby’s ‘Seven Ages of Britain’. Being an Anglophile, I could only marvel at and admire the brilliance of David’s mind and admire his congeniality and lack of airs. This is one of the many admirations that one need not apologise for. I read your blog and sometimes it provokes me out of my indolence which, I reckon, is a condition of acceptance and surrender- without an emotion attached to either. But you incite me only to a perpetual intellectual masturbation without the prospect of a climatic orgasm. Harcharan, what in us seeks salvation, if that is what we indeed seek.? Move beyond the treachery of words. This is not a contest of wills or that whore who parades herself as intellect. It is the hunger of the soul, way beyond the etiquette of rectitude, way beyond the purist ignominy of joie de vivre. Where does our peripatetic mind lead? Do we seek and kneel in the temple of Love? But then what is love but an evocation of Beauty? Beauty indeed has to be the absolute truth. Is it?Beauty owes its existence to its unattainabilty. How can such a feeble thing as familiarity kill divine Beauty? Can you imagine the wonder, the awe, the unspeakable, overwhelming sight of a sunset to eyes that have never beheld it before? My God, it would blow your spirit away. Do you know how we see it through the car windscreen? “Look at the colours in the sky.” “Yeah. Where shall we have dinner?” It’s Prufrock measuring our lives every day of our lives. Harcharan, I have known the tremors of love. I have been where my whole being was but a trembling leaf to a single moment of eye contact with the women I loved. I have known the pain of abstinence where to touch the woman I loved was to defile her purity and beauty. Where I withdrew my hand even though the women I loved craved for it. I could not defile them. ‘Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!’Can you imagine being married to a woman that you loved with everything inside your chest? Can you imagine where three months of sex with her bring you to? Your nerve ends would have withered as you turned your back and felt irritated by her need to cling on. Is there a more gruesome murder of something so divine? That such an insignificant thing as familiarity should have the power to demolish the divinity of celestial beauty is our curse.Therefore, Harcharan, the womb of death which contains the primordial seed of eternal life. Not the chicanery of words, not the perfidy of the strumpet intellect but the peace of the sanctum sanctorum which launches the storms and captures them as they return spent. Activity is not turbulence. In space there is no movement except the imperceptible movement of rotating universes. The rotation is not efferent, it is concentric moving to the still centre of the singular point which contains the ever expanding universes.‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone’The truth is absolute in its transience. One does not disprove another. We just acknowledge and surrender to the truths as they manifest themselves. Acceptance is acknowledgement- no more no less. Nothing more or less is required because the acceptance of a contrary truth in another moment does neither violate nor disprove the one which preceded it. EASE is a mundane but de profundis state of a mind which has known the pain of beauty one cannot blemish by laying a finger, but can let you gaze at its alluring face forever and feel the claws gripping your heart which a lifetime of familiarity cannot wane.Pray that I never approach a keyboard after a couple of scotches- for your sake and mine."

RAJIV MUDGIL
LONDON
January 31, 2010 4:37


AND THUS SPAKE THE SISTER MOTE

"Do we need those props like the elixir and the rocks to move away from the need to apologize and explain? The obstinate shrinking away from the eternal orgasm has been the curse of all those who always seek a wooden permanence in these orgasms, refusing to accept their movement from one climax to another as the only form of eternity nature permitted us ( for our own good!) For those who accept every moment as eternity ( as I do, for example) life is -- has always been, will always be -- an eternal orgasm, even if masturbation, intellectual or otherwise, may be the only way to reach it. I have nothing against anything for everything in the end is a child of nature, even the windscreens of Prufrock's car. (Oh, how often have I enjoyed wonderful rains or gorgeous rainbows or the awesome rising and setting of suns through the closed windows of a moving car or a bus! Recall the days when we first travelled from our college to the roots of the Himalyan foothills which take you to the valley in Kashmir! Recall the river that stretched itself into the heart of infinity at the point we enter Pathankot! And that was more than thirty five years ago! And the sight is mine to behold every time I indulge in what Wordsworth called the bliss of solitude. In fact, any time I want to indulge in the sight, I am transported to that bliss of solitude. With me, means have always followed ends!)

But I understand your acting difficult with the infinite peace and joys that spread around you and your anxiety to reduce even acceptance to a pursuit. And your description of the notes of music as mere grammar ( "play of words!") For me though, the melodies are the only truth that exist, and I do not -- and must not --look at the details of what must appear to you as the architecture of music. In this, as in many other things, we are, have always been and will always be different from each other. And thank God for this. Nature can not afford two idiots as identical twins in the same age. But I celebrate my idiocy and leave you to pine and writhe in your self-erected chambers of analysis. I do not care if love cannot bear the touch of reality, if I can not get up from the bed of a woman with the same passion that I had gone into it with. A woman is under no obligation to sustain my orgasm for ever if that's my idea of endless love! I have to pass through moments of boredom as much as through delirious zones with her and be happy that one is not the other. But nature has given man -- and woman -- the ability to live life as an endless series of orgasms and treat the whole life ( rather than a sliced moment of it ) as an act of implosion, turning themselves into fire-balls of pure self-created, self-destructive ecstasy. I am no piper of John Keats' Grecain Urn, and do not seek to freeze a single moment into eternity! That moment is one orgasm and there is no need to mourn its passing away because there will be another ( There will always be; their always has been in my life. ) I do not know if you will ever get rid of this punishing habit of intellect to mock the passage of orgasmic ecstasies from peak to peak. While I jump the peaks, you are stuck moaning their intransience, their limitedness. Like Walt Whitman, I do not care to look a moment in the eye and judge it mortal because I know the same moment will be born afresh and that these constant rebirths of a given moment are the only form in which eternity exists. I do not love one peak more than the other because I know that these are one woman in dressed in different bridal attires. Jump with me into the florid intransience of moments, jump with me into the waters which are for ever flooding our momentary streams. Do this, or sit there in Prufrock's car " with a closed window at four", cursing both the car and the rainbow that dances outside it. To me, the car is as beautiful as the rainbow is, and both are "magic casements opening on the floors of perilous seas." Its yours to be cursed with insistence on accepting reality and life on your terms and to treat each magic casement as one view-point only. While I celebrate and exult in the "contemprarneity" of each moment, each orgasm, each ecstasy, you mourn the in transience or "temporaneity" of these peaks of existence. You look at the given views as temporary; I look at each one of them as "contemporary." Hence you remain stuck as I move; to you , this life will always remain a movement from one paralysis to another, with health held eternally out only as a Muslim's promise for future. I bound from peak to peak, loving the blessed athletes and kissing the parlaytic souls along the way, for both the blessed athletes as well as the paralytic souls have faces that mirror mine. I love my dreams; you distrust your visions. (And something in you tells you that no dreams are trustworthy because they are all transient; they shall pass. Something in me loves their passing away and coming back again. Something in me loves the rapidly shifting patterns of sunlight on a rain-washed landscape. Something in me celebrates that all truths are transitory and that for each truth that passes away, a million more will be born. I see in transitoriness of patterns nature renewing itself for ever; you insist that there is a permanence, an immortality beyond this dance of moments. You insist that orgasm with your woman must last beyond the first six months of marriage. I do not pine like the piper on the Grecian Urn.

And God be thanked that we are the way we are, two Gods that inhabit the same planet, totally in love with each other and each utterly distrustful of the other's reality.
And God be thanked that I will never need those limpid glasses and dancing rocks in a glass to move beyond the need for apologizing. ( Not that I would mind a shot, but that will only be to move to another level of insanity once I am done with the one I live in.
Besides, if I join the party, you will run away from it, as you of course know ! I thank these two glasses of scotch that have so released you from your prison walls. Have two more and celebrate me!

- HARCHARAN BAINS
CHANDIGARH, FEBRUARY 1, 2010