On remembering past loves

Image Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/

When I was in college, my friends and I used to religiously make trips to Calcutta to experience the much needed balm of civilization and exhilarating freedom that one experiences only when one crosses the threshold from teens to twenties. I also worked in Calcutta for almost two years after graduation and the city remains my long time muse.

I write a photoblog in collaboration with An Observant Owl and I was going through some old notes because I needed to write something for his upcoming galleries on the streets of Calcutta. That was when I thought of this one poem I'd written about my relationship with the city some years ago. When I wrote the poem I wasn't living in Calcutta and what I felt was definitely colored by homesickness and nostalgia but I'd like the reader to understand that after three years of leaving Calcutta, none of the sentiments expressed on the poem ring false for me and I miss her just as much.

Here it goes:

It was love at first touch.

Your roaring pulse in my hand –

Was the symphony of engines droning,

Harmonizing with the shivers

The river –

Sent up your spine.

Pop Quiz: How many nuts and bolts went into this cantilever beam shaped like a perfect parabola?

None. It is riveted. So am I.

An awestruck puppy –

I still stick my head out every fucking time,

Oblivious to the milling, jostling multitude.

I don’t love you for your bhadralok[1] or the machh[2] or the mishti[3],

It is the stories in folds of your saree[4].

I sit down with a cup of cha[5] and you will always tell one –

Or make one out of me.

I can’t decide if you’re perpetually stuck in a bad tempered adolescence –

Or are you a wizened withered witch.

I love your sweet sick smell of horseshit and scum and how you parade your poverty

And then you’ll turn around and dazzle me with your intricate delicate richness.

You are convoluted –

Full of ironies and paradoxes –

Stuck in a time warp –

And trying to break free –

Unsure of where to go and what to take along.

When I stumble, you understand

I breathe you and I calm down.

Your warmth, your flavors, your smells, your rhythms, your stupid obsessions, your nonchalance, your stories all feel like

I could finally come home

And hold you

And go to sleep.

That’s how we’re strung –

Love.

Hate.

And humdrum.

Like I said, it was love at first touch.

While some of the experiences described are are experienced by majority of people who have lived in or visited the city - anyone will tell you how crowded or dirty it gets or the wealth of colonial buildings that lend an aura of bygone era to the city. Then there are other experiences that are deeply personal. The very beginning describes my very first encounter with the city when as first year college kids we got off the local train at Howrah station and walked to the Howrah Bridge. We just stood there with our hands on the railings and let the sensations of the city wash over us. Also I'm an engineer so I love to geek out - even in poetry. It's riveted. 

I hope you enjoyed the poem. I sometimes get the feeling that it works better as performance piece and its better to listen to it rather than read it. I'll get around to that someday.

[1] Bhadralok: Cultured gentry

[2] Machh: Fish

[3] Mishti: Sweetmeats

[4] Saree: A garment consisting of a length of fabric elaborately draped around the body, traditionally worn by women from South Asia.

[5] Cha: Tea

Monday Morning #3: This is Water

Last Monday I wrote some really bad parody of Robert Frost's Mending Wall to describe my sentiments about an average Monday Morning and followed that up with presenting Neruda's Ode to Wine here. This in turn was inspired by an earlier post about Ogden Nash's poem A Drink with Something in it. This I believed was the seed for an interesting tradition - of reading intoxication inspired poetry as a way of getting over the Monday Blues. But I'm already thinking of breaking from tradition.

Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of This is Water. On 21st May 2005 author David Foster Wallace gave the commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College. The speech has since been dubbed the 'This is Water' speech and the entire transcript can be read here or you can listen to it youtube here. My favorite though is this really beautiful video that that takes excerpts from the speech and stitches them together with some really great video and graphics.

He makes the most profound point with this really simple story:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance

I'm going to try to not reproduce the entire text of the speech here - just the excerpts, but bear with me as I have my fan-girl moment. I went to a post graduate liberal arts program and it simply turned my world view on its head so I totally resonate with his views on the value and purpose of a liberal arts education.

the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.

one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean: To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

His insight into the human nature and workings of the mind are the reason why he can write such real gripping characters in his books. I love his point about how we experience the world through the lens of the 'self' and to be conscious of it is the first step towards developing empathy.

I tend to be automatically sure of...that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence...It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth... It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head...I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience...And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

"Getting hypnotized by the monologue in your head"....scientists write papers in Science (and then retract them) about how we're insensitive to corrective information and keep believing false information, but really it comes down to the hypnotic monologue in our heads.

The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things...then you will never have enough...Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly....Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

Guilty as charged for worshiping intellect. And it is true I feel like I know so little - like I'm some sort of backwaters oaf. I guess I have a lot to learn when it comes to being really free of my hang ups.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

The so-called real world not only promotes this way of living, it also reinforces it through the construction of a narrative in line with the worship of money, power, sexual allure and self on social media platforms. Life is demystified through a series of status updates and posts.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Amen.

On growing concrete, walls that heal and walls that breath

I read this article the other day about a pair of Dutch scientists from Delft University that have developed self healing concrete. While concrete has become almost universal material of choice for construction, it has its set of challenges. My mind goes back to all the conversations I've had about earth construction and how earth walls breath and crack and all one needs to do is to add another coat of earth and one is good to go.

Coming back to the bio-concrete, the idea is quite elegant - they added a mixture of dormant bacteria and capsules of calcium lactate to the concrete mix. As cracks develop in the concrete due to weathering, the dormant bacteria come in contact with oxygen and water and spring to life. They ingest calcium lactate and produce calcite, which fills the cracks. 

I have my questions about the process. For example I don't know how they manage to keep the bacteria dormant during the preparation of  of concrete while the concrete mix is wet. The dormant bacteria will be in contact with moisture even when the concrete is setting - what will prevent it from producing calcite at that point? I'm not sure what is the mechanism being used but I'm sure they've figured it out because they're already testing it on the walls of a life guard station on a beach. Also because moisture is a necessary precursor for the self healing to kick in, the effectiveness of this material in hot and dry environments should be looked into.

This is kind of a 'living wall' is very different from the sense one uses for earth walls. Earth used in construction is of course teeming with bacterial (an other) life. Especially with uncompressed earth techniques, the thermal comfort and the plethora of life forms that live in it contribute to the effect that the walls literally breath. Do they heal themselves? Well I know there are a variety of additives added to mud plasters to avoid crack ranging from cow dung to husk to jute fibers and together they bind into structures that are resistant to crack. Active healing of course doesn't happen.

A little bit more digging on the self-healing concrete issue yielded another little nugget. This one also tries to fill the cracks as and when they appear but the approach is slightly different. A South Korean scientist from Yonsei University has developed a concrete coating that "contains polymer micro-capsules, filled with a solution that, when exposed to light, turns into a water-resistant solid. The idea is that damage to a coated concrete surface would cause the capsules to break open and release the solution, which then would fill the crack and solidify in sunlight." 

Where as all these solutions are very interesting, my concern is that the embodied energy of cement-concrete based construction is already quite high, these solutions may increase the life of concrete and reduce the energy required over the long term, but we don't know if the energy required to implement these solutions (especially the polymer based one) offsets the gains. Also these solutions are accessible to only a select few (one's with the technical know how and in future the ones with the paying capacity) and they don't depend on naturally occurring materials. This means that it will never be a truly democratic solution. I hope I'm  proven wrong there.

On Another Monday Morning: An Ode to Wine

Rephrasing another poet I'd like to submit:

Something there is that doesn't love at all,

A Monday's clarion call - 

To return to the tread mill

I haven't had my weekend's fill.

Image Source: https://www.pinterest.com/

Hence I find myself doing everything but 'work'. Today I reread some of my blogs and I found this one I had written a couple of weeks ago on 'Monday Mornings' and before I knew it I was on Poem Hunter reading other poems and it hit me: this is a tradition worth building on. So here it is - in keeping with the last post's intoxicated topic, but far more sensuous - Ode to Wine.

Ode To Wine

Day-colored wine,

night-colored wine,

wine with purple feet

or wine with topaz blood,

wine,

starry child

of earth,

wine, smooth

as a golden sword,

soft

as lascivious velvet,

wine, spiral-seashelled

and full of wonder,

amorous,

marine;

never has one goblet contained you,

one song, one man,

you are choral, gregarious,

at the least, you must be shared.

At times

you feed on mortal

memories;

your wave carries us

from tomb to tomb,

stonecutter of icy sepulchers,

and we weep

transitory tears;

your

glorious

spring dress

is different,

blood rises through the shoots,

wind incites the day,

nothing is left

of your immutable soul.

Wine

stirs the spring, happiness

bursts through the earth like a plant,

walls crumble,

and rocky cliffs,

chasms close,

as song is born.

A jug of wine, and thou beside me

in the wilderness,

sang the ancient poet.

Let the wine pitcher

add to the kiss of love its own.

My darling, suddenly

the line of your hip

becomes the brimming curve

of the wine goblet,

your breast is the grape cluster,

your nipples are the grapes,

the gleam of spirits lights your hair,

and your navel is a chaste seal

stamped on the vessel of your belly,

your love an inexhaustible

cascade of wine,

light that illuminates my senses,

the earthly splendor of life.

But you are more than love,

the fiery kiss,

the heat of fire,

more than the wine of life;

you are

the community of man,

translucency,

chorus of discipline,

abundance of flowers.

I like on the table,

when we're speaking,

the light of a bottle

of intelligent wine.

Drink it,

and remember in every

drop of gold,

in every topaz glass,

in every purple ladle,

that autumn labored

to fill the vessel with wine;

and in the ritual of his office,

let the simple man remember

to think of the soil and of his duty,

to propagate the canticle of the wine. 

Pablo Neruda