Why is it so that the subject-matter for writing or thought, most of the times, is poetic or somewhat linked to it...? Why do we talk of rains and clouds and flowers and love and relationships and seasons...? Why are we so prone to not thinking about things which are ugly or nasty if they do not affect us directly...?
'twas a lovely day..the air filled with a soft drizzle and the sky embroidered with dark patches. I was walking down the slums beside the Bidhannagar station, having completed Coleridge's Kubla Khan with my students at college with reference to the Theory of Imagination and complicated things of the sort, and thereby explaining the process of creation and creativity..and there was this child, two to three years in age, seated on the footpath right in front of me. He frowned at me with angry eyes and that was when I realized that I was almost on the verge of stepping upon some invaluable pieces he had brought together, among them a torn chewing gum wrapper, a piece of cardboard, some brightcoloured strings of I-don't-know-what, a thrown out empty box of some delicacy from some city restaurant etc...I heard an irritated voice asking "why stand in the middle of the road, and that too, such a dirty one, surrounded by garbage all around." I moved aside and saw the couple behind me hurrying down the narrow lane, their faces half-covered, to keep the stink off. That was it. A narrow lane with no defined borders except garbage from the surrounding housing societies. The child didn't seem bothered. I stroked his little head apologetically. This was beyond the artist..the re-incarnation of the sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice..he who on honeydew hath fed and drunk the milk of paradise..never to be included and cited in a class on Romanticism. He smiled back, his eyes sparkling with the energy to make-something-out-of-it-all...
2 comments:
Kubla Khan... We read it today... and as such this post seems to have even more of a significance. We usually write and publish the good things, which will be remembered and perhaps leave a mark, a positive one. The sad, ugly, negative thoughts are written in a tired worn-out diary, the words, at times, erased by some forgotten tear; insignificant because we hardly ever turn the page to read and be reminded of the hurt and pain again. They are written to relieve, to safely tuck away as if in fear of the Pandora's box being opened again by someone else.
Yes, you are right. Somewhere we are uncertain to acknowledge these shades and thus lose out the opportunity to understand Life from a different angle..that which seeps into us every now and then but is very rarely assimilated within the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.
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