Saturday, October 31, 2009

thanks to meera, some of the type of writing i did in, maybe 2002?- vaguely a krishnamurti style!-i dislike some of it, some still holds. i remember only a mostly filled handwritten journal, i can't remember the cover, lots of very lightly edited writing, maybe not so different from now :

These words, these thoughts, are a gift from another. From where do words rise, from which indistinct nerve of the mind. These words are placed before the world’s silence, like flowers before a favored idol; there is only the act of placing, and unpetitioning prayer.
I do not know whose words these are, who speaks through me. If it were possible, I would let this voice speak unhindered. I would know then whose words these are- a master’s, one who is sometimes in my mind freshly dead, and sometimes dead for ever, almost unborn. But because these words come trammeled, I cannot separate the voices; as in the acknowledgments of a book of a lifetime’s scholarship, I say that all that is right is another’s, but the infelicities, mine alone.
So take this beginning as invocation; where words are merged and voice is single, however flustered. Who invokes whom? I wish to speak as simply as oceans imply breadth, as beauty solicits the eye; but such clear motive can only be dreamed of. So let me say that I speak here as an actor who has worked on his lines, but now, on stage, is full of doubt.
What is there to fear? Not failure, or even betrayal or dishonour, but only the perturbations of a mortality made present and intimate. To speak is to invite the future, to cast away the years spent refining, polishing, understanding the past. It is to stand free of the past’s slow consolidation of achievement, it cautious calculations of hope. It is to begin again, and to end again.
So the performer on the stage, who renounces his lines; not that he fears shame, for the audience is wiser than he allows credit for- but he is fainthearted that he has not disciplined himself enough. He must now perform, only his gestures must remember the hours of practice, all the words must possess that newness and polish that can only spring from the integrity of the voice’s free contract with gesture. When the body finally renounces itself in, into voice, then will the voice speak free, breaking away from all source, consumed in universality- again, the utopia of language made transparent, as sky implies breadth.
There is no audience. There is only the bare ear that listens, that becomes, in heaven and beyond, the voice that it hears. As in the four walled darkness of a blind god’s brain, as in that stillness, that denuded floor of perception, may the voice’s chant rest awhile, even as does the soul in it’s unbreathing pause between two bodies.

This work is sought to be set in that poise, that pause between voice and action. But words cannot stay long in that airless planet- nor can voice, or mind, or sympathy. So these words live more terrestrially, sometimes inhaling, sometimes dead-
Whose words are these? “Only he has achieved privacy who does not wish to be loved, or remembered, or be, in any way, a part of the world’s life”. I do not know, I will not raise it again.

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