City, Clandestine

The tribulations, the gruesomeness, the mundane tests of survival: Catching the 9.02 train, riding the bus along with staring strangers, coffees to-go, familiar pavements and unwelcome rain. Is a city still lovable despite such odds? You sit in the confinements of your room with your unripened ability to acknowledge the eccentricities, the capacities, the idiosyncrasies of the heart and you wonder if; like Edith Wharton who found love in Paris, you have to travel to a new city to find love? Or for that matter, is every one of us destined to find love in a pre-allotted city? Like Carrie, who falls in love in New York, with New York. Will you ever find it in your heart to fall in love with a city if you don’t your find great love in it?

A city is made of moments. Moments of love, moments of regret. Everything else is a monument. You see brawls, you see embraces. You miss trains, you fear shadows, you live in a box, and you eat out of a box. You muse over the intertwining trajectories of urban lives. And when you are unmercifully awake at night you muse over the plainness of the day that was. You want to go see Paris and grieve for Oscar Wilde at the Père Lachaise. You want to witness Rossini’s opera at the Colosseum from the cheap seats and anonymously fall in love with the principle tenor. Or seek shelter from the rain with a wonderfully ordinary stranger inside a red telephone booth in London. Or you always have your own city.

Where you can become that stealthy observer who watches people fall in love, in the museum gazing at the same reproduction of a classic and strike a conversation of personal relevance. Or at the book store, among perfectly musty smelling used books, reaching for the same copy of a morbidly hopeful or salubriously cynical novel. You are torn between the easiness of cynicism and the foolishness of hope. You want to take the path of least resistance. It is so easy, so comforting even, to disinvest from hope. So easy to cocoon inside hopelessness during the miss-you nights. But when the day takes form on a pale September morning, and it is just sufficiently sunny, and appropriately murky outside, hope slaps you in the face and makes you want to shun that solace of cynicism. And you hurl yourself into possibilities. And begin another dangerous affair (a la Wilde) with the city, despite all its unfairness and exasperation.

The 3AM peregination

So I took a walk at 3am. A walk to organize the reverie which goes through one’s 3am mind. All the culminations of the week, the do’s and the don’ts of the affairs of the heart, the index of the beginning of a mundane week, the addendums of the remainder of a slightly stirred weekend, Jane Austen’s persuasion in my bag, and the most disposable, shaky perseverance in my heart, slightly tingling in my fingertips (course of the bloodstream?). Its 3am in a dodgy city but when you walk not knowing where you are headed, you look so foot-strong, it is an illusion, like a mended heart or a bad gin.

It would be so easy to just break some glass in your apartment instead during emotionally unregulated nights like these than to take a walk; but issues of neatness, decorum, and the general non-feasibility of courage keep me (plus something as celluloid as that should have an audience). This behavioral inability impregnates me with a seemingly fantastic idea about a place where people can just go and break glassware, dishes and fancy china, ingeniously called something like “soul-spas” or “anger-salons”. Anyway, so 3am walk on a pristine looking pavement with no pedestrian companions apart from the 3 threatening shadows of your own self, all extracting the life out of a cigarette.

I find my most wobbly yet strangely stabilizing spot in the 3am café. It is my strategically situated spot of silent observations, reflections, and consolations and of course conversations. All screamingly silent. Strangers surrounding me, intertwining our temporary 3am aimlessness with each other. Weakly drunk kids, compulsive as well as punished insomniacs, caffeine comforters.. all of us desperately seeking tacit company. The radio plays a relevant song, well; at least it seems relevant at 3am, all songs do, don’t they? Maybe it is the liquidity of the feelings that just takes the shape of the closest song.

Like a shrine where we congregate in our sleeplessness or like an escapade where we vacate into to feel nothingness. Where we break invisible glass as we read our books, stare into our screens or order our coffees unusually loud. We are all settling in this otherwise unwelcome whimsicality (that usually a painter is a proud owner of). We look busy but we really are all, unanimously, just watching the waitress robotically mop the floor; we really are just mirthfully shattering our strength that was carefully constructed over the week. We are partners in this therapeutic vandalism. At 3am, until we find a reason to retire back into thoughtfulness.

art - Coffee Cartel, water colours on canvas

artiste - Marilynne Bradley

url - here

Quelling questions

She always knew falling in love with a matador would be as dangerous as his occupation. Love is a losing game for many, or so she had heard. Only that, one has already won when they decide to fight a savage bull; unlike her blurry consortium with the matador, the ending of which was uncertain. She refrained from asking him if he loved her, if he missed her. She reveled in his slight presence when he was around. She spiraled in his heavy longing when he was away (she couldn’t tell where for she never asked). She did not want to inflict him with any more misgivings than he already suffered, about his job and by the virtue of his job, his life. She did not subject him to all those mundane inquiries of her heart and these inquiries (does he watch when I leave the room?) would quietly dissolve in her submitting heart. At night she would rest the remainder of her inquiries (can he name the song of my life?) in his scars and sleep with flickering eyes. The resignation was only temporary just like the vacuous gaze he conferred upon her when she smiled at him.

During days, an unfamiliar frown would appear on her forehead as she tried to reckon the reasons for his choices. Why did he fight bulls? Why did he never hold her face when he kissed her? Why did he never notice her cry when they made love? She would catch herself feeling jealous of the bull whose eyes he did look into. Who’s head he did hold tightly and before who he did present himself with the barest of gumption. She had not seen him glancing sideways at another woman. She hated that unlike other women she could not utilize that consolation. She hated when he told her “whatever you liked” (should I wear the red dress?). She needed him to care for her heart or break it, not just keep it suspended in passive concurrence. She knew that matadors had to keep their composure while the bull’s sanity teeters. She wondered how it would be to instigate the matador’s temper for a change. What if she asked him if he missed her while he fought the bulls? If he wanted to deploy his belligerent vulnerability to her like she was ready to charge towards him. If he wanted to dancingly yield himself to her, like he did to the bull.

Art - Matador Luis Miguel Dominguin, pencil on paper

Artiste – Pablo Picaso

url - here

Smithereens of a self

The hardest, almost unachievable, task in the world is to keep yourself together; to prevent the sundry fragments of your being from scattering into the wind on a restive evening. Like petals of a dandelion, your atoms attach themselves to your existence and one whiff of change is enough to disperse them. You nurture your loosely adhesive marbles of sanity, grapple to keep them together, in the concave pit of your reasoning, resisting inclinations and embracing inertia. You sever kinship with tears. Stoicism is your consort (but not your comfort). You bury your unraveling seams inside, wear your courage inside out. Your semblance hangs threateningly by one thread of an unsecured belonging. Your carefully under-rug-swept irk shows an ugly hunch. And as you taste your angrily brewed tea on that restive evening, bitterness is what rolls upon your tongue and slides down across your splintering length.

Your perfectly mistimed mistakes spill out of the closet of your skin and it begins to crack, oozing them out. You look at your diffident feet, too scared to take even the easiest step. You envy the carelessness your heart was once, not far long ago, capable of. Your hands tremble as you reach the innards of your composure to prod it a little, for prodding may ease you a little bit. The immediate under surface may settle if left astir. Maybe you should abandon the vain trails of resoluteness. Sometimes you should pain yourself to find numbness. It’s funny how you will learn to grow out of the unchanging. How you will learn that the constancy you feel will be temporary. Resilience is not always the answer to a meltdown, sometimes acquiescence is. It is untrustingly yet dependably okay to let your faith waver in yourself. For sometimes you learn what’s wrong only when u quit trying.

Art title – fragments

Artiste – Jorgen Klausen

Image url - here