another once upon 28 10 94

28 10 94

You don't really need people to SAY they love you, or they're proud of you. Today when we left Parveen Sultana's show, Daddy quietly tucked 3 copies of the souvenir brochure under his arm as we were going out ( I wrote an article on "Introduction to Classical Music" in it).

Once Upon A Dream

Once upon a dream, I was a tiger! I have never been a tiger before. I must have been Siberian because I didn't feel very orange or veyr striped. I was large heavy strong and solid. The dominant sense I had was of responsiblity for the tigress and the two cubs. I was a father. I was a tiger, a father, a protector, a writer.

I was endangered. My family was endangered. I wrote a letter for help! Imagine! A tiger writing a letter! Do you know how difficult that is with no fingers and thumbs, only clows and paws. But I wrote. Somehow. To the environmental NGO people. Telling them about Tiger and Tigress and Tigi and Tiga.

(Wild cats usually terrify me when they are cast as characters in my dreamworlds. To discover that i can be one of them is like - what? I can't think. Like the object of a senstence discovering its actually the subject of a the sentence.

the NGO people laughed as they read my letter. Because they thought I was a human being pretending to be a tiger writing a letter. But I wasn't.. Still in the end they did help, they brought us away but we had to pretend to be human. Walk upright on two legs and wear silly paper face masks. That was their idea of saving us.

OCT 03 BFORE 20TH

I need to write. I think more than anything, I need to write. The pen and the ink and the paper and my hand my arm shoulder neck brain -- there is a path here and it is the path my mind needs to travel often daily, hourly, I don't know exactly. But I need to make this journey often, my sanity, my sanity, my mlife my sanity depend on these.

6 oct 2003

a once upon?

sometimes i'm tired of living. then i think of some choice dengue moments and remind myself how i wanted to live, how i didn't want to die. why is that? It didn't seem as through death would be painful. The process of dying, maybe; the explosion in my head that was building and building: that would finally be silence and stillness and peace. I can imagine that moment: surely it must have its beauty and there can be no other moment quite like it, not even birth. I hope that death is birth backwards.

That's a reassuring thought., that's why we have reincarnation theories and religions. But. But. But. When I nearly died there was no flashing stream of my life's images before my eyes, there were no loved one's waiting there was no sign or tunnel or light. Just incredible pain unbearable pain and the knowledge that death not be amazing profound or even glamourous. I would just cease to be. i would no longer exist. One moment I would be alive, and the next I would be gone. Not even gone as in Elvis leaving the building (which implies that he went somewhere else.) I had the sense that it was an ending. Like the snuffing out of a candles flame. That flame will never exist again. That fire is gone.

Of course we can light the candle again and again but it is a new flame every time. It's not a renewal. What's burnt is gone. Atoms dots in the air specks here and there I know not where. All over. ALL OVER.

dear diary friday october 9th? 2003

today i am troubled and i just want to empty the words that have been collecting, rotting, decomposing in my head. Compost is good. But the heat of it and the stench and the black juicy stew of unspoken sentences that I squashed down.

I am supposed to be a writer.

feb 03 freeing the pomegranate

They do not want to be free. They do not realise they are individuals. Tear off the skin, pull them apart and still they cling to each other. They believe they are one because they share one soul; they too have heard the story that a girl must eat one pomegranate whole - no sharing - guess which seed holds the light and eat them all.

Which seed is it? No one knows. Not even the seeds themselves. Each one believes it holds the light, and so they all shine.

How can you free so foolish a thing that believes it is the world, that shines until sharp ceramic teeth bite and burst its world.

Perhaps though, just perhaps it does not need to be freed. It understand s better than we do because it creates its own understanding, and that might be freedom (so what does the light do? Will it free ME?)

12:05 am, Mon 22 Sept 03

The Natural Way to Press books febb 2003

a writing exercise I found from 2003.

feb

The natural way to press books is of course to do it with flowers. The fresher the better, for dried flowers are bad feng shui. try to ignore the paradox of the pressed book turning into dry leaves that will themselfes be bad fend gui.

A bressed book however contains words, many many two-dimensional words. These words, pressed, become more intense and preserved forever between the petals of a large flower. A very large flower. I gasp as I realise there will be no fragrance no colour and no difference. It is neither art nor craft, but merely the revenge of the faded petals that crumble as we turn over new leaves. Every page reveals a new cadaver. There is nothing natural about this, finding death this way. Bury your flowers and read your books.

dear diary sep 19 2003, post dengue

Childhood is really quite awful. Why on earth are we so enamoured with it, who do we yearn back to it, why do we tell ourselves what happy childhoods we had? W're abused, used, terrories, bulleid, scared, forced, ordered ..blah blah blah...

I think I would be a nervous wreck if I had children, imaginging their days at school, their interactions with friends, being bullied in a playground, not knowing an answer, being snubbed or laughed at, being not good enough or even too good. Childhood is scary. I'm glad mine is over.

4 Dec 2005

from my diary .. I like it because it's from a time when I was trying to get in touch with emotion and understand what different feelings feel like.

"This is joy I've just discovered. It's not an outburst of passion, it's an inner overwhelming, it bubbles up from somewhere between my breasts, swooshes up my throat around my shoulders around my head down my back till I feel it everywhere down to my twiddly toes.

It's not complicated, like jealousy or doubt or fear. it's simple and clear as pain or grief - both of these shall come again in their time. But this day, this moment, is a season for joy. It comes with Christmas carols playing on the backgroun on my old tape recorder. It comes with blushing bridelike memories of a man named Jesus (for we must fall in love with those we choose to follow). It comes with a quiet cloudy Sunday morning, picking dead leaves off potted plants and sowing marigold seeds.

Joy. It's intense but it's calm. It's contentment overflowing. It feels very very good, and so I shall stop writing for now and enjoy this joy while it is here.

"What is success ...

I'm not sure this is poetry, it's just something I wrote in a diary (yes, yes, this is yet another regurgitated pearl from the diaries I'm destroying). But it's poetic and nice and I feel like sharing:

What is success for me?
To be useful, fruitful, functional, famous.
To have peace of mind.

To be a published writer
and to have Askios flourish
and to have my art work
recognised and wanted.
To die without regrets?
To find my soul mate.
To heal my fragmented mind as is best and live well with it.

It'll feel bubbly, energetic,
worth waking up for.

I'll be busily content, my days full, and oh yes I'll be richer.

To be admired.
To have my talents not lie stagnant.
To be recognised for the way
I have used them.
To create
To preserve my ideas
To communicate them in wonderful ways.

To make a difference in the world.
To leave it a better place.
To free myself of torment.
To understand myself.
To love myself.

I want to make a mark.
A good mark that would change this world for the better.
To be remembered?
Not necessarily.
As long as I know I didn't just walk through.
I need to know that I mattered.
That the world is a better place because of me.

(from my diary 2003 July 26 Saturday, 5.20 pm)

What I have learnt from reading this now, is that I need to truly believe that the world ALREADY is a better place because of me.

dear diary 1 1 2004

thought this could be once upon the stroke of midnight.

a few minutes past midnight. Does it really matter? It's all perception and people look at their watches and celebrate accordingly. So some scream 5 minutes earlier, some a moment later.

And tomorrow the sun will rise like any other day - no, not quite - that's the magic of it - if you wake up for the sunrise you will sense the newness of the year. Although that too is a perception: if you woke up every day for every sunrise, you will sense the newness of the (each?) day. THAT is spectacular but most people miss it, thank God, otherwise we'd have godawful crackers going off every midnight (give or take 5 minutes.

fri jan 24 2003

we're all so busy with finding the inner child ... but isn't there also an INNER GIRL - that amazing creature we once were before breasts and pubic hair and periods .. not quite child, not quite teen. Innocent but wise, and free from fear and trouble, a wisdom born of the understanding that life is wonderful, life is to be LIVED.

She gets lost in the cacaphony of our world with its rules, itbs borders and its eyes, watching, watching all the time till we are forced to lower our gaze, draw curtains closed and the inner girl retreats into an attic in our head, where she waits for us to remember, and to find her.

jan 27th

i wish parents would invest as much time on their children's emotional health as they did money on tuition classes ..

oct 4 2003

Men are all the same. They just have different faces so we can tell them apart.

22 8 2003, 11.10 a.m.

What if He's just some big Eternal Superbeing kid, playing with his trainset, setting up obstacles, road blocks, impossible routes; He flips a switch at the last moment to change a journey into something new.

We are the toys - the trains, the engines, the tracks, the goods onboard, the boulders blocking someone else's path, the switch that makes the difference. The plug points, the electricity that makes it possible.

We the people, the creatures, the plants, the cells - we are all these things. At one point or another. We're interchangeable, we become what He wants us to be - this Omnipotent Child with the Vivid Imagination.

We are toys in His game - but in a way we're more. We ARE the game, , and the game is His, and so in a way we are Him.

when kite flies jan 18 2003

from a diary entry 2003 jan 18

when Kite flies

under the sun

her shadow glides

over my garden.

think there is a hiaku in here

dear diary 11 dec 1993

The birds fly in at twilight, hundreds of them, and land on some pre-determined branch of this tree in front of my window.

There is no pushing, no fighting. Each one knows its place, goes there directly in one great swoop, and rests for the night. They seem to know that if they live through the next day, their place on the branch will be waiting for them,. And that is enough to let them rest through the night, and soar again in the morning.

There's so much man can learn from nature, and he does, but forgets; each generation has to rediscover and relish nature's wisdom for itself.

dear diary ? 91 -r 93

How is it we know how to send rockets out into space, but not how to stop one man from killing another?

And we have ways of knowing how the weather will turn, but lack the foresigh to see a young life going in the wrong direction.

And why is it we're disappointed when a millian dollar probe goes astray somewhere by Mars, when nearly half a lakh of children dies every day for the lack of enough food?

We look up and lose ourselves in the heavens, and forget that there are souls lost at our feet.

Dear Diary: Dec 14th 1991

I wrote this when thinking of my uncle Hilly Mamu who died on 29 11 1989. His birthday wa on 14 4.

The feeling, when you think of someone who is dead, is unlike any other. Not the unbearable ache of love for a man, or the yearning to go home. It's just a sad ache, a little twinge and then a helpless acceptance. Words you can never say, problems you can never share, achievements you can never show, voices you can never hear ... laughter.

Perhaps somewhere he is watching. Perhaps he is just behind me, looking over my shoulder. Perhaps he lies there in dark emptiness, and the only time a little light visits him is when we think of him or speak of him .. and God lifts up that heavy veil and lets him listen.

dear diary feb 10th 2001

So the children are back, sort of. It's both wonderful and terrible to see them when I know there is only so much I can do.

Sometimes I wish I had never let us all love each other as we do: perhaps this will cause us all more pain than if I had cared less.

Mrs. H talked about destroying myself if I put them first. And I said, What about the children?

They're already destroyed, she answered.

...

I still think of them as "my boys" ..

it's like "but Fran SAID I could have them, she SAID they were ours .. "

Ha ha .. but look how it turned out, that neither of us has them now.

dear diary 2nd feb 2001, friday. Noon.

No one can give me power. Power is something I have to take, something I can give only to myself. But ... we DO give power to people, don't we? We allow them power over us. So I guess its power over ourselves that I mean.