Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Happy Ending

“Don’t tell me of love everlasting and other sad dreams,
I don’t want to weep.
Just tell me of passionate strangers who rescue each other from a lifetime of cares.” - Joan Baez

They met like any two strangers. She decided to close her eyes on the world that she used to live in. They built an alternate reality together. She found reasons to smile about. It wasn’t love. It was the satisfaction you feel in knowing that someone will be there to bear witness to your life, laugh at your jokes, make you dream.
Then he moved away. He lives alone in a forest now. He misses her. She lives in a world where, everyday, someone wants to serve her oblivion on a sugar cube. She misses him. She knows that life is beautiful – as beautiful as teardrops on a pillow in the light of the moon. She still laughs. Lately she’s been restless. She’s been muffling the screams that almost escape her lips when she lets her guard down.
A month more must they keep the matchstick alight. A month more. And then they can bathe together under a waterfall as if they’re free. Then can she be who he wants her to be again.
Oh, Time! Listen to the silence. Let not the west wind rise yet.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Of 'Iris'

Do you ever wonder what it would be like to forget yourself? To forget what you do? Forget who your friends are? Forget what a spoon is? That’s what Iris Murdoch dealt with in her struggle against Alzheimer's disease and Judy Dench brought it to life beautifully – so beautifully that it hurt to watch it. The scene that particularly touched me was where a postman came to deliver letters and Iris had forgotten what it was that this man who brought the letters was called. When John Bayley (played by Jim Broadbent) reminded her that he was called a postman, she followed him around listlessly saying, “It’s only the postman. It’s only the postman”.
After her friend Janet’s funeral, while she and John were driving back home, she got restless and panicky and threw herself out of their car. John immediately got off to look for her and ended up falling as well. While rolling about in the dirt, he bumped into a heap on the ground which turned out to be Iris. Iris then laboriously said, “I...love…you”.It made me laugh.It made me cry.And that’s what makes a scene truly powerful.
Iris wasn’t your conventional novelist-and-philosopher. She was openly bisexual. She believed in free love. She was fiercely independent. She didn’t care what people said. In one particular scene, John woke up in the middle of the night and asked iris who she was with then. He claimed to hate her. Iris just touched him lightly on his upper arm and he calmed down.
John always remained in awe of Iris (like the rest of the world) , even when she died a peaceful death with him at her side.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

If you're asking me for help-

It's hard for me to save you when I can't even save me from myself.
I'm still pretending to know the answers to the questions that people ask.
Well, I'm only deceiving the flowers in the breeze.
I'm nobody's true north,
nobody's reason to change,
nobody's season to change.
I'm only the blind man's blackness,
the deaf man's silence,
the sick man's cancer.
And one day when I don't roll anymore
I'll reach that place no one knows how to find on their own
and I'll know how I gave forever to the ones I touched and kept.