Metaphor

Metaphors make sense. I mean that literally, metaphors make sense. Imagine a page of even the most eloquent book with its text leached of metaphor and you will see a terrible, dry husk. The image that comes to my mind is of a small log after the fire has burnt itself out -- it has the shape of a log, but nothing of the essence; tap it and it will crumble into dust.

If you read language carefully, you see that one metaphor shades into another, almost without break; indeed, there are layers of metaphor in the most mediocre prose. We may read left to right in lines of little symbols, but what we keep in our heads is the gift of metaphor.

You can always tell a poor thinker by the quality of his metaphors. I work in social science publishing, so I see horrible new examples every single day. A writer who does not know the value of words cannot be a good writer, and he cannot be a good thinker. One thinks, after all, in reformulations of the familiar, with a vocabulary of known sites. If not, how would one think at all?

Among the several books I am reading at the moment is one called The Praise Singer, by Mary Renault (1978). It is a historical novel about travelling bards in the world of the ancient Greeks of the Ionian islands. The work of a bard in the ancient world, where few things were written down, was the safeguarding and employment of memory. Just one elderly bard and his disciple could commit to memory and find new ways to tell the history of a hundred years. Then remember the master's master and the disciple's disciple, and hundreds of bards of varying skill. I bet the ancient Greeks learnt about time in such ways. We nowadays have almost no conception of long durations of time. Instead we have the urge to periodise: the Sixties, the Eighties, the Renaissance, the Great Mughals, the Dark Ages.

To my mind, a beautifully-written story about ancient bards by a modern author is ripe ground for rooting around in. Reading this book, I better understand myself through a story about others understanding themselves through song-stories about others understanding themselves and the universe through act and consequence. And now I am writing about it...

Vir

The Hindustan Times' Brunch section on Sundays is my favourite toilet reading. And that is because of Vir Sanghvi, the editorial boss of HT. In today's Brunch, for instance, 11 out of 24 pages were written by him. The first long article was on some hotelier who's extremely into his guests' sleep quality. I've never spent a night in a fancy hotel, and find it unlikely that I ever will. I really don't give a damn about hotels. But I enjoyed reading that piece.

Then there was another long piece about a wine tour of Burgundy, naturally by Vir Sanghvi himself. (I want his job.) Now, people, especially Indians, writing about wine can be terribly boring and uninformative. The train of unlikely adjectives regularly employed to explain a flavour often leaves me wondering how you could be drinking both tar and berries in the same cup -- Eeyuck. Like squashing grapes onto a gently steaming road in summer and then licking it.

But Sanghvi knows a bit about wine, and what he doesn't he doesn't pretend to. More than all the talk of wine is, of course, the almost unmanageable joy I feel at the thought that here are people (Frenchmen, to be sure) who make money making something beautiful, with a knowledge and practice that cannot really be studied. I think there is tremendous power in a land and occupation -- and product -- into which many, many centuries of work have sunk.

When I drink wine, I feel I am absorbing some of that power, some of that hard work and wisdom. It makes me older. It makes me pay attention.

Plug

Zzeblog is a frightfully tasteless and quite provocative new offering. For example: 'Why Men Love to Play with Balls.' Regrettably, I am related to this man.

Read attentively.

-19 July 2006, 12.31 am-
Correction, there are two people writing Zzeblog: the aforementioned bee-brain Zzebrain and Fadereu, a name that sounds like it should belong to a Harry Potter centaur (but more Continental). Both are sober, respectable men.

Oh!

Oh! oh! oh! Italy won! Oh happy day. Night. This is the way a match should be -- hard-bitten and hard-fought, with spectacular goals at the very last minute. It was late and the house was still, so I did my tribal victory dance on tiptoe and howled in pleasure very quietly. I don't care if it's just a game and the players are a ridiculously enthusiastic, primitive sweating grimacing thundering herd. Hallelujah! Forza Italia! Whoof, am not used to being so unabashedly partisan.

And then I had to read for an hour before my heart rate settled to normal cynic levels. Which allowed me a threadbare four hours of lively sleep.

Plug

This is a plug: A friend with an elegant written voice has started a blog. She is rather shy, so please pretend you've never heard of it, and if you do mention it to her, please hotly deny any acquaintance with me. Here is the link. It's a very new blog, so a bit short of content at the moment.

And another: The Adventures of the Late Late Barry the Booger and other tales. (A friend posts on it.) It is sometimes brilliant, but always unhinged. Definitely not good for the health of sane people.

Football

Lacking both skill and sportsmanship (win or lose never mattered), I was a bored and unwilling participant in school sports like football and volleyball. On the field or court, my ironic detachment shadowed me everywhere and monopolised my attention. Everyone looked so amusingly single-minded and primitive, thundering around the field in a sweating and grimacing herd. It was all too serious.

So I was surprised to find that watching sports is so much fun. Cricket, tennis, football are enormously entertaining. On the other hand: basketball is too quick, and there's little to choose between the teams -- they're all American. Baseball seems a small and dull game after cricket; and American football is silly. (One can get tired of watching Americans on the TV.)

But this is about the football World Cup. I'm loving it. Who could witness Germany-Poland and not think of history? Or Italy-anybody and not think about hairstyles? It's the underdogs that get my cheers and fist-pumps, but the best footballers are awe-inspiring no matter their colours: there's magic in their feet and networks in their brains. While the heroes are getting on with it, all parts of the mind are fed -- the animal portions with steroidal floods, and the rational bit with a flood of metaphor.

I regret not being able to enjoy playing sports. But watching them allows me to taste their cleansing fury, and the controlled delirium of the body unleashed.

Anon.

(In response to a comment on the previous post.)

Thanks for that -- strange and valuable to hear an anonymous voice speaking wise words. That last post on 'truth' in poetry was in fact giving me sleepless nights, because of some of the very things you have said. In the first place, poetry does not sit entirely apart from other forms of what one might call art in seeking to capture and hold into stillness a fleeting state; and perhaps, since that state is subjective, yet can be shared, rather than truth in poetry one ought to speak of fidelity, or honesty or clarity; but these are all words that should be used as sparingly as possible.

It's also true that what one can share through poetry is one's vulnerability rather than some 'item' of truth. I think of it as a conversation between old friends, where words may be the medium, but one can nevertheless 'imagine' himself or herself into the mind or 'state' of the other. Not only is the poet seeking to expose himself, travelling well beyond his natural borders in search of absolution or confirmation in some sense, but so is the reader. One has to feel one's way through a poem, often even a fairly straightforward one, testing the ground every step of the way... So I think that somewhere in this exercise, some kind of truth is arrived at. Both writer and reader reveal something that is essentially themselves, and yet alike.

Every time I write a poem, usually motivated by some moment of clarity fitting to my state of mind and experience at the time, I find myself disappointed by my inability to represent the insight with fidelity. Because it seems to me that no matter how simple the realisation, it shatters into complexity the moment you prod it -- and how to gather all that into a few words? But the end-product, the poem as it stands when I give up on it, begins to become truthful by its very existence. And later I, even as author, have to feel my way through it for echoes of what brought those particular images to the top of the mind, just as perhaps a reader might. Are there poets who do not think visually?

Tangentially, I find that the great restraint that the effort for clarity and fidelity places on the words I use makes for fewer and shorter words and shorter lines and fewer lines altogether. So in that some kind of aesthetic is born. I just find it interesting upon reflection, and a mark of my poverty as a 'poet', that I lack the delicacy and staying power to spiral into a topic rather than, in panic, rush for the core of it in an attempt to make the capture.

Truth

In my poorly-informed understanding, poetry is an attempt to write truth. Truth on the subjects of poetry is not possible to write in steady prose, because the subjects of poetry are the things that happen within the mind -- things of motion and variability, sensual rather than factual meaning. One might say that a good novel has the same subjects; of course it is true, and a novel can be full of poetry. This is because poetry works by seeking epiphany -- bringing the writer's and reader's minds into a temporary, even fleeting, alignment. In fact it is a sharing of visions, of inhabiting other minds, made possible by the recognition by the reader of the truth in the words because of his or her own experience, imagined experience or sympathy.

As for the poet, he or she has to struggle to be truthful, to distil into arrangements of words and pauses a recognisable facsimile of a vision or insight. In this task, the poet is aided by the immense depth that all words have, the great range of their content accreted with time and usage.

Few things can beat the tremendous rush of grace that comes with a great line. I still thrill at the first few lines of Eliot's 1917 Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (after the Italian), even though I don't understand all of the poem. It's all about potential. And here is a line from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova who was persecuted by Stalin, quoted by the wonderful (and often poetic) Michael Dirda of the Washington Post's Book World. Shorn of its context, but presumably about her suffering.

'That was when the ones who smiled/Were the dead, glad to be at rest.'

Edges

Curves are sensual -- but so are edges. A well-off friend of mine has just finished building an enormous house in a pleasant suburb. One of the many bedrooms, described vaguely as a 'children's bedroom', has a built-in double bed, with stumpy posts marking the lower corners. These posts are square, stand about a foot above the level of the bedcover, and, near the top, open out in a decorative feature that looks like an upside-down pyramid. The base of this pyramid is the upper surface of this decorative feature. The four edges, and the four corners, were carefully prepared by the carpenters, and are rather sharp. They are at the perfect height for me to puncture my kidneys on.

Unnerving to see such edgy design in a bedroom. But also strangely compelling, because while my mind was rebelling at the thought of what this shapely chunk of wood could do to some careless grandkid, I was also wondering why nobody else had seen the danger, and whether I was being a sissy about home safety. While the mind was thus ticking over, I was running my hands along the edges, savouring the unfamiliar sensation of good wood, well finished -- to an edge.

Some weeks ago we had a vastu consultant in to scope out our flat for malign influences. He was aghast that our dining table had square legs and a rectangular top, with corners. No, no, one must avoid outward-facing corners in home furniture -- they bring bad luck. Everything should be gracefully (and safely) curved. Chop off that angular headboard. Avoid black. Do something about that dangling beam.

Sure, sharp features at toe level can cause eye-watering pain, but I find I like to have some edges around. Most objects around us, including many items of furniture, are made of materials that just aren't so great so put one's hands on. Polished granite kitchen counter? Cold. Plywood cabinet? Tacky. Laminate table surface? It had to be glued on. Plastic chair? Yuck. No fun to tickle their curves.

But even the nastiest of these materials can have a perfectly competent edge. It helps my concentration to trace lines on my palm with whatever edge is around (the edge of the keyboard tray on this computer table): a distant echo of the wonderful frisson of running one's thumb down the blade of a knife. It's a delicious cohabitation of extremes -- the location of one's full being in the mind, where the thinking is being done and, at the same time, in the body, the skin of the fingertips. It's like being high.

Unglish

As an English-speaking Indian, I am cut off from the free and uninhibited exercise of language. I know the tourist's Hindi, which allows me to function in the local market and perhaps half-chat with a friend. I can cuss, but without salt and spit. Hindi writing is a closed world; the written language is not as louche as the spoken one. It may be that the memory of a short story by the great Munshi Premchand (read in high school, painfully, word by word) survives to keep the door to the presumed universe of Hindi literature open just a sliver. But what's the point of that?

I know the dilettante's Italian -- enough to read by, and enough to miss nearly every nuance sensible to the adept. I can speak Italian to exchange information, but not to enlighten.

French: I read a bit, produce a pungent accent, but can't say 'Rachel' well enough to please a girl named Rachel.

Spanish: Okay, I struggled semi-successfully through a lengthy passage in sixteenth-century Castilian -- on the strength of my dilettante Italian.

Farsi: Grammar's a cinch, but my vocabulary is khaile khaile kochik. Not a sentence goes by in which every word is an old friend.

Arabic: Forgot it at an impressionable age.

Marathi: Forgot it ditto. And I have family who speak nothing else!

Punjabi: Alas, none. Living in Delhi.

Telugu: Wokkati, rendu... I spent nine academic years in rural Andhra Pradesh. Admittedly, at boarding school.

Urdu: A purely mechanical conoscenza; I can read the words... But Mirza Ghalib is clothed, when he is clothed at all, in coarse literalness. Who can show me what the big deal is about zulfein?

Wish I knew (in alphabetical order): Czech, French, Gaelic, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Ladakhi, Lakota, Latin, Marathi, Pashto, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Telugu, Turkish, Urdu, Welsh. Oh, Danish, after watching Babette's Feast. But why I wish I knew these languages, that's hard to figure out. (But not impossible, of course.)

And English. It is my first language -- my mother tongue, the vessel of what thoughts I have, the source of my livelihood and the engine of my imagination. These days, Indians have claimed it, parked their golden Sonatas and black Optras right on top of it, poked their flag into its balding crown. But that's no language, it's a happy muddle. You can't be subtle in Hinglish, unless you want to be subtly ridiculous.

Living in India, in my own land and history, breathing (when possible -- cough, cough, thhoo) my own air, surrounded by Bengalis, Mallus, Punjus, and other oo's, ee's, ites and wallas, I am a linguistic exile. The (real) English, Brits, Britishers or United Kingdomites speak and write (when they can do either) a language that is in their very hair roots. They get it genetically, from their grandparents. Americans speak American, with the speed of summer lightning (to borrow rudely from Henry Higgins). They are glib -- even too glib. But I'm an island. Not Simon & Garfunkel's rock, rather more like a muddy sandbank in a polluted river, into which many things have sunk, but few grown.