an unfailing art

I once read this in Chuck Palahniuk's ''The Cult'' -

Another Christmas window story. Almost every morning, I eat breakfast in the same diner, and this morning a man was painting the windows with Christmas designs. Snowmen. Snowflakes. Bells. Santa Claus. He stood outside on the sidewalk, painting in the freezing cold, his breath steaming, alternating brushes and rollers with different colors of paint. Inside the diner, the customers and servers watched as he layered red and white and blue paint on the outside of the big windows. Behind him the rain changed to snow, falling sideways in the wind. The painter's hair was all different colors of gray, and his face was slack and wrinkled as the empty ass of his jeans. Between colors, he'd stop to drink something out of a paper cup. Watching him from inside, eating eggs and toast, somebody said it was sad. This customer said the man was probably a failed artist. It was probably whiskey in the cup. He probably had a studio full of failed paintings and now made his living decorating cheesy restaurant and grocery store windows. Just sad, sad, sad. This painter guy kept putting up the colors. All the white "snow," first. Then some fields of red and green. Then some black outlines that made the color shapes into Xmas stockings and trees. A server walked around, pouring coffee for people, and said, "That's so neat. I wish I could do that…" And whether we envied or pitied this guy in the cold, he kept painting. Adding details and layers of color. And I'm not sure when it happened, but at some moment he wasn't there. The pictures themselves were so rich, they filled the windows so well, the colors so bright, that the painter had left. Whether he was a failure or a hero. He'd disappeared, gone off to wherever, and all we were seeing was his work.

The last Durga Puja when I was entering at the mall nearby , I saw this man drawing at the glass walls of some big store. He was drawing Dhak drum , Kaash flower and all those illustrations and images we see being drawn everywhere during the festival. The details of his hand drawing at a glance reminded me of the above passage by Palahniuk's write up.

No, the images he had drawn, were cleaned up a long time ago, after Pujo came Xmas and then a few months ago Poila Boishakh happened and each of these time a new piece of image adorned the very wall, but may be they were by different people.

A Landscape of Rain

The rain doesn’t come to this place all the year round, not any more. The clouds gather above, but never fall down the vaster land parched in waiting. A backdrop of eagerness hangs in the middle. The fullness of desire gains more depth above. The ground beneath sinks within the hollowed darkness. A possibility only hangs in between, like Lucifer, the fallen angel, sailing in the abyss between heaven and hell. They said, that rests upon us what to make out of it, hell or heaven ? 

Empty frame: the blank horizon by Sohom

What is reality? Reality, is that what hurts? Or is reality what assuages the bruises with its rickety fingers and icy sinews ? Primal mind bellows to get rid of suffocation, but they refuse to fall off. So many things gather above head. Mind gets numb. Sleep engulfs. Day breaks. Suddenly awake out of a dream, the sound of rain chimes in ears from outside. It’s raining again. Relieved. But was it a nightmare? Or a limbo? Mind is tired. Tired with its perpetual wrestling. It feels sleepy again. Droopier, the eyelids fall closer. Sleep engulfs into deep, now with the promise of a new day.

P.S. I wrote this around last September. I was going through an ANGRY PHASE and I was bleak. But, I like bleak things, like a Tim Burton Movie. 

Yonder the horizon, I'll untether my wings

A girl like me. A lazy girl like me. A lazy girl who doesn't look like a couch potato but can give any of them run for their money on any given day...ok enough! Here's a confession. It's the day five. Exact 5 days ago on 29th June, I suddenly clicked and made this blog happen. Oh yes! JLT! But the name was decided a long ago, exactly a self coined phrase "Sméagol & the Orange marmalade", I use it for myself now and then. I'm feeling like hitting the sack again. But still it's good to know that it's good. Before retracing the footsteps and exploring that beyond horizon.

But I would like to listen more. It might be a hiatus from the flow, and will provide some moments of solitude, I pine only now and then with a stop gap of intermittent frequencies. I started the blog because I wanted to see how much I can pull with a theme of a colour which is not my best colour at all. Yes, Orange, I like them to see, but in my room there hardly any code orange. My favourite colour is something from a very different spectrum. But I like all the colours and now more I see to it , more an orange-Y world is taking shape right in front of me and it's beautiful. There're few things in my head, few drafts which may spill and take shape as more orange-Y . Let see where it takes. But a word of caution, next thing would be a depth charge, not an Orange candy.

The irony is we take a pause during conversation only to start again, rebounding back but in the meanwhile we forget the most important part, listening.

I've said it already. I want to listen. Listen to what matters most and what may stir attention.

Listening is important, if we don't want to end up like the wicked queen, who'd only listened what she wanted to, overlooking the truth in the magic mirror. I keep losing that magic mirror more often. Sometime someone else holds that for me. But I can't be precious. So this time I seek my own magic mirror and I'll keep that for a while.

There might be few more orange-Y-ness to come but the colour will be on the backdrop to make a dark matter look lesser grim. Told you, it would be a hard hitting allegro not a serenade. Meanwhile let me untether my wings. While I'll roam around the farthest corner, darkest nook of the labyrinth of the dark alleys, where only shadows loom large, might be on my way back, I'll make myself understand again the importance of light.

I'd made a line from Plath's ''Mad Girl's Love Song'' as something of my very own,"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.'', but that was before the wake of my naiveté. Though, might be I'm still high on it. At least now I also know, "I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there"... and "We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different."