Ode to Faces

Faces where the eyes have lived for years

Faces wild in feelings or numb in nothing

Hollow of the eyes, the forehead alley

The mountainous nose and the blowholes

Mouth's cavern that hides and unhides words

Teeth houses in metropolitan concatenations

Ears that listen to how the face ends in motion

Faces where eyes have lived for years

Faces dwindling and drooping in time

Before falling away, crumpled in tearlessness

For years to come and not to come

Eyes that have stopped caressing faces

And yet the old shadow image of her face from side on

Massive against the sky

A tiny ipod in the same frame

Unadorned by the ears

Sits like unplayed music

Her face recedes as it meets the stillness of the sky

And yet those trembling brows

Know how to enact facelessness.

কবিতা? রাগ...

যতই আমায় ন্যাংটো করবে
তুমিও ততই ন্যাংটো হবে

রাস্তায় ধূলোর হাসাহাসি
ক্যামেরা আর পুলিশদৃষ্টি

একে অন্যের পারিবারিক শরীর
একে অন্যের লজ্জা নিবারণ করবে

নিবারণ ওদের
আর লজ্জা তোমার-আমার

শরীরের কোথায় বর্ণ লেখা আছে?
নগ্নতার কোন কানাচে লেখা থাকে জাত?

ঐ দেখো স্ত্রী স্বামীকে আড়াল করে আছে
দেখো ঐ ছেলে মাকে আড়ালে রেখেছে

তোমায়-আমায় কে করবে আড়াল?
কে রাখবে আড়ালে?

যতই আমায় ন্যাংটো করবে
নিজে ততই ন্যাংটো হবে

15 August 2015

This was last winter in Delhi...hard to believe I'll never see you again...one by one the voices are ceasing on the other side of the phone...there won't be many calls from India now...farewell Emma...I was raised by you and others...with you now, three of the caregivers are gone...solitude thickens with each of these departures...I have always seen you as an extremely active person, always trying to do something for the other...will never forget your strength...I don't believe in afterlife...will keep you within as long as I am around as others who love you will...The end was hurried and I couldn't go but then I didn't want to see you like that...my thoughts are with my aunt and my once-little brother who has become so mature now...

Thoughtlet

Finishing a phd thesis makes the latent patent: insanity is in-sanity!

Poemlet

You are alone. 
And yet 
There is someone 
Inside you. 
And 
Outside you
There is someone too.
Two?
Are they different or the same?

Chugtai's "The Quilt"

Re-reading this iconic Ismat Chugtai story after years brought back many questions or perhaps they were new questions:

1. What's the relation between parental prohibition and homosexuality in the story?

2. How does heterosexual frustration that leads to a homosexual choice reflect on the event of sexuation here?

3. How does one read the narrator's aggressiveness as a little girl?

4. How does the quilt metaphor transform throughout the story, becoming the object as well as the site of both concealment and disclosure?

5. Do we read anything into the animal imagery of the elephant (and the frog at the end) or see it simply as a turn of phrase?

5. Is the quilt internalised as a censor at the end? what's the implication of the story ending on a note of repression apart from the irony of parental prohibition coming back?

6. Does the story not have a counter-intentional heteronormative strain where homosexuality is reduced to an effect of autistic isolation and seen as a compensation for heterosexual love?

September 4, 2015

On teachers' day in India, I express my gratitude to death, the greatest teacher of life and from whom I have learnt quite a bit...

Sexuality...Sensitivity...

CPI leader Atul Kumar Anjan's comment on Sunny Leone's condom ad interestingly juxtaposes sexuality and sensitivity!

I would like to know how a condom ad 'develops' sexuality in our underdeveloped country and how that 'developed' Miss sexuality then kills Mr. sensitivity.

Is sexuality inherently obscene for a discourse of social moralism? As Alenka Zupancic will say, obscenity is tied up with comedy as a discursive effect and the speech by comrade Anjan is comedy incarnate!

Kavita Krishnan writes:

"The Left needs to reconnect with its own emancipatory legacy, which pioneered a critique of the institution of family and sought to look at human sexual and relationships without the lens of bourgeois patriarchal moralism and double standards. Engels, who tore apart the hypocritical facade of ‘family values’ and exposed the subordination of women that hid behind such ‘values’, would turn in his grave to hear this pompous phrase invoked by his followers, two centuries after his death!

In my own experience as a Left activist over the past couple of decades, I have witnessed the evolution and maturing of the Indian political Left’s understanding and articulation on gender and sexuality: including a shift in its position on the death penalty and LGBT rights and its analysis and critique of gendered restrictions and regulations for women in the family in terms of forms of social reproduction in globalised India.

In recent times, Left student and women’s groups have given slogans of women’s freedom a mass social dimension (in the movement following the December 16th gangrape, for instance) and protested powerfully against moral policing. But, in my observation, there are still considerable sections of Left ranks, cadres and even leaders, who embrace the Left theoretical critique of patriarchy merely superficially, and continue to hold on to the ‘apasanskriti’ paradigm, expressed in terms of moral disgust at sexual permissiveness and women’s sexuality."

অঞ্জন

অঞ্জন দত্তর নতুন অ্যালবাম 'উনষাট' । লোকটার ফিল্ম নির্দেশনার ক্রিটিক করলেও এইসব আসন্ন বার্ধক্যের গানে যে হারানোর সুর আছে তাতে আমার ফেরারি বালকবেলা ভাসছে। তাকে নির্বাসন দিতে পারি না, অথচ ফেরারিরা ফেরে না । অনেকদিন পর অঞ্জন দত্তর গানে অনেকটা মন ভরে গেলো। বিশেষত টাইটল ট্র্যাক আর 'একটা দিন'

Reading Andrew's Brain

Doctrow's last novel is fascinating for thematically staging the cognitive science-psychoanalysis conflict by having a cognitive scientist psychoanalysed. The whole narrative is constructed in the form of an Analytic dialogue between the two. Though I didn't find the political ramification of 9/11 absorbing, the book is a great read for anyone interested in what's lost in translation from the brain to the mind.

Joan Baez Concert at Sydney Opera House 2015

Joan Baez sang like a breeze, danced like a dream and looked all diamond without rust...

She sang new songs from an upcoming album; performed a poem in English and indigenous language about the ancient Australian lands and their "borrowed time" to the accompaniment of the indigenous musical instrument Didgeridoo; she did two false-endings before finally bringing the curtain down; sang others' songs better than themselves (as usual but I am biased of course...the way she sang Dylan's "don't think twice" to a completely different beat and tune was simply breathtaking); she spoke about the homeless people all over the world, clarified that she's a pacifist and not an idiot and appealed to "raze the prisons to the ground"

Though it's difficult to pick highlights from such a concert, I'll nevertheless pick two sublime moments:

1. When she returned to the stage after a false-ending and took the guitar to sing 'Imagine'!

2. When she said she wants to travel as much as she can now because she's an athlete and the muscles around her throat are getting tired these days

জ্ঞান

ছোটবেলায় সামনাসামনি দেখা হলে আমরা গানের লড়াই খেলতাম আর এখন ফেসবুকে পেছন পেছন দেখা হলে আমরা জ্ঞানের লড়াই খেলি।

Reading White

"Time only glances back over its shoulder, like an animal raising its snout for a moment from the carcass it is devouring. But it is enough for space to be able to dig out its slopes again, for the world to be tipped slightly out of true."

Marie Darrieussecq's novel White (2003) written in a delicately calm poetic prose uses sci-fi dystopia to raise fundamental philosophical questions about the human condition in corporeal time and space. From a temporal perspective, it's interesting to read this novel set in the year 2015 in its own time!

What is it to carry on investing in a scientistic project of European colonisation in the year 2015?

What is it to consider the austere minimum of an indifferent nature colonisable?

In this spectrally romantic novel, ghosts inhabiting the fluid crevices of time are at the helm of the narration as they effortlessly move in and out of the protagonists' memories. In the inanimate whiteness of the poles reproduction becomes a melancholic memory trace of the human.

It's quite a different reading experience from the Darieussecq I have read before: My Phantom Husband and Pig Tales. This one's corporeal but less visceral. A beautifully sedate performance from one of the best French novelists of our time.

Reading The Body Where I Was Born

"The bodies where we are born are not the same bodies that we leave the world in."

A remarkable narration from the analyst's couch where fiction puts the story of life at a critical distance by creating a 'willing suspension of disbelief' about itself. The analytic alienation of life into story marks the malleable sexuated body where speech keeps pouring in, without ever settling down on it.

Guadalupe Nettel's first novel is a treat. Looking forward to more such intensities from the brilliant Mexican writer of 'Natural Histories.'

Thrombo-thesis

When a friend recently warned me that I might die from sitting in front of the computer for ages, like a gamer somewhere had died of 'deep vein thrombosis', my instant reply was, 'yes, I too will die, not from thrombosis but thrombothesis!'

And now the 'thrombothesis' of enjoyment (read jouissance) stands at 382 pages and 116000 words. Time for a provisional submission for feedback now.

I realize how each syllable is stitched with my blood...old dark blood ageing and darkening further as it bites on the white surface, be it the screen or the page!

অ্যাশট্রের রক্তমাংস

আমাদের অ্যাশট্রের আগামী প্রিন্ট সংখ্যা 'রক্তমাংস'র কাজ প্রায় শেষ। এই থিমের ওপর নানা ধরণের মাল্টিমিডিয়া কোলাবোরেটিভ ওয়ার্কশপ, কবিতা-রেসিপি, চিঠি, গল্প, নন-ফিকশন ইত্যাদি নিয়ে দ্বিভাষিক সংখ্যা। আমার প্রধান দায়িত্ব ছিল গল্প বিভাগ। সেখানে কুলদা রায় এবং অলোকপর্ণার দুটি অসামান্য গল্প পেয়ে আমি খুশী। আর এই দুই গল্পকারের সাথে একই বিভাগে আমারও একটা গল্প থাকছে এটাও আনন্দের। অ্যাশট্রের জন্য রইলো এর আগে প্রতিষেধক প্রিন্ট ম্যাগ ও গল্পপাঠ অনলাইন পত্রিকায় প্রকাশিত আলেস্টার ক্রাউলির সেটানিজম নিয়ে লেখা সিউডো-গোয়েন্দা গল্পের এক ছদ্ম-সিকুয়েল। স্পটলাইট এখানে ক্রাউলির প্রেমিকা লায়লা ওয়াডলের ওপর। এ গল্পে থ্রিলার থেকে রাজনৈতিক সংবাদের যাত্রাই হয়ত তার রক্তমাংস। আমাদের সময়ের রাজনীতি অ-রাজনীতিতে রক্তমাংসের ছায়ায় ছাই ফেলতে আসছে অ্যাশট্রে ৭। ২০১৬ লিট ম্যাগ ফেয়ার এবং বইমেলায় সাবধান।

October 4, 2015

কাল দিনটা মৃত্যুর ছিল। কলকাতায় ভোটাভুটি, ছোটাছুটি, সরকারী মারামারি হল, তাতে কিছু ঢাকা পড়ে গেল কি? মৃত্যুসংবাদ এলো চেইনের মত। বৃহত্তর পরিবারের দুই প্রান্ত থেকে প্রজন্ম অবসানের অভিমান নিয়ে এলো দুই মৃত্যু। স্কাইপে বাবার কাছ থেকে খবর দুটো শুনতে না শুনতেই ফেবু জবাব দিল উৎপল কুমার বসুর ব্যপারে। মৃত্যুর শৃঙ্খলে এক হয়ে গেলেন তিনজন, ব্যক্তিক আর অ-ব্যক্তিক পরিসর ছাপিয়ে। পারিবারিক স্মৃতিতে থাকবে পুরনো বাংলা গান আর দীর্ঘ বেঁচে থাকার নানা রঙের গল্পগাছা। আর কবিতার স্মৃতিতে থাকবে উৎপল বসুর বেপরোয়া এই লাইনগুলো যেখানে তিনি ভোটাভুটি ছোটাছুটি আর সরকারী মারামারি নিয়ে লোফালুফি খেলছেন, খেলবেন মগডালে বসেঃ

"গাছে উঠে বসে থাকি। ফল খাই। ব্যক্তিমানুষের দিকে
আটি ছুঁড়ে মারি। নিচে হাহাকার পড়ে যায়। বেশ লাগে।
মাঝে মাঝে ধ্রুপদী সংগীত গাই। ওরা শোনে। বাদ্যযন্ত্র
নিয়ে আসে। তাল দেয়। বোধ হয় ছবিও তুলেছে। সেদিন
এক গবেষক বাণী চাইল। ভাবলাম বলি : আমার জীবনই
আমার বাণী। কিন্তু এটিও নাকি বলা হয়ে গেছে। অতএব
নিজস্ব ভঙ্গিতে, কিছুটা বিকৃত ভাবে, বিড় বিড় করি-
“দেখেছি পাহাড়। দেখে জটিল হয়েছি।”"

ছড়া

ব্যান খেয়ে খেয়ে ট্যান খেয়ে খেয়ে
তোমাতে আমাতে ব্যানভাসি
ক্যানভাসে থাক হাম্বার দিন
সরকার নয় দরকারি

The body says I can
The government says I ban

কবিতা

বোধশব্দ পত্রিকার আগামী সংখ্যা কবিতার দৃশ্যশরীর নিয়ে। সুস্নাতদার ডাকে কবিতা নিয়ে একটা লেখা লিখলুমঃ লাকা, রবীন্দ্রনাথ, মালারমে, অনুপমদা হয়ে সে লেখা 'নিউ মিডিয়া'র ওয়ার্ড আর্টে গেলো। 'নতুন কবিতা' পত্রিকার কবিতা ও টাইম-মেশিন সংখ্যার জন্য স্বপনদা লিখিয়ে নিল আরেকটা লেখা। সেখানে লিখলাম কবিতায় সময়ের চলন ও তার অনুধাবন নিয়ে। স্বদেশ সেন, শক্তি চট্টোপাধ্যায় আর শঙ্খ ঘোষের তিনটি কবিতা ঘিরে রইলো সে লেখা। দুই লেখায় দুরকমভাবে অব্যক্ততা নিয়ে লিখতে গিয়ে মনে হল, কবিতায় অব্যক্ততা নিজের সময় আর দৃশ্য নির্মাণ করে। সে সময় দুঃসময়ের আর সে দৃশ্য অপদৃশ্যের পরোয়া করেনা।

'পানশালার মনোলগ'

'ব্রজী' পত্রিকার আগামী সংখ্যার জন্য গল্প লিখলামঃ 'পানশালার মনোলগ'।

'ব্রজী' অনলাইন পত্রিকা নয়, সহজলভ্যতায় তার ওঠাবসা নেই। কতিপয় লোকই কষ্ট করে খুঁজে পড়বেন। হয়ত পড়বেন কোন কোন সহলেখক বন্ধু। তাই ভালো। এর বেশি হলে 'মনোরঞ্জন' হয়ে যেত আর এলেখা মনোরঞ্জনে নারাজ। এখানে বড়ই 'না-পাওয়ার রং'।

সংবাদ, সংবেদ, গৃহহীন মানুষের গ্রহ, ইনফিনিট এইট, মাকড়সার স্থৈর্য--অবলীলায় ঢুকে পড়লো পানশালায়। বাসাহীন চরাচরে মানুষের অনন্ত পথযাত্রার সাফারিং নিয়ে যেটুকু বলার ডাক আসছিলো কলমকার হিসেবে, তার একটুখানি বলার চেষ্টা করলাম এই ক্ষুদ্রাকার মনোলগে।

Once Upon...Aloneness

Goodbyes are time's caregivers 

The memory of an elsewhere 

Arrested in the here and now: 

When I, a kid and you dropped me home after holidays

It was a struggle for you to leave

I wouldn't let you

Time for little strategies of the grown up

And I would be taken away, somewhere else for a moment

Perhaps another room, perhaps the toilet 

Leaving you enough time to leave 

And I would return to your absence

The linking rings on the bed 

Moistened by my hunched tears

I would caress the place where you sat a moment ago

The spot would be warm and my tears would make it warmer

Time has flown through a pinhole since then

And yet I see all that, all that when all this was yet to come

To time, death and farewell to caregiving

To the ripeness of adulthood and once upon aloneness

You are going away again, once more, a last time

No need for little strategies of the grown up now

I am indeed in another room

To let elsewhere speak

I don't want to see you go...

Brief Response to Metafour: Four Samuel Beckett Shorts in Sydney 2015: A Glorious Thing Theatre Company production

The 'Metafour' became a touch too metaphorical for me! I liked the way they invited us to their time; "Beckett's time" by deferring the beginning of performance by 15 minutes and using a gigantic clock on the wall to do the time-keeping for us as the actors came up to each and every waiting audience member and requested them to switch off the phone and remove the watch, not to keep time in any way whatsoever. As the intimate theatre space opened, we were welcomed with a de-familiarising glare from all the actors. I also liked the fact that they 'played' the transitions between one play and another as actors with seemingly befuddled expressions ran around the stage to remove one prop and foreground another.

1. Quad: An interesting move not to mark the square and the diagonals on stage and play the whole movement in relation to two intercutting horizontal and vertical bars of light that make a cross-like structure. The square existed only in the performers' walks. What played spoilsport for me was the choreography which was artificial and lacked the haunting tension of the original TV production. The stamping of feet to mark the inviolable "centre" wasn't a good idea and it created a break between that step and the rest of the movements. All four walkers exiting the square before the final blackout didn't do justice to the import of no-exit-for-one , which is crucial to Beckett's play.

2. Rockaby: For me, this was the worst of the four performances, not so much because of the actress on stage who was decent, though a bit on the melodramatic side with her 'more's but because of the awful delivery of the recorded voice. I have seen much better performances of this play in both English and Gaelic before. And though I didn't understand a syllable of Galelic, the cadence and delivery was quite mesmeric. In this case, it was too hurried and there was no affect in the monotone at all. My understanding is that when Beckett insists on 'no colour', the flatness of delivery is an effect of affect and not an exclusion of affect. For the last ten years, I have read this play again and again in full-on vocalised reading. Its ebb and flow has unmistakably moved me to the tears of "liquefied brains". This production didn't move a limb!

3. Come and Go: This was the best of the lot because there was no effort to out-Beckett Beckett which is quite a stiff proposition! The slow moves and the arrested body language wove the piece into great visual poetry and yet some of the deliveries (naively profound lines such as "one sees little in this light") could've been more poignant.

4. Catastrophe: Another interesting performance about which I had divided feelings. The efforts to make it 'funny' fell flat on their face though to turn the "light" from stage light to a lighter and the ensuing vaudeville routine was striking. I have not seen this play live on stage before this and for me the iconic performance is Mamet's film version in Beckett on Film. And I must say that this performance opened up a different way of seeing this play, especially seeing the part of the tyrannical director. Harold Pinter had played it with an absolute phallic aplomb but the actor in this performance brought out the always already menaced and disturbed aspect of the master. I liked that part of the story and not the forced and overdone comedy.

Poem-thought/Thought-poem

Goodbyes are time's caregivers 

The memory of an elsewhere
 
Arrested in the here and now

'Baba'

For all the pebbles in the horizon 

And all the rainbows after darkness fell

All that we could do and couldn't

For the difficult love in the head 

And the shoes of life, overgrown

For seeing me, before I could see myself...

'Baba' is a soft sound, 'father' is too much of a word!

Deleuze and Nabarun

"One becomes animal all the more when the animal dies; and contrary to spiritualist prejudice, it is the animal who knows how to die, who has a sense or premonition of death. Literature begins with a porcupine's death according to Lawrence or with the death of a mole in Kafka" --Gilles Deleuze ('Literature and Life')

Nabarun Bhattacharya in the dedicatory preface to his Bangla short story 'Andho Beral' ['Blind Cat'] which I have translated into English for our forthcoming Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry Nabarun Supplement, writes the following:

"This story is dedicated to the memory of the cat ‘Gola’. His brief life was permeated with many loves and neglects from my end. Even his death taught me a lesson. Mortally ill, one night, he went away on his own to experience his death. No one saw him after that."

A little translation of Yeats on his birthday

"And then you came with those red mournful lips,

And with you came the whole of the world's tears,

And all the sorrows of her labouring ships,

And all the burden of her myriad years."

Happy 150th Birthday W.B. Yeats! 

---------------------------------------------------- 

"যখন তুমি এলে, তোমার করুণ লাল ঠোঁটে, 

জগত যাবত অশ্রুধারা, তোমার সাথে এলো। 

আর সকল তার বিষাদ যেন পরিশ্রমী জাহাজ, 

এই মাতাল বছরগুলো তাকে বোঝার মত পেলো।"

শুভ ১৫০তম জন্মদিন ইয়েটস!

'ওপেন টি বায়স্কোপ'

মেধা কোথায় হৃদয়ের অনুভবে মেশে আর কোথায় অনুভব থেকে এক পা সরিয়ে অন্যমুখো হয়ে যায় কে জানে? আমি এটুকু জেনেছি, মেধার ভেতর শ্রান্তিও বাড়ে, তার সবটা হৃদয়ে বাস করে না, আর হৃদয়ের সবকিছু মেধায় অনূদিত হয় না, হতে পারে না।

আমি আমার সময়ের মধ্যে দিয়েই বড় হয়েছি। যা কিছু আমার চারপাশে হয়ে গ্যাছে, সবটা আমার নয়, সবটা মানিয়ে নেওয়ার নয়, তাও তারা আমার সময়ের চিহ্ন, আমার বন্ধুত্ব না পাতানো বন্ধু, এমনকি শত্রু হলেও আমি তাদের চিনতে পারি আমার সময়ের (অ)যাপিত বাস্তবতার অংশ হিসেবে।

'ওপেন টি বায়স্কোপ' আমার পাড়া, আমার বড় হওয়ার সময়টার গল্প বলে। সরল, 'চেনা দুঃখ চেনা সুখে'র গল্প, যেগুলো সময়ের সাথে সাথে বদলে যায়। আমি নানা কারণে নানা ছবি দেখি, নানা প্রত্যাশায়। এই ছবির থেকে যে সরল নষ্টালের দাবি ছিল, এ ছবি সে আশ মিটিয়েছে। আহামরি নয়, তবে না দেখার মতও নয়। অন্তত সৃজিতের ফুটো আঁতলামো নেই এছবিতে। বিশাল কিছু একটা দেখিয়ে দেওয়ার দাবি দাওয়া নেই। সাদামাটা একটা গল্পের ছক আর সাবলীল অভিনয়। চন্দ্রবিন্দুময় বাল্য থেকে কৈশোর। মেধার দাবি না থাকলেও অনুভবের আশ্বাস আছে। ফিল্মি বটে, তাও আমার চেনা একটা সময় আছে। সেটাই ভালো লাগে। ফিল্ম হিসেবে কেমন জানি না, কিন্তু আমার মত যারা ৯০জ বেবি, তাদের কাছে এ ছবি সময়লিপি হিসেবে একবার দেখে ফেলার দাবি করতেই পারে।

আফটার অল, বন্ধুদের সঙ্গে একটা সময়ের পর আর রোজ দেখা হয় কই?

A Dream Play at NIDA

Caryl Churchill's adaptation of Strindberg's A Dream Play at NIDA.

Once again a thoroughly professional performance by the cast on yet another inventive stage although I must say the play hasn't aged like great whiskey, appearing a bit jaded and wild at times.

Hundred years back, this was a definitive theatrical break with realism through expressionist extravaganza but in 2015, most of it appeared plotted, overdone and somewhat preachy. I haven't read Churchill's rewriting but wonder what she added to it. I had expected that her own theatrical minimalism would work as an interestingly contemporary foil to Strindberg's expansive theatrics but don't think it worked out like that.

On the positive side was once again the utilisation of the stage space. In a play in which a divine figure descends from the heavens to inspect human life on earth, the constant use of the vertical axis to string down props and elaborate scenographic structures, apart from evoking the metaphorical framework of human puppetry was also connotative of a complex interweaving of the transcendental and the immanent.

Watching The Tempest at NIDA

An adorably entertaining performance of what is perhaps Shakespeare's most eventfully problematic play The Tempest at NIDA.

The young cast did a marvellous job in terms of acting and the director showed great wisdom in not trying to do too much to contemporize the classic. A play like this is always already our contemporary. The Australian context remained implicit in the colonial allegory within the play and yet it wasn't overplayed.

A special mention must be made of the extremely creative and dynamic use of the stage and its two axes to create the spell of magic in ambience. The splits, the undulations, the stage within the stage, resembling the Greek proscenium in miniature and the ladders popping up from nowhere made it a magically multidimensional entity.

Dr. Anup Dhar's Lecture on Freud-Bose Dialogues

All psychoanalysis enthusiasts, please hear this brilliant lecture by Dr. Anup Dhar on the Freud-Bose Dialogue which he recasts as a transcultural dialectical interplay involving questions like the psychic life of power, the relation between crypt and hegemony, aboriginalization of psychoanalysis, (un-)critical cultural relativism, the status of the universal, the cultural and the provincial, the negotiation of the interior and the exterior and so on.

The lecture is a treat for anyone interested in psychoanalysis in the Indian context, its history and its connections with the political. And it speaks volumes of Anupda's precision and lucidity as a thinker and speaker. Hearing him is like reading Bruce Fink.

Not only does Anupda frame an interpretive condition for approaching the psychoanalytic dyad of Freud and Bose but he also reads this dialectical dialogue by marking the logic of reverse causality in relation to repression as hypothesis and repression as an explained concept in the two thinkers.

For me, the highlight was the brief excursus through sexuation towards the end where he insightfully reflected on sexutation as the unconscious of the sex-gender system and an insecurely sexed hauntology of the body in inter-subjective terms.

While I would love to hear/read more on this, perhaps a full paper on sexuation from Anupda, there is a Lacanian question which occurs to me at this point and it is as follows:

How does one see this problematically sexuated dyad in terms of the triadic logic of the Real which in its Lacanian insistence will question and split the dyad?

Differently put, the question could also be this:

If the dyad is produced by the event of sexuation as an encounter with the Other which sexes desire (not in any stable way of course), what's the impact of sexual non-rapport on this dyad?

The fact that sexuality is not distributed across the dyad in the form of a relation but as an absence of relation with the Relation (xRY) itself becoming a third term (the third ring that constructs the Borromean knot) would problematise the dyadic logic by breaking the dyad itself. The symptom (or the 'sinthome') is a further construction on the Real as the third. I am wondering how the rupture of the Imaginary dyad with the Real and the symptom that comes from the Real would have effects on sexuation. I am really looking forward to knowing more about Anupda's thoughts on sexuation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rbGf3lEX-A&index=11&list=WL

Light Walk

Shuffling steps of fluid flow 

Cities talk to one another at the dead of night

And lights open unforeseen petals on homeless streets 

The desire to walk across terrains enters the stomach 

Like a fluid that speaks and yet doesn't know how to hear.

The city keeps cozying in as the sleeping bus gurgles stillness 

To walk back home in the chalk light of the moon 

After the spectacularly Vivid animations of light 

My faint footfalls moving from installation to constellation 

And to think that the bucket of horizon will soon be full!

There's light in friends' faces--a light that passes through time

As much as time passes through light and vivifies it.

[This is a poem I wrote from last night's (June 6, 2015) exploration of Sydney Vivid festival and so on. I dedicate it to my friends Mitchell Stroicz, Mary Van Gils and Steffen Herff who were my lovely companions and to all my old friends who came back to me during my return. Through this poem, I trace my journey back home after our collective revels. After company, there's always a residue of solitude.]

Benjamin Black/John Banville's The Silver Swan

"She held up her wrist and examined, the white furrows his fingers had left there to which the blood was rapidly returning. Everything rushes back, everything replaces itself."

Yes, it takes a John Banville to write this as Benjamin Black. The phenomenological aesthetics of the body, the veins and the blood, the gushing wound in absentia in this case epitomizes the crime narrative. Isn't the movement of a crime narrative one where "everything rushes back" to recreate a past? But how does everything replace itself? Can anything ever replace itself? Perhaps only life can replace itself but then there's the wall of death to be considered. The thing which can always replace itself is a Banvillian ghost; a ghost of a crime and a crime of a ghost.

One more:

"May be if you looked at anything, any event, closely enough you would see the future packed into it, folded tight, like the tight-folded elastic filling of a golf ball."

This is a lilting logic of foreboding in a whodunit where the temporal structure is predominantly retroactive. Everything rushes back not only to form a past but replaces itself in and by the future.

'The Silver Swan' is one of Banville/Black's most accomplished crime novels. Not only is it psychic, atmospheric and existential, as one would expect from a literary if not wholly aesthetic writer, taking to the popular genre of the whodunit, the novel is beautifully layered in terms of its narrative.

The detective is replaced by Quirke, the pathologist who is such a psychic character that you can't trust the pseudo-detective figure. Inspector Hackett. instead of slipping into the classic detective couple. creates more nuisance than anything else for Quirke who always carries the poignant smell of a corpse by virtue of his profession. The mid 20th century Ireland with its social moralism and religious industry forms an intriguing historical backdrop. But what's special about this novel is the movement of its narrative.

The detective doesn't find anything. There's no detective as such and the police are pretty clueless as well. The mystery solves itself as the third person omniscient narrator takes to the myriad characters and goes inside out to narrate the crime retroactively from within the past as each chapter takes up a particular individual's perspective. What's most interesting is that in this flashback, the dead victim gets to tell her own version of the past through the omniscient narrator and by the end of the novel, it's the killer's turn to tell his own tale through the narrator's voice. Even at the end, though the police are in the know of things, law doesn't take its course.

The novel leaves the reader in an intensely humanizing and yet ethically unsettling place where the scene of crime lures us with human empathy as well as a profound sense of aesthetic delectation.

Watching Srijit Mukherjee's film Nirbaak

Finally I saw Srijit Mukherjee's surrealist masterpiece NIRBAAK...

What the fuck, ami toh nirbaak!!!

Since I have wasted the last hour and a half on this film, let me waste another fifteen minutes in venting out my anger as a viewer.

And the rant begins...

Nirbaak is a horrendous film; even Srijit's worst film as far as I am concerned. The story ideas are neither great nor utter crap; but every single story has been treated with crude overdetermination, typically Srijitesque modishness, pseudo-intellectualism and oneupmanship on the audience. All the stories are 'bold' on the face in their superficial impressionism and predictably contrived. A proper treatment would've made for a watchable film at least; this is simply intolerable.

In the name of post-humanism, the narrative threads with the tree and the 'bitch' are disgustingly inane and at the peak of gibberish. The tree is more perverse than cute and the four-legged beauty, reduced to simplified villainy. Post-humanism falls flat on its face as everything in the film gets an anthropo-centric treatment.

As if Anjan Dutta masturbating wasn't enough torture to watch, even the tree had to chip in! And good god, just listen to the masterful G for GUSH-GUSH background score to corroborate the visual of the tree's ejection. Trust Srijit to do that! 

unsure emoticon

Anjan Dutta isn't bad in terms of acting but again it's a diluted and banal take on narcissism. I guess what happens to his character could be described as a nemesis for the visual pollution caused by his semi-nude shower and bedroom acrobatics. Sushmita doesn't have anything to do. 

unsure emoticon

 Casting her is nothing but a pan-Indian gimmick from our posturing movie maverick. Jishu is passable with little to do. And what is that black-and white regime for the 'bitch-camera'? Was Srijit trying to do a Godard there as in Adieu au langage? One would have to say that, much like men, some dogs are more equal than others 

tongue emoticon

The only faint reason to watch the film is Ritwick Chakraborty who gets into the skin of his character and controls the baroque excesses of the clown beautifully. In the 'corpse' narrative with its oh so bold necrophillic theme, the exhibitionistic and oh so clever mockery of Bollywood songs becomes irritating!

Nirbaak is an insolently clever film from a self-assuming filmmaker who takes his audience for the greatest personification of stupidity.

The Second Sex

Today I am doing parts of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir in my Intro to Philosophy classes.

If Sartre comes (I did Sartre last class) can Simone be far behind? tongue emoticon

As I read from her book, I was struck by the exhilarating literary style of writing she has. An example:

"Wherever life is in the making--germination, fermentation--it arouses disgust because it is made only in being destroyed; the slimy embryo begins the cycle that is completed in the putrefaction of death."

Now both Freud and Kafka would've been happy with this formulation smile emoticon It's interesting to see, apart from the feminist core of her argument, how much of existentialist ontology and psychoanalytic mythology are built into it.

Re-watching Satyajit Ray

Watched Gupi Gayen Bagha Bayen, Hirok Rajar Deshe and Agantuk after ages.

The films brought back fond memories of watching them long ago as a boy. The first two films were thoroughly enjoyable as well as politically inspiring. The innocence of fairy tale meeting political allegory in a fulfilling cinematic experience. The films haven't aged whatsoever and still remain so entertaining and relevant. What music and what acting! Comic timing at its best. Rabi Ghosh and Utpal Dutt offer master-classes in acting.

This time I liked Agantuk more than I had as a kid. The somewhat controversial ending esp. the outward movement into the open with the Santali dance sequence didn't seem forced at all. In fact, the narrative logic had started making room for that opening from the beginning I felt.

I was intrigued to think about the testamental quality of Ray's last film. To what extent did he consciously choose to clarify and qualify his position on civilization and urbanity, secularism and scientific and technological modernity in his last film? It seems to be the moot question the film unrelentingly asks and attempts to re-(de)-fine: who is civilized and who's barbaric? And the answer is anything but dichotomous, of course. Everyone in Agantuk is excellent but Utpal Dutt simply towers!

Reading Leviathan by Paul Auster

Paul Auster manipulates the realistic narrative of contrivances in a clever way by underlining its constructedness. He remains self-reflexive about the contrivances in his plot by having his narrator reflect about the incredulous random patterning of events in life which expose the fact that contingency is anything but illogical. The philosophically interesting question for me in this 'postmodern' narrative technique is whether chance can always be unraveled, retrospectively speaking, as a perfectly (almost too perfect!) logical series of events. To put it with brevity and precision: how logical and readable is chance? If it's logical and readable in a logical way, can we equate this logically readable view of chance with determinism?

The other thing this novel made me think is the possibility of a dialectical tension between the two selves of the artist as a creator of a subversive work of art and a subversive socio-political activist. Is there a tension between these two roles? Does a committed artist feel the impotence of his art as a subversive practice? The two novelists in this novel form the alter-ego of one another and ask this old and yet important question. We have seen cases where subversive activism can become problematic for literary creation e.g. Arundhati Roy or where the writer almost entirely textualises his subversive politics in authorial practice e.g. Amitav Ghosh.

Leviathan with its complex narrative is a political novel with an intensely private emotion--a balance Auster as a novelist has mastered quite beautifully over the years.

Watching Piku

An uncomplicated, unpretentious and sweetly sad film on caring for parents, obsession with excretion, attachment for roots and above all on a love of life that can see fulfillment and not incompleteness in death. Everyone was great in terms of performances and Amitabh Bachchan after quite a long time completely transformed himself for this role which was fantastic to see. Gone were the baritone and the overwhelming body language and the loudness this time emerged from within the character and not his performance. His poker-faced silence with its child-like vulnerability when rebuked by others, Irrfan or Deepika or anyone else just goes to show his calibre and reach as an actor. With his real life personality and screen memory as a larger-than life persona, it's not easy to portray that kind of down-to-earth sloppiness on screen but he did it effortlessly. He was irritating, adorable and heartwarming. Irrfan and Deepika were excellent too, not overdoing things at all. Deepika has come a long way as an actor and it's great to see her growth. Everyone else from Maushumi to Jishu were true to their parts. Yes, the end was predictable and formulaic but not overdone. In fact the director was very careful about not making it melodramatic. The film was visually soothing and Anupam Roy's music touched many strings...

On the metaphorical valence of 'motion' etc, it's interesting that Maushumi at one point makes a joke that it's all about Amitabh's 'menopause'...He's a widower and at the fag end of his sexual life and hence an alternative obsession could have replaced the interest in the life of the body in a sexual sense...his 'medical' interest in the interior of the body in the conversation with Irrfan towards the end in Kolkata is revealing I think...the scatological obsession comes from his fixation with the inner life of the body...all the inner space we don't see as Beckett would've said. And this could also be connected with his outspokenness about his daughter's lack of virginity, 'sexual independence' n so on.

On a personal note, it was lovely to see Kolkata from here in Australia...hearing the old tunes and encountering the old haunts...the old haunts never fail to haunt ...the nostalgia element was full on from Tagore to Jibone ki Pabo na and from Ei poth jodi na to Pagla khabi kI.

Somatic

Blood running through flesh,

Flesh growing around blood,

Cutting into the stream…

Obstructing it…

Silencing it…

Until it stops,

Until the silence rings true…

Blood in flesh and flesh on blood

And then no blood,

And then no flesh,

And then nothing

Only silence for company.

That’s where I see you mother

Where I cannot see you

My gaze falls short of your non-gaze

There’s no visor to hide your gaze

There are no eyes to hide

Not even unseeing eyes

There’s no vision to hide

As I hide mine beneath deep dark glasses

Hoping to attain your non-gaze one day,

Your non-eyes, your non-vision.

Each day your non-gaze sinks further

Into my blood, bites into my flesh

Until they start dreaming about you

And dream you into visibility…

In the imploding shadows where blood writes through flesh

And the flesh listens to that writing in speech

In that dialogue I see you mother,

In me, what I cannot see

Until the silence rings true…

Until there’s no blood

Until there’s no flesh

Only your non-gaze for company in silence.

[In memory of my mother Soma Chattopadhyay who had both the word ‘soma’ (something to do with the body) and ‘ma (mother) written into her name. Her body had to undergo a lot of suffering over the years till the very end. And being maternal was in her name. ]