'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.]