cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)

CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore
WEEK SIX. conversation by clair and alex

 

6

If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.  Tagore


~  ~  ~ 

mmm!  what do you reckon alex, because the sun is a star or am i being a little literal?

clair

I think I'm going to be more literal. Too many tears in the eyes and you can't see anything. Don't cry over spilt celestials. No need. There's enough to go round (and around, and around, and around). No teary orbs orbit ours.

alex 

oh i see ;)  hows your valentines day been ... whats it all about and why is love so hard to find?
clair 

I spent St Val's finding different kinds of love to the one that's hard to find. They were everywhere, often inside me, pouring out, bounced back by the people around me.

I think 'society' likes to define certain things narrowly. It gives us things to pursue. Why that is I don't know. I guess maybe it takes up time we could spend changing society, but how does a collaborative structure have so many vested interests?

Happiness is the same. It can be hard to find and far away, or it can already be in your point of view. Every time you look at the sun and realise 'it's for you'. Or the stars. (Or the tears).

alex 

...i know there are many things to love and find love in it is true.

... me too sceptical of what society tells me to do, feel, eat and be motivated by, but this search for romantic love seems to be a true desire and drive of my own.  i find myself feeling very trustful of it.

in fact, when i look at society, i am possibly most in tune with society around relationships... for example that they are important, that people like to find another...  that they be monogamous...
c

I feel the same, I think, but lately I'm less trustful of it. I don't trust my truths, to be honest. Don't believe in them as solitary. There is not one truth, just multiples.

But I can say that shedding tears for the sun of loves lost, has made me missed the stars of all the world around me. There is a directness here. I've spent so much time longing for something specific and defined, that I never notice the wealth of similar but different brilliances all around me.

Many things look like this.

alex 

nicely said alex, absolutely.  i think part of societies training is the believe that we always need more (normally material).  its absolute madness and i too have been finding moments when i feel my self to have everything i can possibly need, and more. yum .)

clair 

That sounds like an ending.

an endding to the writting?

Responding. Conversing. Oddly you're in charge. Your game. Natural ends sometimes extend, naturally. Which way next? Whichever way it goes. Blinded by tears or not. Enigmatic mischief maybe.

 why dont we think about all the things that happen tomo which feel particulaly sparkely.
a sparkle diary :)
clair *

sparkle diary
~ shower today was particually good.  blind in bathroom down becuase of builders and thus soft artifical light from hall came in mimicing evening time.  the feeling of evening in the morning.
~ walking in sunshine...felt like the first time in many months. fresh, light and peaceful...
~ someone touched my hand while i was walking along with them,  that felt warm.
clair

Blue eyed dog.

Sea sprinkled perpetual motion glitters to the right while golden cliffs stretch into the future to my left.

Turning back, the sun turns reds, sinking down into a cloud above the sea.

Behind, where I was before, the moon is a furred gold.

Stars and snow in the gritty cinema world. Poor horse.

alex

lovely .)

clair

  cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)
 


CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore
WEEK FIVE. conversation by clair and jesse

 

5

The mighty desert is burning for the love of a blade of grass who shakes her head and laughs and flies away.  Tagore

~  ~  ~ 

very mighty indeed and without a blade of grass.  blades of grass are not natural dessert company. not enough water and too hot for their bodies who, if there in the dessert,  would dry up and become dust themselves...

do desserts really pine for blades of grass?  
clair

deserts are deserts they know who they are. i think there are a few romantic ones who like leonard cohen records but, like len him self, after the first eons of lonliness perhaps they can be self reconcilled. also the desert is a monster. they eating all the grass up. what they really need is some trees.
jesse


hee hee :)
trees grow from grass so theres no chance of that .)
how does lonliness get reconciled?  i dont think leonard cohen reconcilled it through more lonliness... not for long anyway!
anyway, can lonliness become company?
clair

what trees grow from grass? anyway i think loneliness can be reconcilled because lonliness is being disatisfied with oneself in the end. but how long can we live like that? we finally must welcome ourselves into the world, make the introduction both ways and hope we stay friends for as long as possible. us deserts are very harmonious and beautiful places.
j 


yes, from each blade of grass one tree can grow. they grow out of its little head and eventually the roots engulf the grass blade  which is then looked after by the tree.


indeed, but what i was asking, was not if lonliness can be reconcilled, but, if lonliness can be reconcilled by lonliness itself? ...  like i find, when i am bored and then the boredom starts to get extreme then it stops being boredom (intense boredom is more like panic or anziety) and thus bordom gets reconcilled by boredom itself...  very good process indeed!
c

i don't know except that it sounds like you're doing some very important research - and this is part of that research too. this is a good process you're coming out with some gems and good lyrics.  

i was daunted the other day by a short journey on  the metro without a book to read but then realised it wouldn't be too bad just having my own brain for company for a few minutes. took a couple of breaths and forgot all about it of course.
j

yes i can imagine jesse. reminds me of an old boyfriend i had (not you) who, fetched his book to read while he ran his bath.  perfectly normal you say ...  i just thought it was completley mad.  

....im the opposite.  i am only just learning how useful external stimulation can be and recetly have taken to watching  'human planet' series the last one was about jungles.  oh my god, my jaw was dropped nearly all the way through. gosh!  i love other ways. 

funny how different people are.  in the everyday.  how much of it is habit?

im enjoying our conversation :)

c

we had some friends over for dinner tonight, our violinists dad and his wife, and she was telling us how she cried when she walked in notre dame cathedral in paris. all that height and history and all the piles of stone and piles of people worshiping together across time for the last 1000 years. these places are very special and very human. 

old tagore seems to have decided to treat everything as if its a human. which has its charming side but im afraid i find it dismal and shallow. i want a sentece like that to ring, to resonate on every level. he should have wrote pop songs, perhaps he did churning out lines like that for 600 pages its what the french call first degree. ie no other levels. i look for more and i find nothing but my self in the desert turning over a rock, looking for more and not finding it.

j

how do you feel about cathedrals jesse?    

i would like to see a sentence that you like and which is multi dimemtional for you if you feel to share it. :)  incidently, you art the second person who didnt get on with this line of tagores,  (although i must say i quite liked it...)

c

hi clair, 

i was just myself thinking the same thing. how wrong to complain without offering an alternative. i'd like to offer you something by joseph conrad or dosteyovsky both of whom i've just been reading and enjoying. my notes from the books i've been reading arn't at hand so here's a few off the internet. 

"Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man." dosteyovsky. 

this one from joseph conrad could do just as well for the desert: "The sea - the truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power."

mmm...i dont see many of these qualities in man either...

... and can the sea be deemed to be conscious?  and if not, can the sea be expected to be responsible? and if so, responsible to whom or what?  

nature is nature...not for or against us.  
just its natrual self.
c

still neither of them are the kind of sentence i had in mind. here's one from rumi, lens favourite:

"There's the light gold of wheat in the sun
and the gold of bread made from that wheat.
I have neither. I'm only talking about them,

as a town in the desert looks up
at stars on a clear night."  rumi
j

merci jesse

c

jesse and his projects can be found :
thisisthekit.co.uk
morningstarsmallorchestra.org.uk
fullmoonorchestra.org

  cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)
 


CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore
WEEK FOUR. conversation by clair and laurence

 

3

 

It is the tears of the earth that keep her smiles in bloom. Tagore.

~  ~  ~


I guess if you believe it to be a wonderful way of saying - no beauty without heartache - it leaves me wondering why that is?

laurence

i guess when something exists, in this case beauty, there is inevitably something available to die?  but also, as you say, does beauty always die?...even in death?

for me this sentence by tagore, implies that it is the hurting or taking...the using up of the planet earth which keeps us, in someway, happy.  stray birds, the book where this line was taken, was written in 1916... an early premonition of the consumerist catastrophy we find ourselves and the beautiful earth in now?

clair

So do you think human's have a natural proclivity towards consuming everything in their path, need it or not?

L

i think some people and some cultures, in later years
c

The current fear is everywhere that the earth will at some point not be able to withstand the amount of human-made tears thrown at it. However I think there is a positve aspect in Tagore's line in that the sense and sound of it is cyclical, and I don't see the idea that the cycle will become out of kilter in the line itself.

Incidently I love the way the line feels like a shoot pushing its way through the ground until the final word, bloom.

L

nice :)  

everything is indeed cyclical... as is life and death.   things can go through ememse change, for 'good' or 'bad' and still be deemed cyclical. so although there feels truth in what you are saying, what does it mean?

c

What I am saying is the line itself doesn't forecast doom, rather sustainability. I was on the tube yesterday and there was a Keats poem which seemed to go one step further....

L

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its lovliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkn'd ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.  
Keats

there is a tin can blowing in the wind outside

it is annoying and beautiful
it is blowing up and down the street like a child clattering along on his old rusty bike
never too tired to get into bed and head home
c

  cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)
 

CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore
WEEK THREE. conversation by clair and charlie

 

3

 

The world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover. It becomes small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal.  R. tagore 


~  ~  ~




i am thinking how similar flowers are to human beings.  with their heads and their bodies and their arms and the way they blow around in the breeze. 
clair 

I am haunted by the shadow of what is not. In the fall of a dandy lion seed,  in a hand that touches skin no longer, I hold onto possibilities like melting water, and wonder, are we shaping fragments to suffocate love, or reaching closer to what makes us more than memory of an I or us?  It is too much to conceive that everything is as confused as me, that even a bee flies in torment from the sun.  At least a tree reveals our stillness. Kicking at fungi and leaves, I revel in undergrowth, run through thought.

charlie

what is confusion?...is it a reaction to what is pure and complete but which is just difficult to understand?...

as much as i myself try to understand, do things need to be understood?... do we need to understand all the processes of the body for our body to perform those functions perfectly? and if not then how helpful is that understanding? ...or is it just simply baffling?

animals are better at just being, following their wings and finding the right things! the bees probably especially!

thats what i think... though thought can be very beauty-flowered!
cl

i think the ultimate moment is one where thought is no longer required, because it has created itself - but you have to get there through understanding and the sensation of experience, which is the hard bit. I'd rather be a bee then be me, until i think about it....

My mind's latch opens.  Unguarded at last the day retreats from urban defeat.  Heavy battalions of consciousness sink in the evening mud.  I gallop free, leaving my rucksack of thoughts and identity, a traitor from reason. If they catch me, will they shoot me with being?  I want to, want, to, do.  Once I knew how to make a kite, but now I fly. 
ch 

     ~   ~   ~

...winter got his spikes out again today...i soooooooooo wish i had got it together to go somewhere warmer... gosh! that would be like a dream!! an absolute delight!!! my body wouldnt know what had happened to her. away from his frostly footsteps and in a warm cosy land.     mind you, how loved is janruary? no wonder he is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo bitter!!  would it help if i loved you? how quickly would you change?... does being warmer interest you?...i could feed you soya hot chocolate and sugar coated blueberries on toast until you lost your spikes or until they became a little rounder.  ....do you like the sound of it!?   reply ASAP cl

there is such heavy superficiality under the sun. The glint of false surfaces, shaded eyes, sleeping meaning lost in cocktails and deckchairs. l love the chill of real frost, kissing with steamy breath, the ice and thaw of thoughts, the journey of darkness into spring dawn ahead. ...

ch

charlie, if i ever catch you with you passport lined up in some que waiting to go somewhere hot i shall tell mr frost who will come swiftly into the airport and chop it up with his gigantic frosty scissors! 

mmm...

cl

;)


~ ~ ~

there are lots of crazy sounds tonite coming from other peoples lives.  they let me in to their world a tiny fraction without knowing that i exsist or can hear them.  and i lay listening.

cl

In the bath, blanking out voices of the day from people I don't really know, with commentary on a game I don't understand crackling from a black box, and I think of how a kiss dissolves everything between us.
ch

how is your book on snogging coming along charlie? ... all the different receipes for different kinds of kisses... can you send one to the blog?  it would be nice to see :)
cl

i'm in my hotel in exeter, room 101 funnily enough....the book has stalled a bit as i'm not sure it can be done without another artistic snogger collaborating ...but here is an example ...

A lays down face up on their back, and B lies chest down with their head raised above A so their face is on top of A with their nose places where A's chin is. As B begins to kiss A, opening out lips and sliding tongues into eachother's mouths, so the opposite facing tongues will be able to glide along their surface area and rub up and down as part of a deep kiss known affectionately as 'the cat'.  
Just one of 101 and more ways to re-connect through the meditation and art of kissing.

ch

wow charlie, you really are something else!! @ * & :)
cl

  

cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)

 

CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore

WEEK TWO.  conversation by simon and clair

  

2

 

O troupe of little vagrants of the world, leave your footprints in my words. R. Tagore

~  ~  ~ 


The only footprints you'll ever find in your words are your own. Do the vagrants need you to speak for them?
simon

mmm... yes but things, people and other animals, can inspire words...so words get tainted or painted ... what colour are your words?....what colour do they enjoy being/would you like them to be? 

can there possibly be a colour which is not enjoyable...?

ive been realising the absolute beauty of all emotions... for example, the absolute purity and beauty of anger ...this emotion is not a demon...no more than any other... its the way we use it (or abuse it) which causes the dis ease and recently, when i felt anger, inside, i felt like smiling...
clair

Words, whether beautiful or ugly, are always limited. Unlike silence. Emotions, whether pure or muddled, are never more than a small part of who we are.

S

is silence unlimited?  i guess silence in itself is never ending, ever growing!  as nothingness is... never ending and eternal ... 

the less there is of something, the less there is to disappear or fade away ... but! silence and nothingness have the following limitations - sound and somethingness.
c 

Silence and space enable sounds and things to exist and vice versa. A sound needs silence out of which to emerge. Without things there would be no space, as space can only exist between things. I like living in a universe that is beyond my imagination. 

S

so do you feel that you need to have something in order to have nothing?  i feel unsure...i think that nothingness is so cleaver and self sustaining that it needs absolutely nothing and it can go on f o r e v e r!  it never runs out.  

and is someone genius without something seeing that genius?  
and is someone loving without someone to love? 
c 

simons music is found : http://www.myspace.com/lunarians

  cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)
 

CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore
WEEK ONE. conversation by clair and alex

1 

Stray birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away. And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh. R. Tagore.


~ ~ ~


everything is one. leaves whisper secrets of life and death round our feet and ankles, birds come and go in the same way. everything which is alive is dying.... is that true of everything?
clair
 
Everything is two, too. After I sigh I breathe in. Everything which is alive is living. Even as it dies. The end is in everything, but beginnings are too. The leaves underfoot may be dead, but look what they inspire. Breathe in...
alex
 
am i ready to really breathe?.... its a long time coming, shallow footsteps of breath have come awandering... but they must...or i must... push a little more deeply 
clair

Breathe. Push. Deeper. Birthing, or nine months earlier. Either way is creative. We dig through the ground and try and find the living. Is it all just struggling through rocks and earth? Sunlight dapples ground through leaves as they fall. Colour dances under footsteps. There are songs about autumn leaves. 

alex

      'we dig through the ground and try to find the living'.
  
i like that.

what is capable of loving...  is the sunshine? like honey it falls, getting smiles from faces as it does

...and animals who like to live alone, do they love less?

c

If I can love then so can you (and the sunshine and the honey and the lonely and the falls and the smiles and the faces).

So nothing can. Or everything. Is love? Everything is love. Nothing is.

The leaves don't crunch underfoot once the rain comes. Mulch underfoot. Something to grow out of.

When will I grow out of it.

Love. Mulch.
a

mmm.... lovely.  the trust...the surrender that we will feel where to grow from... and to.... it will be dark,  there will be roots and depth... 

...like intuition...is strong like special soft magic.  magic whos ears pick up the silence in things... the place where the feelings are... some feelings who get covered in soft blankets and some who wake up like flowers.
c 

Wake up. Can't see the trees. Can't see the birds. Everything is in mist. Clouded hidden and lost.

Want that autumn sadness back. Better than this bleak waiting to grow. Silent sleeping flowers must wake up soon.
Roots laid in autumn leaves wait patiently.

Can I?

a

what was nice about the autumn sadness?
c

There's nothing wrong with endings.
a

alexs blog is at 

http://unstruck.wordpress.com/