A WING AND A PRAYER







THE World is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,—
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.


"And what is good Phaedrus and what is not, need we ask anyone to tell us that?"
-Dialogues of Plato


   

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Crazy Diamond


Remember when you were young,
You shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes,
Like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the crossfire
Of childhood and stardom,
Blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target
For faraway laughter,
Come on you stranger,
You legend, you martyr, and shine!
You reached for the secret too soon,
You cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night,
And exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome
With random precision,
Rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver,
You seer of visions,
Come on you painter,
You piper, you prisoner, and shine!

- Pink Floyd


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Tuesday, November 23, 2004
More by Blake

Thank-You Crazy Diamond for reminding me of some of the most beauiful lines I have ever read. I myself had forgotten about them.

Once again William Blake gives us deep insight into beauty and its subjectivity in the following four lines.

Even the simplest of Blake's poems are so profound, that one can almost compare William Blake with the greatest of the great philosophers. In the poem 'Little Fly', Blake so elegantly illustrates that ultimately, our knowledge of everything is limited by our perception... something on which people like Berkeley, Descartes, Hume spent their lives on. More about this later. Without further ado, here is an excerpt  from 'Auguries of Innocence'.

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

William Blake


Posted at 06:07 pm by Phaedrus
(2) took wings  

Monday, November 22, 2004
One of my favourites...

Many, many years ago
When I was twenty three
I got married to a widow
Pretty as could be.


This widow had a grown up daughter
With flowing hair of red,
My father fell in love with her
And soon the two were wed.

This made my dad my son-in-law
And changed my very life.
Now my daughter was my mother,
For she was my father's wife.

To complicate the matters worse
Although it brought me joy,
I soon became the father
Of a bouncing baby boy.

My little baby then became
A brother-in-law to dad,
And so became my uncle,
Though it made me very sad.

For if he was my uncle,
Then that also made him brother
To the widow's grown up daughter,
Who of course was my step-mother.

Father's wife then had a son
Who kept them on the run,
And he became my grandson
For he was my daughter's son.

My wife is now my mother's mother
And it makes me blue.
Because although she is my wife,
She's now my grandma too.

If my wife is my grandmother,
Then I am her grandchild.
And every time I think of it
It simply drives me wild.

For now I have become
The strangest case you ever saw,
As the husband of my grandmother,
I am my own grandpa!

:)


Posted at 09:51 pm by CrazyDiamond
(1) took wings  

Little Fly

Little Fly
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush'd away

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink & sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength & breath,
And the want
Of thought is death;

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.

         William Blake

Posted at 08:39 pm by Phaedrus
(1) took wings  

Saturday, November 20, 2004
Homeless

"Mamma are they going to throw us out ?"

That's the question my brother asked my mother in the early nineties when the Mi Marathi movement was at its peak in Maharashtra.

The day he asked this question was the day a lot of Bengalis in Mumbai were branded "illegal Bangladeshis", rounded up and thrown into Gitanjali Express.

To be honest, I agree with Shiv Sena. Marathis don't have jobs in thier own state .. there should be a check on the influx into Marathi cities. If this means some Bengalis have to go back to Calcutta, some Tamilians have to go back to Madras, some Malayalis have to go back to Trivandrum.. so be it.

The UN guarantees the right to self determination not to countries but to nations .. to societies.

Where do we go? Where does my family .. my father, my mother, my brother, me .. my aging grandparents. Where do we go? Kashmir? We don't belong there.

Hindustani Kashmiri Pandits belong nowhere.



Incidentally, my real name also means homeless.

Posted at 06:38 pm by Phaedrus
(3) took wings  

Friday, November 19, 2004
An Evening to remember

Usual setting ... dinner at a crap place .. my friend and I .. when suddenly pops the topic of another friend who's gone slightly berzerk .. when out of the blue somehow the whole discussion turns to me .. and my friend tells me how I have had a sheltered life, protected life.. so I don't know what the real world is like ... I've always been 'gharelu' ... I don't have many bad habits .. but that might be because I can't rebel .. I stick to norms because I think I have to ... under pressure .. if I have done something ... then its because I have had to prove a point to someone ... or maybe myself. When I said I wasn't interested in a certain company for whose interview I had appeared .. I was basically making a defense mechanism for myself in case I fail later ... of how I can't take failure .... of how I can't control my emotions ... of how I am not in control of my life...


Why did my friend sit in front of me and assassinate my character like this? Was it because he had issues with himself?

Are all these things true of me? How can I say? I can't really analyse myself, can I? And if these things are true for me, for whom (barring Buddha or Einstein) are these things not true? I am all those things .. and I am not all those things .... to some extent aren't we all .. those things? ... and aren't we not all those things?

If all my friend could say about me was all that .. should I change my friend circle?

Posted at 10:56 pm by Phaedrus
(1) took wings  

Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Dulce et Decorum Est

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

                                             --Wilfred Owen
Dulce et Decrum est pro patria mori: Latin for "It is both fitting and honourable to die for one's country"


On a similar note,


Mama, take this badge off of me
I can't use it anymore.
It's gettin' dark, too dark for me to see
I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door.

Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door

Mama, put my guns in the ground
I can't shoot them anymore.
That long black cloud is comin' down
I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door.

Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door


                                                       --Bob Dylan


Posted at 09:33 pm by Phaedrus
(2) took wings  

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