Very interesting! The way to go it seems.
Sep4
Author Archives: Rohini Sunderam
Aug23
The World of Silence
by Fr. Denis Lemieux
Where silence is, man is observed by silence. Silence looks at man more than man looks at silence. Man does not put silence to the test; silence puts man to the test.
Silence is the only phenomenon today that is “useless”. It does not fit into the world of profit and utility; it simply is. It seems to have no other purpose; it cannot be exploited… It gives things something of its own holy uselessness, for that is what silence itself is: holy uselessness.
The basic phenomena take us, as it were, back to the beginning of things; we have left behind us what Goethe called “the merely derived phenomena” with which we normally live. It is like a death, for we are left on our own, faced with a new beginning—and so we are afraid.
Still like some old, forgotten animal from the beginning of time, silence towers above all the puny world of noise; but as a living animal, not an extinct species, it lies in wait, and we can still see its broad back sinking ever deeper among the briers and bushes of the world of noise. It is as though this prehistoric creature were gradually sinking into the depths of its own silence. And yet sometimes all the noise of the world today seems like the mere buzzing of insects on the broad back of silence.
Max Picard, The World of Silence
Reflection – This is an obscure book by an obscure author that a couple of us at MH have discovered recently, and that I am enjoying very much. The author writes with poetic, almost mystical conviction on what I think is an important subject, perhaps one of the most important subjects there is, in fact.
Our world today flees from silence. There was a study at the University of Virginia recently that was much reported in the media, where a large percentage of people, when asked to simply sit in silence without any distractions for a mere fifteen minutes, preferred to administer mild electric shocks to themselves rather than do that.
‘Silence puts man to the test’. And so we flee from it. We surround ourselves with distractions—electronic devices on which we can play games, listen to music, watch movies, chatter away or follow the twittering chatter of others. It is not that all these devices are evil and must be rejected (it would be rather hypocritical for me to suggest that), but rather they must be put away regularly, turned off frequently, silenced daily.
It is a very deep matter, this necessity of silence for the human person. It is this whole business of uselessness, of a non-utilitarian mode of being. Our world today, insofar as it cluttered by noise and chatter and ceaseless activity, is a world of utilitarian values. What use is it? That is the only question. If something is not delivering some value to us–diverting us, feeding us, informing us—then it is useless and to be thrown aside.
But as with things, so it is with people, right? We cannot adopt a utilitarian attitude towards life without extending that towards the people in our life too. And of course then we have the phenomenon of people being thrown away, or at best (and what a sad and pathetic best it is) judged and valued by how ‘useful’ they are. An insecure and terrible way of being.
And so we have the need for this holy uselessness of silence. Picard is right—silence is the one thing that cannot be exploited economically. It is available to us, free, at the simple price of turning off all the sources of noise in our life. And it is a very deep matter—Picard is a very deep writer indeed on this subject.
Silence as ‘death’, as returning us to the immediate experience of reality, underived, uninterpreted, raw and naked, like Adam at his creation, silence as this vast towering reality that surrounds us and threatens to engulf us, silence as a constant presence encompassing the world of noise—these are serious things to consider. We flee from silence; really, in this we are fleeing from reality, from ourselves and from God. Ought we?
NOTE: Fr Denis is a friend’s spiritual director, a priest of Madonna House, which is her spiritual home and community located in Ontario, Canada. He has a blog TEN THOUSAND PLACES which you can easily access (http://frdenis.blogspot.com) but he no longer invites comments as he is a very very busy priest and cannot attend to all
he is also an author of several books
Aug19
My Imagination
By Patsy Mills
I work as a Security Guard at a Halifax campus and one of my duties is to patrol around the outer perimeter of the campus. It only takes about ten minutes or so to do and very rarely is there very much to report about. So, to make my patrol kind of interesting, I use my imagination to give myself a chuckle once in a while.
There are three big garbage bins from the company Re-Group. The Re stands for Recycle, Reduce and Reuse. Part of my patrol is to walk around them to make sure nothing out of the ordinary is around them. Never was told exactly what was meant by “out of the ordinary”. As long as there are no small dead animals or being over run by rats or ants, then, I don’t mind covering the territory as required. It is very boring and the garbage cans have become the basis of my imagination.
The garbage bins are square with two flapping lids on the top. Sometimes the lids are open and sometimes they are closed. The words Re Group are written on the front of the bin.
My imagination portrays the bins in an animated form, and I am human, not animated. Similar to the pairing of cartoon and human done on the movie of Roger Rabbit or also, compare it to the movie “The Night at the Museum” with Ben Stiller and all the statues in the museum come to life after the museum closes.
I am walking along on my patrol, minding my business and as I get closer to the area where the bins are, I can hear voices, as if they are in a heated discussion. I turn the corner to walk closer to the where the garbage bins are and they catch a glimpse of me approaching and then I hear, “Shhhh!!!! Sh!!!! Stop talking you two!!! She will hear us!!! Shut your Lid. Come on guys , we need to “ReGroup!!!!” Shh!!!
As I get closer, I walk around the bins, thinking to myself, “I am SURE I heard some voices!!!” Even if I did hear voices, uh, from garbage cans, ha ha, I think All I would hear would be “trash talk”.
They are just ‘Has-Bins’. I am a lover of using Puns or play on words even when thinking to myself. As sure as I was that i heard voices, I think I was trying to coax a response out of these bins, even though that sounds crazy as the birds.
As I finish my patrol, I walk away. It was either a breeze that flapped the lid on the bin, or was my imagination making me think I heard one of them give me a raspberry as I am walking away.
I turn around and give them a raspberry and continue on my patrol.
NOTE: THIS IS A FLASH FICTION STORY FROM A FRIEND IN HALIFAX SEND IN YOUR COMMENTS!
Jul19
In memory of my mother
July 18th was my mother’s birthday. Every year it rolls around and every year I think of her. She was a major influence in my life and today I think I have the strength to post the eulogy I wrote for her. I wasn’t able to attend her funeral or her memorial service, so my sister read this out to the scores of people who came to pay their respects to her.
TO MY MOTHER
“Woman, behold thy son, behold thy mother.” That was one of my mother’s favourite quotations from the Bible. For son, I think we can all read ‘child’. The other was the Good Friday hymn, ‘At the cross her station keeping, stood the mother gently weeping’. For her these were like guiding lights. And, she was above all else a mother, as fiercely maternal as a Bengal tigress. I think she would have liked the metaphor – no, she’d correct me, that’s a simile. And, although many of us in our family were at the receiving end of her particularly well-honed tongue, I think I can confidently say that we had all also been at the receiving end of her maternal care. She has comforted, helped, taught and just plain ‘been there’ for more people than I think I’ll ever know. A little thing could move her from being a towering inferno to a tower of strength. And only ma could get away with combining both.
Speaking for myself, she taught me everything, from school lessons to the big one about life. Not so much by what she said as by her actions. From as far back as I can remember she embodied what today people would call ‘feminism’. She didn’t hang a name on it. She just went out there and did it. I’ve seen her playing squash in a sari. I believe she played a deft game of tennis and badminton too. She swam, unembarrassed, in a swimming pool at a time when we rarely saw other women even get into the water. She drove a car long before we saw other ladies drive, at any rate in some places in India places like Bangalore and Jamnagar way back in the 1950s. She was a strong woman with very definite views and we secretly nicknamed her sergeant major.
Thanks to her, we had boyfriends and broken hearts and she was always, I now recall, not obtrusively there, but there; with her ‘there’s many more fish in the sea’ wisdom. Afraid as we often were of her, we knew that we had no stronger champion when it came to doing something new, different and perhaps not popular with the older generation of my time. I remember her interest in theatre. She took part in a play for which I helped her learn her lines but I wondered how she could stand up in front of all those people. She gave me an interest in Art, and took us to dozens of art exhibition that we enjoyed and they weren’t school trips. Books, we shared. I recall my mother giggling out loud over a book called Aunty Mame and then laughing over it myself. Poetry. And with the passing years I’ve found myself digging around in the garden finally coming to her enjoyment of plants and the regeneration that they represent.
Today, more than anything else, that’s what she would like us to celebrate: the regeneration of her love. Growing, and like the earth, giving forth of its bounty, where our tears are merely the rain which makes flowers called Smiles, Laughter and that most beautiful rose of all, the one that’s called Remembrance.
Jul13
After tremors
Having just finished reading Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed, I recall a conversation I had some years ago in the Bab al Bahrain souk.
‘You know, that guy,’ he says
Between the displays
Of Lapis Lazuli and silverware
‘The one who wrote Kite Runner?’
I nod, my eyes coveting
A single large bracelet
Woven with fine strands of silver
Into exquisitely painful
Circles and arabesques
Imprisoning
A myriad stones
Inscrutable opals, amethysts
As purple as bruises on a tender face
‘What about him?’ I ask
Half caressing the bracelet
And pointing at
A pair of earrings dripping
Blood-red garnets
Set in marcasite.
Thinking, ‘what does he know of
Kite Runner, he looks as though
He can barely read
Selling jewellery in a store
Over-stuffed with shawls, rugs, woodworked boxes
And glitzy
perhaps-these-western-tourists-will-like-them
Waistcoats and table runners.’
Then I see it
Desperation woven into tiny errors
in the embroidery
Startled by a gunshot.
So, I ask again
This time waiting for his response,
‘What about him?
The book was so moving, so violent.’
‘Ta-shakor’ he replies
‘But they were like nothing’
He whispers
Holding the silver bracelet up for me
Quoting a price and adding
‘Like the stories I have in here.’
He points at his head and his heart.
I see half a lifetime
As it leaks out of his hands
Torn fingernails
The intricate patterns
Woven by hard manual labour
Deep cuts on the side
From scrabbling down a mountainside
Hiding in caves
Or was it from protecting his face
Against knife attacks?
As he enters the sale
For the day.
Jun2
Twenty-one again!
21 for 21
…that’s what the invitation said. That number took me back to the day I turned twenty-one. When the palate was young and my taste buds were alive to every nuance of flavour and texture. Back then, when aromas teased one’s nostrils, they imprinted olfactory memories onto my grey cells to be drawn upon in later life.
It was a time when intense was the shade of every colour in the rainbow, even those less vivid like green and yellow hidden between blue and orange. When a sunset was grist to my writer’s mill and could, on one day move me to tears and on another to revel in the joy of being.
So what has all this meandering in my memory banks got to do with an invitation from Obai & Hill and those lovely ladies Wafa and Zainab to Vapiano’s 21 for 21 press event?
Feb21
Threading the Needle
A Bahrain Writers’ Circle Creative Workshop Exercise
Secreted from the underbelly of the moth caterpillar called Bombyx mori, it sat in suspension for thirty-five days, a single filament one and half kilometres long. The cocoon was plunged into a hot bath to loosen the glue that held the threads together. Then it was cooled so that this thread could be unravelled. The caterpillar died in the process. That fine single strand of silk, for which a life was sacrificed, then joined three other martyrs to form a thread of one of the finest, most prized fibres in the world.
It shone in the light with a gentle glow, blushing as each of its minute three-sided faces caught a sunbeam that exposed its lissom length and supple sinews. It glowed as a moonbeam caressed its tresses. And it stretched in pleasure almost to its tensile limit pleased at its own resilience as one of the strongest natural filaments in the world. Its pride was short-lived.
Before it could revel in its own existence, the thread was trapped. Caught and wound into a skein. Then, enslaved in a ring, the yarn was packed off to a fabled land, Turkey. Here in the dyer’s harem the skein lost the innocent cream of its youth and was plunged into an indigo dye.
The indigo whispered its own sad story of capture, beatings and torture. The two strangers in a strange land wept and embraced each other. As their tears mingled the indigo imbued the silk with the softest, most beautiful hue of sorrow – blue; the kind that shines bravely in the sun and glistens pensively in the moonlight.
Today, a three denier thread of that silk waits suspended, rigid with fear, as a lady’s fingers clutch its neck and aim to push it into the oval eye of a sharp metal spike. At the last moment the thread flinches and dodges the eye of the needle.
The lady looks at the thread, then gently slides it over her tongue. The wet muscular rough appendage arouses an old memory – the glue that once held each strand tight and safe in that cocoon of the Bombyx mori caterpillar so long ago. The recollection makes all three deniers cling to each other now stiff with anticipation as they fly through the eye of the needle. It is threaded.
And the slavery of the silk is complete as the metal spike pulls all three strands together through the squared fabric to form a blue daisy in the lady’s embroidery. The silk sighs as it succumbs to its eternal punishment, forever bent, never free to flow and dance in the light again except in minute parts of its length as it weeps across the tapestry.
Note: This was another exercise through the Bahrain Writers’ Circle – Creative Writers’ Workshop. Back then we had a different format: we’d do exercises and were then given homework to share at the next session.
I remember it was given to us by Shauna Nearing Loej when, as a group, we were mendicants going from one refuge to another. At the time we were kindly granted a spot in a bookshop in Adliya. Shauna gave us us all a choice of subjects to write on. As usual I, ever the ‘teacher’s pet’, had done my assignment – the above post. It was an inspired piece although written frantically the night before we were due to meet. The atmosphere was perfect: dim lights, leather sofas and a slight chill in the air. I intoned my piece and at the time felt my voice sounded almost sepulchral, later I was told I sounded poetic! Anyway, this was met with such enthusiasm that I sent it to the Flaneur, where it still resides as a story under the same title! I’m hoping it’s okay to publish it here after almost two years. And I hope you will enjoy it.
NOW PODCAST
Thanks to Morgen Bailey, this is the first time a story of mine has been Podcast!
And, here are the links
iTunes
https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/baileys-writing-tips/id389840707
Just sharing the info… don’t feel obliged to listen to it 🙂
Other links taken from Morgen’s email to me:
I’m pleased to say that the podcast of your flash fiction is live. The direct short link to the relevant blog post is http://wp.me/p18Ztn-8Kp and long link ishttp://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/2014/04/27/baileys-writing-tips-podcast-short-stories-episode-no-39. Feel free to use them wherever and whenever you like. I’ve also added the details to the Podcast Short Stories, Flash Fiction Fridays and Contributors pages.
The links to listen to the podcast are on the blog post but they are…
iTunes (the first item), Google’s Feedburner (scroll to the end), Podbean, Podcasters and Podcast Alley.
Feb14
Rebirth
Shiva’s tandav nritya* the dance of destruction
He the transformer, limitless, omniscient
The holder of time the ultimate destroyer and creator
Man-woman centre of the trinity
Ever moving forward and backward
His cosmic dance
Frenetic in its final phases
We beat the drums and tablas
Dha din din tha, tha din din tha**
Urging him on to our final destruction, hoping to return
To a world reborn, renewed, refreshed
And pure as the first dew on the first day
Of the first dawn.
(*The dance of destruction ** Names of the basic tabla strokes)
Feb3
First Catch
I remember the jade green turbulence
Of the river Beas up in the Kullu valley
The summer I turned twelve and discovered rainbow trout.
When papa showed us how to bait the hook
And cast way out and stand on the rocky river bank
Making sure we didn’t stand in it as he did, knee deep in the water.
But on the side, waiting for the tug on the line
On my forefinger held against an already taut string.
Not for us the expensively bought silver flies
Imported from the UK because they didn’t make them here
And children learning to fish could so easily lose them
The Beas is a hungry river and runs almost as quick as thought.
And yet, we learnt to feel the fish as it nibbled squirmy worm
Painstakingly threaded onto the hook
Papa did that because the hooks might hurt our soft girls’ hands.
Stand still and quiet not a word, not a breath
The fish can hear us and will swim away
Instead look at the pines and the deodar silver green
Climbing silently up the Himalayan hillside smirking at us.
We watched them in the hush of nothing but the rushing river
And learnt to feel each breeze, listen to the birds
And the crickets in the growing evening light
And pay no heed to the insect that’s biting my thigh
A stern look from papa because I scratched
And then that creeping thrill when I first felt that other nibble
The one at the end of the line, different from the impatient tug of the river
The rainbow trout was having his last meal.
Tug, tug and reel it in, not all at once but slow
In the excitement I could wait no longer and pulled it all
Rod, line and fish arching over my head in a kaleidoscopic glitter
It caught the setting sun as it flew overhead scattering
Beas water clear as diamonds that came showering down on me
The trout landed on the grass behind
I ran to catch it
Papa at my heels – when did he reel in his line?
Now he was near me so that I wouldn’t try to get my trout off the hook.
Our first catch of the day was all of six inches long
And it was mine.
Palpitating gills and wide eyes.
We put it in a bucket of Beas water to keep it fresh
Later mama fried it along with the others we caught
Right there on the riverside in a pan on the primus stove
Everyone had a bit of my trout
The best fish I ever tasted, salted with success.
Note: The Beas is a river in the northern part of India that rises in the Himalayas and flows for some 470 km (290 miles) to the Sutlej River in the Indian state of Punjab.
Kullu, where my father took us on several fishing holidays, is located on the banks of the Beas River in the Kullu Valley. This valley, formed by the Beas, lies between two cities – Manali and Largi – and is famous for its majestic hills covered with Pine and Deodar Forest. Today, The Kullu valley promotes itself as a popular destination for trout fishing. It is also the starting point of several trek routes into the Himalayas, white water rafting on the Beas river is also becoming popular. Back in the early 1960’s it was relatively undiscovered and as far as I recall, there weren’t any suitable hotels and so we camped in tents higher up the hill and walked down to the river every day in order to fish.
Oct13
I missed Malala
…At point blank range
With Malal Yousafzai so much in the news again with reports and articles such as these:
in the The Prague Revue
in the Washington Post
and in the New York Times
I thought the time is right for me to post a poem I wrote several months ago on a chance remark made by my husband when I wondered how the would-be assassin could miss Malala at such short range? And he replied, ‘Perhaps he couldn’t do it’. And from this, the following poem arose:
The training it was thorough
The orders loud and clear
The young girl was a menace
And she was spreading fear
I really didn’t get it
But my superiors were sure
And on the Internet they said
Her demands were all impure
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