The Magician & The Musician

“There are times when the truth can only show you an illusion.” 
(Lionel Suggs)

Music is the purest form of magic. Magic is the deepest essence of music. The romance between the two is legendary. While music is our refuge, magic becomes our resurrection. There is no flow sleeker than music and no law stronger than magic. Both have survived the rise and decline of countless civilizations… both are unbound by time and space, or atoms and cells… both defining life and existence, uniquely and fervently.

The truest lie is magic, the loudest silence is music. A magician and a musician, both estranged by destiny and separated by distance, feel connected to each other through the invocation of their respective spells – magic and music. A series of Haikus and two cinematically emotive instrumentals attempting to create such an atmosphere of invocation:

Whispers at Moonrise

“Heaven, envious of our joys, is waxen pale;
And when we whisper, then the stars fall down
To be partakers of our honey talk.”
(Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage)

Some words are never spoken, but felt. Some feelings are never sensed, until stirred.

One cannot measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange, but by the number of whispers they share. If whispers were the lyrics, silence was the music… making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale.

The heart is not an organ, but a whisper in your soul. Two lovers, from two different realms of time, exchange glimpses of each other, through silent songs at every moonrise. A series of Haikus and two soulful tunes fictionalising a surreal romance:

Words within Worlds, Worlds without Words

Engineman 3rd Class Jay “Chef” Hicks (Frederic Forrest): How come all you guys sit on your helmets?
Soldier: So we don’t get our balls blown off.

[Chef laughs a little, seems to think for a second, and then sits on his helmet.]

(Dialogue from the 1979 American epic war film, Apocalypse Now)

Let’s watch a short war movie montage first, a compilation by Plot Point Productions (Quote by Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in “The Lion in Winter”):

(Please pause the background music to stop interference while playing the video. You can do so from the “♪ Roll your Soul ♫” section on the right. Sincerest apologies for the inconvenience caused.)

Illusions: A Journey through Instrumentals

“Ah, music,” he said, wiping his eyes. “A magic beyond all we do here!” 
(J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone)

Life is much like a song. In the beginning, there is mystery; in the end, there is confirmation… but it’s in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.  Some people have lives; some people have music. Music is in fact a higher revelation than all wisdom & philosophy. Even the great Albert Einstein quipped: “If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”

Music is to the soul what words are to the mind; it is the wine that fills the cup of silence. Like it’s said, everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances. And this rhythm gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything. It can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable. It is the universal language of mankind.

A Feeling Rare

“Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love.
The real miracle is the love that inspires them.” 
(Marie Lloyd)

Miracle. Serendipity. Divine intervention. These often define the willingness to see the common in an uncommon way. Most people’s lives are a series of little miracles – strange coincidences which spring from uncontrollable impulses and give rise to incomprehensible dreams. We spend a lot of time pretending that we are normal, but underneath the surface each one of us knows that he or she is unique. Each one of us experiences miracles of some form, but we don’t realize when we do – miracles of healing, an answered prayer, an unexpected happy ending. Each comes quietly and simply, on tiptoe… so we hardly get to perceive its occurrence.

In fact, miracles are everyday things. Not only the sudden, great good fortune, wafting in on a new wind from the sky. They are almost routine, yet miracles just the same. Every time something hard becomes easier; every time we find a solution which until last week was non-existent; every time a kindness falls as softly as the dew, or someone we love who was unwell gets better; every time a blessing comes, not with trumpet and fanfare, but silently, at night… we have witnessed a miracle.

To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others. This verse is a reflection of one such moment of serendipity when love decided to work in unknown ways:

Ascent

“Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”
(Frida Kahlo)

Balance… Balance is not symmetry. For everything in this journey of life we are on, there is a right wing and a left wing: for the wing of love, there is anger; for the wing of destiny, there is fear; for the wing of pain, there is healing; for the wing of hurt, there is forgiveness; for the wing of pride, there is humility; for the wing of giving, there is taking; for the wing of tears, there is joy; for the wing of rejection, there is acceptance; for the wing of judgment, there is grace; for the wing of honour, there is shame; for the wing of letting go, there is the wing of keeping. We can only fly with two wings, and two wings can only stay in the air if there is a balance.

Having two desired wings is perfection. And perfection is not balance. Nature seeks balance. You cannot have two coveted wings at the same time, nor can you equilibrate with just one wing. A bird with one wing is imperfect; an angel with one wing is unblessed; a butterfly with one wing is dead. Life is a balanced system of learning and evolution. Whether pleasure or pain, every situation in your life serves a purpose. So there could be no joy on this planet without an equal weight of pain to balance it out on some unknown scale.

In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We’re each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid, something real. This verse is one such moment of discovery of the self from a shackled state of inactivity to a long-desired flight.

Inner Insights

“Alice came to a fork in the road. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked.
‘Where do you want to go?’ responded the Cheshire Cat.
‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered.
‘Then,’ said the Cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.’” 

(Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland)

Life has no rules.  It can be a complicated and bitter journey, or it can be a happy rewarding one with simple answers. Over the years I have come to believe that life is about choices. And the choices you make eventually shape your day, shape your views, shape your experiences, shape your thoughts… and shape your life.

There are some life choices over which you have no control or which others will make for you – like when and where you are born, the family you are born to, your life during childhood, the school you went to, etc. etc. etc. Beyond that, there are several other important choices that you make in life. And those choices define you.

Heroes are made by the paths they choose, not the powers they are graced with. If you believe it is a world of choice, you regard your life as a product of your own decisions. If you believe in destiny, you suspect there are greater forces defining your life’s story. Even if we are a part of some grand master plan, our unique journey has more personal meaning when we choose it for ourselves.

Desires dictate our priorities, priorities shape our choices, and choices determine our actions. We don’t get to choose what is true. We only get to choose what we do about it. At the end of the day, the questions we ask of ourselves determine the type of people that we will become.

Life is a test.  It was designed to be so. Few lines conjured up as I meandered into the world of choices that define our lives… or rather, we let them define our lives:

The Poetic Inception – A Monologue

“A poet in his senses knocks vainly at the gates of poetry.”
(Ben Jonson)

No human experience is unique, but each of us has a way of putting language together that is ours alone. Youth really is an intriguing period in one’s life. If one adds writerly ambitions to the difficulties of youth, one must possess an exceptionally strong constitution in order to cope.

Whenever we sit down to write a piece of poetry, our minds are flooded with a million remembered ideas, a billion derived thoughts and a zillion words to link them with. Whether we should follow the rules or simply let our words flow in any form or direction remains the greatest internal fight. The seasoned poets do not face such problems, but the novices or the untrained ones (like me) sometimes go through real dilemmas in choosing ‘what to pen down’ and ‘what not to pen down’. Added to that, distractions of various kinds commove the thinking process and unsettle the mind. Tranquility is sought after. Compromises and sacrifices become quintessentially necessary. In the end, forced eliminations often drain out the core thought that was the source of the written piece initially.

Most poets (rather creative people) often meet an untimely end, due to their obsessive and eccentric nature. This unorganized piece of verse is an attempt to map the mind of a poet embarking on a noetic journey to create a written piece. It has a dual layer of monologue to highlight the dilemmatic nature of the mind. The words written in italics imply that they have a louder impact on his/her cognitive process, and punctuation has been minimally used to bring out the continuum of musing.

Lost in Rhythm

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment.
There is no why.”
(Kurt Vonnegut)

Time and Life, whether you want it or not, have a way of going in circles. Ideally, you’d want it to be a linear path—you’d always know where you were going, you’d always be able to move on and leave everything else behind. Instead, you always find yourself where you had begun. You forget things you try to remember. You remember things you’d rather forget. The most frightening thing about memory is that it leaves no choice. It has mastered an incomprehensible art of forgetting. It erases, it smudges, and it fills in the blank spaces with details that don’t exist.

But however you remember it—or choose to remember it—the past is the foundation that holds your life in place. Without its support, you’d have nothing for guidance. What defines you isn’t “where you’re going”, but “where you’ve been”. There are things that will never change, things you will carry along always.

Time is an equal opportunity employer. Rich people can’t buy more hours. Scientists can’t invent new minutes. And you can’t save time to spend it on another day. What you perceive as precious is not ‘time’, but the one point that is ‘out of time’: the Now. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decrease, regrets mount. Time is such a waste of time to think about, because the longer you reflect on it, the more of it you lose. Yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream. So, flow with the rhythm and start counting how many Now’s you’ve collected and preserved yet!

Owing to some liminal displacement, my thoughts got a bit carried away. Hence, this poetic outcome:

Beat Your Life!

“Your life is your life
Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
Be on the watch.
There are ways out.
There is a light somewhere.
It may not be much light but
It beats the darkness.”
(Charles Bukowski, ‘The Laughing Heart’)

How many of us today are ready to be bogged down by cockeyed conventions? How many are ready to accept established norms just for the sake of obeisance? How many will wholeheartedly oblige if some drag king decides to rule nonchalantly? Hardly a soul I believe; just those who proudly flaunt their cultivated masks of fake conformity, and those who sit and whine when things fall apart.

The truth is: genuineness and unconventionality is what helps in making a mark on the world. If you go down just one corridor of thought, you never get to see what’s in the rooms leading off it. Beyond all our actions stands the larger shadow: How are we to choose between what we have been taught to think ‘right’ and something else which ‘might’ be? Real, constructive mental power lies in the mental conduct and the creative thoughts that eventually shape our destiny. So, develop a train of thought on which to ride. Change your perception and you change your world. You just have one mortal life in hand. Beat it! Beat it well!

Flow of thoughts got overflowed, and led to this small piece of verse: