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:

Secret

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you
because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.” 
(Roald Dahl)

Silence. Have you ever heard the mystifying silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you don’t have the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak; or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re alone in the whole house? Each one is different, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully. Autism is one such silence.

The world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence. And the language of this unexpressed silence is autism. It is neither a disease nor a disorder. It is about having a pure heart and being sensitive… It is about finding a way to survive in an overwhelming, confusing world… It is about developing differently, in a different pace and with different leaps. I believe God created autism to help offset the excessive number of boring people on Earth. In fact, nobody is purely autistic, or purely neurotypical. Even God has some autistic moments, which is why the planets spin and the galaxies swirl.

The reactions of the many should not affect the actions of the few. Being different is what sets you apart from everybody else in this world. It allows you to be unique. It allows you to process information in ways that people will never understand, and see things in ways that others would find unimaginable. It allows you to break free from the mould of society. You are beautifully unique and uniquely beautiful. You are not the same as anybody else, yet you are not different from them either.

Love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it. This verse is one such moment of secret expression of love between a soul who is deemed ‘silent’ and another who could read the silence.

Asymptote

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”
(Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

Courage. Kindness. Friendship. Character. These are the qualities that were supposed to define us as human beings, and propel us to greatness. But have they? We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but we haven’t yet valued humanity. We assign numeric values to each other, demarcating our universal existence with lines and borders that have no meaning. The chaos, despair, and senseless destruction we see today are a result of the alienation that people feel from each other and their environment.

We are all equal in the fact that we are all different. We are all the same in the fact that we will never be the same. We are united by the reality that all colours and all cultures are distinct & individual. We are harmonious in the reality that we are all held to this earth by the same gravity. We may not share blood, but we share the air that keeps us alive.

From cosmic perspective, every one of us is precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. However, there are people who are discriminating by nature. They live inside a box and think people who don’t fit into their box are weird. I believe this lot of morons are like genetically-manipulated plants growing inside a laboratory, like indistinguishable faces, like droids. Like ignorance.

Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human – in not having to be just happy or just sad – but in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time. We are all ordinary. We are all special. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all zeroes.

Zero is the number people often feel, more so than one. This verse is the retelling of the story of an entity that’s considered a ‘nullity’ by the society, but through determination, courage and love, it proves: even ‘nothing’ can truly be ‘something’. 

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:

Like a Nightingale

“But there’s a story behind everything.
How a picture got on a wall.
How a scar got on your face.
Sometimes the stories are simple,
and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking.
But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story,
because hers is where yours begin.”
(Mitch Albom)

One cannot forget mother and remember God.
One cannot remember mother and forget God.

Why? Because these two sacred persons, God and mother – partners in creation, in love, in sacrifice, in service – are bound forever, as one.

A short poem as a tribute to all the loving mothers on the occasion of Mother’s Day (which I feel, should be celebrated on every single day of our mortal existence):