DISTANCE

The distance between you and me is unreal: sometimes it shrinks to a speck and dissolves, but then as soon expands and throws us seas apart. Worse, once written, this fact becomes either poetry or raving, and not the felt experience.

When I say I do not feel I'm alone anymore, I keep the sense of my life at some specific distance away from your life – the distance needed for you to support me. But isn’t that distance between you and me unreal too? You could be thrown far apart the next moment – so far apart from where I mightn’t even exist for you.

The only real within us is a redraftable version of life. A version that burns down the bogus life lived up to now, along with its trials and errors. But that, when written, becomes either poetry or raving. 

MIRROR, IMAGES

I watch her from the bed

As she stands herself

Before the tall wooden-frame mirror

Studying her naked torso.

Thin shoulders bowed with hopelessness

Bracketing two sags that refuse to look

At anything else than her own feet.

She moves both her hands over the belly

And gathers the folds of skin that hang loose

From her navel to the stubbly pubis.

Desire and humiliation swept over me:

Pity and lust, otherwise;

Decay and new birth troubled me:

Ruins and salvations, otherwise.

AFTER THE RAINY NIGHT

It rained torrents last night

And as usual the power failed:

Sitting in the dark, I listened

To the mayhem outside.

The wind turned and returned to the windows

As if emitted from the howling nostrils of

An angry elemental god.

In the morning, when I opened the window

The trees were still, scared, and bent

Amid a sprawling calm that spread around them.

TRAIN NUMBER 7229 SABARI EXPRESS FROM HYDERABAD TO TRIVENDRUM CENTRAL CROSSES THE KERALA BORDER

Train number 7229 scuffs and paces the sun-scattering silvery rails of bare and remote villages. Mud-walled houses, like modest indifferent raccoons, rise, stare and turn away as soon.

Railway-gates where vehicles wait and watch.

Windswept platforms throwing up desolate benches.

Huge haphazardly lying boulders basking naked in the plateau sun.  

I sit back as the light fails outside: into eyes that aren’t looking at anything come a hand that swings a lantern, a pattern of lights left behind in a town, a cold bulb lighting an empty street circle, a shadowy mansion with just one of its top-storey rooms still lit – someone reading?

Train number 7229 races into the wet morning with its one and twenty sooty coaches, thumping through more bare and bushy villages. Sunlight slowly filling the panes, tall green trees swinging their smiles, a river shying away amongst glistening sand – the train leaps and catches up the seven minutes it was late for Kanjikkod. 

പുലര്‍ച്ചെ

 സ്വിച്ചിട്ടു.

ഇരുളൊരൊറ്റ പ്പാച്ചിലില്‍
വെളുത്ത  ചുമര്‍മദ്ധ്യത്തിലെ
കറുത്ത  ചിലന്തിയായ്ച്ചുരുങ്ങി.

To be an Artist among Other Things

The night when the artist,
Heavy-hearted,
Bore his crying child outside,
He noted
That the baby’s eyes
Caught the reflection of the starry sky,
And each suspended tear
Made a sparkling moon.

SPEECH AND MODERN PHILOSOPHY

1

Although language occupies a position of special importance in philosophy, the 'linguistic turn' of the discipline, i presume, need not by itself predispose those who make it in favor of the earlier schools. indeed, a primary interest in the kinds of logical issues that occupy language-centric philosophers tends to have just the opposite effect. i'm just trying to draw some general conclusions: and as it happens with such broader plans, here, i talk about things as i have learnt them - as in, the way i was taught them. exceptions and debates will therefore find plenty of room.

Originally, philosophers interested in the workings of one's mind tended to think that it should be possible largely to bypass the utterances in which the mental functions are expressed and to concentrate attention on what directly takes place in the mind when we percieve or remember or whatever. however, this assumption was soon challenged in the history of the discourse, philosophers and psychologists expressed grave dissatisfaction with the outcomes thereof. questions were raised and doubts expressed about the reliability of the kind of introspection such inquiries appeared to rely on. It seemed like it is time to account the 'spoken truths'. the apparent accessibility factor of language and language use effectively contrasted the elusive and private nature of most mental functions. what someone says, unlike what someone thinks, is not hidden from public view; it is expressed in words that anyone can hear or, if they are written, see. as such a public fact, moreover, language lends itself to joint, cooperative inquiry as introspection hardly does.

Thus, language soon occupied a privileged place among the topics that come under the general rubric of 'the mental'. and in the consequent developments of psychology in general, the language one used for talking about mental functions altogether displaced those functions themselves. for example, it is quite in this spirit that a philosopher would propose that dreams be simply dismissed as mental episodes and that the stories people tell when they wake up be substituted for them. as speech or writing, these stories apparently were not thought to be problematic in a philosophical way, as dreams are. and this is where i think one should be able to see through the incontrovertible space that language has come to command in the discourse (regarding the mental).

Speech as a form of behaviour is a form of objective inquiry, it is also a vehicle of truth: it has a semantic character that other forms of human behaviour do not have. it is possible to apply the concept of truth and falsity to what is said, as can hardly be done in the case of other bodily processes. nevertheless, truth-value on the basis of mere objectivity is equally illusory. the Naturalistic assumption of bypassing the speech to locate mental functionings relied on an illusion - but substituting the truth of utterance does not change the basic nebulous nature of the inquiry much; we still are already-believing in a non-objective privilege.

As such, speech does perform an essential function of mind - without generating any of the puzzles usually associated with mental functions, at that. nonetheless, an approach to the philosophy of mind through language and speech merits far less than what it has been made out to be.

______________________________________

this was written months back. i shelved it then. the write-up felt incomplete and abrupt. when i checked now, i thought i might as well post: the way i would have completed it, has totally slipped me. and i dont feel like adding on any new fancy endings either. i'd rather go for a newer trail in the same direction, a second part, sometime.