Poem

I watch my cellphone flash
With a frantic call -- goes out -- back
Again. I have left the last letter, his
Last postcard in the dustbin of
Desire among sweepings and
Dead cats of memory. Till the next.
I wait patiently for the passing of
This fantastic invasion, when all I'd done was to
Spill by chance some ink on his chest that
Cannot be washed away.
I have chosen a snowy dress, I have
Brightened my teeth. The
Heart -- that is harder to groom
But the better part of it, my writing, is
White.

Correction

Words, giving vision,
like lenses for myopia
      -- Dad,
without whom life is
a blur, in his writing.

Untitled

Look, two hands
Whose twists wring out the cloth
And the bucket
Bucket full of black water
Like a closed piano.

The surface jumps and scowls
Like when a dead heart
Drops in blood
Like the moon upon
Sleepless rooms.

It spills and rolls,
Turns -- a head, there it is,
Shrunken, white,
Eyes blank, teeth looking out.
Standing I survey it.

Idea that'd agitated to clot:
A collage of feelings and events
Wherefore
A plaintive tune floats in time
From depths of the keyboard.

Theatre review: Duets

The Stain, a three-women art troupe, certainly had on its mind expressions by two artistes in the creation of Duets. Conjugation, or the notion of it, is rife in Maude Davey's eight-member cast staging, although the raunchy production turns out to be a poignant portrait of the joys and pain of human intimacy.

Held together by a palette of ballads and abstract dance, for an absent plot, the work reminds us that behind a world saturated by preoccupations with sex is ultimately a desire for connection.

After a bitter break-up, (in a stirring group performance of Gotye's Somebody That I Used To Know), a woman (Francesca Sculli) calls her lover (Jo Franklin), and attempts at reconciliation under apparent talk of rolling-pins and Crisco and nakedness.

A wildly distracted woman (exceptional Sarah Ward), her head in a television-box that she changes channels again and again, further fills the space with songs of longing and of loss. Despite achieving orgasm with inanimate objects she goes on to seek closeness with the audience in a gesture that suggests perhaps the inadequacy of physical gratification.

There is a powerful message inside what first appears to be a sleazy framework (replete with bananas and apples and fake penises) made more potent by Herbz's dim and hazy set design -- enveloped in murky sheets of plastic, so that one feels as if they are looking through half-closed eyes -- and a soundscape in which Gen Bernstein's guitar and Genevieve Fry's harp strum heart-strings as achingly as they do the airwaves. The lighting is noteworthy, too, creating pulse and motion, like electricity shaking up your nerves.

It is The Huxley's final rendition, however, that cuts most keenly. Joined from wearing separate costumes attached by a long, red fabric at each other's chest, Will and Garrett Huxley show and sing of how love is a beautiful condition that comes with the inherent risk of being hurt by actions of the conjoined party.

Still, Duets ends (as it begins; in fact, is interwoven) with a sense of hope through Paula Russell whose graceful ballerina movements, accompanying a choice musical number, leaves you satisfied, with feelings of promise.

An enjoyable afternoon that combines mind and body, science and art, emotions and flesh.

Theatre review: To The Naked Eye

What are the things better left hidden To The Naked Eye in Cerise de Gelder's play? Do they include the unhappiness within Clare's matrimony, something neighbour and single-woman Stephanie suspects? Is the unethical business dealings husband Adam is believed to be involved in one of them? And that Stephanie is alone because, decades ago, her three-week-old groom had been convicted of murder -- is this another? One thing is certain: none of these revelations makes any difference, even if the story ends with trailing possibilities.

We follow the lives of two suburban households, in which Clare finds herself repeatedly presented with gifts from a grateful Stephanie, whom she had helped in a car accident. When Adam becomes hostile to her excessive presence in their home, Stephanie attempts to convince Clare she could be better off on her own.

Meanwhile, the young house-maker, despite maintaining that she enjoys marital bliss, feels neglected by Adam who, himself nursing hurt from his wife's one-time infidelity, claims to be hard at work. Then, suspicious of Stephanie's untoward influence on their marriage, Adam divulges the secrets of her past, and accuses her of sinister motives behind the overtures of friendship.

Although the action of the tale lies in manipulation of power through exhuming skeletons in the closet, Gelder's drama infers truth may be worth less than one would imagine. As the narrative unfolds, we see that, because of circumstances, bringing things into light changes nothing. Characters seem to accept the impossibility of understanding why people do what they do. Given life must go on, the play leads one to think, it might be preferable for happiness to be uncoloured by pain.

Brenda Palmer's staging is brilliant, with the characters jointlessly segueing between soliloquy (as they voice their inner thoughts) and dialogue. In her collaboration with Harry Paternoster whose set deploys the space to magnificent effect, she uses long swathes of cloth to convey transience and a sense of deliberate, if languid, interference.

Performance, too, is tremendous. Stephanie Lillis is volatile and vulnerable as Clare, an attention-starved spouse, with divided loyalties, yet sure of neither. Carolyn Masson is nervy and defiant as Stephanie, a middle-aged loner determined to avoid a similar fate that met with the Sarajevo woman (she'd read) who had been so isolated she was discovered years after her death.

And Miljana Cancar is the returned spirit of that Sarajevo woman, the enlightened figure in red who, in spite of lurking in a corner, is an instructive voice inside Stephanie's head, while Robert Ricks is Adam, effectively suggesting a tormented soul behind the abrasiveness.

This is a profound meditation on idealism and pragmatism, dramatising the interface between self-interests, reality, letting go. What is not hidden To The Naked Eye, though, is that behind the fabric of every existence lies the bleak terror of loneliness.

Golden Fog

The world is a wall of whiteness.
Air or stone watches me steadily;
I keep up the walking.

A chimney lets out wools of breath.
The first old tram,
Colour of sage,

Parts the diaphanous flesh.
For a long time
Outlines of distance are

Dissolving; the next yard is safe.
My bones carry a quiet.
Soon, they melt into farness --

An illuminated way through
The day, tomorrow,
Of love and meaning and golden skies.

Film review: Mia Madre

As our parents age impending bereavement from their death inches closer for some of us. Exploring how lives can be dimmed by the stress of this reality, Mia Madre is a gentle drama so melancholy and drawn-out its very air seems to have been sucked away by labour and gloom.

Filming a picture about worker-protests against factory layoffs, director Margherita (Margherita Buy) learns, alongside her brother Giovanni (in a beautifully tempered performance by Nanni Moretti, writer and director of Mia Madre, himself), that their eponymous mother Ada (Giulia Lazzarini) is dying.

Giovanni is sad but calm and dedicates his time to caring for Ada; Margherita, on the other hand, exists in denial, teetering on an emotional melt-down, amid strains in her daily life.

Divorced, she has just initiated to break-off a relationship with a devoted lover. That her teenage daughter, Livia (Beatrice Mancini), has apparently been nursing a heartache she until now knew nothing about is weighing on the guilt. And the leading-man, Barry Huggins (John Turturro), she has imported from America for her movie is proving exasperating and never remembers his lines.

Revealing very little about the bond between Ada and Margherita, despite hints of past fractures, this (curious) Cannes-award winner is largely suspected to be autobiographical; for Moretti was making his feature We have a Pope in 2011 when his own mother passed away.

If so, Margherita's favourite instruction to her actors -- "to stand beside your character when playing them" -- may not be that bewildering, after all. If each of us consists of an outer-persona (character-role) and an inner (our alter-ego), then Giovanni is really the inside-man of the film-maker who is Moretti acted out by Buy.

If so, it is a delicious conceit.

Only, the 106-minute account alights remorselessly on protracted  and iterative narrations about the way Margherita is (not) coping. Visits to the hospital are touching but dull. While dream sequences and recollections and a fascinating scene, in which she appears to come face-to-face with her younger-self, count like the equivalent of stream-of-consciousness in literature, the story feels like a book uninferent of progress.

Even Tuturro, by adding colour and raising tempo in his portrayal of the idiosyncratic star, cannot save the work.

Towards the end, we see how Margherita arrives at a better understanding of her mother, of herself, indeed of their startling contrasts.

"You don't like anything... that's the way you live," says her lover, bitterly. "People can have only small doses of you."

Well, in Mia Madre, she has been a flame-extinguishing dollop.

Theatre review: In Search of Owen Roe

Arcane ancestor-stories, amongst the most intriguing elements of self-identity, offer rich pickings for dramatists. And this play, written and performed by Vanessa O'Neill, in which she uncovers her Irish roots, certainly digs deep.

Voices in the head and insomnia and a restless consciousness take us back to the 17th-century when Owen Roe O'Neill fought an armed resistance against English rule. One of the most famous antecedents of the dynasty, the commander of the Ulster Army was remembered two hundred years after his death.

It is, however, her great-grandfather, who shares that weighty name eons later, whose life Vanessa desires to explore.

Only, she finds that the body of the man is interred under a bare patch of earth, unmarked, beside his 13-year-old daughter, while everybody else in the family has tombstones to their graves. Why, nobody appears to know.

In this crisp, 60-minute, one-woman show, the playwright tells of how she set out on her mission that has since involved poring over countless documents and trekking many times to her native Shamrock over the past 18 years.

Glynis Angell directs this compelling production that gives us in part a theatrical version of the inside of Vanessa's mind. Sounds of her thoughts come out of the air (in a haunting design by Darious Kedros) about our heads.

The stage is dark and intimate, with a sense of discontent, furnished by a map of Ireland on the one side, and the other a family tree that fruits as the narrative progresses with names.

At the centre, though, of this brooding agitation and persistent search is Vanessa's father slipping into dementia; and in his struggle for freedom and for dignity she recognises a mirror to her own fighting spirit, and indeed her son's emerging quality of independent thinking.

Albeit subtle, Vanessa's scalpel is uncompromising. She peels away one layer of time after another, alluding to idiosyncracies and strength of character that seem to have passed down the generations like breathing heritage.

At its best, the writing combines poetry and soaring images, as it frames the action with ghostly figures that blur the boundary between the dead and living.

But it is Vanessa switching effortlessly into and out of myriad roles -- her father, the great-grandmother, various Irish men she meets at the pub, her son, cousins, to name a few -- using artistic unities to fuse past and present that this staging really shines.

Yet, despite its acuity and tenderness, some parallels drawn across the genealogy feel somewhat elbowed into the account, and strains credulity.

Still, as revelations unfold and we come to understand perhaps why the title character was buried without a stone, and to speculate at his decision to calling himself Gary, In Search of Owen Roe, indubitably satisfies.

It is one of those memorable works that leaves you wondering about your own roots and their secrets and about the same vein that shapes lives today as they shaped them then.

Here, Now

Vegetation riots on the earth,

Big trees are king;
The stretch of river runs along,

Contented,
Into the quiet of shaded distances.

The air is warm and sweet,

Of mud,
The mystery of wilderness

Vigorous upon my nostrils.

On the silvery bank
A pair of reptiles

Are sunning themselves side by side;

There is joy in brilliance of the light,

The stream, the great silence, impenetrable forest.

For they've never known him,

Nor anything in their lives 

Of his hollowing absence.

Under The Tree

Grasping a handful

Of earth where

His ashes were spread

And where he'd burnt

His manuscript

I cannot know if

This is his or him

Light, My Raison D'etre

Light, my raison d'etre
A crack in the sky, the sleepy white of your eyes, the
   company I am happy with,
Clasped hands swinging down the quiet path,
The grass whitened by footprints of overnight mist,
Leaves coloured by autumn red and gold and purple and brown,
Orange, burning rim of cigarettes
The tip-toe of stars on the slumbering lake, headlamps and
   fireflies, the open refrigerator, lantern hanging
   on the empty porch,
The trickle of these images, gentle and imperfectly described by turns,
   limited only by talent, when I summon them to mind.
Poetry that puts on a film, takes the seat next to me,
   arms around my shoulders,
Poetry without words, poetry that does not care for words,
   has no time for words,
The mother, for whom 'motherhood' is merely a collection of alphabets
   invented by somebody to fill a void, the mother who cannot give a damn
   if the word exists or not,
The urgent seeker that moves down the skirt, then up from the hem,
   to make its way hungrily between folds,
New learning, new thoughts, new beginnings,
   old books, old times, old-er surrender,
Slant of the sun upon wet earth, the stir of wind against my
   skin, the scent of wood and bark and scrub and roots,
   sounds of air that sink and swell,
Life that basks in love, then reflects the product of that love,
Signature sharps and flats that join from down and up
   to dissolve into rhythm of movements,
Writing that creeps discreetly up and takes hold,
   that presses upon you with firm, lusty arms,
   curves his strong legs about your consciousness,
   until you yield to his will, breathless and fulfilled,
Lightning that stains upwards, then
   another, a third, again,
Your mouth breaking into a smile against the steamy moon,
The smell of rain, the wholesome sense of rest
   and content and relief,
And this list gathered from scattered puddles,
   that I now toss into the fire.

For Susan's prompt

Poets United Midweek Motif -- Organic

Home

It reads your pulse, comfortable as dusk,
Comfortable that time flows where it must,
And strength back in recrudescence of life,

That the hands of the sisters Sufficiency and Sun
Smear upon eyes and cheeks,
Some pearly pink and deuce of light.

For there is no vacancy; alone, I have chartered
The place. I put on the lamp as the street sign
Quivers out --  then at the desk that catches my silhouette, I feel

Rhythm stir the air, the beat of my drum in salubrious ear.

For Sumana's prompt

Poets United Midweek Motif -- Home

How Long Were We Black

You and I, how long were we black
Now emerging, we slowly rise, as a plant after landslide
There is colour, long have we kept out, but now it returns
We return; we are the colour
We are music, strawberries, lace, cinemas, literature
We are here; we are of the human race
We are walks in the park, dappled foliage on wooden bench, stray tennis ball on the grass
We are the sun
We are a pair of rosellas fluttering away into the east
We hum the tune on our fingers, surf the chords of Rachmaninov, determined as any
We are where the sky and the ocean meet without a joint, the low haze like fabric in diaphanous folds
We are also mud on the skirt lifted above the knees, sound of the river, current between our toes
We are lowered eyes, corners of mouth curling up, meaningful pauses, we are cheekiness
We are bookends, standing side by side with no distance between them
We are novels lying flat on the shelf
We tap upon a blank page with a cheap pen and scribble and dream, we waste time
We are poetry, we are prose, we exist on napkins, spill across scrap-paper
We are what a sunset is: capricious, indifferent, perceptible, imperceptible
We are tenderness, frost, fire, laughter, empathy
We are cafes and galleries and dramas and alleyways
We are hand cream, flowers in a watering can, long chats with mum, bowl of noodle soup
We had lunged about, headlong, in darkness, you and I, back and forth, corner to corner, but now
We are home
We have dug our roots deep inside the ground from where we are free with which there is joy.

Book Review: Pedro Paramo

I read Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo at a time in my life when strange dreams were invading my sleep and, perhaps for want of rest, long days were spent wrestling with old ghosts.

This second (and last) book by the Mexican author opens with the tale of Juan Preciado who, in fulfilling a promise to his late mother, travels to her birthplace to search out a man named Pedro Páramo, a father he never knew.

The Comala he finds is, however, nothing like the lively village of his mother’s nostalgia; today, the land is barren, and death inhabits houses without roofs.

And, Pedro Páramo, as he learns upon arrival, had died years ago.

The son, who had come in search of self-identity and revenge “for all those years he – [Pedro Páramo] -- put us out of his mind”, stays on, nonetheless.

We start to walk down the hot and empty streets with Juan Preciado, running into a variety of characters, experiencing them, and watching, before feeling with him, through Rulfo’s inimitable technique, the same spooky bewilderment each time we realise that those encounters had really been with the dead.

Like him, we begin to question the existence of those with whom we later meet, and try to cobble together from those conversations a story of what had come before.

Presented in fragments, with enormous silences within cut-scenes --  a pattern that is to pervade the whole textual fabric -- the first-person account that follows Juan Preciado’s journey is punctuated with lyrical recollections of his mother’s words.

Disoriented by the disconnect between what he sees and hears and what his mind (influenced as it is) thinks it sees and hears, Juan Preciado is himself eventually driven to his grave, if not by madness, then by fright.

Weaving through these fractured parts, too, is the (largely-)chronological biography of Pedro Páramo.

Born into a family of landowners now languishing in debt a young Pedro Páramo is thrust into the helm of the household when his father dies. There, through duplicity and violence, during the reign of President Porfirio Diaz that favours capital accumulation, his empire expands with little restraint.

Variously giving orders for people who get in his way to be killed, he also marries Juan Preciado’s mother, the heiress of his biggest creditor, to not merely wipe off their account, but usurp her wealth, only to send her away after he has exhausted her use.

In a novel that explores love and loss and retribution, though, Pedro Páramo has his own share of suffering. Despite a stature that opens doors into every girl’s bedroom, the woman the baron loves, Susana San Juan, a childhood friend with whom he remains obsessed until the end of his life, is herself consumed with passion for someone else.

In this, the second narrative thread, the third-person conventional voice is heavily dribbled with interior monologues in which the man who owns everything there is to have pines at every turn for a sweetheart whose emotions he never wins.

Then, in pioneering magic realism, that transformed him into a giant in Latin American literature, Rulfo takes us into the ground where Juan Preciado is buried, and lets us in on the dialogue he has with an old resident of the town, as they listen to the plaintive rhapsodies of other bodies resting close-by.

So, interspersed between the pieces of poetic prose that tell of Pedro Páramo’s progress through life, bribing his way out of the Mexican Revolution, dispensing with loyal servants of no more value, are luminous revelations from Susana San Juan’s restless corpse.

Subtly, she illuminates the subjugation of women in the late-19th, early-20th century Mexican society. Sexual violation by her father is hinted at. And there are plain suggestions of how Pedro Páramo manipulated circumstances to bring her to live with him. Finding herself in a period when women are regarded as chattel, she seeks refuge in delusions and delirium both before-death and after-life.

But if Pedro Páramo is a ruthless manipulator of circumstances, Rulfo is an unflinching manipulator of time. We know we are in the hands of a confident writer when the present tense juxtaposes with the past tense, often, and with ease, and on occasion even in the one paragraph.

Moving the clock back and forth, the story-telling master makes things happen at the same time, or at no time at all.

Meticulous with details swollen with meaning, this slim, yet intensely complex volume is in essence a study of life under the Porfirian regime that, in striving to modernise the nation, ended up distilling a medieval, mercenary society.

Women (including Juan Preciado’s mother), by and large, allowed themselves to be ravaged by the likes of Pedro Páramo who littered the land with countless children born out of wedlock.

And the church, for all the convictions it represented in a massively Catholic environment, seemed to offer redemption only to people who could afford it.

But most importantly, what the extraordinary novel highlights is how when innumerable Juan Preciados of the 1950s embarked on a quest for an understanding about the past, they were in fact trying to explain the absurdities of their own social order.

Maybe, as brazen as it sounds, I too can, by interrogating the apparitions of my history, grasp the amorphous order that governs my living.

To Bring You Back

I would do anything
I would go to gatherings and stay the night
I would do James Joyce’s Ulysses or stop reading
I would swim the clipper route, climb Elbrus

To bring you back

I would play computer games and lose with grace
I would sleep with open doors and starch my sheets
I would tick the box True then tick the box False
I would shoot the Pope

I would lie naked under summer’s mid-day sun
I would spend my days in a Casino
I would set my house on fire or let taps run
I would take heroin

I would push the piano off the cliff
I would amputate my tongue and cauterise her wound
I would do twenty years as the Secretary-General at the UN
I would be a prostitute

I would be a politician and hijack a plane
I would feed the wolves in me I want to starve
I would eat meat and swallow nails
I would let my demons win

I would give up and I would give in
I would break my own legs, fall on their knees
I would live in a purgatory the rest of my life
To bring you back

I would do anything