RING THEM BELLS

Love Story?

Maybe you should title it love poem. Having just written a love song. But no, love story it is going to be. He also abandoned Wondrous Stories, somehow both titles one thought of being repetition, whether from Segal or Yes.

The thing was this that he wanted to start (out) nothing. Wanted nothing, nothing, nil, nada, zilch. Maybe one was happy to be alone. Maybe one was happy when unhappy and to be unhappy. To be happy was, on the other hand, to be unhappy and to be in a crowd was to be alone. So she had told him. The second half. He kind of got it.

He was listening to Dylan live and Dylan rehearsals and Dylan outtakes. He was soaking himself in Dylan. This makes you lonely as when lonely one has the time to do this but then no one shares your madness so it makes you cut off or isolated in another sense. Six years he had been on Beckett and it had not been enough. He knew more than many did on Beckett but Dream of Fair to Middling Women had come out after as had Eluetheria and the letters that were masterpieces and the translations into English poems he had left untouched in his thesis and then there are Beckett’s translations from those other Spanish and Mexican poets. When you dealt with a great writer the excavation never ended, each great writer was a universe. So were great artists. He was now into excavating Dylan who was a musician and singer and lyricist and played piano, guitar and mouth organ and painted, sketched and drew as well as acted, wrote scripts, made films, directed, collaborated, and did metal sculptures resembling installations besides his studio albums and live ones and his written books, interviews, radio work, reviews, charity shows and speeches etc. Dylan was a whole world like Da Vinci and Michaelangelo, a modern American Renaissance man, like Dali the Spanish madman, as creative to the fingertips, and you could go on and on finding out more and more fascinating things and details about him. An ignoramus of a guy from Kerala had laughed at Dylan for getting the Nobel Prize for literature but the truth was he was bigger than literature, he deserved a Nobel Prize for literature, music, art, peace, activism, protest — all rolled into one. It was Foucault who had said Kierkegaard was a discourse. Dylan was a discourse too and in awarding him though he was lucky to get all the money, you were awarding a million people who had worked at making Dylan a discourse, making the Dylan discourse, awarding his ability to make that happen and make others believe in him that he was that great, including those whom he worked with or those who had worked on him, and done research and wrote books on him, or those he had influenced or those whom he had been influenced by etc. Unlike Shakespeare, Dylan could be studied better because his million friends could be detected who had made him who he was as we lived in the age of documentation. A universe and a world. It was the same with Beckett and his minions and millions. Beckett the first and Dylan the second or third. With their own sun/s, moon/s, planets, satellites, star falls etc. Continents, continence and oceans, seas, rivers, charted and uncharted, researched and unresearched lands.

He had started with the idea of writing about why Dylan deserved the Prize and in the process also got caught up with Cohen, naturally, as a kind of contrast and comparison. But gradually his focus shifted to why he as an Indian should bother about Dylan, why such an outlandish figure was interesting to him as were others in the classic rock world. Lou Majaw, Susmit Bose and Bertie D’Silva had asked similar questions through their music in India. The bridge was obvious to him but not to others and he wondered if that made it limited meaning those who would want to read what he was writing. Not that he cared. When you write you write in that dark you have never no idea who the hell you are writing for. The grammar is skewed on purpose. So yes, why Dylan why not Dylan, Dylan and Cohen, Dylan and Beckett, the thousand sided Dylan, why was Dylan interesting to an Indian, Dylan as a world, Dylan as so many others, Dylan the original as well as Dylan the sell out, the hoax, the fake and plagiarist. Con man, ad man, money bags. The books read by Dylan. Others acting as Dylan, including a woman. Dylan who was breaking down the distance between right and wrong.

He did not mind that he would probably never finish the book and it would not get published. He cared only about writing it or trying to. Or maybe he only wanted to go around saying he was writing it. A woman who had said she would help him to publish it with a proper distributor had fallen silent on the issue after she got from him what she wanted. As always it had gone nowhere.

But only he was to blame. Not her. He had not pushed it through. Life was only for the mean the pushy the aggressive the deceptive the manipulative the survival of the fittest and he was therefore marked or slated for extinction.

He was a self destructive artist but listening to Dylan singing Trail of the Buffalo, an arrangement of a Woody Guthrie song, in that/his whining beggar’s voice, and a divine accordion in the background, in an G E Smith- the- guitarist- audition outtake more than made up for it. Dropping names. Or at Nari, Japan, singing Restless Farewell or singing Masters of War in 1994 or Times They Are A Changin’ before Obama, all efforts at recasting his songs made heavenly by the unbelievably great backing he got.

He had had a run in with a woman who was a good poet. Of course, she had to be from his home state, who else would be troublesome dumb like that. A friend of his had systematically weeded out on her fb friend list most of the women from his home state for their curious ability to be both seemingly moral and viciously hypocritical at the same time. His run in with said poet was not because she was smoking or drinking or taking hash or had a young lover or cuckolded her husband who let her do it to him who was corrupt as was she but as she was a person who was into using money, being rich, to get her art noticed. He hated those bitches and bastards. For him that was the sell out and also not having a clear appraisal of one’s own art. She was good but jealous of others better than her who were getting more recognition.

So to forget these run ins and others with meaningless creeps or meaningful ones he lost himself in the waterfalls of the worlds and universes of the artists he liked, in their hills and valleys and troughs and crests, almost as if to make up through his research on them the women he did not have with him to explore who were the ones he actually wanted to delve into, being no sell out, not knowing how to sell out or having the cash to do it even if he did or wanted to, to gain fame, name, position, power, influence, etc.; the idols the Pauline epistles had told him to hate.

“She told her husband that I was after her, it seems.” he told Anna.
She laughed, amused.
“What did you do this time, to make her do that?”
He also laughed.
“Nothing.”
They both knew he was speaking the truth. Nothing except being old fashioned, moralistic and knifing her ego, that is.
“So will he come home when you are here? To complain against you?”
“Hell, no,”he said, hugely entertained by the prospect. “He knows I will know how to deal with him.”

He didn’t fit in anywhere or belong, almost, to anyone and no one belonged, almost, to him. He was either too good or too far ahead or not good enough or too far behind, too much from the future or the past, too much the other or from somewhere else, not where he was supposed to be from, or too much a ‘belonger’ to things no one else belonged to.

It helped one as a creator. One had to be an empty glass one kept filling and throwing the water out from or a full glass one kept catching the spill of the overflow from. Dylan and Beckett were the latter kind but he was probably the empty glass kind. He had gone to that place to take a class on creative writing and the same electricity had happened as always between the students and him but as usual they had been deprived of his genius by the lack of time and he knew he had left them yearning for more but if they had a real yearning they would still go on with it. The kids, the young ones, the students they always got it till they grew up and lost their idealism and became corrupt like the grown ups and peers or the adults who were the ones who never did.

Genius they had said after his impromptu poetry spouting session, some of the women, astounded by his ease. They did not know the half of it, no one did, but genius was not a word he used. It made no sense, the better thing was to simply say you work in the dark and live in the moment. No past and no future, just here then and now there, you allow the screen of your mind to flicker alive and pluck the poems out of the air or the top of your head opening up your skull, like so many rabbits, and that was all there was to it.

He kept reading the positive poets and the constructive ones and they all made him want to puke, even the good ones, not because they were not good but they were not real or true to their art. That was another definition of not selling out. No editing you write what you write in the moment anger if anger love if love hatred jealousy envy guile lies truth peace compassion cock cunt any damn thing and you don’t give in to the urge to not say it as it is exactly at that point in time. The women would come to him secretly and show him stuff they had written like that, really good stuff and then sigh saying no place to put it up in though and he would also sigh and turn away from them as he knew then they would never be one of the artists he would respect, being bound by their sex and gender, though wanting freedom. Unlike some he could name who therefore had made him turned on as he wanted to fuck them as they were free ready to break chains and emerge as what they were beautiful butterflies and dragonflies of the giant world insects no one could catch in any net or tame as they had flown higher than any net could reach. The Anais Nins, Amrita Shergils and Kahlo-the-woman-who- fucked-Trotsky-types. The only ones who knew what being a woman was truly about.
Nina Simones.

“What was it you wanted? Who are you anyway?
What good am I? God knows. Most of the time.
A series of dreams. Caribbean wind. Abandoned desire. Shooting star.’

All that and much more. Them bells of her breasts that he had rung roundly as John Thomas had Lady Jane’s.

He kept discussing art round the clock with his younger friend he loved truly as he had a hell of a lot of patience to put up with his madness. They were discussing Bollywood and how it was mostly a lot of crap but it had been good till the eighties and about whether artists should have freedom and how much and if people should react violently and how bad art should be fought. He was sick of all of them, B(h)an-sali and his distortions, Deepika, Padmavati, Karni Sena and especially the bitches and trolling bastards who subtly or openly advocated violence and not peace on social media supporting the new regime of assholes in the Centre who were as bad or worse than the old ones.

One sold old wine in old bottles and the other older wine in saffron bottles, both rent now with all the wine almost gone, and someone else wanted green bottles and all of it reminded him that new wine should be put in new skins or hip flasks.

The lostness of human beings never ceased to amaze him. He knew there was no hope for them till they came to accept that they were essentially imperfect.

hindu christian muslim jew
buddhist jain sikh parsi bahai new age and atheist too
I hate and love all of you
till we all learn you are me/us and I/we am/are you

He had left them all behind ones he loved and ones he hated the ones who loved him and ones who hated him as he wanted to write. To forget. To be lost and found only in his art.

He was amazed by what she had written which came so close to his own thoughts. Meaning he just wrote. He had no idea where it was going. Didn’t care, basically. He was not going to sent it out for publication or anything, it was the process that mattered, the iterations, unlike the meaningless poets who had not understood that who came from his home state, men and women. In his irritation he had kicked all of them out of his life and under the carpet. He had seven league boots, and had no time for being boxed in.

What interested him was that all the art he loved, all the work he respected and those who made them dealt with the universal, not the particulars of culture and identity which was where these people were being dragged down into action and reaction, the mire and bog, the fog and smog of pettiness.

He half loved her for being so cool, almost there though from the other side of the fence. Her sang froid and the toughness with which she shrugged off things, that skin of the rhino. Only his darts had penetrated sometimes. At the end of the day that was what held him back from destroying himself and her and the relationship. The fact that he had given as good as he got. Or something else. The look in the eyes. The light in the hair. The book in the cleavage. The down on the thighs, the self-masturbating fingers and the moans. Or some other spoonful of lovin’ torture. He had gone down two roads and walked two corridors, written on two pages and slept in two rooms and the sunlight had woken up the waves’ glint on the ocean of something that reminded him of the woman smashing the urn down on the head of the man trying to kill her lover on the cover of Knocked Out Loaded. That was what his writing was always about, the effort to integrate. In this it was theological, teleological, and this was probably in the deepest sense where Christ had left his mark on him.

He could hold her in his arms and let her bite him on his shoulder and it was pure as if it was the stigmata somehow. For the pure in heart all things are pure. Even hickeys. So nothing disturbs you anymore. It was imaginary but real being symbolic. Let no man disturb me because I bear on my body the marks of the nails and no woman as I bear on my body the marks of the virgin and the bride and the whore and on my heart that of love and the love child, she, or the art that comes forth from mating with one’s muse in one’s mind, soul, will, heart, spirit. Either he was thoroughly dead in sin to be not bothered by the fact that such men as he were supposedly outside the kingdom or he had transcended and it no longer bothered him which it was or what it was. Only the writing mattered, dancing nude before God. Confessional prose, maybe, or simply autobiography. What characters or characterization? There was only him and the many in the one or one in the many woman he refused to differentiate but alllowed to remain as an indistinct one or several. What plot or sub plot? What theme or sub theme? What points of view? What setting or settings? What was there was mood ambience milieu atmosphere and no one excelled at it as he did. He had finally found his tone and voice and the pose he wanted to strike as well as made himself empty, shallow, superficial so he could be filled if others wanted him to be, over and over again. He had learned from the best writers and artists and rockers and had carved out a new path, a new style, a new brand and signature and was still on the journey and quest and voyage, one parallel to anarchy and post modernism and he did not know what to call it as it was his own and did not exist before. Had not existed before. He stayed up all night just to write it down. He wished all the women were there, reading over his shoulder and then they could melt into one so he could have his fill of loving them and receiving their love. That had been how it was with the emanation but there had been flaws in the movie which Maury and he could spot which his friend could not though his friend could the ones in Bajirao Mastani which made it second rate. If only he could have one of those emanators, minus the too much tits and ass, and the unnecessary violence to the Nexus woman who could not give birth which had sickened him watching it. He would create her in the image of the ones he loved. But it was not to be. What was instead was the writing. So he wrote. He wrote. And wrote. Wrought, rot, rote. Dylan sang, K wrote, and no one could stop it when he was in full flow.

“I see my light come shining, from the West out to the East. Any day now, any day now, I shall be released.”

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