Retrieved Jottings, Purblind Percepts Poem by Ananta Madhavan

Retrieved Jottings, Purblind Percepts



Since 1960, I used to jot down odd memos, impressions, notions on scraps and
in notebooks. I inscribe a few, hoping to find some resonance
even in the teens of the 21st century.
- - - - -
1. Original minds are namers of things and ideas. Call them ‘Baptists of the Intellect and Imagination'?

2. Water has a releasing effect on the shackles of the self: A river, a waterfall, or billowing sea or sheets of rain.

3. To describe is to desecrate, and where the description is exact,
there is an annihilation of what is described.

4. No Words can fill the interstices, the gap between-spaces in the quality of experiencing. A master-writer can suggest them, as a violinist
can erase the gaps between notes. Most of us write like novices
at the piano - plonking one chiming not after another.

5. Eyes are dangerous apertures. The soul of a person can pass through
them, sucked out or in. Lucky humans are purblind and mostly immune
to this attraction.

6. There is a moment in a bad dream when the foreboding of calamity
Is sensed before it occurs, a timeless moment when the whole universe
Is in balance, like a raft poised on the crest of a wave, which is frozen
in mid-motion, as in a TV commercial.

7. Football under high arc lights makes a crazy starfish of shadows round the hub of every player. Technology is brilliantly impartial; not so the producers, presenters, directors, commentators.

8. Integrity in a human being is not just probity or honesty: it is a
Coherence, as in a Mozart concerto.

9. It is a kind of arrogance, pride or vain impudence that keeps us
going in the face of impossible odds. I think it needs greater
courage to run away from battle than to stay and fight.

10. The discernment of visual pattern, as in a woven carpet,
requires the faculty of abstract perception. Abstraction
is loss of touch with the complexity and confusion of the world.

Tuesday, September 6, 2016
Topic(s) of this poem: perception,thoughts
POET'S NOTES ABOUT THE POEM
I have chosen ten jottings, made over nearly six decades. Request responses.
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