Sean Bonney, Tom Raworth

This morning I woke up to discover via Aaron Boothby that Sean Bonney had died. I knew his work only from the blog I've linked to, but have spent the morning reading screenshots others have put up on twitter, of texts from different works and things that are available to rad online.

Hopping from one poem to another, one poet to another, I was reminded of a post I'd made here some years ago. I thought the words were, Write six words, take away five and searched for that phrase, naturally turning up nothing. 

I googled it, with a vague feeling that it was Ian Hamilton Finlay. Nothing. 

Finally, I began to scroll through all the posts here tagged poetry. Of course I found it again, and of course I'd remembered it all wrong. It's Write six lines, drop five. 

And it's Tom Raworth, not Finlay. So much for memory.

Another lesson: save images on to your own computer, because web pages mutate and you get Dutch, literally, instead of the text/image you linked to years ago.

It's chasing that post down that also led me to find out that Raworth had died in 2017 and I never knew. So this morning, news of the death of two poets. 

Write six lines, drop five. What are you left with?

Dancing at the Edge of the World: RIP Ursula le Guin

Ursula le Guin died last night. She was 88, and she lived the kind of life many would wish they had it in them to lead. 

I first said I wouldn't say much and instead spend the day reading her. Which I will, of course, but I am also awash with a feeling I am finding it hard to describe. It's not sorrow and gratitude doesn't come close. It is what it is and maybe I need to say these things aloud in order to notice this feeling properly and give it its due.

On a personal note: I started writing so very late in life that I feel some residual envy for those who are so accomplished so early in their writing lives. I feel also, as a sort of balance to that envy, a certain kinship with writers like Jayanta Mahapatra, who also started their true lives late.

Taking my first steps in poetry as much as into the world that the internet opened up, I found her website and spent a lot of time there. Then I found a post box number and instructions for fan mail (enclose a SASE; writers find it hard enough to make money, and Ursula walks to the postbox herself because her friend who acts as secretary comes in only once a week. Also, there were default dragons).

Naturally I wrote to her, as I have done to other people from time to time, with my heart beating loudly as I wrote. I  enclosed a SASE, stamped the envelope and went to post the letter. Naturally I expected no reply.

I had written to her about my beginning to write, and how her work had inspired me. I sent her a poem I had written that I thought she might like. It was short, just a few lines long. It would fit on twitter even in the 140 days.

Some weeks later, I got mail from Portland, Oregon and I knew instantly that it was from Ursula le Guin. Today, I looked for that letter, and I see that I had opened it so carefully that all the glue is preserved and the letter has stuck itself back as if it were still unopened.

I opened it carefully. Then and now. It's a typed letter, two paragraphs long, and is filled with warmth. But the words that I have held in my heart all these years are these: 

I love your poem. I'm going to put it up over my desk. And here is a poem from ancient China that a friend sent to me:

[poem from ancient China, with one correction and the name of the poet and translator, in her hand]

Looking for this letter, I realise that there were more. I can't imagine why I kept bothering her and why she was generous enough to reply, even if briefly. But I am grateful for her generosity and encouragement and for showing me a way to be with other writers when my time comes, if it comes.

Outside of the personal, there are so many things to link to, read, discover (even now. One word: podcasts). Most of all, there are the books. 

I found out recently that there is a box set of her entire Ecumen series. I added it to my wishlist on Amazon, and then I remembered her speech at the NBA. 

A week or so ago, I ordered her last book, No Time To Spare. Via Amazon, though (I am sorry), at a time when my mother was travelling and wouldn't realise that things were being bought for her birthday. 

My mother still doesn't know about the book. I still haven't read it, because she should get to read it first. Me, I am going to re-read The Word for World Is Forest starting today. 

The amazing thing is, how much there is to read and re-read. Her work will last a long time.

RIP.

Eunice de Souza: 1940-2017

Eunice de Souza died on the 29th of July. She would have been 77 yesterday. 

It was early-ish morning when I got the news and soon, as happens, twitter and my mail box were busy with sharing memories, photographs and of course, poems.

There have been some lovely, sharp obituaries - sharp in the sense of having in common with Eunice, her cool self-possession and absence of humbug. I'm thinking, especially, of Rochelle Pinto's tribute in Scroll. It's striking how many writers Eunice has taught, and how unforgettable she has been to others who have only a slight relationship to poetry or literature.

I was not among her students, but when I was at Sophia SCM, nearly all of my Bombay friends had until very recently, been in her class. This next sentence will make no sense to nearly everyone reading this, but if there was, as we were discovering there was, a Jeroo type, there was, as surely a Eunice type. 

Anyway. 

So there have been tributes. Though I didn't know her personally, I knew her through her poetry, anthologies, and academic writing. So I have contributed to this tide of thoughts on Eunice de Souza:

The Hindu's Mumbai edition has a full page tribute in the form of poems and brief notes by ten poets, and I am among those.

There's also a short essay on Raiot. 

I would like to read something by someone on her relationship which animals which, as many know was deep and lasting; but I feel there's more to know.

Derek Walcott

RIP. 

Last night on twitter, there was a lot of poetry and quiet celebration, because 87 is a good age and Derek Walcott has left behind poetry that matters. And plays.

Aisha said on twitter that it's impossible to read The Prodigal in pieces and in principle I agree, though I've personally never read it any other way, not having the book.

So here's my favourite portion from it* [from here]:

Reading the extracts from The Prodigal, I'm struck by how lightly Walcott carries off the high tone - that exultant register where it's possible to sustain the use of adjectives and make it seem necessary and just right.

And of course, among the peripatetic wanderings, there's the interrogation of age and what is allowed to oneself and what the testimonies of art amount to - 'no History left, just natural history'. Of this natural world, Walcott turns out to be a masterful historian and maybe the art of being that poet is testimony enough.


__

* Since I can't copy paste, I ought to have typed it out but I'm too lazy.

I ought to warn KM though - there are a lot of lizards scattered through these poems, okay?

'The ancient story of the sun going down': RIP John Berger

The year begins with the ending of a rich and productive life. John Berger, who died yesterday, was 90. 

As 2016 ended, I said to myself, 'At least this isn't the year John Berger died.' As 2017 begins, he has.

And yet, I don't feel the shock and grief that many deaths the previous year brought. I feel gratitude for his work, for his clarity and compassion and for his quest to live and write ethically.

There are many, many things about his life and work that is easily found on the net, so I won't link to anything.

Instead, here's a poem:

Each Pine at Dusk

John Berger

Each pine at dusk
lodges the bird
of its voice
perpendicular and still
the forest
indifferent to history
tearless as stone
repeats
in tremulous excitement
the ancient story
of the sun going down

*

Okay, that was meagre. To fill it out, I will (naturally) need to talk about myself. Of being a very young 21 and encountering Ways of Seeing as a bunch of cyclostyled (yes!) excerpts at Sophia. Though I had already begun to train myself to see visual media more critically, it was Berger who was the first to thoroughly train my eye to work in tandem with my mind.

Then there was Once In Europa. It's a book to re-read today, for sure; but when I first read it, I was editing my first (and only) 'feature film, in Bangalore. We worked in a room off the projector room; the corridor outside was populated with monkeys; the manager of the state-owned theatre found it hard to believe that a woman was a director but frankly incredulous when he found that the editor was also a woman. We stayed in a clean lodge somewhere in Seshadripuram and I discovered a part of Bangalore through sitting and standing in buses to and from Jayanagar.

It was in this month and half (or however long it took) that I was reading Berger, in the few in-between times that were all we had before exhaustion and sleep took us. I don't think there were any even slight parallels between the world of the book and the life I was reading leading. And yet, it is in the dna of my poetry; I'm not sure how, but I know it - and Berger - is.

In recent years, when my mother's reading has outpaced mine in a way that still astonishes me, I've given her his books and she has devoured them. I have, perhaps, been more sceptical of his recent work (that A to X book; what is it with Berger and letters of the alphabet?) but I would never deny the power of his early work.

I need to look for his films now (Ways of Seeing is available on YouTube, by the way). 

His last christmas: RIP George Michael

It's getting to the point when I'm afraid to count the ones that remain. I have words but I can't say them, because it's Bowie, Prince, George Michael, all those people who made my 80s teen years what they were.

Today I will make a Wham!/George Michael playlist and listen. There's one week left in the year but I can say with certainty that 2016 is childhood's end.

'I'm ready my lord' - RIP Leonard Cohen

I'm shaking with the news of this death though with the new album it seemed imminent.


It's like he waited to deliver to the world the darkness we wanted and then left. Another artist who timed his exit impeccably and with bitter irony.




If Bowie signalled the beginning of a terrible year, I hope Cohen's signals the end of it. I hope we've sunk as low as it's possible to go. But I'm not sanguine because only a fool can believe there isn't worse in store.




Hineni, hineni. I'm ready my lord.'

Rest in peace, Leonard.

Abbas Kiarostami, RIP

So many deaths this year and each one feels like a blow, feels personal; and 2016 keeps on giving, mostly by taking away.

Abbas Kiarostami, who died yesterday,  has slipped several knives in the gut with his films over the years, and he did it again by dying so untimely. 

I don't even know what to say. I feel a frisson when I think of the time he delivered the Aravindan lecture at IFFK and we got to listen to him and to watch Five, with him somewhere in the theatre. 

I also feel a huge sense of loss. Escape Artist had both Forugh Farrokhzad and Abbas Kiarostami at its heart.

Here's a poem from his collection Wolf Lying in Wait

Monday, 4th July, 2016. RIP, Kiarostami.

RIP: Lee-Eco

It's a grim two months of reaping and, given that a particular generation must grow old and die, more in store this year.

Harper Lee, Umberto Eco, RIP.

These two bookended my teen years, with To Kill A Mockingbird at the beginning of it and The Name of the Rose at the end. In between, all the space their individual books provided to seek out and delight in the extraordinary: a particular voice or way of being in the world, a dimly grasped idea that a murder mystery was just an excuse for a lot of complicated things. And somewhere, the feeling that though reading these authors and others like them set me irrevocably apart from the rest of my peers, I didn't mind it much at all.

And whatever retrospective adjustments I may have made to how I think about these two writers, with their passing they take away one part of my teenage self. 

(I also find myself anxiously watching for news of Godard and Herzog.) 

David Bowie: "Look up here, I'm in heaven"

Did you know he was ill? I didn't know he was ill. I only knew there was a new album, because that's what all the tweets from the weekend were about. 

But look - there was Lazarus and it wasn't even a clue, it was goodbye. 

All these people who die close to the dates when they were born, these perfectionists, they hurt.

If you grew up in the 70s and 80s, it was impossible not to know Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane/Bowie. Do you remember the music stores in them days? How there were LPs and the new-fangled cassettes but also! posters!

There was a certain kind of person who had Freddie Mercury posters and David Bowie posters and - flamboyant though those images were - the people tended to get lost in the noise of Wham! or MJ and others.

That's the icon. That knowledge or image, music, persona, performance - all of it was retrospective. (When I think of Bowie, I think inevitably of Tilda Swinton and Derek Jarman). My relationship with Bowie's music was not visceral but I can't imagine my childhood without it. He was a part of my process of becoming someone I half-understood I wanted to be.

Yesterday, twitter was (as a friend put it) a wall of grief. There was great stuff: anecdotes, interviews, quotes, replies to fan letters, and of course the music and the images that went with them. 

I'm linking to two things only among all the amazing stuff. This post by Brian Philips on what David Bowie meant to young people:

 With Bowie, you never had the sense that he was in anyone else's negative space. Obviously he was, in all sorts of complicated and complicatedly evolving ways, but his special trick was to make himself *seem* like a perfectly free self-invention, a creation out of thin air. The spaceman stuff made sense for him because his job wasn't to be a freak, it was to present an idea of sanity as it might exist if it had been allowed to develop without all the distorting repressions of our world. I think that's why his weirdness always seemed so comforting to weird people. His strangeness wasn't sickness so much as the suggestion of a higher sort of health.

 And this poem by Tracy K. Smith:

Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?

By Tracy K. Smith

          1.

After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span

Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like

Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman

Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.

And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure

That someone was there squinting through the dust,

Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only

To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then,

Even for a few nights, into that other life where you

And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?

Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my

Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove?

Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep

Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old,

Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired

And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen

That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life

In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky

Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands

Even if it burns.

          2.

He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie

For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play

Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours

Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out,

Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens.

But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin.

Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives

Before take-off, before we find ourselves

Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?

The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts

For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky

Like migratory souls.

          3.

Bowie is among us. Right here

In New York City. In a baseball cap

And expensive jeans. Ducking into

A deli. Flashing all those teeth

At the doorman on his way back up.

Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette

As the sky clouds over at dusk.

He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel

The way you’d think he feels.

Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes.

I’ve lived here all these years

And never seen him. Like not knowing

A comet from a shooting star.

But I’ll bet he burns bright,

Dragging a tail of white-hot matter

The way some of us track tissue

Back from the toilet stall. He’s got

The whole world under his foot,

And we are small alongside,

Though there are occasions

When a man his size can meet

Your eyes for just a blip of time

And send a thought like SHINE

SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE

Straight to your mind. Bowie,

I want to believe you. Want to feel

Your will like the wind before rain.

The kind everything simply obeys,

Swept up in that hypnotic dance

As if something with the power to do so

Had looked its way and said:

                                                     Go ahead.

  RIP, eh.

RIP Tomas Tranströmer

The Swedish Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer has died. 

People are tweeting beautiful lines but ones mostly tinged with melancholy, as if a poet's death deserves lines that are prescient.

I was looking through my copy of the Penguin Modern European Poets series, with poems by Paavo Haavikko and Tomas Tranströmer, and I wanted to post this one.


Face to Face
translated by Robin Fulton

In February living stood still.

The birds flew unwillingly and the soul

chafed against the landscape as a boat

chafes against the pier it lies moored to.

The trees stood with their backs turned towards me.

The deep snow was measured with dead straws.

The footprints grew old out on the crust.

Under a tarpaulin language pined.

One day something came to the window.

Work was dropped, I looked up.

The colors flared. Everything turned round.

The earth and I sprang towards each other.

RIP. 

When I read the news this morning, it was via a link to the NYT, whose title of the obit described him, rather hilariously (and inappropriately) as a 'crystalline Swedish poet'. No doubt they realised that he wasn't quite the Swarowski statuette they had thought him, and the NYT has since changed its headline.

Huh.

RIP Shanta Rameshwar Rao

Shantamma passed away peacefully yesterday. It doesn't seem to be common knowledge yet, but I heard via a text message late last night. 

There's a lot to say and I will say [some of] it but for now this a placeholder.

Until then.

RIP Gabriel Garcia Marquez

After two false alarms, Marquez has died. I'm certain that I'd only have to skim any work of his to find a quote that would be an appropriate comment on this. Instead, I'll ramble about the man and about the announcement of his death.

Social media, though. I woke up with the intention of doing quite different things online before I went to attend to the day's chores. Instead, I fell into a dense jungle (what's the point of saying 'rabbit hole'?) of links and expressions of sorrow.

I have no doubt all all that all these were genuine. But as with all social media, there's a faintest whiff of avidity in the act of making announcements in order to appear up-to-date with the news. I say this as one who retweeted the first tweet I read announcing his death - not the most appropriate one, not that one that quoted what seemed like the most pithy line, not even the links to his Nobel speech or A Life in Photos or anything that might be actually interesting. Just the first one I saw, trigger-happy, and then the inevitable feeling of being foolish when I saw how many hours old the news was and I was announcing it as if I'd just put down the phone after being called by his family.

*

I read Marquez precocicously early. By which I mean, I read him before I understood even half of what I was reading; I read because the writing astonished me even as I dimly grasped that I would need to grow into it, become ready for it.

In really odd ways, Marquez's books have punctuated different, important moments of my life. He was the currency by which I once judged the worthiness of people to be my friends, the way kids otherwise use music to sort peers out into categories.

(I've just pulled out some books to see what I remember as a consequence of holding them).

The way I got The Collected Novellas, as a gift from someone I'd allegedly met once, the confusion and generosity of the person's partner when it was explained to me how it was that I was getting this extravagant gift for no particular reason, the little game of calibrating significance - who else got what book at the same time - and the poring over the few words in the inscription.

The triumph of finding Marquez on that pavement or this obscure corner of an indie bookstore - everyone had One Hundred Years but who even thought of stocking Innocent Erendira?


How a friend's diploma film at the FTII was based on a Marquez story and how, at that time we made these distant writers our fellow-travellers - Marquez, Kundera, Cohen - and it didn't seem at all strange to us, though we were told off by Iztvan Gaal for not choosing our inspirations from closer home. 'Closer'? What did that mean? Marquez was as close to home as it was possible to get, if we even agreed on a  definition of home. What was home if not the world of the imagination*? To be fair, my school library was probably better than my college library if only because how dense with riches it was even though it was tiny. There were plenty of Marquez to read through my senior years there.

This is why I have looked at the reading list my son brought home this month, from the same school, with some disbelief: how is it so full of writers from the US and UK and why does it have nothing from elsewhere in the world? Fine, it has Adichie and Ondaatje and Tolstoy; but how can it not have Marquez?

It is time to make another, parallel reading list for my son. Every time a writer like Marquez dies, leaving behind a treasury of books, it reminds us that these treasures can become unopened and then eventually lost to the next generation unless we hand them maps and mark the spot with an unmistakeable 'X'.

RIP, old man.


__

* Well, of course it's more complicated than that.

RIP Namdeo Dhasal

Namdeo Dhasal, Dalit Panther, poet, has died. His family struggled to raise money for his treatment and this morning he died, a bare month before he'd have turned 65.

Here's a poem - not the better known ones from his earlier work - but from Ya Sattet Jeev Rahmat Nahi (The Soul Doesn't Find Peace in This Regime, 1995), translated by the late Dilip Chitre and published by Navayana in Namdeo Dhasal: Poet of the Underworld.

Autobiography

 The face you find stirred up on the surface of the water is mine:
The foaming crown on the raised wave
About to touch a pride poised between time and space.
Hell's bastions of suffering have begun to crumble and fall.
I've made myself tired and unhappy here on this seashore of pain;
Sculpting with a chisel and image of many-faceted wounds.
The gossamer mantle of Being fluttering in the wind;
a fierce foreplay of light and dark creating its urgent rage
Formless skies; wistful; as the transparent birds of dreams fly away.
The flowers of inner awareness, beginning to bloom, have no fragrance;
Like a snake, I too shed my skin; this touch of icy water cuts all passion's cords.
Don't blow a soothing breath on the surface of the water now, or my memoirs will lose their face.

RIP.

RIP Seamus Heaney

Waking up to the news of Seamus Heaney's death. I still haven't absorbed it yet so until I do, here's an early poem.

The Peninsula

by Seamus Heaney

When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all round the peninsula.
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land without marks, so you will not arrive

But pass through, though always skirting landfall.
At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
And you're in the dark again. Now recall

The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,
That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
Islands riding themselves out into the fog,

And drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,
Water and ground in their extremity.

from Door Into the Dark, Faber & Faber, 1969.

RIP Chris Marker

Chris Marker. He was sui generis. RIP.

Sans Soleil. 1983.

In our moments of megalomaniacal reverie, we tend to see our memory as a kind of history book: we have won and lost battles, discovered empires and abandoned them. At the very least we are the characters of an epic novel (“Quel roman que ma vie!” said Napoleon). A more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach might be to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography. In every life we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae. We could draw the map of such a memory and extract images from it with greater ease (and truthfulness) than from tales and legends. That the subject of this memory should be a photographer and a filmmaker does not mean that his memory is essentially more interesting than that of the next man (or the next woman), but only that he has left traces with which one can work, contours to draw up his maps.
Chris Marker, introductory notes to Immemory (2002)

 [the quotation via Vitro Nasu]

He's gone to where the wild things are

Via Aisha, the sad - but surely not shocking? - news that Maurice Sendak has died.

A friend gave the kid Where the Wild Things Are when he was a couple of years old and we've both loved it ever since. Often our battle cry has been the gleeful

Let the wild rumpus start!  

(Sometime we will say 'begin' instead of 'start', but hey.)

And though it slipped under my radar, I feel I must somehow get my hands on Bumble Ardy now.

Sendak said in an interview last year to the Guardian,  "I refuse to lie to children, [...] I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence."

And that's why I love Max. There's rebellion there; all the control he lacks over his world can be exerted over the world of his imagination. And of course there's loneliness. But also the hope of return and the certainty of an adult's love for a child - this child in the book. And it's done so delicately - an adult would see it; but a child would, I think, understand it.

RIP, Maurice Sendak. Whereever you are, let the wild rumpus start!

ETA: Sorry. Like all my friends, I'm reading everything Sandak-related and of course much of it is quotable, but this is more that that. This is...here - judge for yourself.

 
Found on Letters of Note, via Din

Wislawa Szymborska, RIP

All over my news stream today, that Wislawa Szymborska has died.

Image from: http://podaestrada.blogspot.in/search?q=wislawa+szymborska

In memoriam, then, because what else is there to say:

Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem 

by Wislawa Szymborska

In the poem's opening words
the authoress asserts that while the Earth is small,
the sky is excessively large and
in it there are, I quote, "too many stars for our own good."
In her depiction of the sky, one detects a certain helplessness,
the authoress is lost in a terrifying expanse,
she is startled by the planets' lifelessness,
and within her mind (which can only be called imprecise)
a question soon arises:
whether we are, in the end, alone
under the sun, all suns that ever shone.

 In spite of all the laws of probability! And today's universally accepted assumptions! In the face of the irrefutable evidence that may fall into human hands any day now! That's poetry for you.  Meanwhile, our Lady Bard returns to Earth,
a planet, so she claims, which "makes its rounds without eyewitnesses,"
the only "science fiction that our cosmos can afford."
The despair of a Pascal (1623-1662, note mine)
is, the authoress implies, unrivalled
on any, say, Andromeda or Cassiopeia.
Our solitary existence exacerbates our sense of obligation,
and raises the inevitable question, How are we to live et cetera,
since "we can't avoid the void."
"'My God,' man calls out to Himself,
'have mercy on me, I beseech thee, show me the way

 The authoress is distressed by the thought of life squandered so freely,
as if our supplies were boundless.
She is likewise worried by wars, which are, in her perverse opinion,
always lost on both sides,
and by the "authoritorture" (sic!) of some people by others. 
Her moralistic intentions glimmer throughout the poem.  
They might shine brighter beneath a less naive pen.  Not under this one, alas.  Her fundamentally unpersuasive thesis

(that we may well be, in the end, alone
under the sun, all suns that ever shone)
combined with her lackadaisical style (a mixture
of lofty rhetoric and ordinary speech)
forces the question: Whom might this piece convince?
The answer can only be: No one.  Q. E. D.
           

RIP Russell Hoban

So many people have died recently and their deaths have passed unremarked here, but this one I can't ignore.

Russell Hoban, RIP.

I *loved* The Mouse and His Child (and everything else of his that I've read which, I admit, is not very much) but I have been wanting to read his other, later books because they sound weird and wonderful. (I mean, just look at this. I want that book.)

Comfort in knowing there's still plenty to read, though.

RIP Mani Kaul

Mani Kaul died yesterday in Gurgaon. He was only 66.

I remember watching Nazar for rather dubious reasons: there were a bunch of us applying to the MCRC in Jamia and we thought that was exactly the kind of place that might ask us questions about 'art' cinema. So we watched Nazar, Kasbah, Thoda Sa Roomani Ho Jaayen and a couple of other films, in the common room of our hostel. Other girls who were not applying to Jamia resented the taking over of their space for entertainment.

I remember the antique shop in the film as the one that is (I think) opposite the Regal in Colaba. The female lead was Kaul's daughter, and a friend from school. In one scene (I think) she jumps out of a window. And jumps and jumps and jumps. It also had Shekhar Kapur. It was the oddest sensation to watch someone you knew acting as the wife of someone you knew as famous.

Later, at film school, I watched Uski Roti and even later, The Cloud Door at IFFI, Mumbai. That was probably the biggest audience a Mani Kaul film ever had: the film was one of those commissioned for the Erotic Tales series and naturally people were falling all over themselves to see erotica for free in a theatre. I'm guessing they were disappointed - the film was beautiful, poetic, the best of the three they showed that time, but it suggested more than it showed. Kaul was the only one who understood that the erotic was about possibilities and not about fulfilment.

If this sounds nearly as vague and ungenerous as the Hindu's obit for the man, it is my ignorance speaking. This was a man who studied under Ritwik Ghatak and had a completely different - and therefore valuable - view on cinema. He was theoretically rigorous, widely read and, from the very little I've seen of him, curious about everything. And I don't remember much more about his films.

One time in school, when he was visiting, he gave a talk to the teachers and the senior students about...it must have been cinema, but to me it seemed like it was about music. He had just finished, or was just about to finish, work on Siddheshwari and as I remember it, all his talk was about Hindustani music. He set up the backs of  many teachers when he stated that Carnatic music was more rigid and uncreative than Hindustani. Remember, we're talking about the school where ML Vasanthakumari lived and taught (Carnatic) music to children. He had his reasons for his opinions, not least his total immersion in the music of Siddheshwari Devi, and it isn't unreasonable that he held these views.

For a long time afterwards, though, remembering this talk, of which I retained nothing else but his pronouncement, I also thought that Hindustani music was more flexible and deep than Carnatic music. Ignorance. And the natural tendency of the young adult to strike poses.

It's time, I think, to revisit Mani Kaul. I wonder what I'll make of him post- Kiarostami, Tsai Ming-Liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Bela Tarr.

Here's Khalid Mohammed's obit. Here's Upperstall's tribute.