It was on one of his walks that he first came across it. It occupied an entire stretch of a huge vertical wall and despite the strong presence of graffiti in the city walls, this one stood out more than anything else. It was nothing but a song in tribute of Charlie Parker. It sounded more like a nursery rhyme. White lines of paint ran through in their own abudance of curls to almost reveal a melody underneath that absurd song. But like always as it is with a nursery rhyme, the basics were strong. And that was what the alto sax was all about. Marcus first saw a series of them in a music shop, lined besides each other with varying shades of a golden tinge.
Is Art really nothing but a medium of expression?
It had been an year since he had quit working at the bridge. For an year, he had done nothing but sit around in that torn down attic of his, reading up on basically anything that he got his hands to. He started with Baudelaire, Proust and ran through the cinemas of Jean Luc Godard. The absurdity in his existence almost resonated in the works of art that he had begun to absorb around him now. As the silence around him grew with each passing day, he embraced poetry for the sheer strength that it gave him. Words had acquired a meaning and depth of their own.
And what a joy it was to play with them. The dance of their rhymes conjured up a million different universes!Music gave life and form to those universes that he used to tread upon with leisure. Melody enveloped the words and created a fluid state of form creating one big hypnotic river of sound.
Ironically, the traveler is always the one who enjoys the journey. To the others, it is nothing but a mere test of endurance.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009
Chapter 4
Over a period of time, Marcus quit his daytime job and began working as a caricature artist at the bridge. . With bent backs, beggars would crouch along the grand bridge adorned with white satin scarves on their necks to protect themselves from the icy winds which ran through the city during the winter. On a quite silent day, when for a moment silence would be accentuated and heard with utmost clarity, you could hear the guy with the harp would play the first melody for the day.
Looking down below from the bridge, one could see that the waters had frozen over the lakes and the rivers seem placid. The sunlight reflected sharply and gave a glint of golden hue though this frozen surface to the surroundings for its albeit brief appearance during the day. The changing of the seasons had bought about an almost angelic respect for the sun. He realized it was not just him, but also with the great stage he shared on this bridge. These were the people who celebrated life, in the midst of a never ending bridge that seemed to bustle with a great energy of its own. There were jesters abound, who would come with their melancholic faces at the break of dawn, and at the first advent of the morn, would sit on their rumpled jackets to change into their uniforms. These uniforms, their own symbol of joy were the perfect masks to show the almost symbiotic relationship that exists between melancholy and jest.
It surely must not be the portrait, he thought.
But for all his logical explainations, Marcus still could never get the sense of comfort that exists in a state of denial. He just could not forget the gaze of the artist as he patiently waited day after day in the café, his meager lunch completed with a bottle of whisky.. Of what remained of the artist and his whereabouts he just didn’t know. But somehow, somewhere, through that haunting portrait, he had left behind in him the remnants of an artist’s gaze.
It could not be the liveliness of the colours that existed despite their contrast in the picture which struck him. Nor could it be how peaceful black and white looked to each other, almost seamlessly blended in a single canvas.
How could it be? How could a single picture almost change a state of being?
These sudden spurts of irrational thought, which almost became a source of joy to him could not be just the handiwork of a man who he hardly knew. Never. For all Marcus knew, he was just a penniless artist who visited the café for his meager lunch and a small cup of whisky.
And what of art? Art has never captured a human being. It was a rather foolish thought and an inhuman one at that.
Looking down below from the bridge, one could see that the waters had frozen over the lakes and the rivers seem placid. The sunlight reflected sharply and gave a glint of golden hue though this frozen surface to the surroundings for its albeit brief appearance during the day. The changing of the seasons had bought about an almost angelic respect for the sun. He realized it was not just him, but also with the great stage he shared on this bridge. These were the people who celebrated life, in the midst of a never ending bridge that seemed to bustle with a great energy of its own. There were jesters abound, who would come with their melancholic faces at the break of dawn, and at the first advent of the morn, would sit on their rumpled jackets to change into their uniforms. These uniforms, their own symbol of joy were the perfect masks to show the almost symbiotic relationship that exists between melancholy and jest.
It surely must not be the portrait, he thought.
But for all his logical explainations, Marcus still could never get the sense of comfort that exists in a state of denial. He just could not forget the gaze of the artist as he patiently waited day after day in the café, his meager lunch completed with a bottle of whisky.. Of what remained of the artist and his whereabouts he just didn’t know. But somehow, somewhere, through that haunting portrait, he had left behind in him the remnants of an artist’s gaze.
It could not be the liveliness of the colours that existed despite their contrast in the picture which struck him. Nor could it be how peaceful black and white looked to each other, almost seamlessly blended in a single canvas.
How could it be? How could a single picture almost change a state of being?
These sudden spurts of irrational thought, which almost became a source of joy to him could not be just the handiwork of a man who he hardly knew. Never. For all Marcus knew, he was just a penniless artist who visited the café for his meager lunch and a small cup of whisky.
And what of art? Art has never captured a human being. It was a rather foolish thought and an inhuman one at that.
Monday, January 5, 2009
CHAPTER 3
As time started to proceed with its own gentle pace, Markus sensed that this gift had indeed turned into a quivering restlessness in him from within. With each passing day, Marcus began to draw images out of his mind on paper, and looked for ways to express it frantically. He had begun to realize that maybe this could indeed be an emotion too strong to be captured even in a metaphor. In his free time, he would sit by the window in the evenings and write almost vigorously, reproducing each thought as it come, untarnished by judgment onto paper. On some days, he would draw. His hands would take a lot of time to adjust, but adjust they would, to the rhythms in his mind and how it was meant to be captured. In irregular shapes or otherwise.
After an hour, he would proceed and take his customary evening walk along the Rijn observing the sun set along the river. His walks would be much to his satisfaction, not too long to measure and not too short to forget. In a city that was bustling with golden spires and a thousand passages that he really didn’t know about, Marcus relished and took each lesser known road with a newfound gusto. His steps would rustle among the leaves with greater ferocity, taking with it a distant enchanting melody in its stride. He would walk tirelessly across these passages and pass through the mazes and some courtyards to end his walk right at the first tower which signaled the beginning of the bridge.
The bridge divided the city into the old and the new to the familiar, but to Marcus it seemed to divide itself into the lands of the known and the unknown. Like any great city among the world, this city had its own stories which ran through its river, the Rijn in an almost hypnotic flow of their own. All Marcus would do was sit at the bridge and live these stories of the city through the reflections which he saw in the waters as they would be enhanced by the twilight setting in due to the sunset.
Somewhere at the back of his place, in his study table, were those rumpled pieces of paper waiting to be examined.
After an hour, he would proceed and take his customary evening walk along the Rijn observing the sun set along the river. His walks would be much to his satisfaction, not too long to measure and not too short to forget. In a city that was bustling with golden spires and a thousand passages that he really didn’t know about, Marcus relished and took each lesser known road with a newfound gusto. His steps would rustle among the leaves with greater ferocity, taking with it a distant enchanting melody in its stride. He would walk tirelessly across these passages and pass through the mazes and some courtyards to end his walk right at the first tower which signaled the beginning of the bridge.
The bridge divided the city into the old and the new to the familiar, but to Marcus it seemed to divide itself into the lands of the known and the unknown. Like any great city among the world, this city had its own stories which ran through its river, the Rijn in an almost hypnotic flow of their own. All Marcus would do was sit at the bridge and live these stories of the city through the reflections which he saw in the waters as they would be enhanced by the twilight setting in due to the sunset.
Somewhere at the back of his place, in his study table, were those rumpled pieces of paper waiting to be examined.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Chapter Two
CHAPTER TWO
He remembered the first time what it was like to step into a foreign country and smell the air within. The air he sensed was fresh, though different. Outside the airport, the wind almost whooshed and howled around upon his arrival, as he took a taxi in that storm on an otherwise bright day to the city that was to be home for him, Leiden.
It was around the first few trips that Marcus began to take a trip around this city, that he realized that this was a city that was meant to explored and treaded on foot. He had begun to get a strange sense of familiarity with the sound of footsteps that echoed each time he took these long walks around the city to head back home. It were these sounds that frightened him when he heard them for the first time, almost breaking him out of the lull that the silence of a foreign place bestows upon strangers. Pretty soon, the footsteps had acquired a meaning of their own and symbolized his first flirtations with the sense of sound which acquired greater depths in time to come. Footsteps. Brisk ones, made with the hooves of wooden shoes, camouflaged in the green moss of the pathways of cobbled stone that lined up this beautiful city. A city that had its own way of dealing with the fickle nature of time.
By day, Markus worked as a waiter at the local café beside the Neuwe Rijn. The café was a quaint little place situated along the famous Dutch countryside. The waters of the river Rijn just ran next through it, shaping their way through the most exquisite engineering creation of man one could see, the canals. The sun , through its brief intermittent appearance during the short days, would blaze in its full glory around the city. The swans would come out with their long graceful necks to feel the heat of the summer in their eyes. Right before the café, the Centraal straat ran through the nerve of the city and was in many ways a mosaic for all that was going on in this little town of his. The young students would walk with quick and huge steps with their rucksacks and backpacks behind them. They would either be present in droves with their quirks filling the air and the utter hopelessness of youth in their eyes. The old would walk in coats stretched to their knees, their steps measured and wise.
His normal activities would include serving drinks and the menu to these young men and women alike. The ability to carry a pleasant conversation with a dash of politeness thrown it were some of the things that helped him in this profession and Marcus had both of them in equal measure. Day after day, he would be an audience to some stories of a blooming romance between a newlywed couple who would be frequent visitors at the café. On some days, he would be parley to the frustrations of the artist who lived in the studio across the street. His studio had the bare essentials and always had two canvases in the window which faced the café. Inevitably, one would be a blank canvas and the other would contain his work of art for the day proudly exhibited at the end of the day. These days however, the artist would turn up at his table and over a cup of black coffee, he would share his languish at the money that his creation commanded in the markets.
Over the past few days however, Marcus had missed the presence of the artist sitting around dreamily on the wooden chairs outside the café and brooding endlessly in the sunlight. He hadn’t shown up for quite some many days and as always , there were two potraits lined up his almost barren studio. One was untouched as ever, and showed a sheet of white while the other showed some extremely contrasting colours. Since nobody had shown up on that day, Marcus had gone around and had a chance to get a closer look at the potraits.
The room looked too empty even by Marcus’s standards of what he thought the studio looked like. The sunlight blazed through one of the windows in the day and the absolute darkness in the room lent the studio an almost mysterious hue. The two potraits illuminated this hue by their contrasts. One was as blank as ever, with not a dot in it to stain it wit a mark of creation. The other , however was one of resplendent beauty. It had all the colours imaginable and the image appeared to be highly abstract in its form. In fact, Marcus could not say whether it looked like an image in the first place. It was a weird mesh of all the colours he could think of, but the only lasting impression it left on Marcus’s mind was a great ball of fire, of tremendous luminosity.
He remembered the first time what it was like to step into a foreign country and smell the air within. The air he sensed was fresh, though different. Outside the airport, the wind almost whooshed and howled around upon his arrival, as he took a taxi in that storm on an otherwise bright day to the city that was to be home for him, Leiden.
It was around the first few trips that Marcus began to take a trip around this city, that he realized that this was a city that was meant to explored and treaded on foot. He had begun to get a strange sense of familiarity with the sound of footsteps that echoed each time he took these long walks around the city to head back home. It were these sounds that frightened him when he heard them for the first time, almost breaking him out of the lull that the silence of a foreign place bestows upon strangers. Pretty soon, the footsteps had acquired a meaning of their own and symbolized his first flirtations with the sense of sound which acquired greater depths in time to come. Footsteps. Brisk ones, made with the hooves of wooden shoes, camouflaged in the green moss of the pathways of cobbled stone that lined up this beautiful city. A city that had its own way of dealing with the fickle nature of time.
By day, Markus worked as a waiter at the local café beside the Neuwe Rijn. The café was a quaint little place situated along the famous Dutch countryside. The waters of the river Rijn just ran next through it, shaping their way through the most exquisite engineering creation of man one could see, the canals. The sun , through its brief intermittent appearance during the short days, would blaze in its full glory around the city. The swans would come out with their long graceful necks to feel the heat of the summer in their eyes. Right before the café, the Centraal straat ran through the nerve of the city and was in many ways a mosaic for all that was going on in this little town of his. The young students would walk with quick and huge steps with their rucksacks and backpacks behind them. They would either be present in droves with their quirks filling the air and the utter hopelessness of youth in their eyes. The old would walk in coats stretched to their knees, their steps measured and wise.
His normal activities would include serving drinks and the menu to these young men and women alike. The ability to carry a pleasant conversation with a dash of politeness thrown it were some of the things that helped him in this profession and Marcus had both of them in equal measure. Day after day, he would be an audience to some stories of a blooming romance between a newlywed couple who would be frequent visitors at the café. On some days, he would be parley to the frustrations of the artist who lived in the studio across the street. His studio had the bare essentials and always had two canvases in the window which faced the café. Inevitably, one would be a blank canvas and the other would contain his work of art for the day proudly exhibited at the end of the day. These days however, the artist would turn up at his table and over a cup of black coffee, he would share his languish at the money that his creation commanded in the markets.
Over the past few days however, Marcus had missed the presence of the artist sitting around dreamily on the wooden chairs outside the café and brooding endlessly in the sunlight. He hadn’t shown up for quite some many days and as always , there were two potraits lined up his almost barren studio. One was untouched as ever, and showed a sheet of white while the other showed some extremely contrasting colours. Since nobody had shown up on that day, Marcus had gone around and had a chance to get a closer look at the potraits.
The room looked too empty even by Marcus’s standards of what he thought the studio looked like. The sunlight blazed through one of the windows in the day and the absolute darkness in the room lent the studio an almost mysterious hue. The two potraits illuminated this hue by their contrasts. One was as blank as ever, with not a dot in it to stain it wit a mark of creation. The other , however was one of resplendent beauty. It had all the colours imaginable and the image appeared to be highly abstract in its form. In fact, Marcus could not say whether it looked like an image in the first place. It was a weird mesh of all the colours he could think of, but the only lasting impression it left on Marcus’s mind was a great ball of fire, of tremendous luminosity.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Chapter One
CHAPTER ONE
Marcus tiptoes out of the bar, as the doorman and he exchange their last smiles for the night. He watches the door close behind him, and the air now warming up to the smell of alcohol, emanating from breaths of drunk men and women coming out in droves. He senses in their movements, laughs and lunacies, a desire to get lost into the beauty and vast expanse of the night. The sardonic smile on his face is quite prominent now, with his lips etched out in almost the shape of the half crescent moon. His smiles are the reflection of wisdom, as he watches the night allure them away into its tempting glories and keep them enthralled in its darkness.
Marcus knows all too well about the night.
His cigarette is now almost half burnt, as he retreats to the oak tree at the back of the courtyard for his last smoke. The arrival of the first raindrops are tender, and they echo a resonance even with the fallen maple leaves below, bringing them to life as they move gracefully to the accompaniment of the wind. The wind smells bright and fresh for a change, and carries the deep chill along with it. The drizzle seems untimely, beginning during the fall season. It’s clear that the great chill of Europe had set in. A strange time for the first advent of the raindrop to fall, Marcus would think.
In the movement of the gray sea of clouds above him, Marcus begins to recognize the first signs of this great winter. He observes the oak tree that has been his famous retreat abode for quite a time now. It seems desolate at the prime of autumn. With the branches bereft of any emotion, he observes in full glory what the wind starts to do the autumn leaves below. The rustled leaves almost come into a life of their own, awoken by their slumber by an almost thunderous roar. They whirl around in volcanoes of joys, and then get lulled into a peaceful sense of contentment.
The cigarette hasn’t been smoken for a while now. A heap of ash lays barren, almost asking to be released in the dance of these leaves. Marcus stubs out the cigarette, and proceeds to take the long walk back to his home.
Marcus tiptoes out of the bar, as the doorman and he exchange their last smiles for the night. He watches the door close behind him, and the air now warming up to the smell of alcohol, emanating from breaths of drunk men and women coming out in droves. He senses in their movements, laughs and lunacies, a desire to get lost into the beauty and vast expanse of the night. The sardonic smile on his face is quite prominent now, with his lips etched out in almost the shape of the half crescent moon. His smiles are the reflection of wisdom, as he watches the night allure them away into its tempting glories and keep them enthralled in its darkness.
Marcus knows all too well about the night.
His cigarette is now almost half burnt, as he retreats to the oak tree at the back of the courtyard for his last smoke. The arrival of the first raindrops are tender, and they echo a resonance even with the fallen maple leaves below, bringing them to life as they move gracefully to the accompaniment of the wind. The wind smells bright and fresh for a change, and carries the deep chill along with it. The drizzle seems untimely, beginning during the fall season. It’s clear that the great chill of Europe had set in. A strange time for the first advent of the raindrop to fall, Marcus would think.
In the movement of the gray sea of clouds above him, Marcus begins to recognize the first signs of this great winter. He observes the oak tree that has been his famous retreat abode for quite a time now. It seems desolate at the prime of autumn. With the branches bereft of any emotion, he observes in full glory what the wind starts to do the autumn leaves below. The rustled leaves almost come into a life of their own, awoken by their slumber by an almost thunderous roar. They whirl around in volcanoes of joys, and then get lulled into a peaceful sense of contentment.
The cigarette hasn’t been smoken for a while now. A heap of ash lays barren, almost asking to be released in the dance of these leaves. Marcus stubs out the cigarette, and proceeds to take the long walk back to his home.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)