Lines to Live by

no truer words were ever written

IF
Rudyard Kipling

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling

Caliban - a vignette

The Island Innocent


Reflections don’t lie, especially something as honest as water. The water reflected the lucid grey sky, the green branches swaying and clearly showed Caliban what he couldn’t bear to see. He looked like he was what he was, an aberrance. His form served as warning of what could result from a deviant coupling, as in his case, of devil and woman. If the woman was more human and less wicked, maybe her progeny would have fared better. His was a form which could not be classified as beast or man or fish. It was as if elements of each was chosen at sundry and thrown in together to a horrific outcome. Caliban was nature’s mockery of everything unnatural.

Caliban essentially grew himself up, like a resilient weed in the island. He hunted with the animals, swam with the fish and slept under the blue black sky of the island. He didn’t think, he didn’t feel. He just was.

Then one day like pieces of driftwood, two humans came floating into the island. Caliban gaped, when he saw the ship-wrecked, bedraggled Father and daughter stared at him. Stupid as he was, somewhere deep inside, he could sense their instant revulsion. Feelings he never had flooded him; pain, a keen awareness of surroundings, fear and anger.
His anger later turned into a blind animalistic lust, when he noticed Miranda’s sweet flesh. He had seen the island animals do it. Just as he pounced on her and grappled her to the ground, he heard silence. Her silent revulsion suffocated him, for an instance he saw himself for the beast he was and for that millionth of a second, Caliban was shamed and with the shame came anger. Anger made him want to continue and he would have too, he told himself now, if her father hadn’t chanced upon them.

He’d slunk off the woods, into its comforting darkness and did something he never did before. He had begun to think.

Caliban started noticing things. Things like how the fishes in the stream swam together, how the bear cubs always walked with their mother, how the birds in the trees protected their young ones and he wished desperately, that he like them could also belong. He also noticed how different he was from Prospero and Miranda, how Miranda smelt like the morning air, pure and fresh, how the island seemed so still when dusk came.

The reflection on the stream rippled when his tears fell on them. The sky began to darken, enveloping the island in a shroud of black. Prospero felt relief when his reflection dimmed in the water. He got up heavily and made his way back to the woods, his ungainly feet weaving clumsily, as he tried to avoid treading on the flowers.

tell me your story

Tell me your story
I know you have one

I see it in your eyes
When you sigh and smile
I hear it in your heart
Whilst you gaze away

Tell me your tale
I want to know it

I know it is dark
With spaces between
That you care not to fill
Till you ready yourself

Tell me your story
I am willing to wait

Rantings of an existentialist

Every story is proof of the existential awareness of the writer. It makes the reader think of the life that we all pass through and seeing it with the eyes of another gives the reader a chance to perceive the writer's life .Thereby influencing his future actions.
Act defines a person, aspiration does not. I know it makes me into a hard-core existentialist. But it the only one theory that has intersected with what had been in mind forever. This may of course, throw a wedge into the 'nature-nuture' theory, tilting me very into the 'nature' side of things.
A new-born baby cannot be called an individual; A person is not defined at birth. The choices he makes and thereby his actions define who he is.You cannot blame your genes for what you are. There is a state of ambivalent freedom which stimulates or influences choice that precedes every action. A freedom which is responsible for one's actions and concurrent with one's values.
Why do people always say "forget the past an on with the future"? Doesn't our past delineate who we are? Every step forward should be taken with a glance backward.
So what i am saying here is; dwelling on one's past in not essentially stunting, rather can provide a composite view of things and impose responsible freedom in future choices.

Marriage

Holding on with a tenuous clasp,
Of faltering fingers and mighty resolve,
By failing strength and potent will,
Wanting very much to rest for a minute
She held on.
Lest He falls, into the abyss dark,
Where the end beings,
With clawing fingers and greedy grasp
To doom them to eternal stillness.
Thus they lay, draped on the precipice
Suspended and entwined,
Interlaced with guilt and anguish
Like a grotesque sculpture
That no human hands could make.

“Let go” He entreats
“Let the sun rise for you tomorrow.”
She smiles in tender sorrow
“You are my Sun”

Their blood and together mingle,
Dripping into the chasm below;
Filling the sinister depths,
With a red ocean of love and fortitude.
Washing away the sins of time,
And the darkness of doubt
And then they fell,
It buoyed them both
Kept them gently afloat
On the tide called Life…

The Race That Knows Joseph

“We both belong to the race that knows Joseph, as Cornelia Bryant would say.”

“The race that knows Joseph?” puzzled Anne.

“Yes. Cornelia divides all the folks in the world into two kinds– the race that knows Joseph and the race that don’t. If a person sorter sees eye to eye with you, and has pretty much the same ideas about things, and the same taste in jokes–why, then he belongs to the race that knows Joseph.”

“Oh, I understand,” exclaimed Anne, light breaking in upon her.

“It’s what I used to call–and still call in quotation marks `kindred spirits.’”

“Jest so–jest so,” agreed Captain Jim. “We’re it, whatever it is. When you come in tonight, Mistress Blythe, I says to myself, says I, `Yes, she’s of the race that knows Joseph.’ And mighty glad I was, for if it wasn’t so we couldn’t have had any real satisfaction in each other’s company. The race that knows Joseph is the salt of the airth, I reckon.”

- passage from 'Anne's House of Dreams' by L.M.Montgomery

I did not have the faintest idea why L.M.Montgomery calls kindred souls as 'The Race That Knows Joseph , but it sounded so right, that i did a bit of research on it on the internet and a quote from the bible turned up;
Exodus 1:8 gives the moment in time that Israel ceased its period of comfort in Egypt, while under Joseph’s rule with the Pharaoh. “Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.” So, the reverse being that those who were believers in God, who followed Him, were of the group that “know Joseph”.

So the Race Who Knows Joseph shared the same ideals, thoughts and beliefs. It is so perfect to describe those people, whom you meet when you least expect it, who are so like you. Those who think like you, talk like you (want to), act like you(really wanted to) and in whole embodies so many things that you stand for without realizing that you did until you met them.
There are certain signals that alert your 'social antennae', when you meet this race that knows Joseph; like finishing a sentence the same way that you just put together in your head, the glint of their eyes that mirrors your own and all the small similar things that you antenna picks up and magnifies for you. That instinctive feeling of kinship and relief.
I guess it can be explained as a primodial feeling, an instinctive mechanism of survival, where 'birds of the same feather' did flock together to survive. But for whimsical creatures of emotion like me, it is a sort of magic. A magic which binds the human race, a tenuous suggestion of a bond surpassing the biological, geological and the innate. It goes beyond the primordial and the inherited, it offers a tantalizing glimpse of achievable divinity the wise men talk about.
Am I reading too much into something that is as basic as the third tier of Maslow's pyramid or the profoundness of belonging to the class, who is simply ' the salt of the airth'...