Colourblind

Noir, black, dark, blanch, white and fair;
From the heart and mind to the eyes, ears and tongue,
In soccer, chess, print, piano music and the infamous cocoa-
Why then do we condemn or appraise when they make their debut,
On the most harmless of all stages?

Does it matter who the beauty flowed from?
For after all,
Pele, Kasparov, Chopin, and Lindt were all artists;
And art knows nothing but beauty.

Would you condemn a perfectly arced ball or a flawless melody?
And raise your eye at a daring poem
Except in praise?

So forget our misguided and baseless notions,
And when we can justify Luther’s Dream,
I know that you will say with your heart;
“What a Wonderful World”.

Leaving Home

And then it took off, my view blurred; was it the tears or the taxiing? The mainland shrank till I couldn’t crane my neck any longer to watch the waves beating against the shores, like little strips of shredded paper caught in a maelstrom. Before the silence descended and muffled my thoughts and before I sank into sleep from the exertion of leaving home; before I realized the change that was taking place in my life, I remember the plane breaking the cloud drift, and I remember the sunrise. The most beautiful sunrise I had ever seen, the brilliance of the colors , the orange, red and yellow, purple ,pink and orange, red and orange and yellow and orange and in the brilliant orange that comforted me I sank into my seat , my eyes held together by the drying tears.

I woke up in a different country, a million miles away from the bed I had slept in the previous night and on every night of my sixteen year old life. I woke up in a different country, a million miles away from anything I knew as home. I woke up in a different country and my tears in heaven had disappeared.

I was here, but I was there as well. I was getting my little blue book which numbered me, stamped for a two year stay, but I was also getting it re stamped, back to where I started. I was getting on the bus taking me to my new room, but I was also on the way back to my old one. I was unpacking, in both rooms. I was getting into bed, pulling my cotton blanket over my eyes, and a million miles away, so was I.

And when I woke up again, pulling my blanket down, reluctantly parting each eyelid, my view had stopped blurring, I knew where I was and I knew, my stomach churning, that I was not at home. From the white, wooden confines of my room, I looked out at the world, detached from it all by an unfamiliar sense of clinical loneliness.
For the first time in my life, I was a stranger.

Feeling uncannily like Camus’ Outsider, I set about exploring my own new world. The only hindrance seemed to be the Outsider’s unwittingly strong resilience to assimilation…..the outsider walked along the road outside the hostel to the traffic light and theneverythingseemedtobe onelongstreetwhichdidnotendanywheresoon………..walkingstoppingwalkingstopturnaroundwalk…….

Since that first day, there seems to be a certain preoccupation with silence that I have developed- silence offers you possibilities and opportunities, a carte blanche which lies waiting for you to use it: you can scribble on it, you can fill up as much as you want it, but then again, you can also leave it untainted, watching and waiting till the time you feel that the silence is yours and that no one can take it from you. And even though pen after pen, and mind after mind, from the Stoic to Schopenhauer and Krishnamurti, has talked to us about silence, it took me a thousand miles and more, a severing of the umbilical in me, to understand, or more truthfully, to begin understanding the white, stretching expanse of solace that silence can weave out of your own mind’s trepidation.

Something else which seems to be emerging in my consciousness, its arrival ironically chimed by the bells of its gravity, is the sensitivity which silence compels you to consider. Where my words seemed to occupy my thoughts before, the silence now asks me to listen. And when you listen, actually listen, not just with your ears but with your eyes and fingers and mind, you learn great things.