Feb 10, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
I am fascinated by angles and curves. (Why was the realm of mathematics such a closed book to me when I was an eighth-grader, bored and maddened by all things mathematical made mundane by well-meaning, but muttering teachers?)
Pythagoras’ theorem and the puzzle of Pi (can’t get the symbol on this thing) enchanted me, always. I understood both, but couldn’t for the life of me figure out how those Greek cats got to both core understandings.
Then, I come downstairs to re-heat some coffee and cudgel my brain into some semblance of alertness, and what do I see on the dining table? A book on mathematical reasoning left there by my husband, with a page opened to my very favorite topics in geometry!
It really is all about squaring the circle — so magical!
Somewhere out there is a perfect place, a folded space that contains every shape and non-shape, every number and non-number, every sound and all silence, every color and non-color.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Circle. In ever-widening circles, we swim upwards towards a blind understanding of our earth-bound selves. And we reach for the radius that will spin us around our galactic core, and we hold on desperately, inching towards that still point, the centre of it all.
Ah, that was one good cup of coffee! Smack!
Tags: #Poetry, coffee, folded space, mathematics, pythagoras, squaring the circle
Feb 10, 2013 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, the surreal and the unreal
Greeting the Ghosts:
(First posted on my WordPress blog on Feb. 10, 2013)
©Vijaya Sundaram
Every morning, when I wake up, and every night when I go to sleep, I greet my ghosts.
They cluster around me, aching with loneliness. “Tell us about it all,” they sigh and await the news of a world they crave.
They never got used to being dead, you see.
I take pity on them sometimes. They are so very sad
Still, I ask myself, Is this all there is to it? Shouldn’t they be floating higher and higher, and eventually get sucked into the vortex of the sun?
I don’t tell them what I think. Their feelings might get hurt. One of them, a tender-hearted spirit stays long by my bedside, asking me all about my sleep. I lead it into my dream world, and it takes in a deep breath. The other ghosts, jealous and fretful, pull it back into their world. The tender-hearted spirit weeps. The windows rattle outside.
I turn over. I need to sleep. Morning awaits me, fresh-eyed and abrupt, like a child waiting to roust one from one’s rest.
Tags: almost-real, border-world, Dreams, Imagination, mind, Sleep
Feb 10, 2013 Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes
I am, first and forever, a dreamer of dreams.
In the real world, I am a teacher of eighth-graders.
I am a wife and a mother.
I am a musician, a singer-songwriter, a guitarist, a sitarist, a poet and writer, a keeper of beats, a tapper of taps on the side of objects.
I wander in dreams a lot, except that now, I have to be practical and proper, a mother and a teacher in the real world. Leaves little time for dreaming, but I persevere, I persevere.
If I had my way, I would never wake up. Never. I love sleep, as one would love a lover. I never get enough sleep. This is a crazy world we live in.
I would love to find my way back to the stars, whence my atoms formed themselves. I would love to curl up inside the tiny compressed state of mind known as the darkness before the Big Bang.
But enough! Welcome to my blog. Leave me a note letting me know who you are, if you feel so inclined. Be gentle.
~Vijaya
Tags: Big Bang, dreamer, mother, musician, poet, Sleep, teacher, writer
Feb 10, 2013 Essays on Music and Musicians, Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes
We love to sing together. As we do so, we create a shared history of memories.
Because by The Beatles; Things We Said Today by The Beatles; Sweet Sunny South; Sunny Tennessee; Five Hundred Miles, Indian songs from the Hindustani tradition, old movie songs from Tamil and Hindi movies that I’ve sung to her since she was very little, French folks songs for children from a CD, Samba Bossa Nova songs …
So many songs, so much music in the world! It makes us happy. Keeps the darkness at bay for the two grown-ups in the room, for whom deep worry about the state of the world swirls around the edges of our conscious mind, always. It is our child, that happy spirit, that pure, unalloyed magical being who knits together those unraveled parts of our scattered, tired selves. She laughs, twirls around the room, makes foolish repetitive remarks that make us grit our teeth in mock annoyance, makes deep, wise observations about people and characters in books, herself and her learning processes, and animals … she enchants me, and makes me remember that way beyond our puny selves, there is a deep, deep place of creativity, whence we all come.
Our daughter reminds me of all that the beauty that ever was and will ever be.
And the music we make comes from that place.