Mar 28, 2016 Climate Change is Real!, Daily Life, Ramblings and Musings, Uncategorized
Climate Change is Real: Day 8 of my Lone Vigil
© March 28th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
This morning, I actually had some dreams (which means I had about five hours of sleep, instead of four) from which I arose, like a fish jumping out of the sea, water streaming off its fins, before plopping onto an unforgiving shore. Fortunately, that’s where the fish analogy ends, because I evolved quite rapidly, grew legs, and trooped downstairs with dog, to start my coffee.
Dog went out, came back in, settled down, and I left.
I dragged myself to Warren’s Intersection (as I have dubbed it), travel mug in hand, and the “Climate Change is Real” sign on my shoulder. This was a most unusually flavored coffee, for it tasted like French Roast and Ginkgo Clarity tea (because I had accidentally forgotten I was pouring coffee into the travel mug, and had tossed in the ginkgo tea prior to that. Fortunately, I detected it before I left, and fished out the offender). Ever tasted coffee that tastes like ginkgo and other herbal ingredients? I don’t really recommend it, though it wasn’t completely awful.
It was a cloudy, gray morning, with no sign of sun. There was no sign of anything that denoted life, except an endless stream of cars, which, having awakened from their Sunday torpor, sullenly headed towards Boston.
I should have checked the weather (duh, here I am holding a Climate Change sign, and I don’t even remember to check the weather?! Tsk, tsk!). Why? Well, it started to rain, and increased in volume as the hour unrolled – and I’d forgotten to wear rain-proof gear. I mean, my wool-influenced winter coat held off the worst of it, and so did my wool felt hat, but my shoes were getting more wet than I would have liked. So irate and discombobulated was I that I didn’t notice anything much that would have piqued my interest.
So, I drank my coffee grimly, and started up the music, my ear-buds in place, hoping that would dispel my gathering gloom, and it did. More songs in Raga Bhatiyar, a nice tarana (the Indian Classical Music equivalent of scat-singing) that our Guruji had composed that was massively fun and rhythmically thrilling to sing, so much so that I had laughed out loud in delight in our 1994 recording, and laughed out loud today. That cheered me up a little, and took my mind off the weather. I confess I forgot about Climate Change, as well, for a little bit.
So, the cars went by, and there were even a few waves, smiles, thumbs-ups, despite the dreariness of the morning. At one point, someone honked, and I looked up from fiddling with the i-Pod, and a young man waved, held his phone out the car, and took a picture. Hm. (I’m going to be world-famous, folks! Hah!)
The usual vans and trucks advertising various services drove by – plumbing, masonry, water conservation, air purification systems and other environmental services, security systems, communication systems and construction services – the providers of the infrastructure of our modern modes of living. (Sometimes, I wish that Atlas could shrug. That would show us the way to a different world). Apart from that, the usual cars drove by with preoccupied people and their Dunkin Donuts coffee, their i-Phones, their children, their spouses.
When I see all these cars, I make up stories about the people in them, just to pass the time. I have always, always, been curious about every single individual I see, because each person is such a magical mystery tour of sorts, each person’s trajectory is unique, each person’s life is being lived parallel to mine, and I know ONLY mine. And yet, great things happen simultaneously with terrible events, tragedies occur, people are born, people learn, people play, fall in love, get married, get separated, or stay together, and people die. People love and hate, live and give, and take and make, and everyone is moving blindly, or consciously, along the path or her or his life, like a bead on a wire. And we learn from all these experiences, and from our reactions to our setbacks. It’s all we can ever hope to do. And music can steady us as we learn.
Music has been in my blood and bones, in my voice and in my fingers, and it has helped me always – that is why when Warren speaks about saving music, the traditional music that bridges the past and the future, it resonates deeply with me. Music is the best of who we are. (I wrote a semi-sci-fi story about it three years ago, which I transferred from an old blog of mine to my current one. See: Polaris-Bound – A Short Story.)
We have to preserve our best selves. We have to preserve the planet and its music. Climate Change is Real, true, but music is Real-er (sorry about the grammar, but as a former English teacher, I grant myself a pardon on this one!) – so, sing, and learn the music that sustained you as you grew up. And if it didn’t, find the music that does sustain you. When there’s more beauty, there’s more peace, and more concerted effort to unite. And we can unite on this issue.
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P.S. A nice encounter this afternoon. I was walking Holly in the misty afternoon rain, when a young man came towards me from the opposite direction, and said, “Excuse me, but are you the one who stands with the sign every morning?” When I said I was, he said, “I have to tell you I appreciate what you’re doing, and think that it’s right and true.” Then, he said, “And what happened to that gentleman who held the sign earlier?”
I informed him that “that gentleman” was my husband, and that he was returning on Tuesday, and would be back at the circle. We exchanged names. He had nice words for Holly, and we parted. Gives one hope, doesn’t it?
Tags: #ClimateChangeisReal, #ClimateVigil, #Music, #Original Short Story: Polaris-Bound
Mar 28, 2016 Original Short Story
Polaris-Bound – A Short Story*
March 24th, 2013
©By Vijaya Sundaram
The stars were very bright that night. I looked up, and saw Polaris, and became still. I knew that I had to do something within the hour, because if I didn’t, I would lose the game which had released me as a pawn into the night those many decades ago.
The man stood in his toll booth, counting change. Car after car came by, slowed down, stopped. Anonymous people rolled down windows, spurted out change, exchanged meaningless words, and pushed off into the night, so many flashing streaks of light, released like arrows into the unknown.
The man was alone. There was another, just like him in an adjoining tollbooth, also alone. They did not communicate. They didn’t need to. They were both from different worlds. Each did not exist in the other one’s world. I wasn’t interested in the other one. He seemed dull, dull as a drainpipe filled with leaves.
Loneliness is an absolute thing. It cannot be described. It cannot be reduced to songs, stories, descriptions, but we try, anyway. So, I’ll tell you about this man, because he was lonely, except that he didn’t realize it.
I watched him from the side of the road. I saw him sigh, his shoulders rising, chest filling with air, and falling, air flowing out from him, making little puffs of cold mist that dissipated in all directions. His mouth was the toll booth, and the hot air left him, and it seemed like so many cars coming and going into a cold night.
Crouched in the tall reeds by the side of the road, I watched him calmly, dispassionately. I was trying to get a read on him, you see.
I watched him pull out a thermos, pour himself some coffee, click on an old-fashioned radio.(Where on earth does one get a radio like that these days? I wondered.) He sipped his coffee and drummed his fingers. He looked at his wristwatch (Doesn’t he have a cell-phone? Nobody wears a wristwatch these days!), stepped out of his booth, did a few stretches. He seemed restless as a thirteen-year-old boy in a classroom (I know, because I’d masqueraded as one, once, long ago). Again, his shoulders rose and fell in a sigh.
“Can you hear me?” he spoke urgently into the darkness, his head tilted towards the stars. The man in the adjoining tollbooth seemed not to register that he had spoken.
I wondered when I would go up to the first man. My knees were getting stiff, deep in the tall grass by the side of the road where I crouched. I was biding my time, though.
He looked up and down the roads approaching the tollbooth and saw that there were no cars coming up (it was 2:00 a.m.). He seemed to make a decision. He went inside again, reached down, and pulled out a saxophone.
And he began to play.
And the music poured out of his horn like the cry of the accumulated lonely nights of all humankind. It spoke of despair and hope, it spoke of dreams that arose with the dawn and died with the day. It lingered in the air like the smoke from his cigarette, long after it had been crushed underfoot. It poured down the slopes of his being, like an endless waterfall, the kind in which people perish if they step into swirling waters, little knowing the danger down the line. It swirled around like the kind of eddies which sink ships, and leave nothing, except a single suitcase floating on the surface. It spoke about night after night of no one to go home to. It climbed up my spine and shook my brain-stem. It made the air shiver and weep. Or, was it just me?
I shivered, and wept.
And I turned back into the tall grass to where I needed to go. I had learned a lot by reading and listening to people in the past several decades. I had paid close attention to all the noise and chatter that poured out of their computers, their phones, their television sets, and I had seen the horrors they had endured through all the hatefulness that seemed to dog the footsteps of their kind. I had seen the ice-caps melting, and their forests dying. I had heard their politicians lie, and their talking heads nod endlessly as they passed on the lies, pocketing the change – different type of tollbooth workers, they seemed to me.) I had seen their dying and their dead. I had seen children reduced to skeletons, hunger big in their eyes and in their bellies. I had been filled with a hopeless rage, and a helpless horror.
But I had also seen their women thrown into the pits of hell and rising again stronger, more determined, despite their pain. I had seen little children picking up the trash that littered the woods around them. I had watched a teenage boy make magic out of wasted bits and pieces of trashed electronics, so that his people could have working radios. I had seen a teenage girl find a way to provide water purification through the power of the sun, and it cost very little, and would help millions. I had seen an emaciated man feeding his emaciated dog before he fed himself, and I knew that there was something here that was not to be denied.
Still, I had been determined to do what I had come there to do. I was not about to lose the game, and go back to my people to face the consequences.
Tonight, however, I saw and heard something that was beyond all that I’d seen. I heard in that music all that I needed to know about this lonely being, and all of the lonely beings on this strange planet. I understood them. I looked up again. The stars blinked back at me, brighter than they had ever been. I sighed.
These people might yet be saved, but I wasn’t the one about to do the saving.
I had lost the game, but I didn’t mind. I was ready to go back and explain why I hadn’t destroyed this tragic, flawed planet, this beautiful, blue pebble that swung around the sun, full of death, full of life, full of music.
And the music followed me all the way to my home, far, far away.
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* This is a story I wrote in 2013, and shared on my now-private first blog V-Hynagogic Logic. I decided to share it on my new blog today.
Tags: #Alien, #Music, #Philosophical Science Fiction, #Saving the Planet, #Science Fiction Short Story