May 9, 2014 Uncategorized
Music in the Present Tense
©May 9th, 2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
The insistent beep of a device somewhere
The punctuations of birdsong
The clack-clack of high heels tripping down the hallways
The voices raised in ritual greeting
The hum of a computer awakening
The whir of an unidentifiable machine
The question from a student
Poking a head in at my door:
Is Poetry Club cancelled for today?
And my strangled “Yes,”
Accompanying a nod,
The high hum of electricity
The shimmer-buzz of fluorescent tubes,
The shuffle of janitorial feet
Jingling keys and all,
The clicking of my fingers on these keys
And the tap-tap of my restless ankle-boots –
All these lead me to this question:
And for what purpose
Is all this work, this tension?
Where’s the music?
The piano at the far end stands
Silent, withdrawn, reserved.
The guitar teeters madly
On the counter where a student
(Or perhaps I) put it,
The hanging-plants overhead grow silently,
Breathing in my carbon-breath,
While I drink in their lovely
Oxygen-rich green exhalation,
So symbiotically symbolic!
The rhythm of inhale-exhale
The music of plant and mammal
In a room full of made things,
The give-and-take of the natural
And unnatural, mediated by
Human intention and action.
I listen intently, and think:
And what’s the purpose?
And, Where’s the music?
I wonder again.
And the music blossoms,
Rose-like and silken
Spiky and molten
Opaquely clear
Before my eyes, my ears,
My breath, my skin.
Right here, amidst all these
Things, these thieves of Time and attention,
These sheaves of paper
And cluster of pens.
Amidst all these four-legged
Quietly triumphant things
On which we sit, and at which
We labor mightily.
But I don’t hear it. I wonder:
Where’s the music? Shall I play some?
And then, I find it, right here, see?
Tight, at my feet, hands, skin, ears.
Still, I’ll play the guitar,
I think, and stop
This, this thing I’m doing.
And I do.
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Tags: #Music, #Original Poetry, classroom, daily noises as music, intention vs. action, sounds, symbiosis, Work
Dec 9, 2013 Original Short Stories
Tags: #Couplets, #Original Poem, #Procrastination, chores, Ditty, panic, putting off, tasks, Work
Apr 1, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
Indifference?
©By Vijaya Sundaram
April 1st, 2013
You want to see pure indifference?
Talk about work to a person who has not slept for forty-eight hours.
Talk to a starving person about morals.
Talk to an angry teenager about duty.
Talk to a woman in the throes of giving birth about the dangers of population explosion.
Talk to a painter about toxic substances in paint.
Talk to an Isaac Newton about weightlessness.
Talk to a dancer about sitting attentively in a classroom.
Talk to a Climate Change activist about the profit margin in polluting industries.
Talk to a caged animal about why it is safe and better off in the cage that you’ve created for it.
Talk to a child and explain to her why she shouldn’t play, and attend to her homework instead.
That’s all for now, folks!
Too sleep-deprived for a bigger, fancier blog-post.
~Dreamers of Dreams~
Tags: #indifference, #NaPoWriMo, Artists, caged animals, children, Children and Play, dancers, dreamers, musicians, Play, Pointlessness, Work
Mar 28, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
Lilies and Poppies ©By Vijaya Sundaram March 28th, 2013
Tomorrow is Good Friday.
It means nothing to me, in the religious sense. I am an atheist Hindu, with a mystical, spiritual leaning. Oh, and I went to a convent school in India, while coming from a somewhat orthodox Tamilian Brahmin family (our parents chose the route of “convent school education” for their two daughters for various reasons).
However, I do sometimes feel as if I’m carrying a cross up a hill, and being buried in a cave that’s shut with a boulder.
I’m still waiting for that angel to remove the boulder, so I can ascend on Easter Sunday.
Will I be done with the work that’s weighing on me? Everything depends on that. Work takes precedence over everything in this country. So, there’s an extra-delicious sense of guilt when one is playing hooky, even if is for an hour or two.
See what I mean? I used the phrase “playing hooky” so casually, thinking that if I don’t do my schoolwork immediately upon getting home, then it’s “playing hooky.” I mean, my time is supposed to be MY time, and yet, I have to do work well into the wee hours, frequently. And my so-called “Prep Time” at school is taken up with menial tasks. It never ends.
Work is over-rated, I think.
What was it that the Christ said about the lilies of the field?
Forget Ascension. I want to be one of those lilies. Better still, a poppy, so that I can embrace blissful oblivion.
——————————–The End ————————————
P.S. if anyone is a devout Christian and is reading my blog, please know that I mean no offense in using the metaphor of carrying a cross or wanting to ascend. It is a metaphor.
P.P.S. For those who might be worried about my mention of “poppy” and “oblivion,” please note that, again, I am being metaphorical.
Tags: Idleness, Leisure, Lilies of the field, Oblivion, Work
Mar 19, 2013 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, the surreal and the unreal, Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
Snow Day–A Poem
©By Vijaya Sundaram
March 19th, 2013
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Woke up today to snow!
No school!
Feel like a child …
Alas, the feeling ends there.
Work calls.
I cover my ears
Pretend not to hear.
Nope. It’s insistent,
Like an unwanted visitor
Leaning on the doorbell.
Silence in the house.
No pulse stirs the walls,
Breath is suspended.
Lips parted, couched in bed, I wait,
Willing my intruder to vanish
Into the snow whence it came,
But it waits. It is patient.
I grumble and grouse.
I stop my ears with my fingers.
I go, la, la, la, la, la.
I arise, drink coffee, look out
See all that piled up snow.
I tend to my child,
Listen to my husband playing guitar.
But work always waits.
Quiet, brutally determined,
Work waits, arms crossed,
Infinitely aged and weary.
And I long for the quietude
Of my final rest.
I yearn, I yearn, I yearn
For my final rest.
Alas, I know my work
Will follow me there.
It is not to be spurned, rejected
Cast aside. It is wedded to me.
Sighing, I get up, allow my breath
To resume its rise and fall
And, with rueful smile,
I open the door.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Original Poetry, #Procrastination, Snow Day, Work
Feb 11, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes
My daughter is happily singing this song by They Might be Giants while making her bed in her room (she’s now used to doing it, and I’m mighty pleased about that). She’s a happy child, and I love the occasional up-shifts in key, so carefree, so unself-conscious! I know she revels in the strangeness of the lyrics (she knows about the Mesopotamians, because her mom, unable to let a teaching moment go waste, told her all about them a couple of years ago. To her credit, she wanted to know).
And as I hear this song about Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, Gilgamesh and Sargon, I remember “Ozymandias” by P.B. Shelley, and remember “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair,” and imagine how, behind the “vast and trunkless legs of stone” in that poetic desert, the “lone and level sands” stretch far away. Then, I look at my calamitous clutter of corrected and uncorrected student papers, and feel a moment’s spasm of rebellion: Why work? Nothing survives.
Of course, I know why. It’s work, silly!
I have a Snow Day today. Like a child, I rejoice, but then soberly contemplate the gritty pile of student writing that I have yet to plough through. Work!!
Still, there’s play, and raccoons in our backyard in the summer, and love, and laughter, lots of good food, great music to play, a child who gets jokes and profound ideas, who laughs and spins and reads and thinks, and loves us unconditionally, and who’s kind to everyone, and a loving husband, who’s kind and hard-working and funny and creative beyond all imagining, and students who are wonderful, hard-working and thoughtful, and friends who are kindred spirits, and my mother who is the well-spring of love and devotion and the epitome of hard-work, and a sister and bother who are good and loyal and hard-working and fearless, and I have all those unwritten stories and poems, and finally, all those dreams waiting me on the far shores of sleep.
Looking back on this run-on sentence, I see one hyphenated word that jumps out at me, like a monkey from a tree (just felt like using that simile. You don’t like it? Ah, well. Better luck next time). What word? You guessed it: Hard-working!
Work! Work! Work! says the monkey on my back.
I’d better get back to working hard. I’ve not much time to waste.
So much to be happy about in the midst of so much work in the world!
Tags: Ashurbanipal, Gilgamesh, Grading Papers, Hammurabi, Ozymandias, Sargon, Snow Days, Thankfulness, They Might Be Giants, We're the Mesopotamians, Work