The Lake of Mind
By Muhammad Awais Aftab

In the stillness of my memories
Your thoughts come
Like stones thrown in a pond
By children in their innocent games
The ripples dance
The waves glide
The previous stagnant surface
Is consumed by movement
But soon
The motion fades away
And the calm is restored.

Published in today's Us magazine.
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/mar2007-weekly/us-30-03-2007/p7.htm#1

She'll lead you down a path
There'll be tenderness in the air
She'll let you come just far enough
So you know she's really there
She'll look at you and smile
And her eyes will say
She's got a secret garden
Where everything you want
Where everything you need
Will always stay
A million miles away

[Bruce Springsteen]

The beginning of an infatuation is something that strikes you. At first you don't even know what it is that attracts you -- something in her face? Something in the way she smiles? You try to conjecture, to explain this mysterious emergence of attraction, but you remain uncertain. All you know is that you are in the clutches of a crush, and that you are helpless against it. Now, if it is a mild case, you'll wait for the storm to blow over. But if it is a severe case, you'll probably do something stupid. :)

We do not love people because of their abilities or talents. You may admire them for that, but love and affection are a different thing. We like people for what they are as a person. If you love someone because of some talent, then you are loving a mere ghost.

There is only one obligation you have: Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. No body can blame you for failing to accomplish something you didn't have the ability to do in the first place.

How does it feel to know that something that you had so desperately wanted has slipped out of your hands; that you have failed.
And add to this the realization that the opponent you have lost to is surely the more able one. If this doesn't lead to jealousy, it leads to a sense of despair and inferiority. A proper acceptance of defeat is an art; something which few people are able to master.

The Russells will always have more fame and glory than the Wittgensteins.

It is often said that the best things in life are free, but in a sense, nothing is free. Every thing costs something. Friends require time and money. Even for appreciating something as simple as rainfall, you need to have time... an expensive and rare commodity these days.

* It is not the genius alone who suffers; their true friends suffer with them.

* Hard work can make you successful, it can make you skilled, but it can never make you a genius. It is a curse you are born with.

* Nature has little affection for men (and women) of genius; they are all born with genes of self-destruction.

To all great philosophical questions, there is only one honest answer, "I do not know."

I saw the movie The Hours just a little while ago, and it is so awesome, it demands a silence in its praise. I am strongly reminded of a quote by Robert Frost that i read earlier today, "The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it." This movie too is an immortal wound. It'll remain with me for the rest of my life.

Some quotes from the movie:

* A woman's whole life in a single day. Just one day. And in that day her whole life.

* I am ungrateful? You call me ungrateful? My life has been stolen from me. I'm living in a town I have no wish to live in. I'm living a life I have no wish to live. How did this happen?

* If I were thinking clearly, Leonard, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark. And that only I can know, only I can understand my own condition. You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, I live with it too.

* You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.

* That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.

* I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.

* I wanted to be a writer, that's all. I wanted to write about it all. Everything that happens in a moment. The way the flowers looked when you carried them in your arms. This towel, how it smells, how it feels, this thread. All our feelings, yours and mine. The history of it, who we once were. Everything in the world. Everything all mixed up, like it's all mixed up now. And I failed. I failed. No matter what you start with it ends up being so much less. Sheer fucking pride and stupidity.

* To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.

Why do we live? We live because we are in the habit of living. There is no other reason.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The Road Not Taken, st. 4 (1916)

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it.

The Poetry of Amy Lowell, From the Christian Science Monitor (May 16, 1925)

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.

In the Clearing (1962)

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life — It goes on.

Happy Birthday to Robert Frost!

I know not of a single sin which a person can't justify to himself; i know not of single religious belief which a person can't rationalize if he really wishes to believe in it.

You know that you are infatuated with someone when her[1] absence is more conspicuous than the presence of other people. And in every social gathering, your eyes lift and wander, expecting to see that face. The odds of statistical improbability stare at you, but you refuse to acknowledge them... and you hope that maybe, just maybe she'd be present there, and through a miraculous quirk of fate, you'll be able to meet her. It never happens, though. Maybe that's what infatuation is all about: a seductive denial of reality.

[1] Since i am talking from my point of view, allow me the use of feminine gender.

Sometimes when i look in a mirror, i am surprised to see how i look. If physical self-awareness can create such surprise, how much surprise would psychological self-recognition generate?

I look at the world and I notice it’s turning.
While my guitar gently weeps.
With every mistake we must surely be learning,
Still my guitar gently weeps.
~ George Harrison ~

"Let no one who loves be unhappy, even love unreturned has its rainbow."
James M. Barrie

Let's construct a parallal statement:

"Let no one who loves be happy, even love returned has its thunder and thorns." :)

"A thin line (or thread) separates the fool from the fucker. On one end of the line lies the fool and on the other, the fucker. Upon snapping the line it's a million dollar question as to who's the fool and who's the fucker, my friend."

The opening lines of Omkara, an Indian movie adaption of Shakespeare's Othello... and what a movie it is! The pain, the tragedy is indelible.

Perhaps the good that we do to others is the good that we receive from other people. You often encounter some persons who show you kindness and care for no apparent reason at all. They help you whenever you need it and they never ask for anything in return. It is so inspiring to be with them. I admit, i have never been able to repay such people in my life, but if nothing else, they have stimulated me to be kind and caring to people who need me. I once read an article in Reader's Digest which gave the message, Perform spontaneous acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty. And all the small, nameless deeds of benevolence that you will perform will not go to waste, but they will return to you in this life in ways you would never have anticipated.

P.S. I wonder, what good thing did i do in my life to have found a friend like Saad. I can't remember. :)

I recently rediscovered this song by Back Street Boys, and despite all the years, it still hasn't lost it's charm. It still leaves me mesmerized.

"What can I do, to make you mine
Falling so hard so fast this time
What did I say, what did you do?
How did I fall in love with you?

What can I do, to make you mine
Falling so hard so fast this time
Everything's changed, we never knew [i love the way he says this in the song]

How did I fall,
in love ,
with you?"

In the rainy season, romance pops up like mushrooms.

X: Tell me you love me, dear.
Y [who is a student of Wittgenstein]: My love, what can be shown, cannot be said!

Lolz.

What is poetic faith? "That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." says Coleridge. As a poet, i believe and write many things which i would surely refuse to accept as a philosopher. But does that make them any less significant? I do not know whether such poetic faith has any correlations in reality, but i strongly believe that it has a great role to play in life. To believe in a metaphor, because it satisfies your aesthetic sense and your heart, just as a philosophical theorm satisfies your reason and mind, this is poetic faith.

Dedicated to the girl with the aura of light :)

To love beauty is to see light.
Victor Hugo

Love is the hardest habit to break, and the most difficult to satisfy.
Drew Barrymore

True, very true!

At times, my ability as a writer suppresses my talent as a philosopher! :S

I read this in Interclass Poetry Recitation competition in my university today, and got the 3rd prize. :) I'd like to dedicate this award i got to my dear buddy Saad Javed.

We are all trapped in different cages in our lives: cages of society, cages of family, cages of tradition, cages of economy… but there is a cage far more subtle and dangerous than all of these. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is the cage of love, and I, its humble captive, will sing out my sorrow.

THAT’S WHY THE CAGE BIRD SINGS

I flutter like a bird
In the confinement of your love
And like all birds who sing
Their joys, their fears
I, too, sing the soreness of my heart:
I adore you, desire you
It is true
But I will not beg
For your love
I know I risk my sanity
I wager my peace
I gamble my sleep
I would rather choose
This prison of thorns
Painful and deep
I would prefer
These chains of tears gladly
And weep
But I will not beg
For your love
I know I may even die
My misery roaring sky-high
I may be heart broken
The infinite anguish unspoken
Shattered beyond repair
Scratched by claws of despair
But I will not beg
For your love
I beg not
Not because I am proud
I have no vanity left in me
I do so because
Love is not a penny thrown to a beggar
It is a gift of heart
Arising from the depth of passion
Not from mercy
Not from pity
And that’s why the cage bird sings:
I will not beg
For your love

Muhammad Awais Aftab

The Secret
By Muhammad Awais Aftab

Looking down
On the mirror surface of the pond
I see a face
Not mine
But hers
And I wonder
Has the secret of our love
Leaked out
To the water, as well?

Published in today's Us magazine
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/mar2007-weekly/us-16-03-2007/poster.htm

It's 15th March today, the famous 'Ides of March'!

"Caesar summoned the Senate to meet in the Pompey's Theater on the Ides of March, 44 BC for the purpose of reading a petition, written by the senators, asking him to hand power back to the Senate. According to the Greek biographer Plutarch, a few days before, the soothsayer Titus Vestricius Spurinna apparently warned Caesar, "Beware the Ides of March." Caesar disregarded the warning:

"The following story, too, is told by many. A certain seer warned Caesar to be on his guard against a great peril on the day of the month of March which the Romans call the Ides; and when the day had come and Caesar was on his way to the senate-house, he greeted the seer with a jest and said: "Well, the Ides of March are come," and the seer said to him softly: "Ay, they are come, but they are not gone."
As the Senate convened, Caesar was attacked and stabbed to death by a group of senators who called themselves the Liberatores ("Liberators"); they justified their action on the grounds that they committed tyrannicide, not murder, and were preserving the Republic from Caesar's alleged monarchical ambitions."

[From wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ides_of_March]

"Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move in the opposite direction."

Happy Birthday to Albert Einstein!

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
Voltaire

The excuse a mob gives to its conscience. :)

There is so much cruelty in this world, it horrifies me at times. There is a devil lurking in all of us.

I don't believe in the fact that we are all born equal. Biologically speaking, not in the legal sense. :) Every one of us is born different, and some are born with greater intelligence, some with greater strength, some with seeds of insanity, and some with artistic genius. You don't get to choose what characteristics you'll get. They are imposed on you. You find yourself existing, and you have a certain characteristics given to you... regardless of their adequacy or inadequacy, you'll have to live with them.

You realize this fact with great severity when you are competing with someone who is naturally better than you at something. He is born with a greater ability, but what can you do about it? You would just have to accept the fact. Hard work can help, of course, but there is a limit to it. In a sense, our defeats and victories are predicted at the our birth. So unfair, isn't it?

Has anyone thought that there is a distinction between what you really believe and what you think you believe/want to believe? I have come to appreciate this distinction only recently.

We need a certain degree of indifference to survive and live happily in this world. At times, it seems cold, selfish and inhuman to me, but experience has proven me again and again the validity of this axiom. Of course, the real problem is: to what extent should one be indifferent. I don't really know. Perhaps the limit would vary from person to person. But then, at points, an ethical clash is involved. At moments, one strongly feels it ethical wrong to be indifferent to a particular situation. I hate to generalize about ethics, but i think that one should usually pay attention to such moral instincts.

At the beginning and at the end of love, the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone.
Jean de la Bruyere

:)

Nobody welcomes a prophet of doom...

I was going through some old stuff when i saw this. My friend Ahmad Arsalan, a doctor, a Marxist, has worked in UK but is now back in Pakistan, has been like an elder brother and a mentor in philosophy... when i joined medical college, this is what he wrote to me as a welcome address. I still value these words:

"Hiya
dear Awais
First of all, let me welcome you into our community.
You have started your life as a doctor. Now you are
part of medical community. Its a responsibility
believe me. Its not an ordinary profession, doctors
are not ordinary persons. Its the only profession from
which state, law and public expect super human
attitute.
From your first day to the day you will take Oath and
start practicing, remember one thing. Its HUMAN LIFE
you are dealing with. You are playing GOD. People will
think you are GOD. But we r not. Just remember always
try to to your best to learn and practice safely. So
you can be worth of trust of patients
it will be you soon who will decide, who will die and
who will live. You will stop treatment of patients to
let them die, you will declare patients whose heart
will be beating dead,
so mate , welcome aboard, but its a tough life
but let me tell you THERE IS NO BETTER LIFE THAN IT AS
WELL. Once you are into it, you can't live without it.
Sorry for lecturing, but its a tradition, one of my
senior told me this, and i think at least this is a
tradition that should continue.
so enjoy your life
cheers"

"If I'm drunk on forbidden wine, so I am!
And if I'm an unbeliever, a pagan or idolater, so I am!
Every sect has its own suspicions of me,
I myself am just what I am."

[Omar Khayyam]

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.
Margaret Thatcher

I think it also goes for being beautiful and being a genius...

I will not make the same mistakes that you did
I will not let myself
Cause my heart so much misery
I will not break the way you did,
You fell so hard
I've learned the hard way
To never let it get that far

Because of you
I never stray too far from the sidewalk
Because of you
I learned to play on the safe side so I don't get hurt
Because of you
I find it hard to trust not only me, but everyone around me
Because of you
I am afraid

I lose my way
And it's not too long before you point it out
I cannot cry
Because you know that's weakness in your eyes
I'm forced to fake
A smile, a laugh everyday of my life
My heart can't possibly break
When it wasn't even whole to start with

Because of you
I never stray too far from the sidewalk
Because of you
I learned to play on the safe side so I don't get hurt
Because of you
I find it hard to trust not only me, but everyone around me
Because of you
I am afraid

I watched you die
I heard you cry every night in your sleep
I was so young
You should have known better than to lean on me
You never thought of anyone else
You just saw your pain
And now I cry in the middle of the night
For the same damn thing

Because of you
I never stray too far from the sidewalk
Because of you
I learned to play on the safe side so I don't get hurt
Because of you
I try my hardest just to forget everything
Because of you
I don't know how to let anyone else in
Because of you
I'm ashamed of my life because it's empty
Because of you
I am afraid

Because of you
Because of you

Kelly Clarkson - Because Of You

Have you wondered how the society around us is trying to commit a subtle murder: an attempt to kill the person we really are. Through a sophisticated game of reward and punishment, it moulds our character, forces us to change ourselves, to become something which we are not... we are biological cells amidst radiation, which is mutating every single one of us into a monster.

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
Oscar Wilde

Hahaha! Wilde is brilliantly witty. Most often, there is everything but love between a husband and wife. :) Why go far? Look at the people around you... the reality is glaring.

Love thou the rose, yet leave it on its stem.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Appreciate beauty, but do not desire to possess it. :)

Prism

By Muhammad Awais Aftab

A translation of Parveen Shakir's poem 'Prism'

When sun enters
Into a drop of water
A collage of colours appears
The seven arches of rainbow
Spread out their arms
And draw into the tiny droplet
A whole cosmos of colours!

I, too, have a sun
That by a mere graze of body
Cultivates in me the rainbow flowers
A slight change in his angle
And I am rendered
A simple drop of water
Unscenic, uncoloured!

[Published in today Us Magazine
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/mar2007-weekly/us-02-03-2007/p25.htm#1]

However much we describe and explain love,
When we fall in love we are ashamed of our words.
Explanation by the tongue makes most things clear,
But love unexplained is clearer.

Rumi

Does it happen with you that while driving on the road you forget for a minute or so where you are going and what is your destination? Well, it happens occasionally with me. And i suppose there is an analogy to be discovered here: How many times do we forget in our lives what our purpose is and where we are supposed to go?

There is something written on your face, but it's not readable...