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Wednesday, December 21, 2016

YES

The music of YES has accompanied me from childhood. Heart of The Sunrise carried me away into melody. Jon Andersen's girlish voice suited them perfectly and I had never heard a drummer as different as Bill Bruford. Wakeman stole the show with his Moog synthesizer in Close to the Edge and Steve Howe was also a class apart as an acoustic and lead guitarist, unique. As for Chris Squire, late, he was the only one who played bass like it was like lead. For me Yes started and ended with them, except for Trevor Rabin bringing in a  breezy, welcome, fresh, change of pop air in once. I agree with the Hitler meme video that Yes was them and like how LOTR music should be and produced nothing much of significance after Going for the One but for their classic YES period of five albums meaning Fragile, Close to the Edge, Relayer, Tales from Topographical Oceans and Going for the One they are up there with Genesis, King Crimson, Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd and secondarily Marillion.  And 90125 makes for a good change from their usual style, as an album.

A White should also be mentioned, of course, as the drummer, but for me he never matched Bruford.

Happy they have been finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, at least in 2017.

Yes has had many other members over the years but only Tony Kaye matters to me of them and Peter Banks for nostalgia and sentimentality's sake, as well as Patrick Moraz. Igor Khoroshev needs passing mention.

Something needs to be said about Buggles' Trevor Horn as singer and Geoff Downes on keyboards as well as  DRAMA which is a fine album after the lacklustre TORMATO.

Heart of the Sunrise (FROM FRAGILE)


Finally, there is no Yes without the art of Roger Dean.

The pic is that of Union Yes which has all the members inducted into the HALL OF FAME





The image has Andersen, Wakeman, Bruford and Howe.


AND YOU AND I (FROM CLOSE TO THE EDGE)

For more information on YES line-ups and albums the best page is this one: http://yesworld.com/we-are-yes/


Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Metapfiction

Some other place, somewhere, some other time - a tentative start to a novel that may be renamed later

It must have been so. There, then he might have been a man and treated her cruelly while here, now it is just the opposite. He is still a man but being treated cruelly by her, a woman. This makes it symmetrical, aesthetic, if nothing else and hence, in that way, a matter of satisfaction. This does not lead to any kind of satisfaction, however, such a thought. What matters is not to be treated with cruelty and not treating someone cruelly.  Of course, there are no other lives or planets or universes, it is here itself that they have both been one thing or the other to each other. The blame is equally distributed or apportioned as is the praise. It is only in such encounters that one finds out how much of the worst and the best one can have brought out in one and bring out in the other. Looking at it in that sense such encounters are truly significant as harbingers of self-knowledge, if not worth having or beneficial. Maybe they are that too. Maybe in the long run, they turn entirely poisonous or malignant or entirely benign, like cancer cells, if such a thing is possible.


Metafiction - This won't be there in the final draft probably.

The thing about writing a novel is this: where does one start? The form itself is puzzling in 2016 December. Is it about writing a lakh of words? Or is it about passion and intensity? Is it form and genre, structure, style, language, mood, ambience, atmosphere, plot, story, characters, characterization, settings, details, feelings and emotions, points of  view and all the other things he teaches like exposition, rising action, conflict, confrontation, complication, climax, falling action and resolution? Is it having a giant vocabulary and having an impeccable grasp of grammar and syntax as well as dialects and registers and a feel for the language as it is used now and was and will be later? Using lakh reveals one's nationality. "Where do I begin? To tell the story of how great a love can be?" "Let's start at the very beginning." But where does 'a great love story' begin?  One that is 'older than the sea'? And 'younger than the mountains'? Is he a plagiarist for using all these quotes? No. He puts them in double or single quotation marks and it does not matter in creative writing. Is this going to be just that or something more? Can he roll all three stories he wants to into it plus the story of the nation or nations he has been in to make it what he really wants to, an epic novel like the ones the Russians wrote. The novel had died after them. Tagore's Gora and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Anandmath and Lalithamabika Antharjanam with her novel that included Gandhi in it were all written in its heyday in a sense by their getting to know of the greats only later and so they had been still been able to write 'proper' novels. Every great novel after that was proof of its deconstruction, be it Ulysses or Death of Virgil or American extravaganzas like Gravity's Rainbow which he hated and could not finish or Beckett's classics or any other novel that still mattered after the Russians, especially after Anna Karenina. This dissolution of the well-made novel existed even in War and Peace and Doctor Zhivago. It could be seen even in Jude the Obscure and in the fact that Dickens could not finish his last Drood novel.

He is that rare phenomenon, a great writer stuck in the past in a world that no longer cares for such a gigantic misnomer or freak and he wants to write a novel, this one - part of a trilogy but starting with the last one first and not yet knowing how to go about it but feeling his way.

It makes for good reading, though, as it always did.

One could start with repetition. That is how one always starts. The first woman he loved was his mother. Then his sister. After Freud, no such statements are possible without admitting that it is all incest, too, of some kind or the other. Oedipus complex. What is the word for sister love complex? He does not know. There must be one. Sibling love, probably. Interesting. Must google it or look it up. Musil was the one who dealt with it in his classic incomplete novel. Diotima and Ulrich. The novel had killed him or he had died while writing it. Would this one kill him too?

GSA, it seems.

'Roll call of names. Names fly in the wind.' He has written of it in Anamika too and thus in a diary ages back and was now writing it here again. This would not do, one does not talk of love by listing out the names of every girl or woman he had ever had a crush on as if it was a poem or a shopping or laundry list. That does not lead to the novel - what would lead to it is planning, research, preparation, writing, perfect execution - the things he blamed Modi of not doing regarding demonetisation.

So where does one begin?

Humour?

Some other place, somewhere, some other time - a tentative start to a novel that may be renamed later

It must have been so. There, then he might have been a man and treated her cruelly while here, now it is just the opposite. He is still a man but being treated cruelly by her, a woman. This makes it symmetrical, aesthetic, if nothing else and hence, in that way, a matter of satisfaction. This does not lead to any kind of satisfaction, however, such a thought. What matters is not to be treated with cruelty and not treating someone cruelly.  Of course, there are no other lives or planets or universes, it is here itself that they have both been one thing or the other to each other. The blame is equally distributed or apportioned as is the praise. It is only in such encounters that one finds out how much of the worst and the best one can have brought out in one and bring out in the other. Looking at it in that sense such encounters are truly significant as harbingers of self-knowledge, if not worth having or beneficial. Maybe they are that too. Maybe in the long run, they turn entirely poisonous or malignant or entirely benign, like cancer cells, if such a thing is possible.

Monday, December 19, 2016

I gave you my everything, finally
Because I never will, again
When you finally get really, really hurt
it ceases to matter if it was meant or not
if to hurt was the intention from the other side
or it was only the ignorance of selfishness
There's just the shock of getting hurt
of knowing something this time got broken
and that it cannot be repaired
There's only the tears you never shed
There's only the blood you never bled, in this place
The lonely room and the empty space
When you really get hurt, hurt, hurt.

A couplet

I would of have been glad to stay
If only you had not driven me away

Goodbye.

It was a dead end
(but) even dead ends (reach their) end
It (too/finally) did

It was a one-way street
a one-way ticket
That is why since day before I gave it my all
after understanding just who you were and I looked like to all
It was my farewell gift
after understanding how well you are able to make me die
and fall
You did not hear the terrible thud
it made
when
I killed (y)our love
as it ended
the music
dying in my room
of my love for you
a sound softer than the sound of a dying fall
If you had you would have wept
as the one that died, it's true, lost
but nothing as much as to what you lost
compared
to what you would have got
in the many years still left to it
if you had not done this (at) all.

God and I + you and I

Only God
can create or make
something out of
nothing

Only God
can let people never die
make them drink of the fountain of everlasting youth
reverse or halt aging or disease
heal in a second and fully, miraculously
make people live forever
Only God
the philosopher's stone

overcomes death
brings back people from the dead
can be in two places at the same time
and travel into the past and the future, melt time


If I was God
having loved you
I would
unmake and remake you
as what I want you to be
from or out of thin air
give you youth and beauty
eternal
never let you die
bring you back from death if you did
let you always be with me
invisible to  others if and when needed 
and also in the past and the future
just in case there are other lives
or were
and to go one better than Him
would prove to this clone of yours
that by granting you or her
and not me
all this
it still would be 
as hopeless
as my love for the other, earlier you
again.

This is why I am not God
This is why it is clear
I am
only a lover
a failure
and that you are not anywhere in the picture
in the first scenario
or the second.

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