Catharsis Koshur Qalam - کآشُر قلم prompt for January 19 poetry challenge, poem written by Dr. Koshy AV
The dark side
needs its outlet
and we can no longer afford it
to find it in yearly rites
like the one in Jallikattu
or in art
as what is catharsis and healthy about it for one
may be an incentive to indulge in the dark side for another
A dartboard is okay
Throw the dart
hit the bull's eye
but maybe we should just call it margin
and not centre
and definitely not 'bull's eye'
Solo games are okay
archery
boxing in the gym
but not violent ones
like bull-fighting
and boxing
Genocides start at home
when the cowardly
tell their children
who to hate and why
who to 'other'
in the name of history
sparing no one
not humans or living beings
or even trees and plants
and these young hotblooded ones
when they get a chance
grow up to become youth
who form groups
to carry out
the unconscious, war-like, plundering, pillaging, looting, rapacious desires
of their parents and the groups they belong to
not knowing they are only indoctrinated
brainwashed
pawns in the hands of evil spirits
and somebody else's game for power and wealth and for their pleasure
Language is full of violence
against women
against castes
against others
not cathartic
unless we learn to wield it
Deny base desires
It's true we all have these tendencies
but what we do with them
how we channel them
into what and out to where
is the difference
Catharsis is separation
Turn away from the monsters
inside
and under the bed
that hid there when you were a child
and are around you in others
lurking, waiting to come out
and turn to purgation
of the wrong kind of fears
anxieties
worries
feelings and emotions
to the right kind
or sort
Bad company corrupts good morals
Learn to watch your thoughts
so you are not your own worst enemy
and separate the wheat there from the chaff
and burn it up with unquenchable fire
Be moderate in all things
Turn away from anything
that is not cathartic or purgatory
that does not help to purify
He who walks with the wise grows wise
In the midst of many genuine counsellors
who really love you and have gone before you
there is safety, as they have your best at heart
and even a fool cannot stray
on God's highway.
Watched Amplified's How Bob Dylan Catapulted Folk Music that covers Bob Dylan's first five albums along with people who knew him or wrote on him giving short interviews or commentary in between. The albums are:
Bob Dylan
Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Times they are a changin'
Another side of Bob Dylan
Bringing it all back home (where he does electric for the first time on one side of the album)
These five albums probably will remain the most enduring part of his legacy. They contain Masters of War, Blowin' in the Wind, Times they are a changin', Tambourine Man, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, With God on our side, A pawn in the game and Subterranean Homesick Blues, as well as I say probably, as Hard Rain, It's Alright Ma and the list goes on and on, too many songs that are now clearly recognized as classics to list in a single sentence. I don't know and no one does as Dylan even recently came up to the eyes of the public with Adele doing a cover of one of his later love songs. And with his songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways, especially the one that starts out being about John F Kennedy. Which is his kind of song about the day he probably thinks not only the music but America with its dream of equality died. The Day of Kennedy's assassination, a kind of new My Back Pages. The Song is named Murder Most Foul, a nod to Shakespeare, and is also a tribute to modern American music from the sixties till, you got it, like me, the nineties and so you won't find MC Hammer and others onwards in it. You find them in his radio broadcasts though.
I was born in the sixties, maybe that is why I am so interested in it. My knowledge does not stretch beyond the nineties actually of the twentieth century. I keep going back to find out things while everyone else seems to be interested only in the present which I find very boring. My interests are also outlandish. People around me don't know as much as I do about the things I do and don't want to know and people over there where I've never been probably know more than I do about the very same things so I act best as a bridge between the ones who know more and the ones who don't know but are interested as in the matter of Dylan.
It's the same with literary criticism in English. I come from the tradition starting from Aristotle, and of Arnold, and Eliot, and then go on up to Eagleton and though I am well versed with the moment of theory and the hour of theory, its spread and its death due to the arrival of post-modernism and today's sprawling landscape of subcultures where everything and nothing matters and everyone and no one matters, which is very postmodern, but even my postmodernism is more of a deconstructive turn than driven by the countering capitalism model, which makes it lose its edge as the edge is in politics and I am more interested in engaging with aesthetics, ontology, epistemology, (hermeneutics), theology and other branches of philosophy, criticism, and theories like formalism, (semantics), structuralism, and post-structuralism, as well as psycho-analytical criticism, so I feel that what I have to say is pretty offbeat and not by any means so-called mainstream-theory/discourse oriented. So back to the bridge-building. The foundation is, of course, literature itself. From there I go on to literary criticism and theory, philosophy and psychology, humanities, the arts, and the social sciences. Science remains largely unexplored.
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