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apexart-journal · 7 years ago

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Radha Gomaty in NYC Day 22

Alien in Transit @New York State Transit Museum

I think i have to first explain what this business of Alien in Transit is and why it is such a recurring motif with me in these journals.

I first came across this term while doing the online Visa application with my sister in law to make this Visit possible .Initially totally lost as to what head to apply under we scanned the different categories up on offer and my eyes fell on this one -ALIEN IN TRANSIT.

My Heart sang!

I never expected to come across such a perfect description of how i experience myself most of the time through all the various locales i daily sojourn , that too in an online Visa application form!

“That’s ME! That’s me !” I trilled like a happy bird till my more prosaic and practical sister in law guided me gently but firmly with Margaret’s no nonesnse inputs that came in live just then to the right Visa application category .

But the phrase stayed with me.

One day if i find myself bored to death with myself i just might write an autiobiography by the same name that my beloved first born once prophesied would be a ‘blockbuster some day ’ adding darkly”…given the way you have lived…”

In our brief but intense relationship he tended to position himself as my parent rather than me ,his.

The first time that happened was when he was five when i decided to swim /wade across a particularly difficult fast flowing river just because I wanted to know how it felt to sit on a graceful low hanging bough of a particularly beautiful flowering tree on the opposite bank and he chose to remain on this one ,hands on hips , a tiny mini patriatch yelling stentorian cautionary notes .

At New York Transit Museum.

A destination like a lot of stuff in the Apex Art Schedule Margaret Ewing draws up with such meticulous care that makes me go first :

“Eh?” (or as the American expression for it goes -“Duh”!)

Translation : “Egad!Now what on earth is this?!! “

In fact Casey Smith ,the writer -teacher I met through Apex at Washington ,nailed it when he described this whole schedule as an ‘Anti Art Residency’.

I remembered my sons Aditya and Aravindh who are both train maniacs and could not help but think what a thrill it would have been for the boys!

Once at Brooklyn , a wonderful place in itself ,with the help of a couple of really interesting and helpful kids i met on the street , I found myself before the entry of what for all purposes looked like the entrance to a Subway station were it not for the give-away signage.

What an ingeniously designed entry point and what a fascinating statement of purpose for a museum that says the story of the building of the Subway ,that staggering mass transit system of the people of New York city without which the city simply cannot be imagined.

And here is the best part !

It is said from the standpoint of those who built it with their hands in the first place and who , from the time it was commissioned ,have kept the show running as best as they can through all possible conditions ,smooth or rough , every single day -the Workers.

The invaluable Labor and Society angle.I have shown here only one.

What struck me about the narration about this gritty and extremely lucky survivor is the line about a pressure that might very well have killed him-”i was being squeezed tighter than any girl ever held me…” :D

This finally explained to me why the name boards of NYC subway are so quaintly antique looking with a surfeit of beautiful old fashioned mosaics and ceramics.Im so sorry I’m not able to locate my own curious photos of the same to share here!

A shot against an old ad in the beautifully maintained period carriages on display showing all the transitions with changing technology and times .

Such a remarkably visitor friendly display really! :)

True…the Business of following apexart schedule as a resident …But not for long now and the bittersweetness of impending farewell has begun its work within…

that makes me ask passers by to take “ I was here “ kind of pics…

And even one like this that guides me gently by the little finger to the primary location i inhabit as an Alien in Transit… This FORM(perishable) with a NAME(evanascent and relative)

This picture i requested a stranger to shoot for me because i thought it should be shot for the word on it …RESILIENCE. The word sums up a quality and points to a cluster of other qualities that go to make it . It is a declaration of a way of Being as well ,a description of an experience of Being alive that one cannot take personal singular credit or merit for…

i note here my Gratitude to THAT for having got me thus far.

YOU as well no matter what your relationship with me has been as we lived -Whether it was Love or War in all its various denominations- If War whether upfront as in an open duel or indirect but near fatal like a hidden sniper’s shot or in an ambush by camouflage ,it does not matter any further.

I think not as to how much more there is to go and to be resilient through .

It is not in my ken to think so far ahead nor am i actually really interested.

Or Am I ?

#Radha Gomaty #Inbound from South Eroor

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apexart-journal · 7 years ago

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Radha Gomaty in NYC Day 18

Alien in Transit @Washington (OR At the Butt of the White House)

An exhilarating morning , I wake up to look at myself in the large mirror opposite with a carelessly buttoned short ,mussed up hair and a goofy smile . I sure must had some really good dream to wake up looking like this … My steps are brisk and for some reason a song is playing perpetually on my lips and I decide to walk it today .

“On the way to the Reston Art Gallery make sure you step across for a glance at the White House…”suggested dear Margaret Ewing in her meticulously created schedule sheets.

The road to the White House looks very simple.

Once again Picture Postcard Beautiful .

Swank hotels but distinguished by understated elegance and not jet set flashiness were aplenty along the way and of course gorgeous flower beds in full spring bloom as well.

I see an equestrian portrait across the road and beyond that a white building .

Something is amiss and a the friend to whom I immediately sent a picture for clarification replies- “Wrong building ,Dummy!The White House has a dome on it “

“Maybe there is another without the dome?”I reply in deliberate argument to this friend who has this legendary short fuse.

“Oh No “she replied with characteristic sarcasm,”They just unscrew the dome and send it to the Laundry once every week.Call me when you get your facts straight ,woman!”

My day is made. how i love to hear her irate comments!

“Excuse me !”I hail a passerby “Is this …er…really the White House ?I thought it had a dome on it?”

“The Dome is out there in the front,ma’am.That is the official front side where all the media and hoopla happens .This is the backside where protests like this happens and never reaches the frontside!”

No Kidding!

Now I am grinning wide

"You are right " i text my friend" They did send the dome to the laundry.But it is the White House alright "

So I’m at the butt of the famous White House .That is kind of like being in the backbench at school! It’s way more fun here!

A huge bunch of school kids on a trip throng a small colorful pavement protest pavilion displaying various types of grouses people have against the American Administration in general and specifically ,the Trump Government.

(see images )

Its curator seems to be living right there directly under it and is delivering an educative speech on politics and democracy to the curious kids who are drinking it all in .

Good.

The regular text books could do with some ballast balancing like this.

While the lecture is on, a shirtless jogger passing by suddenly slows for a second to fish out a hooting horn from his pocket , suddenly turns and facing the White House blows out two loud long ridiculous sounding irreverent hoots and keeps up with his running like nothing happened.

An appreciative gale of laughter follows him.

(see all images)

I crossed the road to check out the cordoned lawn a bit better .

“Things weren’t like this before…so barricaded! “ someone observed with displeasure “All these restrictions are recent business”.

There stood a lone man holding up a cardboard piece with a critique and reminder to the President written on it with a marker pen.

Where he stood , this protestor could hardly hope for any kind of audience ,not even passers by unless of course the Prez peered at him by chance through a pair of binoculars or trained a sniper's telescopic gun on him.

I anyway recognized his steadfast stubbornness by passing right in front of him ,reading his placard and then walking past again with a smile and a salute which seemed to add some pizzazz into the one man protest .

I think it worked.

He smiled and gestured “Attagirl!” while resuming his serious concentrated gaze upon the empty rear windows of the White House.

Quite enthused by this fabulous start to the morning as a whole i vended my way, with a broad smile on my lips and yet another song ( can’t recall which now correctly ) to the gallery where there was this absolutely bolt crazy show going on .

……(to be contd.)

#radha gomaty #inbound from south eroor

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apexart-journal · 7 years ago

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Radha Gomaty in NYC Day 16

Washington

Schedule meant finding my way to the National Mall and looking for all kinds of monuments &memorials that had been listed out to me to visit. As things stood I was already quite late finding my way to my hotel , settling in and getting out again finding my way in the Washington Metro .

What hit most in Washington are the interminable distances ,not quite friendly for a walker. It’s not even actually just the issue of distances but the fact that the scale is not human scale as in NYC.

You could ask me who am I kidding !

“NYC with its skyscrapers … human scale ,huh?we sure have heard that Love is blind ,baby …but this one hits a new high!”

No, Not that really .What i meant is this - down there on the road things are placed closer together .Even the skyscrapers that are all infinitely vertical than horizontal take up less space on the ground and are all closely set together at a fair level of the eye.

Our (“Our ,eh?!this woman who is ‘inbound from South Eroor’ in all her hash tagged posts on the apexart journal on Tumblr says ‘our ‘ for NYC’s roads now? Wow!”) roads are narrower too ,and so yes,infinitely and comfortingly ,more crowded.

It is also a question of layout-No friendly corner pharmacies, No small eateries spread out over the place but only in specialized pockets almost .One can walk blocks and blocks without catching sight of even one.

The overwhelming feeling was that one was staying in an overly manicured ,scaled up picture postcard park.

That feeling was certainly heightened on reaching the National Mall, a huge sprawling over sized lawn spread over several football fields.

I haven’t really worn shoes & socks since was in school a few decades ago and I always hated socks because my feet perspire.

Already having tasted the pleasures of kicking off my shoes the previous evening with the feisty Elizabeth Larison, who was assigned to guide me on a walking tour over the old Brooklyn Foot Bridge that being really old was still actually paved with timber , I decided to do an encore.

So peeling off and rolling up my socks together in one grey woolly smelly ball stuffed into the innards of my bag and my walking shoes , tied firmly by their laces hanging to either side from the handle of my grossly overstuffed shoulder tote that was already weighing me down enough, I set off .

Sole and Soul sang a sweet duet.

Ah bliss! to walk with soles bared on the cool lawns , the gritty gravel , the textured earth …

It was like going back to my nine month barefoot existence when i was 17 year old undergrad Design student in NID, Ahmedabad when I gave up the use of footwear for nine months for some abstruse reasons related to Gandhi ,Thoreau, altering the feel of being or some such thing and also to cut the sheer bother to have to take off my footwear each time I chose to walk the grass and not the foot walks!

So the walk turned some other way .It was no longer about dragging myself across Memorials .

Memorials and the insight that physical Memory too is essentially a construct came with the passing of a much loved One.

The whole process of Memory has been a personal journey as well for me over the past some months and days.

Being an artist is also about inhabiting that State of Being that glows up in rare moments of incandescence that total self absorbed engagement evokes .

Inhabiting such a Form of Being in itself is the first and most primal Form of Art .It is infinitely easier for a creative spirit to understand that History, and every other story for that matter even our own autobiographical ones, is just one thread amongst a hundred odd possible others by which these glowing beads are sought to be strung together ,’made sense of ‘. We have this inner compulsion to arrange and order things into Time and duration .We are conditioned to simply not be content with the moments in themselves .We cannot leave these moments be in their singular ,pristine ,self born glory and have to compulsively tinker with their glorious This -ness …

The notion of Time was invented in this itch -like tinkering .

Is it not the notion of Time that births the illusion of Gap between a thought and its fruition,an action and its reaction?The inventor of Postponement?I n fact ,isn’t Time the Serpent in the Garden of Now that invented Desire because in the very notion of Desire is inbuilt the notion of Postponement?

NOW is raw .

It wears no clothes and in the upsurge of its sheer incandescence it scalds all masks &clothes away.

That is why in the aftermath of the serpent’s visit ,Adam & Eve.teh notion of clothes entered the picture alongside the notion of shame &guilt & fear & sin.

But in the aftermath of the serpent’s visit, the notion Labor too was born and brows that knew not what sweat was or hands the need for the intermediary of a tool became callused and worn because Hunger was born too as a postponement between the need for Nourishment and its fulfillment .In the cool white intensity of Satya yuga(or the Eon of Truth ,the first of the four described in Indian scriptures Light can assume a life form with just the meeting of the intensities of intentions bypassing the messier commingling of physical bodies.

But in the aftermath of the serpent’s visit,instead of the bliss of a play like fluidity of boundaries that can shift and change at will,Sex, now reduced to a specific act between two kinds of bodies designed for the purpose entered the scene .Birth now entailed the processuality of a prolonged Pregnancy & Labor…

As the Buddha observed succinctly-Things compounded tend to fall apart . So it is with History as well which is a composing or threading by the string of a chosen strand of whatever narrative that serves best the pre defined purpose at hand ,the many moments of a collective existence together .In administrative interest it is important to keep certain narratives stronger and more compelling than others are .

This can be created through frequent repetition one over the other like the devices of chorus in music or alliteration in poetry .Overlaying it with sentiment and other sensory cues that can be triggered then easily by the slightest suggestion later by which the needle correctly falls in ,running through and playing out what has been already etched in through repetition through the grooves as Habit.

Of course some moments are always there , the sort that poets swoop on with the alacrity of falcons ,that do not quite jell with the chosen main narrative .These are easily dealt with the oft used devices of omission usually by ignoring and passing over in silence .If that doesn’t work ,then by invoking processes of demonization that lead to the convenience of a Graveyard like silence once Taboo buries it under one of its its leaden headstones.

Some moments of the inaasimilable-as-they-are may lend themselves to some photoshopping (tweaking).Which also works to build the edifice of Memory& Memorials …

Oh Well.

Whatever .

Perhaps that is why whenever i encounter a proliferation of memorials in one place a pinch of salt immediately finds its place between my thumb and forefinger .Well and truly ,I dont know how it gets there .But that pinch of salt is what carries me safely through all the machines of history making without getting unduly caught in any of its busily grinding teeth.

The Washington Obelisk Tower has great light effects with the sun breaking out through the gathering clouds. A man from the Philippines and I helped each other snap the customary “I have arrived.Look at me!” portrait-before-famous-monument scrapbook memory shots.

I am supposed to cover an impossibly high number of memorials in this one evening walk -the Vietnam memorial ,the t World war 2 Memorial,the Martin Luther King Memorial, The Lincoln Memorial and if possible ,also the Thomas Jefferson Memorial across the River.On the way I notice plenty of museums as well .Two suddenly draw me to them with that light visceral tug that always is a right indication that there is something in there for me . They were the Museums of Asian Art in America and The Museum of African Art.

No time to enter and it is almost closing time anyway .

I’ve a schedule to cover,you see!

(the schedule !the schedule! oh… the schedule!)

It is already getting late into the evening.

I hear strains of music far away and somehow feel that following it will lead me to Martin Luther King’s memorial and decide to follow the sensations in my feet and in my ears.

On the way I see a sunken plaza of fountains,cascading streams with a pool in the centre and scores of people taking pictures around them .This is the World War Two memorial.

I walk through it skirting the crowds and continue my engagement with bare feet upon earth till I at last see the source of the music far away in what looks like a rather severe Greco-Roman looking structure.

A revelry is on on there in complete contrast with the mood of the building itself . I go closer and see the band playing .Playing is not the word .They are rocking ,belting out lively Latin American Music to which all kinds of human bodies-youngsters,hipsters, teenagers,school kids,senior citizens , folks in their middle years, all kinds of couples from various nationalities and sexual orientations are flowing together in a River of revelry.

Ol’ man Lincoln meanwhile looks on with his rather saturnine expression from atop his stone throne set high on the many tiered stone steps at the saturnalia there in uninhibited progress.

I choose not to climb up the steps and read speeches but weave my way through the infinitely more interesting human throng.

I have been walking nonstop so long I think it is wisdom to calculate the distance that I have to walk back now and turn to retrace my steps .

Half way through as i walk the cold breeze gathers strength ,the darkness deepens .Walking endlessly i find myself in line again with the Washington obelisk where I began my barefoot sojourn and the gathering rainclouds begin to pour .

A true New Yorker & and a true Keralite have one thing in common -a handy all season umbrella in the bag at all times to brandish against all inhospitable weather.

It looks like I am the only one on National Mall with an umbrella.

Well,I looked around and I realize ,with or without umbrella .I am perhaps the only one left in the National Mall!

I sing out loud in the rain splashing little puddles as I walk…Bob Marley,Louis armstrong ,the songs of Ella what have you in my best possible jazz imitation voice.

The Red brick Cathedral that I had passed earlier rises to view on my right .For a moment I have this urge to enter and kneel in silent prayer in one of the old wooden pews in the high domed interior I imagine hung over with paintings&chandeliers .

Its entrance up a flight of stairs was however cloaked with ink dark shadow. I put out only one tentative indecisive foot to the right in a step when something stirs in the dark and calls out in a low male voice .A glint of eyes: “Hello Ma’am…”

i immediately changed plans, withdraw that outstretched foot as gracefully and unobtrusively as I can (What if it was just a homeless man calling out for hope of some financial assistance that i am anyway unable to give now?why hurt his feelings?) and maintain my brisk pace.

There is not one person to whom I could ask directions to the closest metro station whose terrible signage is legion in Washington.

Amazing!

Not a soul on the road after just about 7.30 pm?!

Ugh! What a stick-inthe-mud respectable town , i say!

Give me my crazy swingin’ old NYC any day !

I finally spot a man and a woman from afar.

But as I approach to ask there is a sudden scene change. She on second thoughts turns to gaze into his eyes and soon in that deserted bus shelter,they are locked in a long lingering gentle kiss in a little pool of light with the rest of the roads looking like a neutron bomb had fallen on it exterminating all signs of Life.

Except me ,who stood there turned into the all-seeing -eye -of -God looking upon a wonderful moment when time stood still for two people.

Directions to the Metro station be damned! I walk on feeling very pleased .Overall ,in this country I love the fact that people express their intimacies without reserve-I recall my moments of Subway joy in NYC- an old couple twining and untwining palms with slowly caressing fingers at the metro station as they stand talking about perfectly ordinary things, A couple basking in the park calmly leaning on one another in the sun -she is dozing lightly with an open book across her belly and he is texting with one finger supporting her weight upon his chest.Two youngsters in love lingering over a kiss to say goodbye as they prepare to catch trains in opposite directions for the night.Two men , both in skirts sitting in each other’s laps chatting happily oblivious to the world.

It’s nice.

How uptight are we back home!How merciless are we in our censorship while hunger & desire claw our innards to the point of near manic violence that we do our best to keep declawed,defanged or at least chained and hidden in a cage in the cellar ,dark and redolent with droppings.

Meanwhile a Japanese man in a suit looking almost as lost as me zero in into one another asking directions and we decide to team up in a spot-the-metro station contest .

Though we fail first attempt , the distance covered becomes time for mutual self introduction .At last we find ourselves before a drab grey building and spotting a man in uniform decide to ask him where the Metro is .He pointed into the building with an equally grey drab expression.That anonymous hulk of a building happened to be just it!

Back home it would have immediately drawn out an indignant interjection -“ithenthaa!valla vellarikka pattanamo?!”

(Lit.Transln: “is this some kind of cucumber town or what?!”

Meaning :”is this some sort of ridiculous village or small town growing cucumbers?

(The smallness of the town is measured metaphorically in terms of a settlement that raises low value produce like cucumbers!!!)

Really ! is Washington an overgrown village where everyone is just supposed to know where things are ?(Actually ,that’s all I meant to say ,folks!)

My gentlemanly escort, though going opposite way ,graciously waits till I get the gate opening-with metro card -ritual straight and waves with that slight inflection of his spine that his culture has unmistakably ingrained in him as he moves on.

This is just like I do instinctively the first touch-on -forehead-and-then-the centre-of-chest routine every time my feet unintentionally touches someone on a train .It is an ‘I respect your sanctity’ gesture that we pick up as children because where we grew up to place one’s feet on anyone is construed a disrespectful act.

(In fact even crossing over any living being is seen as a no-no because the physical body also includes the invisible aura of energy around it that should not be desecrated by the touch of feet!)

I get off finally at Farragut North station with disrupted Late running trains due to repair work & dysfunctional elevators of which I counted at least five in my two and half days stay there .

That certainly made me feel very good indeed about our stuff back home. If this is the scene in Washington, the power capital of the world,you are excused ,little Kochi !

I am starving after ,I suppose, my ten kilometer circuit walk today .

Finally losing my way to the hotel ,I stumble into small shop where a man of Caribbean descent sells baked stuff he makes himself starting with what we call savory puffs back home for about 5 dollars each .

When i call the lobby a fourth time to please send someone to to teach me how to use the coffee maker , a slightly tired looking but attractive african origin woman walk in. Alice Walker ,66 ,is a generous soul who warms up to me and begins to chatting even fetching me extra satchets of coffee .We chat on about her decision to quit the US and go back to Sierre Leone where her husband waits for her leaving behind her three married daughters in Washington because “… no-one knows how to live or eat properly here and my knees are killing me with all this standing on the job and boy! dont I need some rest now! ”

I do too …

A large watery cup of coffee later , I chat with a friend and in one on the two large looking beds in a room far too big for one small lone me.

I fall into a deep untroubled sleep.

#radha gomaty #inbound from south eroor

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apexart-journal · 7 years ago

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Radha Gomaty in NYC Day 25

yeah ! of all things -a blonde! ive hardly seen a blonde head in NY actually...

Well, my ma used to joke ,actually only half joke, when she was much younger that she is going to dye her hair blonde or wear a blonde wig!

She had this penchant for reading all kinds of perfectly horrid political espionage novels and really goshawful state-of-the-art horror pulp too in English that my smart aleck, super brilliant older brother , my only sibling and her favorite offspring,shared with equal fervor.

(BTW She can read Malayalam ,Tamil,Hindi and speak Kannada as well with her natural flair to pick up languages and dialects with the admirable ease of a sponge).

I would stand gaping looking from one mouth to another like a viewer of a tennis match does as mother and son went into animated discussions of events , characters and motives in such books that I had no truck with . I came from altogether a different stock -a wild arboreal creature who skinned her heart &her knees endlessly against all well meant advice engaging with real life projects&relationships each time with the same indefatigable sense of optimism and enquiry .

In the long spells of solitude in between, I was drawing.

She created another sub story about going blonde_ with her typical dark self deprecatory merciless sarcasm ,combined with a high degree of histrionic skills "...You know i am going train to be a detective.A famous one working with the Globe detective agency .And then to look unobtrusive , I shall wear my blonde wig ,lean on a pillar or sit on the street side bench and pretend to read the morning paper while actually I am on assignment observing my target through a hole that i have cleverly punched in it ...!"

That narrative detail about my mother peering through a hole cut out of the morning newspaper with her large eyes ,wearing her blonde wig would have my brother and me rolling helplessly on the floor in splits

It was perhaps her way of expressing the much repressed travel bug in her.An insatiable curiosity about the world,its cultures ,landscapes,languages...

It didn't matter that warring alongside was her Vertigo ,bad enough for her to shut her eyes tight if she saw Spiderman by chance on the TV yelling- "Change that channel !Im giddy!"

Or her terror of water (kindly remember here that she ended up marrying my father who is a seaman!)

Or her strict adherence to vegetarianism but with great tolerance of outlook limited only by her very real physical suffering due to her acute sensitivity to smells. Her olfactory capabilities sharp as a dog's that while making her a superlatively gifted chef also affected her to the point of making her sick.

When she she was younger ,her tendencies for violent bouts of migraine also wore her out.

But that is my Amma.

From the time i was little i have borne witness to the live wire trembling with which she lived this split ,this mercilessly twisting Torque of equally intense&opposing contradictions every moment -Between her desires and her conditioning,her drives and her internalized strict self restraints.

It was always like she had more than two people in her who were constantly at war with one another . As a child , i could sense this wild impatient suffering moodiness in her around which she wore a cloak of inapproachability as she stormed her way through her chores in the kitchen with absolutely formidable multi tasking skills.

It always scared me quite a bit. Still does without fail to bear witness to suffering I am not allowed to approach or address.

I sensed it simply wasn't easy for her to be who she really was and learnt to empathise deeply and respect her for it .

When she was that young woman ,while she satisfied that hunger to travel and see the world by reading insatiably magazines like the TIME and national Geographic , the only favors her proud self deigned to accept from two of her brothers in the US, she ended up opening huge windows for my brother and me .

When she also tuned into foreign stations with an inborn instinct , even foreign language ones , they greatly contributed to my brother's and my own enrichment through the subconscious means of listening in into international languages and soundscapes while doing perfectly ordinary chores.

Today through some strange cosmic plan ,without any prior preparation or goal setting i find myself in NYC where my identity is mirrored back to me in a different light than the one I am used to being seen in back from I come.

That 'Outsider ' residing in me that also comes from and is perfectly hand in glove with a Universal Insider by which I am inhabited...One that recognizes increasingly the oneness of all life Forms with every passing moment ; A form of being that is becoming a form of seeing itself that with every passing moment is a lived affirmation of an insight that is more ancient than this little i that I am and present myself as.

There is no greater and more avid reader of the spiritual than my precious Amma has been for me . I learnt so much just watching her. I have been witness to that flowering of what is already in her , a legacy from her namesake and her pious courageous resilient paternal grandmother who took it on herself to raise her children single handedly with the early demise of her husband,teach the unlettered women of her immediate neighbourhood and initiate them into spiritual readings while she could.

My Amma retains her intellectual and researcher oriented approach while I ,as usual, remain that earnest and extremely foolish child who cannot learn it seems without repeatedly having her heart broken and knees skinned .But we appreciate one another now much better than ever before.

In a couple of hours it will be 7 pm back home. i can see my ma settle in with her plate of rice gruel in front of the TV Even today her idea of winding down after a day's home management at 77 ,is to watch a french film on the TVE channel.

This small town girl brought up cocooned in a conservative Tam Brahm household,my Mother Alamelu Ramakrishnan ,is my idea of a certain kind of unsung genius.

My Salutes to YOU ,with Blonde wig and the works!

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!!

#radha gomaty #inbound from south eroor

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apexart-journal · 7 years ago

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Radha Gomaty in NYC Day 16 part 2

Enroute Washington(Alien in transit)

Sitting at Smithsonian Air & Space museum another memory rises that I grapple with in silence-Aditya ,my precious first born,who was a precocious reader of Space ,whose innate relationship with Things Celestial and the Stars pans back to an inspired moment in one specific conversation of our many when he was about 5 or 6 about sunspots and how every 11years their activity impinges on even such aspects of Life on Earth like electric grids,climate,the propensity for general disturbances & outbreaks of conflicts/ wars.

His large expressive eyes suddenly glowed up with a passion that burnt like embers and I knew something more ancient than him and me put together had awoken …

By grade 5 he had read Sagan, by 7th grade he had read Hawking and by 8th ,he was attempting Penrose as well though we some difficulty -the book ,a spontaneous large hearted gift from well known Indian cartoonist EP Unny out of his personal collection to a child he met only through his mother.

That kid in this photograph?*

That could be you and his mother, me...

True, the Smithsonian or NASA wasn't exactly next door but the books we ferreted out, the warm narrative as between perfect equals we briefly shared in our better days while you were still small, combined with the crazy sense of humor and gift of wild imagination we shared took us where we needed to be taken, to awaken in you what was programmed to awaken.

No .

I’m not gonna say next "Oh now you aren't here anymore "

Because I'm not sure anymore that I am either.

I'm just another space traveler like you but with a dimensional difference now.

As long as I live here in this physical body,in me you do too like a crater left behind by a heavy dense piece of a meteor that is altogether from some place else but before it burns marks its place upon Earth .

PS:Good. For once perhaps the opposite of my usual feel @ home universality in my posts Because it is true …that I’m just a friendly Alien with porous boundaries in backward transit enroute my Source.

*The photograph?

oh i’m sorry.But it is no fit condition to be posted because it turned out far too blurred.Perhaps that is not so strange considering the fact that my eyes were a bit blurred over too.

Perhaps when the camera eye blinked it wasn't so much taking a picture as clearing a film of unshed tears.

#Radha Gomaty #Inbound from South Eroor

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apexart-journal · 7 years ago

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Radha Gomaty in NYC Day 16

Enroute Washington

Had a particularly rough morning as my India phone suddenly dithered into deep coma just as i was readying to leave to catch the 9 am Bus to Washington .

Quite distraught I sat bent over the phone compulsively pressing the three buttons that i could see in various permutations and combinations and with varying finger pressures till time on the clock approached danger mark and i had to run from the room .

I find my way through the subways carrying a heavy shoulder bag besides my usual awfully ethnic glittery (and now rather dirty)cloth tote with its stitches coming undone that somehow gells well with this crazy city .

Of course, then there is my friend’s handy little leather multi pocket cross sling that carries everything from my proof of identity , all my various complimentary entry cards and metro /subway cards .In fact she hung it on my shoulder with emphasis genuinely afraid that I might lose my papers otherwise and end up in prison or something !

A gift notepad from my god daughter that i had cherished on my table without finding fit reason for using it fits in perfectly and had scrawled in its first page with a waterproof marker all important numbers of immediate near & dear that proves really useful now that my phoned conked out!

I thanked the stroke of intuition that had me do that just a coulee of ours before i left home for Kochi Airport.

Yet another friend lent me her veteran leather jacket advising me that i should wear this as soon as i disembark from the flight at JFK so that I look like a true blue New Yorker and not like some babe in the woods.

In short I had made my trip on some old clothes donated to me (category:Something OLD;status-check!)

Some new clothes , shoes and socks (first purchase since I passed school say , some 35 odd years ago and a pair of brand new spectacles (category :something NEW-check!)

Mostly borrowed stuff right from money for my food to all of my woolens and even two pieces of luggage of the three I had.(category: something BORROWED-Check!)

And something blue?Well ,Besides a pair of rather horrendous blue jeans hurriedly brought and in memory of an older body size that i once inhabited .It was now so large that I have to find ingenious ways every moment to keeping it from slipping down to the ground.

But then there were some events too just as I leaving home that for a few moments dyed Time to the deepest ultramarine possible.But thankfully only for a few moments ,as off late like a practiced boxer I duck on raw instinct rather than from rather deadly blows. designed to kill my sustaining spirit .

(category:Something BLUE-Check!)

BTW for readers rom my part of the Globe this business of having something OLD /NEW /BORROWED /BLUE is what a Bride is supposed to ensure she has on her person at the ceremony to ensure some things as follows:

Something old represents continuity; something new offers optimism for the future; something borrowed symbolizes borrowed happiness; something blue stands for purity, love, and fidelity.

A 1940’s song from my childhood that was part of dad’s vinyl record collection .the one i heard was by Vera Lynn but i can’t find it anywhere now trawling the net.

So please listen to this version by the Velours.

Yup.

I’ve deliberately chosen the one with the excessively frothy pulp romance visuals to rub it in and have people of understated refined tastes to run for cover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc0G7y1gfEU

Well !Me , a bride ,huh?

That’s a good one !

I’m sure reading this will have many folks i know in sniggers to downright splits at the prospect of a hat trick (Me too actually …!!! :D :D) , a grossly anomalous event for a woman ,at least in the cultural context I happen to be in !

But jokes aside ,in a way that is true about all trips like this, you know.

It is like one’s self (spelt with small case )and one Self (spelt with upper case)that ,ejected by some hidden cosmic plan across a huge distance from familiar physical coordinates and the habits of time zones ,embark upon on a unique honeymoon together within one …

Like in this lovely Hindi movie back home called ‘QUEEN’ after the mild mannered typically middle class protagonist called Rani (meaning Queen in English &played with finesse by Kangna Raut) who is stood up at the altar ,so to speak ,by her recently ‘settled abroad’ NRI fiancé because suddenly she is not smart & trendy enough to be part of his new life style abroad.

Though utterly shattered she embarks upon a radical decision encouraged by her feisty paternal grandmother -To use her honeymoon ticket and go to Paris & Amsterdam on a honeymoon all by herself as planned like commemorating a wedding that never happened .

The results are unexpected and totally exhilarating for Rani after some initial shocks which completely jolts her out of the narrow confines of her comfort zones that were based on role based conformity and not centred on the realities of her feeling-self.

The film traces how Rani , the average middle class Indian girl,begins to find herself finally in new locales through new & diverse friendships and challenging experiences restoring her to an unassailable fresh new sense of wholeness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_(2014_film)

Distance has a way of conferring perspective as little else can as also the cosmopolitan multi cultural bustle that, throwing off-gear one’s sense of context ,challenges one to reexamine , feel ,assimilate and eventually generate anew every moment a new and enlivening context for being.

Just this evening on a watsapp call , my brother was telling me of a new book he was reading on the realities of a Dalit Life called ‘Ants amongst Elephants’ noted for its freshness by Sujata Gudia , based on the locales of her own life written only after she migrated to the US and became a subway conductor.

Even the cold , the wind , the need to layer over skin for a person from more hospitable or warmer climes where one may as well comfortably walk next to naked with just one multipurpose piece of cloth that works interchangeably as garment , mat or drape by night changes things in a way that is not easy to describe.But change it does ,from the fundamental level of the nebulous cusp of Body & Being.

The same reasons ,also dictated by a different culture of valuing Tme ,may necessitate similar changes in dressing -from wearing flowing clothes to closely fitted ones that facilitate free movement of limbs while keeping the cold out.

Simply put ,just the simple act of wearing pants , say even for a woman like me, changes things and facilitates entry from languid self containment to dynamism & extroverted action .

The giddying verticality of Metropolises also has a similar effect upon those who like me from not such a heavy metropolitanised( a new word I suspect but let it be!) living backdrop.

In short the stage is set for a strange wilderness to sudden burgeon forth almost overnight overrunning the complacence of Familiarity altogether . From within this wilderness strange new animals ,whose presence was only gleaned hitherto from an occasional track mark of sensation or from the sharp smell of droppings begin to show themselves better with a new found fearlessness.

Weird flowers blossom of strange hues and heady scents that disorient the head as in open eyed dreams .Voices unheard hitherto begin to make themselves audible .

I am convinced now that Traveling far makes one more amenable to accept the fact that perhaps the very nature of Life is a virtual reality .I stumbled on that secret long ago but frankly speaking ,its the darned diciest thing to get used to though with the years and the abrasions of experience ,I think I’ve made much better peace with it .

“…so why did i come so far,my love ? to catch a glimpse of an Amerindian lifetime that still courses through our blood ?The time when the horses brought in by the Spaniards escaped and came in first from Peru through Mexico through the Oklahoma plains to multiply and run beautifully wild and you were part of those who lassoed and made peace with them to become our steadfast friends ?”

Amerindians??

Did i actually doze off for a split second in the Metro Bus headed to Washington DC that everyone seemed to called by its euphemism ,’the Blue Bus’?

My fellow passenger , a man from Honduras who has worked in the US for 16years now and longs to return home is happy to let me have his window seat .

He gladly accepts a piece of Kappalandi Mittai or Peanut Candy from back home as agonizing over my phone left me no time to prep or eat anything for breakfast. i make do with gnawing at an apple afterwards thinking I shall eat in Washington.

Washington !

Can two cities be so totally different?

The Metro station has this glam front of cafes et al and suddenly with one turn the whole atmosphere changes into a grey drab one.i have trouble with topping my Metro Card and a family from Kerala reach there just in time as if to help me.The gate won’t open and I enter through an emergency door.

Everything is strange ,bleak,dark and interminably gray even the lifeless mechanical announcements .I feel it takes an eternity to find my way walking too to the Beacon hotel .

The young lady at the desk checks out ‘Margaret Ewing’ under whose name my room has been booked .While she is examining my passport for a second time with apologies for the inconvenience caused ,Trump is delivering voice mime thunderbolts on illegal immigrants on a silenced TV Set in the tastefully decorated lobby.

Standing there i find myself worrying about one of James’ students, I think one who is on our show at Apex, whose dad is on the receiving end of this with the aftershocks landing on the prospects of the entire family.

James ,whom I met at Apex is a wonderful teacher of Art at a Public or city funded school in the Bronx where the poorest people live ,many of them precariously.

i get my room keys finally and enter a business class room with two huge single beds ,a TV set , a coffee maker and something that I think is a microwave oven .

For the first time since i came ,I'm feeling a bit lost.

I miss my home@1Irving street, the cute white Mac on the table by the window that helps me type my thoughts, the narrow crowded streets outside full of really interesting looking people , the crazy subways abuzz with chaos &music...

Yeah, my phone from India on which I refused to change the time in India to keep in touch withy beloved ones there abruptly dying with all my contacts in it and remembering that it's my father's birthday and my younger son not realizing perhaps that I haven't called not because I don't care but I can't, adds to it.

My packed lunch of Rice and Mung sprouts suddenly turns tasteless in my mouth.

I hurriedly get up.

Schedule beckons …. (to be contd.)

#Radha Gomaty #Inbound from South Eroor

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apexart-journal · 7 years ago

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Radha Gomaty in NYC Day 14 part 2

Snapshots of Consciousness.

i love this term .

i encountered it first in a book gifted to me by a friend called I AM THAT -a the transcription of the dialogues by Maurice Frydman of a great Indian mystic Nisargadatta Maharaj or NM for short .NM had barely studied to 4th grade and successfully an a small chain of 8 tobacco shops till the call came , he met his Master and underwent a fundamental transformation spontaeneously becoming one himself .

Snapshots of consciousness.

These are nothing but the procession of the NOW moments when being kind of glows up at its radiant best into experience that the Consciousness captures in their utter lucidity then and there and stores away into its endless annals.

It is different from what in general parlance is referred to as a Memory; In the sense ,memory is a construct of many such moments strung together and thereby shaped by various narrative threads that Mind brings in .

So memory and such snapshots moments are not the same

I have been wondering if i could put some down here...

But since this is a journal , a mandatory one at that and I am positioned as this traveller from a different culture ,a different physical and geographical clime ,that slight self consciousness does tend to crystallize an element of memory as well, seeded around such single snapshot moments in the saturation of sensations while journeying.

April 21st Earth day ;Walk at East River Park .

i have to look for a foot bridge that for the life of me i am unable to locate and curiously , none i ask seem to know either .That way my experience with New Yorkers has been very human and altogether quite nice .

People stop and actually take their earphones out of their ears and stop to answer your queries which for me is like ...Wow!

it doesn't matter that few walk on or choose not to hear you out .

But thats OK.

There is always the next person you could ask.The world is a busy place.

Finally a young man points out the central route in the bridge that is raised above the rest ,there are only walkers ,runners ,skateboarders and speed cyclists.

”Thats the foot bridge right at the centre of the bridge , raised in level from the vehicular traffic “he said and i thought - wow!what a concept !

it was exhilarating going higher and higher seeing the river slowly rise to view, the charming old fashioned red brick high rises ... Suddenly i am flying ... and a smile from inside bursts into bloom in a slow spread across my face that my dimples almost ache .I can feel my heart opening out with the sky .It’s for one long slowed down honeyed instant as in a reverie as i share the smooth dream-like momentum of the cyclists with their pointy helmets but sans their serious and often grim faces .Physical ease and totally controlled bouyant agility has always been part of my favorite dream vocabulary. In that state when i walk i dont just walk.

I flow.

i fly .

But somehow i began to feel i am perhaps on the wrong track as directions go, if i have to find an old firehouse at the end of a foot bridge leading to the bank of the river .However while i looked i saw the river was petty much now almost beneath my feet .

My hunch was right and guided by a cyclist with better sense I turned right back round , neither flowed nor flew but plodded like anyone else effortfully finding my way to destination ,quite royally off the punctuality mark by now a full 15 mts!

There i saw a soul as lost as i as the group had walked away by the time she had got here 10 mts before me and no one was answering her calls either.

While Patricia is chatting away about herself to me she is joined by her friend Emma,an avid runner who has caught sight of her at a distance and walks in to join us.Both friends request me to shoot a pic of them together against the flowers of spring which i happily do .

Emma happens to have a connect with india that soon led to the topic of her interest -meditation and Yoga. On being asked I added my two pennies to her interests and concerns .As a mark of our gratitude for the conversation , we shoot a selfie together for the road as i leave finding the long way back to the subway station .

I was walking down a long fairly quiet road with a wide sidewalk of dirt when i felt a leg of my spectacles fall away on to the ground swinging to one side of my face.

oh no!

i bend to look for the screw that had come loose but to no avail!

i was mildly dismayed because they were a brand new pair of spectacles i had spent a good deal of money on just a couple of days before I started .in fact just two days ago at the Brooklyn museum where i also happened to be quite unwell , a leg had already dropped off and the resourceful and exceptionally friendly young woman at the reception dug out a small drawing pin with a ball shaped small round black head upon my request for an improvised fix up session. I managed to bend and insert it in place of the lost screw.

Even that had seemed like small miracle then and i was so grateful. Now i had gone and lost it again ...oh!

But here pops up the snapshot- suddenly a tiny golden colored metal safety pin slightly glued up because obviously it has been part of some form of ornamentation jumps to view.

Its role was to keep something in place on the dress or hat or hairband or whatever and was now lying on the dirt upon a sidewalk under a huge bridge in an avenue of flowering trees where people take their dogs out freely to poo, at the precise moment when my spectacles collapsed from my face with one of its legs losing that minuscule screw that keeps it in its place, coming loose and disappearing!

You see , the fact is I am simply good for nothing without my glasses on . Like... i can’t read a thing !

So finding a tiny golden safety pin that still works though all glued up in nowhere and at the exact precise moment i lost a leg of my specs was like further affirmation that HE is very much there and with a zany sense of humor at that!

(why HE ?and not a SHE or an IT ...Oh!that’s simple. Being SHE is still quite part of my experience as of now and having a groovy HE around now wouldn't harm me one bit ! )

Thats when i realized yet another fact -Hey ! the leg fitted in with the drawing pin was still intact and this was the other one that had come loose too !

Now ain’t that grand !

I’m in New York now with truly iconic deconstructed/reconstructed eyewear - a pair of unique red rimmed spectacles whose legs are each fixed with one,a black ball headed drawing pin on one side bent into a u shaped loop with the sharp end jutting upward like a micro antenna into space as if to catch the voices of the voiceless on Earth &intelligent alien civilisations in the Heavens .And,two, a tiny golden safety pin whose location for falling off from whatever was its last functional post seems to have happened with a preordained purpose ,pre orchestrated right to the micro-moment when the other good leg of my spectacles chooses to come off with a precision that simply astounds.

Simply put ,someone ,who while choosing to remain maddeningly hidden, still loves me one hell of a lot with a rocking sense of humor and a penchant for springing shocks & surprises with equal impunity .

You are so close sometimes that i can almost feel you - Secret Lover ...You who has watched over many a tear and then each time stirred to life a smile on my face creating rainbows while even letting me occasionally , the blind woman who sees only with her fingers ,touch that hidden Prism from where You work Your Rainbow making Magic.

I am shooting a bough all abloom for a friend back home who I think loves flowers when You shows up again ... this time with a sudden cool breath of strong breeze that begins to ruffle the flowers with a secret caressing playfulness. i burst into a peal of laughter looking from under tree up at the blueness of the sky through the gaps between the whiteness of the flowers .

My eyes are dancing as I whisper to you “I’m switching to video since you won’t let me photograph...so what are you going to do about that?”.

“Go ahead ...do it!”

i can sense the play-along approval as i tape and the breeze ends as suddenly as it began .

Love: shutter / aperture / lens .

Snapshots of Consciousness.

#Radha Gomaty #inbound from south eroor

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apexart-journal · 7 years ago

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Radha Gomaty in NYC Day 5

Back Home there is this phrase for utter an act of total destruction .Actually it is a description of the extreme intensity of the intention with which decimation of the enemy is carried out -“kuzhichu(dig) kulam (lake/Pond)thoanduka(to excavate)”.

I was obtuse enough ,when i first heard this phrase to wonder why is it such a bad thing now to dig a lake in what is enemy territory?

i mean ,is it so bad to actually dig a lake given the ecological crises we are going through ? Perhaps the context of the phrase has changed over time and it has to be looked at differently now , in a more positive light ?

However my rose tinted revisionism ,fueled largely by pure ignorance of context, was swiftly made short shrift of when someone told me what is implied is the intensity of rage - A rage that does not rest not only till the last member of the enemy’s kith & kin are wiped out ,but also that even their ancestral homestead /dwelling / stronghold is so completely and systematically destroyed that even the very foundation is excavated so deeply that not a stone remains even of its memory .

The natural destiny of such a gaping hole in the ground in a monsoon struck tropical land like mine is that it fills with water and turns into a lake .

That is the phrase that floated into my mind as i went down this morning as per my schedule sheet to see the 9/11 memorial with its manicured settings , a new gigantic shimmery tower in the background and a huge lake where once the buildings stood with a gaping hole so deep in the centre that we ,who are positioned at the periphery along the walls inscribed with the names of the dead ,can barely see where it goes…

I go up to a sort of garden-like mezzanine opposite that sports even a couple of smaller variety of trees .Suddenly I catch sight of a young tree that says Anne Frank’s Tree.It is a sapling from the original Horse Chestnut Tree in the garden behind the Secret Annex upon which Anne Frank had supposedly gazed at from her hiding place as a symbol of Freedom & Nature.

Before the original tree died it seems a foundation called Anne Frank Centre for Mutual Respect created eleven such saplings from it which the website says is distributed around the world .Actually according to their own listing they are all planted in various parts of the U.S including the one that has that has nonplussed me with its presence right here at the 9/11site.

i have always loved Anne Frank ever since i picked up her little book from the shelves of a local library down the street adjacent to where I lived in the old colonial enclave of Fort Cochin, I was about 12 or 13 years old and i had never ever heard of her before till i saw her name on the book .It was the cadence of her name and the quality of her smile that drew me to it .

And yes. For the intense young adolescent in need of expression that i was it was reassuring that she did actually write a journal without feeling silly about it or the grownups ferreting it out .

But incorporating her name at the 9/11 site makes me feel uncomfortable somehow.

A Memory ,even at the Being level of our own personal experience, is actually just a construct we create for ourselves through conscious &unconscious processes of selection of what to keep , what to accentuate , what to downplay /drop.With what narrative to thread disparate moments together into a shape that is more often than not informed with some sort of interest ,

It becomes a kind of compositional design that keeps shifting shape .

Forgive me for saying this ,but Memory is a gear and it has been used here too as always , in a collective social setting to manipulate and tweak emotion , sentiment ,value , feeling with wonderfully well calculated precision.

When it is crystallized into a spatial design of such a capital intensive monument building project serving to create a memory with its play of reinforcement of some factors , downplaying some of the others etc with real events in it it is a very interesting political exercise indeed, even if it chills your spine just that wee bit.

I only had to recollect the the powerful docu on Winnie Mandela I had been invited to witness at the IMAGE NATION’S Raw Space Art Gallery in Harlem in which the apartheid council’s advisor Mc.Pherson talks with such chilling precise candidness as to how every single aspect of collective life depends on the images doctored and doled out by the controlled media where so called reality is nothing but a function,an outcome ultimately,of branding -How Winnie’s fall into ignominy was a carefully orchestrated branding exercise that finally worked after years of continuous exertion and never-say-die industry that one may even find admirable if separated from the destructive ugly purpose it served.

Two small iridescent birds of a variety I’ve never seen before descend briefly upon the mezzanine garden near where i stand back turned to that cold cataclysmic lake ,still in a pool of Sun �� .

I felt that i had to make them an offering .

So gingerly, making as little noise as possible I open my little stainless steel tiffin box containing a bit of hard bread spread over with hummus ,bite out a bit and then break it to smaller crumbs.

Though they had hopped away somewhere I was sure they would come back and accept my offering .

The memorial with its cascading water lake was definitely a nice photo op judging by the number of clicks going on around.

Standing at the mezzanine I scan for gaps between the surrounding buildings. From where could the two offensive in planes in the tale fly in to actually impact two building so tall , so strong that they collapsed into themselves?

Wow !

Honestly .I never could ever buy the story that all those innocent human lives of those in that building on that busy workday morning could have been killed by just two small planes that brought two huge buildings down like a stack of pancakes as we all watched incredulously on our TV sets from various parts pf the world standing in different time zones.

Slowly the other versions of what might have happened crept in undermining the dominant narrative that had already been effectively shaped by then .And they never came through the main news portals making serials like Homeland exposing the underbelly of the intrigues of Power & control seem like only a shadow.

No .

i am not going to attempt talking about it here .Dig around yourselves as I’m sure plenty of us have already .

Nothing ever is what it seems to be.

And I also realize it can actually really make me sick if I let it.

But i won’t.

We create our worlds all the time by doing just only that we have the freedom to do .Which is gaining mastery enough over ourselves to be able to control the way we respond to the world through an exercise of self reflexive awareness .

Its the only tool we have .

Are we generating what we see together like so many split projectors unifying on a surround screen upon and in which we live , as projector ,projection and the image projected all at once?

If that is the case and I have an option ,I would rather be the screen that is just surface.

Helping make visible remaining unremarkable .

Just letting show .

No pursuit of purpose.

#radha gomaty #inbound from south eroor

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apexart-journal · 7 years ago

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Radha Gomaty in NYC Day 2

Been catching myself humming two or three songs that popped into my head from nowhere past couple of days as i walked endlessly on N.Y roads at 7 degrees celcius. I stopped for a moment and decided to listen in and then smiled.

No wonder.

One of them happened to be Pat Boone’s chocolatey gooey 1957 hit (Now dont laugh!) DONT FORBID ME… “Its so cold and your lips might freeze…”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgTkfWeyyVI

In what is this freezing cold for me that maybe isn’t such a big deal to New Yorkers, I try sticking my poor palms deeper and deeper into my pockets for warmth .

For the first time I become aware of a branch of some kind inside my body that goes all the way up from my palms to the top of my head where a not very skilled drummer sits thumping away fairly tunelessly on a flaccid drum .

No .

I cannot see his face because he is all muffled up and is indifferent to all attempts to reach out .He is an Afro American alright and his Drum is a large hemisphere with tiny beads on it .

Now where have i seen on like that before?

The more numb my palms get the more he drums.

Is the call of that distant unseen drummer to whose tune I am supposed to dance ,alas, only a winter headache wreaked upon this body ?It cannot be blamed after all because it came into to being in a place mapped on this planet at 9°55'52.44"N by 76°16'2.29"E !

I can’t write a post now based on days as i haven’t been able to write daily as i need to do .Writing is a personal need like bathing because i do not know what i feel till i start talking to someone, real or imaginary, who i know loves me enough to not judge me.So its good to write .

Correction .

it is a necessity to write if Im not to go numb all over and not just my palms.

On official day 2 of my schedule when i woke with a fever, I got by with a little help from my homeopathic doctor friend from back home down with pretty bad virus herself who walked me through a strict schedule of heavy medication to help speedy recovery .

So I dont really know how i pulled myself together and got my body through the subway to my first destination that was the Grand Central Terminal.

For a while I stood dazed and disoriented in the cold with the fever still wracking my body .

I found myself inching my way onto one of those dysfunctional old public call phone booths not used anymore .I guess it is my old response of wanting to curl up into the smallest place available to wait things out ,for the storms to blow over that suddenly acted out in a public space .

So it was just me there in that tiny cubicle looking at the remnants of a partially torn out phone that in its heyday must have facilitated so much of live stuff going on between people .

I must have looked a little crazy too ,I suspect ,perhaps a little homeless too though i wasn’t carrying a placard .I had already seen about four people like that on the road by then and they always hurt my heart . I stopped for a coffee and a bagel from a van more for just telling myself that I’m alive .

Finally i found my way with the help of a friendly cop .

The gargoyle like decorations on the building looked rather scary , In fact i realized i do have an inbuilt problem with colonial buildings and their Grand and more than Human Scale generally.

Not trying now going into the ‘why-s’ though i do have some idea why this might be so .

I wandered about and vended my way to the library way before schedule by which time i was already feeling like a total train wreck.

Sarah Jeffe,the sprightly elder who took us around was amazing in terms of energy and quite whom i’d like to be maybe 20 years from today in terms of her indefatigability, her love for what she does, her facility for unbroken speeches and her wit.

Often in my stupor ,though I missed her words I enjoyed the visual of her face and just let myself ride the animated arabesques of her lilting eloquent cadence.

By lunch time the Sun was suddenly in full form outside.A steely silvery blaze of a molten metal light.

I touched the walls , the floors ,even the asphalt on the roads with my chilled up hands hopefully .But no .

There was only this light and hardly any warmth .

By then I was kind of gone pushing my endurance like a distance runner about to pass out but not letting go of the sight of finish line.

Though looking at the food carts and their offerings made no impact on me whatsoever I decided to buy a falafel sandwich and work my way through it , no matter what i felt about it. Still a bit dazed I settled into a little nook stone bench of the library with a little bush to my right side.

That’s when it happened .

…Sparrows ,or Kuruvi in my language ,are birds once so common in childhood that have almost completely disappeared with the breakdown of local paddy cultivation in my home state of Kerala .I’m told, the increasing reliance on chemical pesticides that modern Agricultural practices brought in increased the toxicity of produce to lethal levels spelling disaster for these bright little inquisitive birds.

Sparrows here , I noticed are a plumper version than their cousins back home.

One suddenly hopped a little closer.

i still can see her beady little black eyes ,her slightly cocked to a side head looking a little curiously at me.

Then she lightly picked up a bottle mouth wrapping plastic strip in her beak and flew away .

I watched after her up and down ,don’t-care ,nonchalant flight through the air and saw her make her way into a tiny surveillance camera where she was building her nest .Such delightful enlivening resilient impudence!

Soon suddenly many emerged into sight.The little bush was a kind of Union Square for them i realized.I forgot my blankness and began to share my falafel sandwich …That attracted the larger more belligerent pigeons too .Something smiled inside and lifted a little.Enough for me to mentally revoke my message to Margaret that I’m not well and am going back to rest.

I signed up at the Fencing class run by Vladimir ,a former Ukrainian National champion (”whaaat?a national champion?!what you doing here teaching folks like me baby steps in a library garden , young man??! “), apologise for my being totally unfit physically , re-enter the library , meet up with the pleasant &helpful folks at the local history section with all the energy I can still muster to make a few queries and then make my way to the subway to Brooklyn trundling in a not so clean local subway train across the bridge made famous by the movies.

Everything is different about Brooklyn -the light , the air , the space…

I'm before schedule here too and end up falling asleep sitting on a bench awaiting my guided tour group through the Brooklyn Museum.

Oh dear! what a sort figure I must be presenting of apexart foundation and my country of origin!

I make another round of apologies.But actually i realize I’ve been far more receptive in this open eyed zombie walking stupor state than ever before ,now as i write…The masks, the tunics worn by the Egyptians,Banana leaves ,so common back home,i see for the first time as decorative motifs on the Chinese Blue pottery ,The light of the sun through the paper white flowers of the trees in front of the museum , the intent expression of a lone man taking selfies beneath their canopies , the light in the eyes of a pair of lovers who have just caught sight of one another waiting for their tryst , the father and the son in the subway train and the dad asking his little boy playing with game cards

“...so you wanna be badass?”

“yeah dad…i wanna be badass”

if i got back to 1 irving place , it is because the universe is kind and decided to reach me here safely by letting me open my eyes at the right time not missing stops, put kind people in front of me who showed me the right way to get home…yes ,home.

Its begun to look just as comfortably sloppy and lived in.

April 20 ends in a restorative sleepathon.

The world is good.

I am too.

Amen to that!

#radha gomaty #inbound from south eroor

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apexart-journal · 7 years ago

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Radha Gomaty in NYC arrival

A sense of deja vu to this city...Picked up at the airport after a good hours wait in an intreminably long line at the airport immigration by the adorably genial and good natured Suchith Nair married to my dear old student, Dr Sridevi Rajeeve .I taught her Art from the time she was in grade 2 or 3 till she reached 11 th grade in Cochin Refineries School where I worked as a teacher between 1993 and 2002 . Today that super petite starry eyed stubborn driven perfectionist with her shining little earnest face of 3rd grade is a dedicated doctor completing her MD here.

Still having am/pm issues with this stubborn refusal to not change my time on phone so that I know what time it is back home keeping time sync with loved ones and their little routines. No wonder I found myself wondering what families were doing at Starbiucks at the wee hours of a windy dawn with their kids!

The way home sticks to the self in small details like earth stuck from home field on freshly pulled out potatoes headed to faraway markets!

Unforgettable study class yesterday on the electrical system of the human heart from my dear Sridevi last night to my query on the phenomenon of sudden death, an attempt to get to the bottom of the medical mystery of a beloved one’s passing.

The wildly passionate old Biology student from High School surfaced in me again and in my erstwhile student in a wonderfully poetic role reversal, a fantastic & dedicated teacher...

This old Biology fixation-I recognised this much later in life as yet another form of that fascinated engagement, both aesthetic and spiritual all at once with this complete miracle that is called Life/Living.

Within its folds, Death, that heightens, intensifies everything to a degree of feeling that it is difficult sometimes to rein in.

And one quietly explodes sometimes simply sitting within one's skin, not a ripple showing...

“Jetlag feels just like a hangover headache but worse”

A wise old freind had counselled.

Maybe this is it? Coz Ive forgotten what a hangover quite feels like and dont quite want to know either .This feels weird enough suddenly...Let me try going horizontal awhile shades pulled over my eyes.

See you soon.

#radha gomaty #inbound from south eroor

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apexart-journal · 7 years ago

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Radha Gomaty (NEW) YORK /YEAR

Packing time... All pushed to the last moment. For a month in February i wasn’t too well and lost out on a lot of time to complete pending assignments to get on with this trip.Breaking my own inner freeze with the help of well meant friends &working on a breakneck deadline for a tiny show of paintings; Attempting a free translation of my loved one’s book in two languages that I am, as a rule, not too used to handling ... Helping out a dear friend with certain issues connected with Life &Work meant stretching myself thin creatively .and in terms of my sense of being alive, being here it was a season of both very painful and extremely exhilarating breakthroughs ...Like riding a new set of wheels with 9 gears when you are sort of used to only 5 ! :) Now the time to actually haul myself physically to the airport is approaching like a hurtling avalanche .

Handling alien woolen clothing handed in on generous loan by better travelled friends sitting here literally streaming sweat down my spine in an extra humid tropical climate during a particularly extreme summer is sci fi enough to handle ,thank you!

Besides today is Vishu, my home state Kerala’s Harvest festival that ushers in the Traditional New Year ,a fresh surge of Life marked with exploding crackers .The Lady of the house usually gets up extra early and makes a ritual arrangement of a little mirror adorned with a golden neck chain symbolising the goddess(alternately, the mirror that merely reflects back an image, in this sacred setting becomes a symbol of self reflection) .It is flanked with the fresh vegetables of the season and includes grains and coins symbolising prosperity .The lovely golden hued ovoid shaped gourd called Vellarikka(Cucumis sativus)& the blazing beautiful yellow blooms of the Kanikonna Tree (Cassia fistula) are a must in this sacred ‘still life ‘arrangement complete with a traditional brass lamp with one , two , five, seven or nine wicks.

Custom is to open one’s eyes to this beautiful sight put together by Mother and the female elders of the homestead with Love, Sense of Beauty and Dedication.

My new year this year begins with this journey to New York.

Whoever saw it coming !

I didn’t. Did you ?

The Mirror catches the golden orange glint of the rising sun a bit and smiles a little inscrutably back at Itself...

#radha gomaty #inbound from south eroor

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radha-apexart-blog · 7 years ago

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... All Rise!

SCHEDULE TWO .

Gosh!Look at that ! im already in the second week of my residency here !

I’m kind of late and make a beeline out of my apartment door grabbing a wad of folded seats lying on the desk

when i opened them at the lift however to make a note of how to get there directions these words opened to my bemused eyes “...You beautiful fisher maiden/Pull over your boat towards the shore /come to me and sit down /we will speak of love hand in hand...”

(Schubert ,from Schwanengesang,Das Fischermadchen)

True .

Romantic poetry has this unfailing capacity for transport.

But to transport myself through the trundling subways that too to a place like a trail room in an American Criminal Court I need Margaret’s no nonsense schedule sheets and not the the song sheet the usher gave me at the JuillIard the previous day for the free Wednesday lunch performance at the grand Alice Tully Hall that I had grabbed from table in error.

i got there finally after as usual walking in a loop and losing my way.It was sure nice to note that i could walk into the court complex with no one asking me for any kind of identifcation though i was specifically warned to not try entry without a passport .

At Room 1000, the clerical work section , I got to pick from a white board , like from a restaurant menu , whatever trial was ongoing in any of the courtrooms at various floors of the building 100,Centre Street that i could simply walk in and attend .Up on offer on the menu ,sparse considering the mindboggling spectrum of possible human folly was listed a murder , a grand assault and a few other options that I do not even quite recall .

I picked grand assault though teh clerk could not clarify if it was a racial thing or a geneder thing i got the floor number right, alright but having promptly forgotten the room number as I a wont to do offlate of the room number of the gang assault trial i wanted to attend by the time i got there which resulted in me entering some room and taking a seat .

Since the mild looking judge was already seated i did miss the “All Rise!“ sequence that had witnessed in so many american detective and justice serials on STAR TV.And it sure was thrilling to have an official walk up to me and enquire if i was a witness. i mildly regretted giving the gentleman a truthful answer NO .I mean I could have just said YES , gotten on the stand on the right of the Judge in due ceremony raised my left hand with the right on the book and then of course suddenly done a Mr.Bean.

Im sure it might have given me a free sampling of what is is like to dress in a unisex jumpsuit in a sexy shade of hot Orange and sample the free lunches here in a N.Y Locker .Back home ‘Godumbunda’ ,actually a heavy and not exactly great tasting steamed dish of wheat flour balls is a blanket term for all prison food no matter what is served finally .In fact it is a culinary metaphor for the state of incarceration.

The sweet voice of my neghbour’s son before it cracked with adoloscence rolls into the memory scape momentarily as I sit in the court room ... “Nee-EE Gunda!Ninakkini Godumbunda!(You are a goon , eh !?It’s Godumbunda for you now on!”Anyway , the moment passed with the delectable opportunity it offered as all moments do if not immediately seized.

I had passed up the opportunity for authentic experience of extreme cultural immersion ... to the point of drowning .

Ah!lily livered me!

Anyway i did get to see the Jury enter comprising of the Citizens of New York who get in after mandatory background checks and a system of locks.I am sure to be called in a juror is a t badge of good citizenry that most folks must wear with a certain pride.

A lady cop takes the witness stand , goes through all the ceremonious motions of raising a hand while placing the other on a book the clerk holds out to her ending with the lines “... so help me,God! “

The young crisp woman turns out to be formidable firearm expert and gives an exhaustive class about a particular brand of pistol -how it is fired , how the bullet is pushed out and most interestingly ,how small technical glitches are always present in the manufacturing processes of all brands of pistols by which individual guns have always a way of revealing their unique individual identity and stand a chance to be traced back to their owners from casing left behind on the crime scene.I watched her get off the stand and actually take a patient class all over gain to the citizen jury in the interest of justice at the behest of the attending attorney.

Im sure it must be a crucial factor to clinch this case whatever it might have been .

I didn't wait to see the end of it.

I decide to take a short beak in the comfort zone of my room before starting out on my next schedule ,this time to Staten island.

See you soon!

#Radha Gomaty Inbound from South Eroor

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apexart-journal · 7 years ago

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Radha Gomaty in NYC Day 24

16-04-2018

You

will

never

ever

know

who

you are

Or who I am

You will only barely touch ‘

a surface

Never

a depth

You

are not destined

to know ever

who we might once have been ...

Go on

FInd your ways to break

Me and

You will know that

I cannot be broken into

and entered Nor

have I locks at all to pick ...

The Gates will fall open

on oiled hinges

only for the One who knows who He Himself is

For Him

nothing is closed Nothing

open

For if such a One exists in Flesh &Blood

Then I am

but Him

This I scribbled at about 12.45 am on 16 April 2018 sitting in the lobby of Kochi International airport back home where I arrived much before time to catch my 5.15 am flight to Kuwait city airport, the first leg of journey to NYC.

My face was tear stained and tired.

I bided my time after these lines wrote themselves out in my little notebook with their tone of confidence and steely resolve steering me through what I was feeling...

Because I know from all my experience hitherto that solitude ,often combined with a journey by train or very rarely by air,has always been my greatest salve in times of the deepest distress the darkest of which I know are well and way behind me now for good.

Prepping as I compose this post to leave for now(Only for now!) I am overcoming the slight sense of strangeness and perhaps even something that bears resemblance to a sudden sense of desolation circling my soul.

Yes.

And here I am now .

i needed to come this far to know at least a bit better than I ever knew before that ...

“ ... For if such a One exists in Flesh &Blood

Then I am

but Him...”

#Radha Gomaty #Inbound from South Eroor

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apexart-journal · 7 years ago

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Radha Gomaty in NYC Day 14

Assignment - “Look for an Indian Restaurant in Jackson Heights, Eat there and do let us know!”

O yeah ?

But I prefer Chinese!

Perhaps that maybe a bit of a sweeping statement too because i have heard of restaurants that specialize in Schezwan , Yunan and what have you .

I am largely ignorant.Chinese is well...Chinese.

That’s about it...

For those culturally oriented or hailing from across that vast country, knit together by political interests and perhaps around a few very broad cultural lines,each must be an offering of different tastes of Home according to which province in China they come from.

Anyway so can I have Chinese instead , or whatever it is that i have understood and categorised under that word , anyway today?

Frankly ,looking at Chinatown pockets around ,upon my tongue awakens the sensation of Shanghai when i visited there for a week on a whirlwind residency in late 2015 and came back looking rounder and better padded than Ive been in a very long time.

It is also by going there that i learnt how what passes off in my country as Chinese food is nothing but blatant Murder of the Essence of the same

( ie if you are the sort that goes by the sheer verticality , the inbuilt aspirational impossibility of essences.)

It is good to stand warned though that judging in terms of Essence and its Intolerant Purity it is perhaps not such a good stance for Living .

At least not if you like dancing over walking.

i do.

Because I cannot help feeling as the years roll by that walking becomes dancing when an Ear is pressed to the Earth and Eye kept open to the Sky...

It is much nicer when it is about flexibility,adaptation and yes ,imagination and its power to make Real.

it makes it all easier to live by ... (Forgive these sudden transports.)

Let’s come back now to the Jackson Heights Subway Station where i stand for a change above the ground and the Subway becomes a Sur -way or an Over- way

Certainly .I am interested in seeing the cultural diversity you speak of at Jackson Heights ...and yes , the view from the elevated subway as it bursts out into the sun is sublime.

The shops rise to view on either side of the street .I am drawn to enter a 99 cents store and look at the stuff there and more so,at the people looking at the stuff there before exiting .

Of course ,i dont buy a thing.

I notice I have here a natural objection that rises up in me unbidden on reading this assignment. I’m looking at myself carefully to know what that could be as i alight from the station seeking out the 74th and 75th streets to ferret out that Indian restaurant .

So I decide to play along and let it pan out on its own .

The India i encountered in these two streets are largely Bengali or Bangla.

Bengal -Once one integrated state that spoke the musical common language of Bengali or Bangla with its infinitely rich heritage , culture,cuisine ,music and literary accomplishments was split vertically with the tragic partition in 1947 alongside the declaration of Independence from the colonial master ,Britain.

A part went on to become the tiny Islamic nation of Bangladesh while the remaining ,still called West Bengal post the demarcation of territory for the partition , remained an Indian state.This is the same partition that along lines of religion rent apart a vibrant Punjab into two -one part becoming the Islamic state of Pakistan while the other remaining part of india ...

Having studied my Masters programme in Viswabharati university in W.Bengal i had a healthy enough appreciation of the language and cuisine there ,especially the mostly milk based sweet meats, way different from those in the culinary traditions of my home state far down the South West coast. i buy myself a Rasagulla (pronounced Rosho -gullah, a ball of soft white cottage cheese suspended in sugar syrup ). I am unable to eat not more than a half and have the rest packed away as i’ve seen everyone here do at US restaurants. However small the remanent portion of food , however much ever it is handles and bitten into, it’s still seen as OK ,possibly because it has been paid for and money is held here in a different order of valuation and respect.

Yes. Like a value in its own right.

That is saying a lot.

You see , I come from the coastal town of Kochi in the south western state of Kerala that has been has been a port from A.D 1342 when a sudden storm changed the course of the Periyar river and opened out a natural harbor mouth bringing in foreign traders right to the soil , or dirt as you might call it here ,literally on my door step.

i grew up between the ages of 10 and 20 right in the colonial quarter closest to the sea because of my father’s job with the Port Authority.It is a place that goes by the name Fort Kochi and it’s more ethnic sister ,Mattancherry in whose cramped quarters live at least eleven or so highly varied communities all speaking different languages following different customs and religious practices and of course having vastly different culinary habits.

Cosmopolitanism and Multicultralism arises with the opening and the go-getter attitude of exchange and enterprise that trade brings ; Diverse identities converging upon the common platform and the expansion of context that the flows of economics creates .

Cultural diversity there goes beyond shop rows jostling for shoulder space with boards proclaiming lands/culture of origin in a commercial zone where everyone is driven to a certain kind of uniformity ,at least on the surface ,by a certain singular definition of a shared aspiration of a better life .And the better life is defined by being able to attain to certain ,largely financially defined ,accomplishments in a competitive economy where you get to play but by a certain set of unsaid rules to survive and so adapt accordingly .Identity in an immigrant ‘s life in a ‘better world’ like here is a different ball game altogether.

The multi culturality of a place like Mattancherry where certainly there are fewer languages spoken than in Jackson heights as you told me , is different in this sense that it just all hangs out there not driven by any particular anxiety or aspiration.On the streets spills not only its ways of economic survival or its branding as English supplemented by native language signboards ,but also as a way of living , breathing , carriage;As holidays openly observed , the public participatory fanfare of festivals with shared feasting and sensory excess.

The mood and feel is different and this is what hits me here as I search for that Indian restaurant.

i decided Im in no real mood for lunch as Ive been on a cooking spree lately.I scan the menu and the display window for Fish ,what Bengal is actually legendary for.But to stay true to my word I buy myself a tandoori chicken leg that has nothing much to do with Bengal as it has with the North Western frontier of Punjab as also the capital ,Delhi.

i also cannot resist walking into a South American place just because they had a picture of a fish on the window .Bengal has roused in me an expectation that had not been satiated and ended up with a bland looking characterless creature , all flattened out ,white and rolled in white flour and fried ,seasoned with salt and nothing more.

i meekly leave taking both - the anemic looking fish and the check for its reimbursement .

Even if it doesn't qualify as an Indian Dish,at least it is supposed to be my lunch!

PS:All this rumination on food(yup!rumination is the right word ,alright for mulling over food ! :D) has suddenly stirred in me a desire to eat a Dosa-a lovely golden brown pancake like food back home made from a fermented batter of rice and urad dal(a particular kind of pulse)in 3:1 proportion with a pinch of fenugreek added for softness and flavor.

No South indian restaurant in sight though i caught a swift smattering of Tamil once in the subway that disappeared as fast as it came before i could properly see who spoke.

In the evening i attend a climate change panel discussion at columbia and my old student Krishna whom I have taught from Grade3 to the 11th takes me to her room because it has suddenly turned too cold to be outside.

Guess what?

Krishna offers me Dosa!complete with a spicy powder of ground roasted pulses & spices and Sambar too , a tangy soicy lentil and vegetables based curry !

I told you !

Someone Loves me ,alright!

And I should be careful about what I desire.

oh! though never as much as He can , I guess I Love Him back too far too much , to overplay His tab.

Thank You!

#Radha Gomaty #Inbound from South Eroor

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