Coucal: the Crow Pheasant

If Coucal could speak then it would say “what this bird shird life I should have been a cat or something!”. Coucal (they are also referred to as crow pheasant since they have head and bill of crow and long tail of pheasant) is a member of cuckoo family (but non parasitic) is an ungraceful bulky kind of bird that doesn’t seem to like flying and could be seen creeping or clambering through the tangled undergrowth. They have black overall with chestnut color wing and blood red eyes. A very common bird found throughout the subcontinent and East Asia they can be sighted in bushy region with water source nearby, they spend most of their time walking sedately on the ground and when disturbed take a short flight or scuttle to the nearby bush, they are strong runner possessing straight hind claw. They live on insects, reptiles (snakes are high on menu) and are known to be quite destructive to other species of birds.

Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958) was one of the prominent Spanish poets- born in Andalusia. An interesting aspect about him was that he translated Tagore into Spanish. It is difficult not to like Jimenez as a poet but more as a person. Quite an amazing man.

In an essay To Burn Completely (1956) written near the end of his life, after he had stopped writing poetry, he writes When we contemplate things and beings, when we love them and enjoy them, when we have their confidence, having given them ours; when we concern ourselves with them through our complete consciousness and as complete consciousness, they manifest their content to us, we shall possess their most profound secrets and thus they will be able to offer themselves to us as an ideal, for perhaps the ideal may be a secret of which the most loving are worthy.

He writes in the same essay The true man, the authentic man, the inherent cultivated aristocrat, who unites the greatest sensitivity in daily life to the greatest richness of a greater life, is he who most desires the happiness of the world, he who seeks his own happiness in the universal happiness, he who succeeds by means of a clear concept of the whole life of the world, in best occupying, using, and enjoying his space and time.

He defined aristocrat not on family or wealth but as “a state of man in which are united in supreme union, a profound cultivation of the interior being and a conviction of the natural simplicity of living-idealism and economy”

In another essay, Poetry and Literature, he wrote Literature, however perfect it may be, is always artificial, the more artificial, the more perfect. Through literature it is possible to arrive at a relative beauty but poetry is beyond relative beauty and its expression aspires to absolute beauty…Pretentious literature must be content to reach a mirrored beauty

To live out of doors in the sun and fields was, for Jimenez, the ultimate existence. "There is no more exquisite form of aristocracy than living out of doors." He had many ‘disciples’ includes Spanish and Latin American poets (prominent being Lorca). Juan Ramon Jimenez is regarded, within the whole Spanish-speaking world, as the teacher and master. He was poets poet, I thought he was beyond poetry.

These two poems I came across on the net

I am not I
I am not I
I am this onewalking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
the one who remains silent while I talk,
the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
the one who will remain standing when I die.

Poems

I am like a distracted childwhom they drag by the hand
through the fiesta of the world.
My eyes cling, sadly,
to things...And what misery when they tear me away from them.

I liked the above poem a lot, quite simple but really remarkable. A unique kind of Time-Space construct. Time as death, Space as attachments.

Juan Ramon Jimenez once wrote In reality the poet, when mute or when writing, is an abstract dancer, and if he writes, it is out of everyday weakness, for to be truly consistent he ought not write.

I wrote these (my ‘everyday weakness’ no not about writing, better word would be scribbling)

In the pond
moon sleeps
water lily blooms