Purple-rumped Sunbird: In search for the nectar

A bird endemic to Indian peninsula, Purple-rumped Sunbird (Leptocoma zeylonica) is another of charming bird that I get to see quite often these days. So much so he has started to pose for me…well this is one bird that seem to know the value of good pictures! The acrobat they perform to get to the nectar, and the ensuing commotion is worth the time. Sunbirds are the closest to Hummingbirds we can see in this part of the world.  

Sometime back I bought this book Books That Changed the World (Andrew Taylor), quite an interesting collection. From Indian subcontinent the only book find mention is Kamasutra, so you can gather how trivial the compilation is. There is no mention of Marquez while JK Rowling is very much there. I am wondering which world the book has changed. So did I waste my 450R? Well not really, I wouldn’t undermine the collection, there are some insightful books I wasn’t aware of. So I would say, though I was quite disappointed by absence of Kafka, Dostoevsky so on but there is fair amount to chew on.  About fifteen years back I had another of similar sought by Osho, that one too introduced me to new writings and ideas, the prominent being Nietzsche!! You never know what can come from where? That makes it quite exciting. So coming back to the above mentioned book, I was riveted to Poems by Wilfred Owen. Quite a find that one, though I must add Yeats didn’t think much of him (“…however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt and sucked sugar stick”. Clearly Yeats got it absolutely wrong as he was of Tagore, indeed Yeats is passé). Wilfred Owen is an amazing find, and I am quite taken in by the lines he wrote. At this instance I would also like to point out two movies, that comes to mind, that showed devastating effects of war, Stanley Kubrick’s (Dr. Strangelove, is a stand out movie) Full Metal Jacket and Kurosawa’s Dreams (my favorite movies of Kurosawa is too long to be listed here!). There are other movies too but these two stands out in its impact and influence. 

  

Wilfred Owen (1893 – 1918): What passing bells for those who die as cattle?

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.

My subject is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity.

The tag that is associated with Wilfred Owen is ‘greatest of the war poets who have written in the English language’. Owen fancied himself to be poet and man of letters, reading Shelley and Keats, but eventually enrolled himself in the Army due to the demands of the time, during the First World War. Very soon the mild mannered, shy youngster was facing the full horror of the war, he tried to play his part and even won gallantry award. He wrote “I lost all my earthly faculties, and I fought like an angel . . . I captured a German Machine Gun and scores of prisoners . . . I only shot one man with my revolver . . . My nerves are in perfect order”. But the traumatic sights and experience left an indelible mark on him. He describes himself as "a conscientious objector with a very seared conscience."

Merry it was to laugh there -

Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.

For power was on us as we slashed bones bare

Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

He was soon to be consumed by the war and was killed by a bullet. He was only twenty five. During all those years at war he kept a long correspondence with his mother, in the meanwhile he also wrote some searing poems that has become a standpoint on morality of war and jingoism that comes with it.

Owen was aware of the opportunity to write about something very important. He wrote to his mother: "Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!" There are moments of regrets too, writing to mentor Sasoon and blaming him for his predicament. ‘You said it would be a good thing for my poetry if I went back. That is my consolation for feeling a fool. This is what the shells scream at me every time: "Haven't you got the wits to keep out of this?"’

Over the years significance of Owen has only increased, I read somewhere "Dying at twenty-five, he came to represent a generation of innocent young men sacrificed - as it seemed to a generation in unprecedented rebellion against its fathers - by guilty old men: generals, politicians, war profiteers. Owen has now taken his place in literary history as perhaps the first, certainly the quintessential, war poet." Here are some his well known poems, must add I couldn’t understand few words.

Anthem for doomed youth

What passing bells for those who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in the eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds

Dulce et decorum est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And floundering like a man in fire or lime.

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in.

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

(Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori is a famous ode by Horace claiming, "Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country.")

Insensibility

Happy are men who yet before they are killed

Can let their veins run cold.

Whom no compassion fleers

Or makes their feet

Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.

The front line withers,

But they are troops who fade, not flowers

For poets’ tearful fooling:

Men, gaps for filling:

Losses, who might have fought

Longer; but no one bothers.

And some cease feeling

Even themselves or for themselves.

Dullness best solves

The tease and doubt of shelling,

And Chance’s strange arithmetic

Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.

They keep no check on armies’ decimation.

Happy are these who lose imagination:

They have enough to carry with ammunition.

Their spirit drags no pack.

Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache.

Having seen all things red,

Their eyes are rid

Of the hurt of the colour of blood forever.

And terror’s first constriction over,

Their hearts remain small-drawn.

Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle

Now long since ironed,

Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.

Happy the soldier home, with not a notion

How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,

And many sighs are drained.

Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:

His days are worth forgetting more than not.

He sings along the march

Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,

The long, forlorn, relentless trend

From larger day to huger night.

We wise, who with a thought besmirch

Blood over all our soul,

How should we see our task

But through his blunt and lashless eyes?

Alive, he is not vital overmuch;

Dying, not mortal overmuch;

Nor sad, nor proud,

Nor curious at all.

He cannot tell

Old men’s placidity from his.

But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,

That they should be as stones;

Wretched are they, and mean

With paucity that never was simplicity.

By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever moans in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever shares

The eternal reciprocity of tears.

From my scribble pad…

Flowerpeckers

It may not matter that you are there or not

The calls will go on from one tree to another

You may listen you may understand

It isn’t in the scheme of things

Nor does it matter

That the moments are songs that rise and fall

In the fancy of little thing that dress in feathers 

Snippet: the other day I was taking this lady for Nature walk, frustrated at not able to have long sighting of birds, she says “birds should be put in cages so that we can have good look!!” People are transforming into aliens, I reckon.

Darwin was wrong in many ways about competition in animal world leading to evolution. That has been hijacked by market to justify its incursions, which is essentially weak validation of entitlement driven accruing, that characterizes Indian society. I understand it is cooperation led adaptation than competition that is driving nature towards evolution. Lichens are such amazing example.