Orlando

Detail of plants/trees/leaves from various Indian miniatures.

Cinema Paradiso

If I Could Tell You - W.H. Auden

Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know. If we should weep when clowns put on their show, If we should stumble when musicians play, Time will say nothing but I told you so. There are no fortunes to be told, although, Because I love you more than I can say, If I could tell you I would let you know. The winds must come from somewhere when they blow, There must be reasons why the leaves decay; Time will say nothing but I told you so. Perhaps the roses really want to grow, The vision seriously intends to stay; If I could tell you I would let you know. Suppose all the lions get up and go, And all the brooks and soldiers run away; Will Time say nothing but I told you so? If I could tell you I would let you know.

IN THE EVENING —C.P. Cavafy Anyway those things would not have lasted long. The experience of the years shows it to me. But Destiny arrived in some haste and stopped them. The beautiful life was brief. But how potent were the perfumes, on how splendid a bed we lay, to what sensual delight we gave our bodies. An echo of the days of pleasure, an echo of the days drew near me, a little of the fire of the youth of both of us; again I took in my hands a letter, and I read and reread till the light was gone. And melancholy, I came out on the balcony— came out to change my thoughts at least by looking at a little of the city that I loved, a little movement on the street, and in the shops.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

THE LAST TOAST

Whether we like it or not,

We have only three choices:

Yesterday, today and tomorrow.

And not even three

Because as the philosopher says

Yesterday is yesterday

It belongs to us only in memory:

From the rose already plucked

No more petals can be drawn.

The cards to play

Are only two:

The present and the future.

And there aren’t even two

Because it’s a known fact

The present doesn’t exist

Except as it edges past

And is consumed…,

like youth.

In the end

We are only left with tomorrow.

I raise my glass

To the day that never arrives.

But that is all

we have at our disposal.

- Nicanor Parra

The Guest - Anna Akhmatova

All as before: against the dining-room windows Beats the scattered windswept snow, And I have not changed either, But a man came to me.

I asked: "What do you want?" He replied: "To be with you in Hell." I laughed: "Oh, you'll foredoom Us both to disaster."

But lifting his dry hand He lightly touched the flowers: "Tell me how men kiss you, Tell me how you kiss men."

And his lustreless eyes Did not move from my ring. Not a single muscle quivered On his radiantly evil face.

Oh, I know: his delight Is the tense and passionate knowledge That he needs nothing, That I can refuse him nothing.

January 1, 1914

“I was determined that you should join me in our liberating quest. It seemed at the time that we were the only two out gay men of Indian origin that we knew. You went back to teach history at Delhi University, and I didn’t manage to visit you till 1980. We became very close as you helped me in my quest to visualise Indian gay men. After five years of British art schooling, I had not been able to find any mention of them and it had become my overarching goal to locate them in the canons of art history. You were my informant and also my muse and appeared in my earliest pictures at a time when nobody else would. Together we cruised the parks and parties of gay Delhi hoping to meet like-minded men in search of gay liberation. We talked a lot about where one could live as a gay man at that time, and you opted to live in India and make a difference while I found it impossible to go back and live in the closet.” - To Saleem Kidwai: A letter to a friendship by Sunil Gupta. Hindustan Times. 30/08/2021.

I went - C.P. Cavafy

I didn’t hold myself back. I gave in completely and went, 

went to those delectations that were half real, 

half wrought by my own mind, 

went into the brilliant night 

and drank strong wine, 

the way the champions of pleasure drink.”

-translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis

Fireflies, Rabindranath Tagore

The furthest distance in the world

Is not the distance between life and death

But when you don’t know I love you when I’m standing in front of you

The furthest distance in the world

Is not that you don’t know I love you when I ’m standing in front of you

But that I cannot say I love you when I love you so madly

The furthest distance in the world

Is not that I cannot say I love you when I love you so madly

But I can only bury it in my heart despite this unbearable yearning

The furthest distance in the world

Is not I can only bury it in my heart despite the unbearable yearning

But we cannot be together when we love each other

The furthest distance in the world

Is not that we cannot be together when we love each other

But we pretend to not care even knowing love is unconquerable

The furthest distance in the world

Is not the distance between two trees

But when the branches cannot depend on each other in the wind

even when they grow from the same root

The furthest distance in the world

Is not when the branches cannot depend on each other

It is when blinking stars cannot burn the light

The furthest distance in the world

is not in the burning stars

But it is after the light they can’t be seen from afar

The furthest distance in the world

Is not the light that is fading away

But the coincidence of us not supposed for the love

The furthest distance in the world

Is the distance between fish and bird

One is in the sky, the other is in the sea

The furthest distance in the world

Is using one’s indifferent heart

To dig an uncrossable river

For the one who loves you

आना - केदारनाथ सिंह

आना

जब समय मिले

जब समय न मिले

तब भी आना

आना

जैसे हाथों में

आता है जाँगर

जैसे धमनियों में

आता है रक्त

जैसे चूल्हों में

धीरे-धीरे आती है आँच

आना

आना जैसे बारिश के बाद

बबूल में आ जाते हैं

नए-नए काँटे

दिनों को

चीरते-फाड़ते

और वादों की धज्जियाँ उड़ाते हुए

आना

आना जैसे मंगल के बाद

चला आता है बुध

आना

Meditation at Lagunitas - Robert Haas

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her. But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Depictions of water in various Indian miniature paintings. Instagram:@Niraamish