The Spirit of the Hive

Conversation at bed-time

Finding Frankenstein

The Train


Fernando goes to work

In the Woods at night, seeing the monster

The Black Cat

The Eyes

Mushrooms

The Bees

Piano and Photos

Cyrano De Bergerac, Jose Ferrer, and a Poem

One summer night, around 1965, I returned home around midnight, and turned on the television to catch the last few minutes of the movie version of "Cyrano de Bergerac", with Jose Ferrer.


I was so caught up in the rhythm and mood of that final scene that I wrote down the following poem as fast as I could write.

A Summer Evening Lives Into The Night

The subtle shade of laurel leaves abides
The red of roses laughing at their side,
The brambles' acridness,
Survives the petal's kiss,
The petals' sweetness,
The scent of grass fresh crushed,
In gentle drifting through the visions,
Drifting through the languid rush
Of moons and clouds in shadowy collisions;
A star through velvet shifting,
The hush of breathing lifting to the night,
The lightness of your lips,
The caustic after-image of their touch,
The laughter of my fingertips
Dancing down your face.

Memories in dreams go dancing,
Clutching hand-in-hand, it seems,
The blush of cheeks serene enhancing
Red remembering of green.

So roses wilt and fall from too much laughing.
The green of laurel leaves out lives them all;
The summer's flame, the frost of early fall,
The winter's call begetting
The blame in each sun setting,
The gaping spring raped green
By passion's budding breath,
The falling-fashioned ,hushed serene
Of age,
Of death.




- Sitaram

(circa 1965)

I recently purchased the DVD version of the movie, and saw once again that final scene.

In his final moments, before death, Cyrano speaks of all his laurels and roses being taken from him.

The Sci-Fi/Fantasy movie "Cube"

I wrote this

http://toosmallforsupernova.org/page003.htm

after watching Cube, because I found it inspiring.

Morality is a game which only makes sense when
played by the rules of free will and for high stakes.


The playing field may be as small as a four foot
square prison cell, or as large as the surface of the
earth or even as geometrically infinitesimal as one's
point of view.


Freedom has rules. There is a law of liberty. Even
chaos and anarchy have structure and
consequences.


This idea has come to me on December 29, 2003,
as I awoke from sleep. From where and how does
such an idea come to us?


Ideas seem to arise and take shape from the
ever-changing and fleeting patterns of thoughts and
feelings and moods in the kaleidoscope of
consciousness, caught by the snapshot
photographer, language, posing for us only once in
prose, and never to reappear again if we do not
pause to write them down.


That prose is pose and pause gives us pause for
thought.


Who or what has set this kaleidoscope in motion?


It is the movie "Cube" which served for me as a
metaphor for the genesis of ideas from thoughts.


The cube was a prison and a puzzle of thousands of
rooms constantly changing in position. We do not
know how we got there, in a room in that cube. We
do not know why we are there. The cube has no
purpose, but our decisions and choices weave the
fabric of meaning and purpose which becomes the
tapestry of our character.


There was only one exit, bridge, escape, which was
freedom, liberation, salvation, heaven, for it is
called by many names.


One exit, one solution, but countless paths which
lead to that solution.


The inside of the cube seems at times like hell but at
other times simply like life itself.


We are constantly faced with decisions great and
small. Even inaction is a course of action. Even
silence is a statement, a reply to the invisible master
of the Koan of Existence.


Even our decision to get out of bed and cross the
street can be monumental, resulting in death or
resulting in a new and different life, a rebirth.


Had I stayed in bed and fallen back to sleep, this
idea might be gone, lost, never to reappear in the
ever-changing patterns of that kaleidoscope.


I made a choice to find pen and paper and search
for words.



Such thoughts are fragile as a gossamer moment
strung between frail reeds, bejewelled with morning
dew, yet once captured, written down, having taken
shape and final form, they are cast forever as a
juggernaut in monumental bronze, lumbering about
the earth like a behemoth Godzilla, toppling citadels
and empires.


It is our illusion that we create and author such
ideas. We are a conduit, a focal point, a lense. We
do not cause but rather, simply, we allow to
happen. We become quiet enough for the silence to
be heard.


We may give birth to the smallest mustard seed of a
notion which in turn may grow to something either
majestic or monstrous, something which
overshadows us and empowers us, or leaves us
powerless, imprisons and enslaves us or frees us.
And our only weapon against its greatness is mute
silence and abstinence, denying the seed its thimble
of soil and drop of dew.


Sutras always begin "I have heard it said." Oral
traditions always give birth to religions with laws
etched in tables of stone which guide empires of
giants with feet of clay.