Mathy

Thanks Ramani for introducing this poet.

During that time I kept out of circumstances that were too full of mystery
As people with stomach ailments avoid heavy meals,
I preferred to stay at home inquiring into certain questions
Concerning the propagation of spiders,
To which end I would shut myself up in the garden
And not show myself in public until late at night;
Or else, in shirt-sleeves, defiant,
I would hurl angry glances at the moon,
Trying to get rid of those bilious fancies
That cling like polyps to the human soul.
When I was alone I was completely self-possessed,
I went back and forth fully conscious of my actions
Or I would stretch out among the planks of the cellar
And dream, think up ways and means, resolve little emergency problems.
It was at that moment that i put into practise my famous method for intrepreting dreams
Which consists in doing violence to oneself and then imagining what one would like,
Conjuring up scenes that I had worked our beforehand with the help of powers from other worlds.
In this manner I was able to obtain priceless information
Concerning a string of anxieties that afflict our being:
Foreign travel, erotic disorders, religious complexes.
But all precautions were inadequate,
Because, for reasons hard to set forth,
I began sliding automatically down a sort of inclined plane.
My soul lost altitude like a punctured balloon,
The instinct of self-preservation stopped functioning
And, deprived of my most essential prejudices,
I fell unavoidably into the telephone trap
Which sucks in everything around it, like a vacumn,
And with trembling hands I dialled that accursed number
Which even now I repeat automatically in my sleep.
Uncertainty and misery filled the seconds that followed,
While I, like a skeleton standing before that table from hell
Covered with yellow cretonne,
Waited for an answer from the other end of the world,
The other half of my being, imprisoned in a pit.
Those intermittent telephone noises
Worked on me like a dentist’s drill,
They sank into my soul like needles shot from the sky
Until, when the moment itself arrived,
I started to sweat and to stammer feverishly,
My tongue like a veal steak
Obtruded between my being and her who was listening,
Like those black curtains that separate us from the dead.
I never wanted to conduct those over-intimate conversations
Which I myself provoked, just the same, in my stupid way,
My voice thick with desire, and electrically charged.
Hearing myself called by my first name
In that tone of forced familiarity
Filled me with a vague discomfort,
With anguished localized disturbances which I contrived to keep in check
With a hurried system of questions and answers
Which roused in her a state of pseudo-erotic effervescence
That eventually affected me as well
With a feeling of doom.
Then I’d make myself laugh and as a result fall into a state of mental prostration.
These ridiculous little chats went on for hours
Until the lady who ran the pension appeared behind the screen
Brusquely breaking off our stupid idyll.
Those contortions of a petitioner at the gates of heaven
And those catastrophes which so wore down my spirit
Did not stop altogether when I hung up
For usually we had agreed
To meet next day in a soda fountain
Or at the door of a church whose name I prefer to forget.

http://www.kalin.lm.com/parra.html

I Love History. Love reading about the bygone days. Have always been curious of who could have walked ahead of me. about their experiences. abt their life style. I can go on about whys and the wherefores. But will postpone it for another day..

My love for history makes me pick up all sorts of books at the library only to be disappointed. But sometimes, i do pickup some interesting books. Latest one being, ‘Spice: The history of a temptation’.

Spice has single handedly changed the world map. The Portugese and the Spanish travelled across the globe in search of them and the place they are produced in. Other countries followed them. And hitherto free nations were annexed by these spice seekers.

Would like to share some interesting stuff from this book.

The beautiful vessels, the masterpieces of the Greeks, stir white
foam on the Periyar river. . . arriving with gold and departing
with pepper.
- The Lay of the Anklet, a Tamil poem of c. AD 200

Q: Periyar river???

The Romans were not the first Europeans to eat pepper, but they were the first to do so with any regularity. Locally-produced seasonings had been used in the Mediterraniean world since at least the time of the ancient Syrian civilisation of Mari, late in the third millennium BC, where inscriptions on clay tablets record teh use of cumin and corander to favour beer. When Rome was still a village, Greek cooks knew a host of different seasongs. Cumin, sesame, coriander , oregano and saffron are all mentioned in Greek comedies of the fourth and third centuries BC, but as ytet no Eastern spices. It was not that the spices were unknown nor that no one had yet thought to eat them, but rather that their exorbitant cost rendered them too precious for consumption by all but the very wealthy. There is a fragment by the Attic poet Antiphanes dating from the fourth century BC: “If a man should bring hom some pepper he’s bought, they propose a motion that he be tortured as a spy’ - from which not much can be extracted other than a wague allusion to high cost. Another fragment contains a recipe for an appetiser of pepper, salad leaf, sedge (a grassy, flowering herb) and Egyptian perfume. The philosopher Theophrastus (c.372-c.287 BC) knew pepper, but the context makes it clear that the spice is still the conern of the apothecary not the cook.

Three centuries later pepper was still an elite taste among the Greek. According to Plutarch, one admirer was the Athenian tyrant Ariston, who was happy to feast even as his subjects starved. When a Roman army besieged Athens in 86BC the cost of wheat soard to 1,000 drachmas the bushel, whereupon the chief priestess of the city approached the tyrant to beg for one-twelfth of a bushel of wheat. Callously, he sent her a pound of pepper instead.

All that would change with the Romans. That a Roman soldier could share the taste even in the outer reaches of empire depended on one of Rome’s more stupefying technical achievements, and it first emerges in clear view. Over, 1,500 years before Vasco Da Gama sailed his three small caravels to India, the Romans had done the same, but in bigger vessels and on a much grander scale. And as with da Gama after them, a strong aroma of spice hung over their exploits.

By the time of the geographer Strabo(c.63BC - c. AD 24), writing a few decades before the legions decamped from the Lippe, an annual fleet numbering some 120 ships set off for the year-long round trip to India. The outlines of their journey are described in the document knows ans the Periplus, a pilot’s guide to sailing in the Indian Ocean. Written by an anonymous Greek-speaking sailor sometime in the first century AD, the Periplus describes each step of the journey, identifying which harbours to stop in and which goods to acquire. His readers were the long-distance traders and trampers who serviced the ports and markets in what he calls the Erythaean Sea, by which he meant the huge expanse of water emcompassing both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean beyond.

According toe the geogrpaher Strabo, the first European to attempt to establish serious commencial contacts with India was a certain Eudoxus of Cyzicus, an etrapreneurial Greek who mae the acquaintance of an Indian shipwrecked somewhere on the shores of the Red Sea. Around 120 BC Eudoxus was in Alexandriawhen the regine;s coast guards brought a half-dead Indian sailor to the court of Ptolemy Euergetes II. Most likely the castaway came from from the dravidian south of the continent, or possibly even from Ceylon, since by this stage an interpreter for one of the northern languages could have been found without too much difficulty. Before long the enigmatic arrival acquired a sufficient command of Greek to interest Eudoxus in the possibility of going to India himself.