Cracks

Photograph by  Chinmay Dave

No matter what you do or say

Or don’t do or don’t say

There will be cracks and breaks

We will not mend them

Or stop them

This brokenness

Will be our stories

And the light from within our soul

Will come out

Through the cracks

In our personalities

A Million Reasons to #VisitABookstore

Why visit a bookstore when you know all you need to do is to sit at home and click a button. The books come visiting you. Why bother to walk the miles or drive? What is the entire point of a physical experience?

It is the same reason you would want to visit a restaurant, meet people in person or even go to school for that matter. It is a matter of happiness. It is a matter of quality of life. The human experience is driven and enriched by the senses and what we perceive through them. The smell, the taste, the visual appeal and the feel on your skin. Ever went for a picnic in a garden or camping in a forest? What if someone were to tell you to order a tent, switch your air conditioning on full blast and enjoy yourself?

Of course it’s not the same! Nothing could possibly replace the bliss of being surrounded by books just waiting there in the shelf, simply for you to pick them up and flip through them.  No matter which bookstore you go to, whether it is the one just around the corner or one of those lavishly pampering ones with pillars, fancy lights and ceilings and innovative arrangements of books - the pleasure is simple yet unique. 

The stores are always stalked and ready with - countless books. Simply books. The paperbacks and the hardbacks. The colours on the jackets and the ink on the pages. Think of holding those pages between your fingers and inhaling the air that a book exhales when you shut it. The ‘soft-swish-and-sharp-click’ you hear when you turn a page. Stroll through endless book-filled rows, hide behind the shelves and bury reality in the pages. The space between pages is the space between two worlds. A bookstore is a universe of infinite stores. It is incredible how many stories, thoughts, opinions and fragments of human imagination can fit under one roof. And guess what, there is always space for more.

Bookstores are the ultimate space of interaction. Silently becoming a euphoric milieu of a million cultures, places and experiences, sharing and reaching-out. They bring to our lives such incredible romance and profoundly fulfilling nostalgia. 

Friends, visit a bookstore! It is all I can say, time and again. When you are happy, when you are sad, when you’re lucky or simply going mad. Whenever you feel lonesome or need a comforting spot. When you feel hopeful or have questions storming your head or your heart.  When you want to take your loved one to a pleasant cozy place or unburden the heaviness of a tearful stormy day.  If you are raging for a cause or want to gain some perspective on life’s woes. What better place to be in than a bookstore?

The Half Door

Half a door's a shadow 

Half the door is mine

Half a thought means nothing

But you can keep what you find

There are stories untold

Half written

Half lost in time

Scuttling through the hours

And doors

And many matters in the grind

Need they be seized or held?

Or waited upon so that 

They alight on your shoulders and palms

And be etched in another rhyme

Ready to walk the line

Ready to keep the time

Yours and mine

Worth every penny and dime

And a Retort

And then, while looking for some related  writings online, I discovered an interesting retort to Bukowski's spirited 'Don't Do It' -  On Writing. A valid argument eh?

Don't buy it. This is Charles Bukowski telling Charles Bukowski how to write like Charles Bukowski. He's guilty himself of all those sins he's admonishing you against as an aspiring writer. 

You might have a natural inborn talent as a writer - or, for that matter, as a plumber or a portrait painter - but that's not the way to bet. You can't rely on raw talent. It's nice to be a genius of course (did somebody else use that phrase?) but most people have to learn their trade or profession.

Thomas Gray spent a lifetime rewriting and polishing his poems. His "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" took him over 20 years. It is held by many to be the best poem in the language - not the most popular, a dubious honour held by Kipling's "If..." Anyway Gray's Elegy didn't just come bursting out of him: he ground it out over decades. He studied the poetry of the ancients, he wrote Horatian and Pindaric Odes, he learned his craft.

In fact, when you look at the lives of most poets closely, most of them learned their craft by studying other writers. There have been a few successful primitives, but most of their efforts are merely quaint. You can't just sit down and write, unless you're willing to judge what you've written harshly and compare your work with the work of others. 

Just as Science depends on the findings of previous scientists, on Newton and Faraday for instance, so poetry depends on the body of literature that has gone before it. You can't depart from the norm unless you understand thoroughly what the norm is. You can't be a rebel unless you know what you're rebelling against. 

Remember there is and was only one Charles Bukowki. Don't try to be him.

                                                                                                                         

Bukowski On Writing

I recently discovered this. Bukowsi on writing. I come back to it, every now and then. It provokes my creative impulse. Tells me to trust my instincts more. Also, it is beautifully narrated by Tom O' Bedlam. Enjoy!

So you want to be a writer

By Charles Bukowski

“

If it doesn’t come bursting out of you

In spite of everything,

don’t do it.

unless it comes unasked out of your

heart and your mind and your mouth

and your gut,

don’t do it.

if you have to sit for hours

staring at your computer screen

or hunched over your

typewriter

searching for words,

don’t do it.

if you’re doing it for money or

fame,

don’t do it.

if you’re doing it because you want

women in your bed,

don’t do it.

if you have to sit there and

rewrite it again and again,

don’t do it.

if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,

don’t do it.

if you’re trying to write like somebody

else,

forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of

you,

then wait patiently.

if it never does roar out of you,

do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife

or your girlfriend or your boyfriend

or your parents or to anybody at all,

you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,

don’t be like so many thousands of

people who call themselves writers,

don’t be dull and boring and

pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-

love.

the libraries of the world have

yawned themselves to sleep

over your kind.

don’t add to that.

don’t do it.

unless it comes out of

your soul like a rocket,

unless being still would

drive you to madness or

suicide or murder,

don’t do it.

unless the sun inside you is

burning your gut,

don’t do it.

when it is truly time,

and if you have been chosen,

it will do it by

itself and it will keep on doing it

until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.”