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update (20061203):
Finally, we have transferred all our archive to our new site! Still missing are the comments and the images, but we are nevertheless feeling again a sense of completion. (more…)

Fear No.1

One day I will understand
that straight lines are necessary,
but optimism will quiet me
and I will conclude: this is not enough!
I will start burrowing in the garbage to become surer of my belief,
and right there I will find my childhood
and, overwhelmed with hope for despair,
Mania Grandioso will take me to the eighth floor,
where a blue-eyed Angel will make me feel deeply
the existence of The Eighth Day.

Fear No.2

Standing on one leg,
until I resemble my recognition, (more…)

The white minaret of a neighbouring mosque pierced the lazy blue sky. Warmth caressed my skin. Unbelievably though, it did not come from a radiator, heater or sunlamp, but the sun itself. The cords of the string bed made their presence felt by imprinting themselves on my back. If proof were needed, there it was: I was finally back in India, where time had a tendency to flow at its own leisurely rhythm.

Sounds and smells of the street came wafting up on a warm breeze and if I was still not convinced, then India had conjured up a pair of inquisitive black eyes to confirm the fact that this was indeed an Indian kotha - the flat top of the roof which most Indian homes are endowed with, in order to make the most of the cool breeze during summer evenings, and the sun during winter.

I was lazing around, half-reading a book, avoiding the moment when I would have to put on my uniform. It would be accurate to say that no other uniform in the world was shinier than mine, for it was not brass, but real gold. Like all good, even mildly prosperous Indian housewives, I had to adorn myself with jewellery everyday.

Most women slept with the armour on, so they didn’t have to go through the daily ritual of putting it on and taking it off. I had lost the habit, due to time spent away from barracks. In any case, I had never been a good recruit because I used to quietly take off the metal, heavy or otherwise, every night, even as a new bride. (more…)

One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything - Occam’s Razor*

The problem is he’s never had any insight. Perhaps being a microbiologist is overcompensating somewhat. Looking at traces of things as opposed to the things themselves is far too easy to be consumed in. All those billions of atoms comprising millions of molecules that constitute just one strand of any helix. And that helix could be anything from the minutest strand of hair or what helps make dust.

Occam’s Razor never cut as sharp as it does here, he thought, to dissuade a remark about his lack of insight, turning away from the microscope, which isn’t all that small, and yawned.

Pieces of him in the air now. From the sound he made, the long heavy breath he exuded, the energy that took, which he was responsible for, to the thought he had; all now in and a part of the air of the laboratory around him. Interconnected. One. And individual. Separate. All so easily forgotten. Or not thought of at all. (more…)

Vancouver is my home and it’s not my home; it could be anywhere. I could be anywhere. You are left alone; I am left alone — most of the time, whether I want to be left alone or not. This is not purely a matter of disinterest, no. People sniff around for a year or more, (You need that much time to invent elaborate rejection scenarios); donít scoff, no one ever died of being too timid.

We tried to have discussion groups at my college; it didnít work, people kept agreeing with each other too quickly. All this agreement, however, should not be confused with actual agreement. You can’t even take for granted that anyone is awake.

Still, I live here. I’m alone most of the time. It rains. Rain, however, is too simple a word to convey the full variety of wetness. There is, first, the darkness. Sometime in October the sun retreats. Light becomes depressed, muted, not its usual self. She gets lazy, heart broken. She’s unable to rouse herself until later, later in the day. Mornings start at eight, then at nine and then even later. What follows is a hung over version of brightness; muted, fuzzy-tongued grayness. You remember all your most embarrassing moments, in slow motion. It looks like used cotton balls, it hums with the soft whine could have been. It smells of regret. Rain. (more…)

Afar, the large polite world of language
here, the wide serenity of things
in the ocean’s bottom where it lives
how could it be considered otherwise?
In this art in which it exalts
if the first to pick up the chisel
united in words the brilliance of the humble color
the trace of what was seen the wide serenity of things
one half is night the other half is deception (more…)

Today begins
light with

sun-scraped
skies swim

in the
distance belowing

over greens
and the

golden mist (more…)

Sinking into oblivion or holding on for a good while is a vital decision when you find yourself passing through the quick sands. The latter is preferable, but in doing so, you have to keep in mind that it’s all about taste.

If you see someone tossing about in the quick sands, you should stifle your desire to advise him what to do. Whoever he might be, he has his own right to set a liking for the final upturn in his fortune. What seems a wise advice for one could be an ill turn of fate for another.

I moved through the quick sands. The dunes stretched before me like a white immensity as far as my eyes could see. I consoled myself that the quick sands didn’t intend to swallow me yet. Undoubtedly they had existed all the time, so I couldn’t gloss over their unpleasant deserted essence with my appearance and - what bothered me even more - it didn’t deign to respond to my presence anyway. Perhaps I had to pass across the quick sands without a set destination like an accidentally woken fool or a deliberately deceived sage. I hoped that it would become clear in the upshot. But it would not be my whim.

There were white quick sands and nothing else. I had thought that there might be someone’s visible footprints before me pointing in right and wrong directions. They would prompt me how to suit the quick sands so I would not sink, but I was disappointed in my supposition. There were no signs indicating that someone had gone before me. There were no signs that could take me back to the time of beginning and that could help me to get at the tangibility of the end. (more…)

Edward T. Hall, anthropologist and author of The Hidden Dimension (1966), first coined the term, “proxemics” in the early 1960s. The concept deals mainly with how people set up personal and social spaces and interpersonal distances. One of the interesting assumptions, of which humans have been well aware of for centuries, is that different cultures have different rules of keeping distances, that is, the distance between two or more individuals is culturally set. The violation of these spatial rules will put one in trouble. Thus, one can say that the American expression of stepping on one’s toes is probably connected more to distancing than to corporal punishment. In fact breaking established social norms for distancing could be interpreted as something far more serious.

Americans have been said to have closer distancing than, let’s say Germans, and yet, Latin Americans will consider Americans as people who maintain considerable more distance from each other. Apparently, it is this sense of cultural relativity that has attracted and intrigued anthropologists and psychologists to the study of proxemics.

It is most stimulating to observe Americans, and also the various strains of newly arrived Hispanics from Mexico, Dominican Republic, Cuba and Puerto Rico, in these space related close encounters. I, being Puerto Rican, was perturbed one day, after having recently arrived in the States from living in Puerto Rico. I was back again in the “land of the free” after thirteen years on the Island. I asked some fellow in a gasoline station for directions. I had lost my bearing in the drive from Orlando International Airport to Gainesville, Florida. When I posed my question, the person became quite startled and backed off a little. But I just moved towards him making no thought of why he acted the way he did. (more…)

She bathed in the bay of bitterness. An islet of granite rock, covered with barnacles, sea snails, sea-eggs and tiny crabs that scurried all over it, stood at the entrance of the bay, indifferent to the wind, indifferent to the waves that prostrated themselves at its feet and the clouds that wept copious tears of remorse. She compared the rock to her father. Silent all these years, unyielding, unforgiving. But he was dying now, of cancer, and before he died she hoped to transform this rock into flesh, free its soul from the hardness of its core, and give it voice to sing her name once again.

All these years her mother had stood by her. Her mother was her rock against the onslaught of the wave of scandal and the wind of shame. After the birth of her son, her mother took her and the child down to the bay and baptized them under the breaking waves in the shadow of an albatross that soared overhead on extended wings. It was a secular baptism, a rite of passage to a different idea of herself. She was a mother now, a woman now, innocent no more; she was no longer an adolescent girl, green and tantalizing. Her spirit had risen and become one with the albatross. She soared like a song, like a seagull. (more…)