Dibyendu's WallScript

B ā m in Bengali can mean “buttocks.” B ā m can also mean “ointment.” Again, B ā m means “leftist.” The B ā m I am speaking of here is the vagabond, the eccentric wanderer, or even the beggar. When this sense of B ā m was joined with Dharma (“religion”), there arose, in the 1950s, a major literary revolution in America—the land of “un-leftist” culture.   We know that in any country, a revolution has several centers. This one had three: Greenwich Village (New York City), Venice West (Southern California), and North Beach (San Francisco). A group of young men in their mid-twenties—followers of Zen Buddhism, believers in a Bohemian way of life, committed to writing literature for personal ends. Drugs, jazz, sexuality, and intellectualism—the literary historians named this clan of poets and writers The Beat Generation.   Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac—these poets and writers of the Beat Generation created quite a stir in American social lif...

All that is living and all that is dead lie here as silent as the Supreme Self.   Seventeen human bodies are burning. Not on seventeen pyres. Like winter’s small coils of fire, the corpses have been divided into many parts and are burning apart, giving off heat in silence.   So many bodies, burning in a thousand pieces—yet no crowd has gathered to bid them farewell. Nowhere around is there any loud weeping or sniffling.   There is no one here. No one anywhere along the riverbank. Not a single soul. No one lives here. Not a single one. Here the dead have no right to flare with sound. A soundless, hushed everywhere. In this warrant of secrecy the flares of fire climb into the sky without a sound, to offer the dead their final salute in silence.   All around—a gleaming darkness. No one knows where the invisible eyes keep watch. Someone spits from far away. Someone whispers: “Not a single bone must remain whole. Grind them to pulp. Then cover it with sand on the river sh...

By melancholy , I understand a vast ocean of solitude. Perhaps an idealistic man, living in an urban civilization, has no other destiny than to become the bondslave of melancholy. Urban society itself is a kind of illusion-machine. Some of these illusions drag a man forward like the wheel of a treadmill, forever spinning. This horse-race continues through life. Like the midnight summons of a ghostly call, it swallows him whole, devouring him unawares. He does not notice when, in half-sleep, he unlatches the door and wanders outside—only to be discovered near the pond at dawn, half-dead.   The intelligent one, however, bolts his door at night in fear of that ghostly call and throws the key out the window. He does not belong to melancholy. Likely he dwells in the crowd—perhaps a government clerk or a paunchy tradesman. His life never wanders beyond the threshold of his house. Most people of the world fall into this group.   In my childhood school, there was an old-fashioned teac...

Shamit was astonished. As if cool white snow were falling from the sky. On the ground people’s minds were unwell. Everything seemed to be congealing. The field where Shamit stood was ringed by ancient banyan trees. In the slanting late afternoon, the sweat of those trees slid down into the soil and soaked the grass.   A flock of crows was driving a neelkanth—an Indian roller—before them. The colored bird, exhausted in flight, found the crows arrowing in with a hiss. From the left one crow jabbed its beak into the roller’s ribs; another clamped its throat like a pair of tongs. Staggering, the neelkanth began dropping toward the earth—only to snag upon a leafless branch. Four or five crows now circled and penned it in. Trapped in a wheel of assault, it suffered peck after peck until, at last, it fell lifeless onto the world’s wet breast. Such a cruel falling for so beautiful a bird left Shamit stunned. The snows truly were descending upon the earth, tireless.   Shamit began to s...

The world needs cinema now more than ever. It may be the last important form of resistance to the deteriorating world in which we live. In dealing with borders, boundaries, the mixing of languages and cultures today, to seek a new humanism, a new way. ~ Theo Angelopoulos   A faint blue—at times the boundless sky, at times the undulating surge of sea-waves, mist-filled horizons stretching into infinity—and a yellow that sometimes deepens into a reddish hue: a massive ship, a railway carriage, an old house, a boulevard, a cheap restaurant in the city, a bustling street. These few colors float with stoic indifference through Theo Angelopoulos’s parables, in his frames, in his worlds of social life.   There is, in color, some secret warmth of relationship. Blue—tranquil and cool—set against yellow—violent, fragmented—projects knowledge at the core of their dialectic. A scientist will tell you: at forty-thousand Kelvin, matter appears blue to the human eye; at only fifty-five hundr...