The learning of art … and the art of learning

I watch as the teacher’s brush flicks and glides gracefully across the canvas. “Use confident brushstrokes for the wash,” she says, “… Be generous with the viridian, and add a drop of cobalt”

I peel my eyes off the dance of that brush, and proceed to slash my own paintbrush across my canvas, willing my strokes to look confident. Having “washed” the canvas in teetering strokes, I now set my sights on the “still” that has been arranged for me. A lamp that is too treacherously symmetric for my untrained hand. And a brass ornament that sits sedately, challenging me to glean the secrets of its complex structure.

I groan inwardly at my luck, and stare at my neighbour with a twinge of envy. Her still is an overgrown plant, so reassuring to a novice in its absolute lack of shape or symmetry.

To call myself an amateur in most things art is to understate the case… an affront of sorts to amateurs of any standing. Pencils have been known to whimper in protest at my attempts at sketching. As for recreating life-like colours out of the 12 standard tubes in a box, it was, or so I thought, firmly beyond the perimeter of my ken.

Yet, there I was, blind-contouring and palette-creating… and plodding along, even when at times the perfect colour tone or that right brush stroke seemed just out of reach.

But how do I explain the exhilaration that I felt? The sheer joy of discovering that I could learn how to make tertiary and even quaternary and other derivative colours. The way time warps as I become engrossed in learning. The calm that envelopes me when I lean in to my novicehood and seek help, letting go of my fear of being judged. The sense of accomplishment when I finally manage to coax symmetry into my pencil strokes.

The small but satisfying feats that can be accomplished when one leaves the burden of perfectionism behind…and embraces the act of learning something utterly, liberatingly new.

Flocci-nocci-what?

Those who have been through the mental, physical and emotional wringer that is the Indian educational system, chiefly of the variety that slotted teenage children into two groups: (prospective) engineers & doctors, and further classified the former class of adolescents into GRE-takers and CAT-crackers, will be no strangers to the art of expanding one’s English vocabulary by committing to memory words that drip with preponderance, sound staggeringly pretentious when used, and that lends one the presumptuousness needed for floccinaucinihilipilification of the system that produced them.

Like any corporate group, your vocabulary also has two pathways for its growth strategy: organic and inorganic.  Some choose to go about it in the organic way: boring, old-fashioned. Gleaned from reading books of various genres and periods across one’s lifetime. Some choose inorganic, achieved by spending a weekend with Barron’s. I can neither confirm nor deny whether I belong to the former group and whether or not I turned up my nose at the latter. Of course, there are nihilists who don’t believe that words are our ultimate source of magic, and drip disdain,” Say, you really think knowing  gasconade from gasbag is going to save you when the cyborgs come for us?” To them, at the risk of repeating myself, I have just one thing to say, “You, madam, are a first-rate floccinaucinihilipilificator!” Bam! QED et al.

Secretly, I had to agree with them, though, that some words have only curiosity value and cannot be expected to pop up in any conversation, particularly if the interlocutors have to maintain straight faces. And particularly if you don’t want to the give the other party a chance to smirk (as a beloved period character said once), “My, my, have you swallowed a dictionary?”

Until recently.

For those of us who are in drab corporate jobs or stuck in high-octane dealing rooms where the only scope of learning or rediscovering words are either if they are given to a newly-minted charting pattern or creative expletives hurled at the unexpected turns being taken by inflation or the inversion of yield curves (I can I can neither confirm nor deny whether I belong to the latter group), deliverance arrives from a completely astonishing quarter. In the form of policymakers of the central bank, no less, deigning to use words that you had no hope of glimpsing outside of your long-forgotten and much-maligned study material.

To my old friends, the vocab- floggers, I can finally say that ‘curiosity’ words have finally found a useful economic function: the much-vaunted ‘surprise element’ in the policymaker’s toolkit.

I rest my case.

Heck, not yet. Just one parting shot.

If you can keep your vocab when all about you,

                Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can tell the difference between capacious and commodious

                And yet not equivocate too

Then you can be a central banker, my girl!

A world of their own

We all grow up, to a greater or lesser extent, in a world of their making. In some cases, they are an occasional presence, casting a charm on long summer vacations. In others, they are doting caregivers, witty story-tellers and the backdrop for one’s childhood. 

Regardless of the degree of proximity, grandparents define us in so many intangible ways. They are our link to understanding the past, the context of our present selves, the glue that binds us to our extended families.

Parents perhaps, are our closer friends - whom we love, confide in, fight with and exasperate in equal measure. Grandparents, on the other hand, are ever our indulgent allies. Parents contend with the ‘generation gap’ in our rebellious teens. Grandparents appear more accepting of the fact that our world and we, are very different from theirs and them, and are at peace with the idea. Parents grow with us through the arc of our adulthood, the guiders gradually turning  into the guided. Grandparents, paradoxically, seem changeless, ever present as a reminder of our younger, lighter selves; a window to a world of our childish innocence.

What would childhood days have been without them as companions or providers of sanctuary? And few things remind us so starkly of the closure of this chapter of our lives as the  passing of the era of grandparents. 

The end of an epoch, one may say. An epoch, however, that lives on in the shared memories of two generations, drawing us closer together.  

Falling, Staying

 

Falling in love

A tequilla shot.
A fleeting, intoxicating high.
Exciting. Finite.
Pebbles on a seashore.


Staying in love

Spring water.
A steady, unsung bliss.
Colourless…Bland…
The bedrock of life…

To oblivion

When the curtain of the Ages that had slowly closed

Lifts someday:

then old recall lays unclogged

To come trickling gently through.

A flood of recollections: Images from the past    

The smells   The sounds   from a life that was,

Whip into shape, with becoming haste

And oblivion is returned from the lost

The joys of new, and the oft-recalled old

Are trite, trifling, in the legion of the Known

Repeated recall turning memory impure

With none of the lustre of the very obscure

But the Known that wanes, to be born again

Delights afresh, as Remembrance re-owned

Oh Glorious Oblivion!

Sweet un-remembering!

This tucking away in ridges of the brain

All for the joy of being found… just once again

The canvas in the sky

The sun lowered itself into the twilight sky, spreading a warm glow around it. Colours I had never seen before revealed themselves; shades of orange and grey emerged high in the sky, and the shimmering red of the land-kissed reaches seemed to blend into the darkening background.

I watched the picture unfold; it was akin to a tastefully splattered canvas on a master’s easel- a canvas of riotous colours, breathtaking in its calculated carelessness. The vibrant shades in the sky morphed into their lighter counterparts until the change of guard from daytime gaiety to the soothing shades of the night was complete.

I sat back in my seat by the window on my flight back to Mumbai, and returned to my musing. As tiny blobs of life in this grand universe, we’re all fascinated by its mysterious workings, and are drawn as if by magic to those amazing sights of nature changing form in gentle abandon. Be it a riot of colours splashed across the sky as the day changes its raiment, or the magic of waves as they romp about. And then, it struck me...that it becomes even more meaningful when one finds a way of actively engaging with nature, and expressing the joy therefrom. Some do this by setting it out in words, some by speech, still others in the form of visual (painting, photography) or performing art (music, dance).

Such expression will unlock the doors to a new world, where everything you witness has a lot more to teach you, where every mute spectacle takes on deeper meaning, and paves the way to share the joy with others around you...

And the puzzle falls into place

There is a special joy in discovering the origin of a tune that has been ringing in your ears.. and when you've been unable to place the tune. The orphaned tune floats in your mind, frustrating your best efforts at trying to place it…. until one day you catch the tune in a song when you’re walking by! And then the tune has its happy reunion with the song… and the world is at peace again!

Or in a phrase that you read, which keeps popping up in your mind again and again. And the way it comes back to you with the suddenness of lightning, like a particularly difficult part of a jigsaw puzzle that falls into place finally.

Or the way something that's bamboozled you completely comes to you in a flash of insight.

The mind is a vast storehouse of forgotten thoughts, thoughts waiting to be reclaimed and relished. Maybe the joy of rediscovery is worth all the frustration that precedes the retrieval of the elusive thought.. or phrase... or song.

Thoughts... on thoughts

Thoughts are like soap bubbles in a bath. They emerge in an invigorating flush, ballooning inside of your mind… you can play with them, mull over them… and then if you’re not careful..poof! they’re gone in a flash, at times the very pressure of the thought causing it to explode, to vanish forever. How strange! The tiny pin prick of another pressing thought, or a momentary lapse of attention is all it takes to make that fragile, concentrated bubble of thought to disappear, to merge with the millions of other lost thoughts, forgotten ideas of a million people.

I think about a million things all the time, all day long. There are resolutions I make, ideas that emerge.. and then in a flash, they’re all gone… products of the human mind, so sublime, they vanish into thin air, many a time never to be thought of again.

How do I keep track of my thoughts? How do I get back to those thoughts that were so beautiful, those ideas that were so creative, those resolutions that were so important… how do I capture everything… keep track of every little thing that I thought of doing, revisit them and work on them?

Sigh… if only my thought bubbles weren’t so fickle, weren't playing truant with the conscious mind. That huge, cumbersome machine, churning out little bubbles of thought every instant we breathe… loses sight of the bubbles only to let them escape, or hide slyly in hidden recesses... to lie forgotten, that there remains no memory that they ever emerged.

How do I befriend my thoughts... make myself the master of them all.. and hold them all in my conscious mind, and pick out the important ones at my bidding?

Capsules of memories

Memories come in various forms and sizes... they are like capsules, wrapped in colourful rice paper, all seeemingly harmless and largely similar.  But each tiny package hides within it various remedies for diverse maladies. Little details tucked away into corners of one'e memory are just like nameless capsules. You don't know what it is for, until you take it in and understand what it does to you.

My mind is a repository of many capsules, large and small, innocuous and potent, deep and superficial. And no capsule can be unlocked at will... each capsule has a key that opens it.  The beauty of these capsules lies in the fact that until unlocked, I am in blissful oblivion of their existence. And I do not know the key that releases the fine powder of memory within. And once unlocked, the powder of memory within is so special to me: it can be retrieved again and again... to another, it just a tiny white cloud of dust. 

The keys are unknown until they perform the very act of unlocking the capsule... and the keys... ah, the keys themselves are deceptively clad... A particular aroma wafting from a nearby kitchen could trigger poignant memories of a childhood outing. A certain tune could unlock a high school memory, long since forgotten. Travelling down a certain road could trigger a wonderful memory of a boisterous schoolday excursion.

Scant would I have thought that an olfactory sensation would transport me to teenage days... or that a cherished memory was trapped in notes of an old song. 

Years of unlocking old memories have shown me that a sizeable number of my memory capsules are hidden in musical ciphers... to me, listening to music is  to be transported to a tranquil world of unlocked capsules and puffs of memory released into  my conscious mind. Not all capsules bring happy memories though... which is why I vehemently block out certain pieces of music or avoid some fragrances. 

Some capsules are memorable... cherished... like the olfactory trigger that takes me back to middle school days and bathes me every time in reclaimed joys of childhood. Or the tune that brings back first days in college, and how I met my best friends...And then, there are those elusive capsules of memory that I try in vain to unlock.. but which are stubborn and unyielding... 

The happy memories are safe in their capsules... to be unlocked and to be relived as I wish. Atleast there are some treasures that are only mine, never to be taken away... 

The mind needs but a trigger to reflect...

It takes a certain type of trigger for a person to truly appreciate the real wonders of the world. With due respect to the things that I mention further down in this sentence: to me, magic is not the rabbit that pops out of the performer's hat, nor is wonderment induced by architectural marvels;  it's the miracle of the human body's healing process that is truly wonderful. And healing is not just about the tissues that spring back together, or the parted skin that inch together again, or even the nerves that snap back, restoring feeling... it's the healing that happens in the mind that's just as marvellous. 

Recovering from the injury to my foot has opened up a whole new dimension in my thoughts. And I'm now more aware of the orchestra of muscle, bone, tissue and skin that make the music of movement possible. When I started learning to walk as a child, I was too little to understand all the wonderful complexity... now I now exactly what I have been taking for granted.

 Just as in every effort involving more than one party, faith in each other is the starting point. My first lesson in re-walking: Walking is an act of mutual trust between feet. 

I couldn't begin to move until my uninjured foot recovered its faith in the injured foot's ability to contribute to the movement. That achieved, I started taking it a few steps at a time, and realized this: You never know how fast you've really been going until it is time to pause and reflect.

And reflect I did, so that I could fully appreciate that the art of walking, for many years buried in the subconscious, was brought sharply to the conscious. And as I pondered more over the act of walking, so complex in its simplicity, I realized that there is joy in discovering how you do what you used to do unconsciously.

The more confident I grew in my knowledge of this wonderful mechanism, the more I took pride in every step: every little bit of effort is important!

While my mind was outdoing my walking pace in its pace of thinking, healing enveloped me in its secure embrace... The old makes way for the new, it's all a part healing and growing!

Surely enough, the injured one gained the confidence of the other... paraphrasing our Man on the Moon - Footstrong: A small step forward for the left is a big leap of trust on its part. 

Some other discoveries: it's not the foot that runs forward that is really supporting you... your support comes from the backfoot, paradoxical as it may seem. 

And it's just gravity that makes going down easier: your muscles are more at home walking up the stairs... I find climbing stairs easier than walking straight. 

My paces may have slowed for a while, but my agility in learning to learn has just gained pace...