I’m happy today. Crossed the raging river I had to. Yup! Or maybe I drowned and am dreaming. Anyway, I’ve reached the bank I wanted to. It’s been a hell of a ride. In cutting off the tentacles of the octopus-like monster that had got hold of me, I may have mutilated myself. The rush of triumph shuts out the pain. I’ve to get to the light to see the damage done.

Right now, life feels good. I’ve already started on my plans for the future. Wish me luck. Thanks.

Will get back to you about geocities and pics, Fobbin.

Today it’s been exactly twenty-six years since the day I added my screams to the cacophony of this world.

Spent the day in my usual maze of epistemological quandaries – struggling with the usual doubts that have nagged my mind for years. How much can you trust your mind? Someone once said that man is sentenced to solitary confinement in his own skin. He forgot to add that he is also cursed to the company of his own mind.

There’s a river I have to cross. But it’s deep and it is raging. Actually I’ve already fallen into it. I wish I’d drown rather than make it back to where I started. But maybe, bless the thought, I’ll make it to the other side.

Twenty-six years. Did I live up to my expectations? No, my friend, no. Not at all. But what difference does it make?

You take what you get and you move on. You’re not supposed to look back, but you have to. Anyway you can’t see ahead and you can’t locate where you are at present. So you look back. And because you’re always looking back, you don’t move much ahead. Sweet, isn’t it? But, that’s the bargain. Take it or… no, take it. You don’t have a choice.

Today I missed love and touch. I miss mother. The only tenderness I can look forward to is that of Mother Night. As I cuddle up in her embrace I forget all the claptrap and I’m whole again. What does she feed my soul with under the benign watch of the stars? Maybe it is the same nectar that she feeds the trees that grow silently around me. She takes away the poison of the day’s routine. But, alas, the corrosion remains.

No. You may yet find me smiling soon.

Truly, madly, deeply,

Clementslcw

See I ve opened a web page in geocities. And as you know I dont know a thing about web publishing. My objective in starting this page was to put the prints of my paintings in it. From there i can make link to salon.
So help me Clement.

I have been painting for the last few days. It is comforting because I am developing a style of my own. But you can still see the influence of Henri Rousseau and Paul Gaugin. But only if you observe tightly.The bad thing about Painting in kerala is that, the good ones look like good paintings but on closer observation they fall apart exposing there pretence.
I and Neslie are planning to conduct a exhibition of my paintings.

thomas is a living person. crazy but a nice fellow. he is related to me through my maternal grandfather. when i was in school i wanted to write his story.but i didnt know how. so i let him rest at the back of my heart. five years ago i thought of a plot for a novel. and liked it, but didnt have enough stuff for subplots. thats when thomas came in without being called. he came in and became the insane brother of the saint who is the protagonist of my novel. i am planning to post the first draft of this novel in salon. so you will be the unfortunate one to share the mess. thank you.

i liked the idea of an earth devoid of people and 'monuments' he created by d h lawrence. it looks so peaceful, not even myself to disrupt the peace. good idea, actually a very good idea.

Oh yes, forgot to tell you. You won’t believe it. Thomas came to see me yesterday night. Congrats – your fierce creature has invaded my dreams.

‘Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?’
– D H Lawrence in Women in Love.slq

When D H Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers was rejected by publishers, he wrote to a friend:

‘Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it's a marvel they can breed. They can nothing but frog-spawn – the gibberers! God, how I hate them!’

Lovely misanthropy, isn’t it? I’m beginning to share his feelings, not just for Englishmen, but for men. Am I in serious need of therapy?

Anyway, read Sons and Lovers. It is a novel of towering passion – the story of an artist’s struggle with life and love. There are novels that touch you, and then there are those that will stir you deep. Sons and Lovers belongs to the latter category. I’d recommend it to you especially as the protagonist is a painter – Lawrence was a painter himself, and this novel is famously autobiographical – and the narrative is coloured by his visual imagination. And Lawrence also persuasively presents his pet theme of the inherent spirituality of sex.

I come here to tell you about the vagueness vexing the vacuum of my mind and you are already here with the rabid fruits of your own imagination. Anyways, Thomas looks good to me – real good. What are you going to do with him? Taking him further? Got plans for him?

Story of Thomas 2

Thomas puts it on

For the last one week Thomas was restless. Blood in veins around his head was surging with anger. Spongy meat of his cock was gorged with the blood of an unknown animal. Blood thinned inside the trunk. So blood polarized in his body and took the shape of a dumbbell. Head at one end and the cock at the other. And on Sunday morning he sprung up from the old mat on the floor on which he was sleeping with unbearable pain in the shape of a dumbbell and ran into the corner where he cooked and took a machete and hacked it on his forehead to let out some mad blood to get some relief and he got it.

Blood rushed merrily out of his head drenched his moustache and masked his grin of relief and ran down his trunk and gathered at his naval. Coils of his pubic hair soaked up the blood and took the happiness off it and let it dribble onto the angry cock and pacified it in rhythmic pulses. Finally the cock rested on the balls. To stop the blood Thomas blind blood in his eyes groped into the corner and got a tin of tea powder, took a handful and pressed it into the cut and stopped the blood flowing.

Relieved of the weeklong ordeal Thomas walked to his junk box to play with the found objects which are his toys. With crazy blood out of his body he felt weightless and drifted in the air. Out of the box he took a blunt nail and drew pictures on the drying blood on his chest and stomach. His eyes fell on a nut and he took it and put it on his middle finger. From the bites he got from the sharp milling inside the nut gave him a strange feeling which pushed him from pleasant relief into the pit of pleasure which gave a new sight to his blood filled eyes. In the red light of pleasure he removed the nut from his middle finger and brought it closer to his face for closer inspection. To his surprise he saw a hexagonal ring of flesh wriggling inside his palm and its hole opening and closing as if in some familiar pain. Holding the nut in his right hand Thomas now fallen into the black redness of insane horniness took his tired cock in his left hand pulled back the black cobra skin and pushed the nut over the purple feeling the silver lightning caused by the sharp tooth and on the midway sprang up like a snake provoked his cock bulged at both sides of the nut like a dumbbell choked and angry and bled.slcw

Story of Thomas

Thomas

Everyone seems to know the story of Thomas but each story was different so we listen to them all as mere stories and liked most of them. But every story pointed at one fact that his father was the richest man in that area and was cruel and blood thirsty. He had a huge tamarind tree in his backyard on which thousands of bats as big as dogs lived. No one could tell when they started to live on that tree but Thomas’s father believed that they guarded the wealth of their family, so he in turn started to behave as if he is protecting them, which consisted of talking about it in the town and market and throwing blind threats on any one trying to do any harm to his bat.

Before Thomas he had four offspring of which except the first-born all were female. He was greatly offended at the god and the parish priest for this injustice.. At god for not hearing his prayers and at parish priest for not converting his donations into blessings from the god, which he believed is the sole duty of a priest. So to pay back god and padre he stopped praying and cutoff church donations respectively.


After the great tragedy of receiving three girls in a row, Thomas’s father thought of stopping this business for a male child for good. “Otherwise could end up with more cunts in the house than needed”. Local midwife suggested some thing similar to castration for him and removal of uterus from the stomach for his wife. He liked the latter and proposed it to Thomas’s mother. She snapped at him for the sin of daring to remove the spring of life from her. He explained to her loss his family would incur with more bitches in the house. He elaborated the scenario where his twenty acre single piece at the centre of the growing town would go to bastards who are out there hanging price tags on there pricks when it is time for us to get rid of these female kids of mine eating and growing up like bamboo shoots after a rain and once they are married these bitches would bargain with me for more as if I didn’t gave them enough. Still his wife didn’t agree.

About this much is common in most of the stories, but what happens after this is where almost all the stories differ. Some stories say Thomas’s father in his anger beat up his wife and raped her and that she was mad till Thomas was born. Once Thomas was born she passed the craziness to Thomas and became sane. another version has it that Thomas’s parents didn’t quarrel and tried again for a male child. After copulation Thomas’s mother as always went to the backyard in the dark to piss and was bitten by a bat from the tamarind tree. The poison from the bat seeped into here uterus and it is in this poisonous fluid that the male seed and the female seed united. Thomas was formed in the rabies fluids from a bats bite.slcw

How to do it? That's HTML stuff. You got to write the following:

[img src="address of picture"]

Note that you should use the pointy brackets <> instead of the square ones I've used. I didn't use it now because the browser would mistake it for HTML and display an error.

The pic should be somewhere on the web. Suppose while you're browsing, on a particular webpage you find a pic you'd like to put here, right-click the pic and click 'Properties'. You'll find the address there. Select the address with your mouse, press CTRL+C to copy, and paste it in place of "address of pic" above. Try Vincent's pic below. You'll find the address is "http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/20/V113VANG.JPG".

So, all you got to do is type
img src="address of picture"
within pointy brackets and post it. You'll find the picture on the blog.

As you can see from the previous post, I just learnt how to add pix to the blog. Eureka!

Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night (1889).

Try this link for remnants of something I abandoned some months back for want of time. Hope to get back to it later.

A stimulating discussion by Denis Dutton of Dean Keith Simonton's book Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity in the Johns Hopkins University journal Philosophy and Literature. Dutton is at present the editor of the Arts and Letters Daily, a favourite of mine.

[Quoted or paraphrased from the article:]

« In asking how the brain creates, Simonton quotes Karl Popper's notion that our thought processes show the essential elements of natural selection: "our knowledge consists at every moment of those hypotheses which have shown their (comparative) fitness by survival so far in their struggle for existence; a competitive struggle which eliminates those hypotheses which are unfit."

« In one historical study, he reports, 28% of notable scientists exhibited mental disturbance, whereas the rate was 60% for composers, 73% for painters, 77% for novelists, and 87% for poets, which places completely sane poets in a distinct minority. A degree of insanity, however, is not much help unless it is mild or borderline; if the psychopathology results in early suicide or complete incapacitation, history does not record the individual as a creative genius. The balance appears to be: the creative genius is mad enough to be inventive or imaginative beyond the ordinary, to think outside conventions, but not so crazy that it interferes with productivity or self-control.

« Simonton quotes the psychologist Albert Rothenberg comparing "authentic" with schizophrenic poets: "Unlike true poets, schizophrenic poets refuse to revise their initial drafts, revealing an inability to adopt a more objective perspective on their work. They are all inspiration without verification, variation without selection."

« Simonton discusses gender differences in creative genius. He refers to Darwin, who noted that given an individual animal that displays some markedly unusual characteristic relative to other members of its species--it is very unusually stupid, or aggressive, or curious, or strong, or imaginative, or psychotic, or vicious--the chances are it will be male.

« Simonton also gives much attention to Frank Sulloway's thesis that first-born children tend to be conservative in outlook, whereas later-born children are more prone to be radical and unconventional in their views.

« A provocative remark attributed to Werner Heisenberg: if Einstein had died as a child, someone else would have discovered General Relativity; if Beethoven had died as a child, the Opus 111 Sonata would never have been written.

Does God Almighty have genitals? Have you ever wondered? I’m surprised I’ve never. But there are a lot of pretty inquisitive people out there. One of them, Alexander Waugh, raises this and other questions in his book God.

Other observations include that God chose the Flood as a more effective means of destruction than, say, 'packets of irresistible biscuits that explode in the oesophagus'. And a courtroom investigates Jesus's parentage, as if hauling God up before the Child Support Agency.

Last Words

Just before breathing his last, bullet-riddled Francisco "Pancho" Villa told a comrade, "Don't let it end this way. Tell them I said something."

One has to admire the single-mindedness of purpose in the last words of French grammarian Dominique Bouhours: "I am about to — or I am going to — die; either expression is used."

Asked by the firing squad commander if he had a last request, James Roges said, "Why yes. A bullet-proof vest!" And you've got to love a condemned murderer who can continue to cut up from the electric chair. "How about this for a headline in tomorrow's paper," James French said. "French Fries!"

Karl Marx, in answer to his housekeeper's request for any last words, replied: "Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!"

And, finally, trust the great Voltaire for the best lines – his response to a request that he foreswear Satan: "This is no time to make new enemies."