Of Dreams and Memories

If you live a life primarily of the mind, seem to spend so much of your time alone that your inner life lingers even when you are among friends or family you know and love, there are two sentinels who stand tall on the gateway opening to the landscape of your mind. Forged by an ancient, forgotten race, you know that they are there, and with calm that doesn't even disturb stillwater as much as a falling leaf, you lean back, and are at peace with the knowledge that this is so.

If you will forgive this elaborate preamble, I mean our memories, and our dreams. Now it would be rather presumptuous (though perhaps temptingly mystical and redolent of alternate consciousnesses... but we are not in that fable tonight and must return to where we were) to speak when awake of worlds we can visit only when we have surrendered our selves to sleep – so we shall limit ourselves to the dreams we dream when awake. These encompass a range of valleys and slopes full of tea saplings smooth in green profusion to celestial concertoes played in perfectly silent cathedrals but resonant till the ends of the world we know – alone, together, remembered, forgotten (wilfully, for our own good, through compulsion, or through plain absentmindedness), but crucially, through all this, definitively unreal.

Memories present no such conundrum. They are as real as they come. They might occasionally indulge themselves by serving as fuel for the dreams – but like most aristocrats who do not have to concern themselves with petty concerns like being and livelihood, their taste in amusement often tends towards the baroque, even the macabre. And so we have nightmares (which are all I seem to have these days), but let us not digress. Yes, we do have room tonight for one of Chopin's that-which-says-the-unsayable nocturnes, but no more than that.


  

The lady who has uploaded the video does not reveal who the pianist playing Nocturne No. 20 in C Sharp Minor, Op. Posth. on this occasion is, so we shall assume the rain washed our messenger's name away. 

Here, incidentally, is my favourite version of the nocturne:

.

And now, two songs that I felt compelled to share, two songs which say a lot of things I am not quite in an evolved enough position to articulate just yet in the staccato rhythms of the scrivener's alphabetic palette. 

If someone asks for a sign to remember me by,

Write him the colour of this mehndi on my skin

Two weeks of intricate sepia painted on my hands

My name, my being

inscribed as if by you on this canvas that in this moment

is me

Sometimes, you know, I sense the moon 

standing by my side

Then again, at times, it is the lady who is dusk

whose presence lingers 

here, beside me.