The End Of All Songs

It seems we live our lives in miniature these days. Call it generational ennui -though I’ve never heard that term before- or what you will, but gone are the days when JRR Tolkien would feel like a sore loser if he hadn’t penned at least one voluminous letter through the day. Blokes like me sigh softly, rather, if they go for a month without adding another inconsequential entry on their blog. But what to do? Everyone ain’t an Oxford don sneering at “Beatle-type bands” down the street creating a ruckus. Dear me, am I baiting Tolkien? I guess its envy at that man’s perfect isolation than anything else. It was still possible, at the beginning of the last century, to live in your own private Hobbiton and derive your bread from it as well. I don’t think its possible now. At least, the number of people who can still do so must be tiny indeed. And really, does it matter, when everyday I shiver at the thought of the havoc we’re wrecking on nature?
Sometimes when I’m listening to the Amelie soundtrack at night, I see scenes from a train, as I sail through an imagined French country-side, with green downs flecked with vineyards. Till a year ago, I could feel happy at the thought that even if I were never to see it, it would probably exist forever. Perhaps my children would see it. Perhaps someone I knew would see it. And now I think that in a hundred years even that imagined world might not exist. France could be a desert and my great-grandchildren dying of starvation. I don’t even need to look at imagined paradises. Right now, I’m dying to go to the Himalayas, because in thirty years, who knows what those mountains will look like? No glaciers! Imagine that…I really feel like crying. I remember feeling this sense of utter loss when I read of the fading of the elves in Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s lament for the vanishing of the natural was coming from a very different place, yet, it now seems so chillingly similar! When he was working on the book, it was during and in the aftermath of the second world war, the most hellish depiction yet of what man can do. Though as far as I know, Tolkien never acknowledged that to underpin his thoughts, I’m sure it did…after all, he had served in the trenches during the WW1. And yet, all those horrors seem so insignificant now that we are so dangerously near to a total destruction of nature, of all that teaches us awe. I think I first felt awe while approaching the foothills from Siliguri. I was almost a baby then, so that memory is more of an instinct now. And, I think of my first view of the sea, an impossibly immense expanse of water water water suddenly revealed as the car I was in crested a rise in the road in Puri. That view of the Bay of Bengal. My god was it strong enough to make me shiver…a shiver which is probably encoded in the genes of all humankind. Beyond that immensity, there could be nothing else. And now I know that the seabed contains volumes of methane so high, that driven to it by rising temperatures, that blue monarch could one day burp enough of it into the atmosphere to make this world another Mercury, another Mars.
And no, I haven’t even seen “An Inconvenient Truth”. I don’t need to see a film to comprehend my utter spiritual terror at the shit we’re in.
As Lothlorien would fade, Galadriel reckoned all the memory of the elder world would be gone with it. What Tolkien unconsciously hints at is that a new world, a new beauty would arise to fill that gap. Now its naïve to have even such indirect indistinct hopes. The world ends here ladies and gents, and its enough to make me inarticulate with dread.

Shayri II

Far away in Shayri’s grove, I sit and think of home
A dream in her wake, a dream that her shadow stole
You were a hidden across the river where the wildflowers wept their fears
Taking flight you flew on by unseen, unheard
In a cold land with the scent of streets covered in frost
Shayri did you find the lines between your life and mine?
Tell me what the ocean said as you flew overhead
Did you laugh your giddy joy, swept down and soared again?
Your jingle-jangle ankles spun the threads that caught the clouds
You picked a flower, I gave it a name
The colours that spun the sunlit gold
As I sat in your grove and thought of home