Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Santosh Kalwar's Thirteenth Book, Entitled "Obscurity," is Published

Lappeenranta, Finland, July 07, 2010 --(PR.com)-- Lulu Press, Inc. is proud to present "Obscurity" by Santosh Kalwar from Lappeenranta, Finland.

In his new book, entitled, "Obscurity," a young Nepalese poet from Chitwan, Nepal has published collection of obscure poems.

Obscurity is a collection of thirty two meaningless poems. In some poems, author maintains an obscure tone. The simplicity of individual word may not be clearly understood. In some poems, author lacks clear formulation of idea due to inadequate conception. The first poem tells about departure of soul mate whereas the second poem is about spoken words of soulless mate. Poem 3 is about words and poem 4 about loneliness. Similarly, poems 5 and 6 speak about carelessness and obsceneness, while 7 and 8 describe about love and death. In short, all these poems may look as if they are the most mysterious poems ever written.


Santosh Kalwar is an author of twelve published books entitled, "Nature God (2008), Human behavior on the Internet (2009), A Very First Book of Poems (2009), ...109 Quotes, 07 Poems, and a song of despair (2009)..., 20 Love Poems and Economy Crisis (2009), 25 Sexy Poems (2009), Yet another book of Poems (2009), Happening: Poems (2010), I Am Dead Man Alive (2010), You Can (2010), An Aphrodisiac (2010) and The Warrior (2010).

Santosh Kalwar is studying at Lappeenranta University of Technology, Lappeenranta, Finland. He loves reading and writing poetry. For further information about the writer, please visit his website at kalwar.com.np

ISBN 978-1-4461-3628-7

To place orders for the book, contact: Lulu Press, Inc.

URL: lulu.com/product/paperback/obscurity/11703864

Saturday, July 3, 2010

a poet

A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men: the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed—and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and, if demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!


-- Arthur Rimbaud

Friday, July 2, 2010

IT in developing world

One article was invited and published by an Editor of Global South Development Magazine, a quarterly magazine published by Silver lining Creation ry. You may read the magazine for free. "Literate Yourself"

I don't know much to say about
how the development works
but I have much to say on
what we can do, to make
underdeveloped developed.

Anyway, thank you and Happy Summer !


Monday, June 28, 2010

The Warrior decides

****
The Warrior decides
****

Yes
The warrior decides
not what other asks
him to do

but what he/she/it
wants/desires/perceives

The, God lives
in the Warrior
always

It is Warrior's
attitude/believes/behavior
which changes everything

Even the Warrior
encounters problem
he/she/it breathes deeply
and finally, decides...

and says, "I must go on..."

***

Friday, June 25, 2010

Few thoughts

- We are all prisoners of our thoughts.

- Most difficult things for us to do is not what other ask us to do but what we desire to do.

- An artist is free like a bird but even bird has limitations.

- Every body has limitations but an artist is not everybody.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Santosh Kalwar's Twelfth Book, Entitled "The Warrior," is Published

In his new book, entitled, "The Warrior," a young Nepalese poet from Chitwan, Nepal has published collection of twenty-five poems on war.

Lappeenranta, Finland, June 22, 2010 --(PR.com)-- Lulu Press, Inc. is proud to present "The Warrior" by Santosh Kalwar from Lappeenranta, Finland.

The Warrior is a collection of twenty-five delicate war poems. The book describes many aspects of warrior’s life. In some poems, author maintains an ironic tone. The simplicity of individual words may be elusive. In some poems author belittles the role of the poet. He has voiced his opinion about war by writing poem against war. The first poem tells about man’s intention to slaughter contemporary man, a feeling of anger and frustration. Poem 2 questions on warrior’s death. Poem 3 and poem 4, describes a death of warrior’s life. Similarly, poems 5 and 6 deals with types of war and selfless desire to live an ordinary warrior’s life, while 7 and 8 describes story of two warrior boys and urges for change. In short, these poems may be very simple but they may also appear to be most outstanding and poignant poems on war.




Santosh Kalwar is an author of eleven published books entitled, "Nature God (2008), Human behavior on the Internet (2009), A Very First Book of Poems (2009), ...109 Quotes, 07 Poems, and a song of despair (2009)..., 20 Love Poems and Economy Crisis (2009), 25 Sexy Poems (2009), Yet another book of Poems (2009), Happening: Poems (2010), I Am Dead Man Alive (2010), You Can (2010) and An Aphrodisiac (2010).

Santosh Kalwar is studying at Lappeenranta University of Technology, Lappeenranta, Finland. He loves reading and writing poetry. For further information about the writer, please visit his website at kalwar.com.np

ISBN 978-1-4457-9131-9

To place orders for the book, contact: Lulu Press, Inc.

URL: lulu.com/product/paperback/the-warrior/11394843

Monday, June 21, 2010

One Poem accepted by Hanging Moss Journal

Every new submission teaches you something, every now and then. Today, I learned that every editor has their own taste on poetry. The Goodnews is, one short poem, entitled, "A Journey" is accepted by Hanging Moss Journal.

So, the editor I am talking about is: Steve Meador

Steve is popular, National Book Award and Pulitzer- nominated poet his golden words impacts nearly every reader!

I always recommend reading poetry before writing poetry. Therefore, If you are interested, please do read Steve's work in his website and then submit.

Anyways, Thank you Hanging Moss Journal !

Saturday, June 19, 2010

The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin

The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely, that man is descended from some lowly-organized form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians. The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed into my mind - such were our ancestors. These men were absolutely naked and bedaubed with paint, their long hair was tangled, their mouths frothed in excitement, and their expression was wild, startled, and distrustful.

They possessed hardly any arts, and, like wild animals, lived on what they could catch; they had no government, and were merciless to everyone not of their own small tribe. He who has seen a savage in his native land will not feel much shame, if forced to acknowledge that the blood of some more humble creature flows in his veins. For my own part, I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs-as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future.

But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest 1 living creature, with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system-with all these exalted powers-Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.



Excerpt from book: Dragon of Eden by Carle Sagon, Page1-2

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

"I am your reflection"

"I am your reflection"

Where are you going? Everywhere
you go, you will only find me,
every streets you cross, you
will only worship me, every
time you will have any
thoughts, you will only think
about me. Do you want to know
who am I? You may think that
I am the GOD but I am not.
You may think that I am your follower
but I am not. You may think that
I am someone very close to you
but I am sorry, I am not.
Then, finally when you will not
recognize me, I will reveal
you who I am.
I am your reflection.
© 2010, Santosh Kalwar


Published: Mahmag
12/06/2010
Edited by: Dr. Mahnaz Badihian

About Publisher:
MahMag strives to open the borders between peoples of all cultures and languages through the proliferation of art and literature. We encourage both established and emerging writers and artists by providing a visible platform for international recognition of their creative contributions. MahMag is committed to the freedom of individuals to express their unique voices and perspectives and to be heard by a diverse audience.

Monday, June 14, 2010

Very Happening

Everyday there is something happening all over the world. People are finding love and people are losing love. Somebody is betraying his best friend for women and somebody is depressed or frustrated over something.

Our political leaders are sitting in hotels making laws and policies for the country, aren’t they? There is crisis or conflict everywhere. The million dollar question is not what is happening, but why are these things happening? Every morning when I wake up and read sad and melancholic news, I feel that there is some kind of conspiracy going on around the world.

Some news and media are trustworthy and some are not. It is apparent that not all the news media are right and fully truthful. Some events and news are “made-up stories”. Some are not.

With the penetration of the Internet, the contents cannot be easily trusted. How can an ordinary man assume something to be truthful? It is a very complex world that we all live in now. It apparently appears that a life without conflict is no life.We all are born and we all have to die someday, but nobody is interested in such stories. If there is nothing happening and there are no interesting stories to read about they do not fascinate anyone, do they?

To live fully, we have to do something and while doing something these conflicts or crisis are aroused. There can be many types of crisis: inner crisis, outer crisis and other types of crisis. I am no conflict expert and I do not claim to be able to solve all the miseries that are happening in the world. My inner conflicts are more important to me than outer conflicts. The other day I met a friend who asked, “How to solve these conflicts?” “First of all it is important to solve the inner conflicts, then only can we solve outer conflicts”, I said.

I would rather assume there are three types of things happening in around the world. These are: creation, conflicts and destruction. Firstly, we are created by the creator and then there are conflicts and finally, the destroyer is responsible for the end.

It is similar to Hindu beliefs where Brahma is God of Creation, Vishnu is Lord of Love and Mahesh is responsible the destroyer. Somewhere in this blue planet, something just happened, as you read this “very happening article”. May God bless our souls!





Published: The Himalayan Times
Editorial Column: Topics, Page 08

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Football World cup



World cup has begun.
and millions will run
to watch, love, expect,
praise, bet, predict

…the winning team

Nobody can
predict
            who will be the winner

what if there was
no winner
            what if there was no game

are we controlled by media?
            It seems that someone is
controlling us.

            someone has found secret
to rule the crowd.
           
whatever …
            world’s attention
is focused
            now…
in watching
football/soccer/association football

Friday, June 11, 2010

One Poem accepted by Chiron Review

Well, well well... now it seems that I am going to get qualification for being a real "poet" ....officially. Early this morning, just woke up and checked e-mail, I found an acceptance letter from the Editor of Chiron Review for my work, entitled "In Chitwan", isn't that great news? Anyways, my excitment landed me to see what kind of journal is this... and I found following information, which might be useful for you too:

Chiron Review, a creative writing journal well known in the English academia arena, came to literary life in the Spring of 1982. Chiron Review has even been used as a teaching tool at Princeton and other colleges! Impressive, to say the least!
Michael Hathaway, editor/publisher, has presented readers with the widest possible range of contemporary creative writing—fiction and non-fiction, traditional and off-beat—in an attractive, professional tabloid format, including artwork and photographs of featured writers. About a quarter of each issue was devoted to news, views and reviews of interest to writers and the literary community.


 Past contributors include Charles Bukowski, William Stafford, Marge Piercy, Gavin Dillard, Edward Field, Antler, Robert Peters, Joan Jobe Smith, Fred Voss, Janice Eidus, Felice Picano, Lyn Lifshin, Will Inman, Richard Kostelanetz, Lorri Jackson, Ruth Moon Kempher, Charles Webb and a host of others, well-known and new.
 
Visit the home page if you are interested to read and submit your work !
 

The Guest House by Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.



A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.



Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.



The dark thought, the shame, the malice.

meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.



Be grateful for whatever comes.

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.



-- Jelaluddin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks

The Wiseman

The Wiseman said, “


Expect

The

Unexpected”

The fool questioned, “

“Why?”

Both fights…

two twinkling stars

collide

up above so high



a young Finnish

women was expecting

her husband to be

wise/witty/loving/

caring/delightful/



In a lake

far across the northern

hemisphere

a curious child

was expecting

to get an acceptance

letter

from the university

which he applied



a lonesome man

was travelling

and journeying

across southern sky



Europe/America/Asia/









His dreams

Was to find

Love of his life





A boy looks over

Bright blue sky

The sky in a minute

Turned grey/black/



as if there was something

huge coming towards him.







Thou see with great expectation

arises:

desire/belief/faith/sacrifice/



but maybe



The Wiseman

Was absolutely right!

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Happenings

Love reaches everywhere,

so do the words and wisdom.

Yes, there are tragedies,



sorrow, pain, disaster,

and above all,

happenings…



without these

no man can survive;

without conflict

no one lives

on this planet earth



so, eventually

differences can be sorted out;

life can turn upside down



because all we have



is love to seek

and speak about.
 
 
Published: VIRGOGRAY PRESS.
Edited by: MICHAEL AARON CASARES

Santosh Kalwar's Eleventh Book, Entitled "An Aphrodisiac," is Published

n his new book with very interesting title, "An Aphrodisiac," a young Nepalese poet from Chitwan, Nepal has published collection of forty-three erotic, sensual and delicate love poems.

Lappeenranta, Finland, June 08, 2010 --(PR.com)-- Lulu Press, Inc. is proud to present An Aphrodisiac by Santosh Kalwar from Lappeenranta, Finland.



An Aphrodisiac is a collection of forty-three erotic, sensual and delicate love poems. The book describes many aspects of love and art of making love. In the poems, there are several poems which describe events in the relationship, thus presenting readers with seductive feelings. The first poem tells about man’s intention to touch a woman, a feeling of infatuations and affectionate desire for love. Poem 2 is didactic and describes principles by which a man develops an addiction of making love. The third and fourth poem, describing a reproduction cycle of human, and claims that no life can prosper without sex. Similarly, Poems 5 and 6 deals with types of sex and lustful desires for it, while 7 and 8 describe an act of making love. In short, all the poems cover romantic, sexual and spicy words which will stimulate readers and will act as a love drug.

 To arrange a book signing or interview, contact the writer. For further information about the writer, please visit his website at kalwar.com.np

ISBN 978-1-4457-8190-7

To place orders for the book, contact: Lulu Press, Inc.

URL: lulu.com/product/item/an-aphrodisiac/11197687

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Two Poems accepted by unFold

Well, well, well... finally, some small press of poetry accepted couple short poems. You can find more informaiton about the press at unFold, which is a PG-rated experimental poetry journal that seeks inspired 140 character (including spaces) Tweets.

Friday, June 4, 2010

So You Want To Be A Writer by Charles Bukowski


So You Want To Be A Writer

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Accepted as a member to Suomen tietokirjailijat ry

Learning never stops. You learn from friends and foes. I attended my ECSE Support Meeting this year. I came across a great fellow researcher. Through him, I learned that there is a association of non-fiction writers in Finland.

Usually, it is not an easy to become a member to such associaiton. There are certain rules and regulation, which needs to be followed.

In short, I have been accepted to THE FINNISH ASSOCIATION OF NON-FICTION WRITERS.

Good day !

A Poet's Love


Ovide et Corine by Agostino Carracci portrays the poet with his love of Amores, poem of his huge production in elegiac couplets

Selfless observation

Imagine that you are standing in a crowded street in some unknown city. Take a deep breath, and look around. What will you see? Will you take some notice of that man standing in that crowded street? Most of us will probably ignore him.
What if you were standing for a moment? You will see that everybody is moving around. 



You may be surprised when people hardly notice you.Our existence in the form of ‘flesh and blood’ is similar to the above scenario. Each one of us is standing in a crowded street and we are unaware of our sole purpose.And I understand the reason behind not noticing such men/women. The answer to any question lies in the question itself. 

Please hold your breath because I am going to reveal a secret.The secret is that we are selfish! We are selfish because our primary goal is to fulfill our needs. We always think about 


ourselves first.Some of us may argue that this is a failed theory. And I understand their rejection. Many of us live a life based on the ‘principle of dualism’. This principle suggests that there are two ways of doing things or looking at things.
One is right and another is wrong.Based on such principle, the theory of ‘selfishness’ reports that either we are selfish or we are not. So, if you are a follower of dualism, probably you will either accept the theory or reject it outright. I would recommend experiencing this sacred moment before rejecting or accepting it. At least once, before your ‘final exit’!
The beauty lies not in thinking about us but thinking about others. 


In simple English, it is called 'observation'. There are two types of observation. On the one hand, there is self-observation or inner-observation, and on the other hand there is selfless-observation or outer-observation.Again, imagine that you are in the same crowded street. You may see office/home goers, a student searching for a job or righteous education, a woman looking for her prince charming or a man looking for his princess fair, someone selling or buying one thing or the other and so on.


Therefore, a person standing in a crowded street will experience fellow humans hustleand bustle which is what may be the experience of selfless observation. And, that is good news of you having achieved enlightenment.



Published: The Himalayan Times
Op-ed


Source:  THT

Saturday, May 29, 2010

God, God, God by Paramahansa Yogananda


From the depth of slumber,
As I ascend the spiral stairway of wakefulness,
I whisper
God, God, God!
Thou art the food and when I break my fast
Of nightly separation from Thee
I taste thee and mentally say
God, God, God!
No matter where I go, the spotlight of my mind
Ever keeps turning on Thee;
And in the battle dim of activity my silent war cry
Is ever;
God, God, God!
When boisterous storms of trials shriek
And worries howl at me,
I drown their noises, loudly chanting
God, God, God!
When my mind weaves dreams
With treads of memories,
Then on that magic cloth I do emboss;
God, God, God!
Ever night, in time of deepest sleep,
My peace dreams and calls; Joy! Joy! Joy!
And my Joy comes singing evermore;
God, God, God!
In waking, eating, working, dreaming, sleeping,
Serving, meditating, chanting, divinely loving,
My soul constantly hums, unheard by any;
God, God, God!
- Paramahansa Yogananda

A Poem by E. E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence.
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you always open petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

nothing that we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility:
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands




Friday, May 28, 2010

Before Or After the Sunset.


War
Moment of birth begins with
War, war and the                                War
War of sufferings
             From the unknown names to unknown path that we may take
There is war within us each moment.
            There will be war outside us
each and every moment.
War of poverty and pain; war of rich and poor;
war of goodness and evil; war of love and hate;
war of sadness and despair; war of life after death or death after life;
war on religion, culture; war on politics and social issues.
War of this and war of that;

Who is the winner? and
Who remains the looser?
            How do we know if this is an answer?
Both sides, we are victim.
                        Both side, we are hurt.
All the fights for this land
and that land, my land vs. your land
When is this going to stop?

“How much land does a man need?”
Man needs 6feet long, 2 feet wide and 6 feet down land.
            This is never ending story

as it will continue. Before or after me;
history has shown us, it will continue in future.
Only solution is eradication of all living creature by natural calamities.
That soon is going to come. 
It is not very far when all our advancements
will collapse in the matter of day or two.
It is like building a house with the deck of cards.
The knowledge and wisdom,
whatever strength, ideologies
and dogma human has created must come to an end.
The time is coming soon
when no human soul will survive in this planet.

Whoever you are killing
on either side of war, is your own self reflection.

You cannot kill the image of your own self.
That selfish image has caused you greed, proudest
And that will forever continue
before or after the sunset.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Too early to comment


This is with reference to the article by Alistair Burt and Alan Duncan “Nepal: Time to deliver” (May 26).
            I entirely disagree with the writers’ statement “parties with different ideologies and interests have expressed their common desire to come together to complete the stalled peace process.” I think it is too early to predict that Nepali political parties have reached any sort of consensus on the ongoing peace-process.
            It seems to me that after the death of ‘Girijababu’, our political parties are lost. They don’t know how to move forward with the Constituent Assembly. They are only trying to fool Nepali people. We have yet to see wheather they will lead the peace process to a logical conclusion.

Santosh Kalwar
Chitwan, Nepal

Published: Republica
Letter to Editor


Incompetent PM

Many congratulations to the Nepal-led government for breaking the record of the longest serving Communist government in the country ("Base year,", May 26, Page 6). But that is no indication of his competence, Ideally, he should be helping the political parties find common ground on the contentious issues instead of using all tricks in the book to hold on to his chair.

Santosh Kalwar, By email

Published: The Kathmandu Post
Letter to Editor

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

"I am longing for nothing."

I am longing for nothing.
I know I am not going to
become, what they want me to become.
As I have lived fully today,

I am ready to quit if death
comes my way.

I don’t care if you accept
me as I am.
and from where I come from
or not.

I do not care since I have never cared
and these humanly selfishness of longing
for something
has caused only problems.

There are awards, rewards
and all these recognitions
are foolish accomplishments.

How can someone judge?

We were all created equal
by nature, we are all taken away equally.

I tell you, my dear friend:
I am longing for nothing.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

PublishAmerica Presents I Am Dead Man Alive by Santosh Kalwar

PublishAmerica Presents I Am Dead Man Alive by Santosh Kalwar

Frederick, MD May 25, 2010 -- PublishAmerica is proud to present I Am Dead Man Alive by Santosh Kalwar from Lappeenranta, Finland.

I Am Dead Man Alive is a collection of death poems by the Nepalese poet Santosh Kalwar, first published in 2010 by PublishAmerica. The book is collection of several dark poems written to visualize the past, present and the future of human life. The poem is mainly about the death. These poems reflect how one should consider living on present moment and not fear the death.

I Am Dead Man Alive represents ancient, classical, modern and contemporary human times in very poetic manner. The state of physical, spiritual, and rational sensation is aroused in this book. The book brings new light and questions simple phenomenon of human life and death.

Santosh Kumar Kalwar (born September 7, 1982) is a poet, writer and researcher. He is a self-published Nepalese writer who writes in English. He has authored a number of newspaper columns, articles and books on truth, love and relationships. For more information about author, please visit, http://kalwar.com.np


PublishAmerica is the home of 40,000 talented authors. PublishAmerica is a traditional publishing company whose primary goal is to encourage and promote the works of new, previously undiscovered writers. Like more mainstream publishers, PublishAmerica pays its authors advances and royalties and makes its books available through all bookstores. PublishAmerica offers a distinctly personal, supportive alternative to vanity presses and less accessible publishers.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

My Funeral by Paulo Coelho

An Excerpt from “Like The Flowing River” from Harper Collins Publishers

The journalist from The Mail on Sunday appears at my hotel in London and asks one simple question: “If you were to die today, what kind of funeral would you like?”

The truth is that the idea of death has been with me everyday since 1986, when I walked the Road to Santiago. Up until then, I had always been terrified at the thought that, one day, everything would end; but on one of the stages of that pilgrimage, I performed an exercise that consisted in experiencing what it felt like to be buried alive. It was such an intense experience that I lost all fear, and afterwards saw death as my daily companion, who is always by my side, saying: “I will touch you, but you don’t know when. Therefore live life as intensely as you can.”

Because of this, I never leave until tomorrow what I can do or experience today- and that includes joys, work obligations, saying I’m sorry if I feel I’ve offended someone, and contemplation of the present moment as if it were my last. I can remember many occasions when I have smelled the last perfume of death: that far-off day in 1974, in Aterro do Flamengo (Rio de Janeiro), where the taxi I was traveling in was blocked by another car, and a group of armed paramilitaries jumped out and put a hood over my head. Even though they assured me that nothing bad would happen to me, I was convinced that I was about to become another of the military regime’s “disappeared”.

Or when, in August 1989, I got lost on a climb in the Pyrenees. I looked around at the mountains bare of snow and vegetation, thought that I wouldn’t have the strength to go back, and concluded that my body would not be found until the following summer. Finally, after wandering around for many hours, I managed to find a track that led me to a remote village.

The journalist from The Mail on Sunday insists: but what would my funeral be like? Well, according to my will, there will be no funeral. I have decided to be cremated, and my wife will scatter my ashes in a place called El Cebrero in Spain- the place where I found my sword. Any unpublished manuscripts and typescripts will remain unpublished (I’m horrified at the number of “posthumous works” or “trunks full of papers” that writers’ heirs unscrupulously publish in order to make some money; if the authors chose not to publish these things while they were alive, their privacy should be respected). The sword that I found on the Road to Santiago will be thrown into the sea, and thus be returned to the place whence it came. And my money, along with the royalties that will continue to be received for another seventy years, will be devoted entirely to the charitable foundation I have set up.

“And what about your epitaph” asks the journalist. Well, since I’m going to be cremated, there won’t be a headstone on which to write an inscription, since my ashes will have been carried away on the wind. But if I had to choose a phrase, I would choose this: “He died while he was still alive.” That might seem a contradiction in terms; but I know a lot of people who have stopped living, even though they continue working and eating and carrying on with their usual social activities. They do everything on automatic pilot, unaware of the magic moments that each day brings with it, never stopping to think about the miracle of life, not understanding that the next minute could be their last on the face of the planet.

The journalist leaves, and I sit down at the computer and decide to write this. I know it’s not a topic anyone likes to think about, but I have a duty to my readers – to make them think about the important things in life. And death is possibly the most important thing. We are all walking towards death, but we never know when death will touch us and it is our duty, therefore, to look around us, to be grateful for each minute. But we should also be grateful to death, because it makes us think about the importance of each decision we take, or fail to take; it makes us stop doing anything that keeps us stuck in the category of the “living dead” and, instead, urges us to risk everything, to bet everything on those things we always dreamed of doing, because, whether we like it or not, the angel of death is waiting for us.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

You Know You've Been In Finland Too Long, When...

You meticulously manage your plastic bag collection.

You don't think twice about putting wet dishes in the cupboard to dry.

Silence is fun.

Your coffee consumption exceeds 8 cups a day.

You pass a grocery store and think: "Wow, it's open!"

Your native language has seriously deteriorated. Now you "eat medicine", "open the television", and "close the lights off".

You associate pea soup with Thursday.

Your notion of street life is reduced to hanging out in front of the railway station on Friday nights.

After a presentation, you finally stop asking "Are there any questions?"

Hugging is reserved for sexual foreplay.

You no longer look at a track suit as casual wear, but consider it acceptable for formal occasions. Neither do you see a problem wearing white socks with loafers.

You accept alcohol as food.

You no longer eat mashed potatoes - you eat smashed potatoes.

You understand why the Finnish language has no future tense.

You know that "one" beer means "let's get pissed."

When a stranger smiles at you, you assume he is drunk, insane, or American.

You've become lactose intolerant.

You know how to prepare herring 105 different ways.


Source: Finnish Jokes

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Before and After

------------------------------------------
Before and After


------------------------------------------
A cycle of life
travels along the time

It makes a journey
with a beginning of sun rise

It travels along the coast of universe
meeting, talking, writing, speaking
thinking, creating, singing and
and
many "ing" suffixes in words...

After being for a while
it wants to take rest

and goes back

goes back to the time

from the time where

once it started

it just wants to take rest...

it leaves the body
and soul departs...

it departs from the cloth which once it was wearing

finally, it goes to "memory-tomb"

and in there, it forgets everything it once did

during those period of time and when it stayed
there

for a while

like 69, 72, 75 ... years

after forgetting,

it takes any other form based on "karma"

in its new form,
it will not remember anything

the cycle repeats
and

repeats

until someday

it reaches to thee;


----------------------------------------------

God bless you all !

Monday, May 17, 2010

“Remember My Name”

“Remember my name”


I have no desire,
I have no pain.

The love which once had,
is lost in vain.

I have no money,
I have no fame.

The world which once I loved,
remains unclear, unknown and selfish.

Thou had to step-in
art rejuvenates this poor heart.

What had I given?
Mother Nature lets me sustain.

What would I do with desire?
Desire hardly reaches to destination.

Thee resurrected in love,
This world had once blamed.

If I would someday rise,
rise and rise
rise high above the mountains

I tell you, my dear friend,
I have no one except your love
as you remember my name.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges

The Aleph
by Jorge Luis Borges


O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite space...
Hamlet, II, 2
But they will teach us that Eternity is the Standing still of the Present Time, a Nunc-stans (as the schools call it); which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a Hic-stans for an Infinite greatness of Place.
Leviathan, IV, 46

On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I noticed that the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes. The fact pained me, for I realised that the wide and ceaseless universe was already slipping away from her and that this slight change was the first of an endless series. The universe may change but not me, I thought with a certain sad vanity. I knew that at times my fruitless devotion had annoyed her; now that she was dead, I could devote myself to her memory, without hope but also without humiliation. I recalled that the thirtieth of April was her birthday; on that day to visit her house on Garay Street and pay my respects to her father and to Carlos Argentino Daneri, her first cousin, would be an irreproachable and perhaps unavoidable act of politeness. Once again I would wait in the twilight of the small, cluttered drawing room, once again I would study the details of her many photographs: Beatriz Viterbo in profile and in full colour; Beatriz wearing a mask, during the Carnival of 1921; Beatriz at her First Communion; Beatriz on the day of her wedding to Roberto Alessandri; Beatriz soon after her divorce, at a luncheon at the Turf Club; Beatriz at a seaside resort in Quilmes with Delia San Marco Porcel and Carlos Argentino; Beatriz with the Pekingese lapdog given her by Villegas Haedo; Beatriz, front and three-quarter views, smiling, hand on her chin... I would not be forced, as in the past, to justify my presence with modest offerings of books -- books whose pages I finally learned to cut beforehand, so as not to find out, months later, that they lay around unopened.

Beatriz Viterbo died in 1929. From that time on, I never let a thirtieth of April go by without a visit to her house. I used to make my appearance at seven-fifteen sharp and stay on for some twenty-five minutes. Each year, I arrived a little later and stay a little longer. In 1933, a torrential downpour coming to my aid, they were obliged to ask me for dinner. Naturally, I took advantage of that lucky precedent. In 1934, I arrived, just after eight, with one of those large Santa Fe sugared cakes, and quite matter-of-factly I stayed to dinner. It was in this way, on these melancholy and vainly erotic anniversaries, that I came into the gradual confidences of Carlos Argentino Daneri.

Beatriz had been tall, frail, slightly stooped; in her walk there was (if the oxymoron may be allowed) a kind of uncertain grace, a hint of expectancy. Carlos Argentino was pink-faced, overweight, gray-haired, fine-featured. He held a minor position in an unreadable library out on the edge of the Southside of Buenos Aires. He was authoritarian but also unimpressive. Until only recently, he took advantage of his nights and holidays to stay at home. At a remove of two generations, the Italian "S" and demonstrative Italian gestures still survived in him. His mental activity was continuous, deeply felt, far-ranging, and -- all in all -- meaningless. He dealt in pointless analogies and in trivial scruples. He had (as did Beatriz) large, beautiful, finely shaped hands. For several months he seemed to be obsessed with Paul Fort -- less with his ballads than with the idea of a towering reputation. "He is the Prince of poets," Daneri would repeat fatuously. "You will belittle him in vain -- but no, not even the most venomous of your shafts will graze him."

On the thirtieth of April, 1941, along with the sugared cake I allowed myself to add a bottle of Argentine cognac. Carlos Argentino tasted it, pronounced it "interesting," and, after a few drinks, launched into a glorification of modern man.

"I view him," he said with a certain unaccountable excitement, "in his inner sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries, timetables, handbooks, bulletins..."

He remarked that for a man so equipped, actual travel was superfluous. Our twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain; nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed.

So foolish did his ideas seem to me, so pompous and so drawn out his exposition, that I linked them at once to literature and asked him why he didn't write them down. As might be foreseen, he answered that he had already done so -- that these ideas, and others no less striking, had found their place in the Proem, or Augural Canto, or, more simply, the Prologue Canto of the poem on which he hd been working for many years now, alone, without publicity, with fanfare, supported only by those twin staffs universally known as work and solitude. First, he said, he opened the floodgates of his fancy; then, taking up hand tools, he resorted to the file. The poem was entitled The Earth; it consisted of a description of the planet, and, of course, lacked no amount of picturesque digressions and bold apostrophes.

I asked him to read me a passage, if only a short one. He opened a drawer of his writing table, drew out a thick stack of papers -- sheets of a large pad imprinted with the letterhead of the Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur Library -- and, with ringing satisfaction, declaimed:

Mine eyes, as did the Greek's, have known men's
towns and fame,
The works, the days in light that fades to amber;
I do not change a fact or falsify a name --
The voyage I set down is... autour de ma chambre.
"From any angle, a greatly interesting stanza," he said, giving his verdict. "The opening line wins the applause of the professor, the academician, and the Hellenist -- to say nothing of the would-be scholar, a considerable sector of the public. The second flows from Homer to Hesiod (generous homage, at the very outset, to the father of didactic poetry), not without rejuvenating a process whose roots go back to Scripture -- enumeration, congeries, conglomeration. The third -- baroque? decadent? example of the cult of pure form? -- consists of two equal hemistichs. The fourth, frankly bilingual, assures me the unstinted backing of all minds sensitive to the pleasures of sheer fun. I should, in all fairness, speak of the novel rhyme in lines two and four, and of the erudition that allows me -- without a hint of pedantry! -- to cram into four lines three learned allusions covering thirty centuries packed with literature -- first to the Odyssey, second to Works and Days, and third to the immortal bagatelle bequathed us by the frolicking pen of the Savoyard, Xavier de Maistre. Once more I've come to realise that modern art demands the balm of laughter, the scherzo. Decidedly, Goldoni holds the stage!"

He read me many other stanzas, each of which also won his own approval and elicited his lengthy explications. There was nothing remarkable about them. I did not even find them any worse than the first one. Application, resignation, and chance had gone into the writing; I saw, however, that Daneri's real work lay not in the poetry but in his invention of reasons why the poetry should be admired. Of course, this second phase of his effort modified the writing in his eyes, though not in the eyes of others. Daneri's style of delivery was extravagant, but the deadly drone of his metric regularity tended to tone down and to dull that extravagance.

[Among my memories are also some lines of a satire in which he lashed out unsparingly at bad poets. After accusing them of dressing their poems in the warlike armour of erudition, and of flapping in vain their unavailing wings, he concluded with this verse:
But they forget, alas, one foremost fact -- BEAUTY!
Only the fear of creating an army of implacable and powerful enemies dissuaded him (he told me) from fearlessly publishing this poem.]
Only once in my life have I had occasion to look into the fifteen thousand alexandrines of the Polyolbion, that topographical epic in which Michael Drayton recorded the flora, fauna, hydrography, orography, military and monastic history of England. I am sure, however, that this limited but bulky production is less boring than Carlos Argentino's similar vast undertaking. Daneri had in mind to set to verse the entire face of the planet, and, by 1941, had already dispatched a number of acres of the State of Queensland, nearly a mile of the course run by the River Ob, a gasworks to the north of Veracruz, the leading shops in the Buenos Aires parish of Concepción, the villa of Mariana Cambaceres de Alvear in the Belgrano section of the Argentine capital, and a Turkish baths establishment not far from the well-known Brighton Aquarium. He read me certain long-winded passages from his Australian section, and at one point praised a word of his own coining, the colour "celestewhite," which he felt "actually suggests the sky, an element of utmost importance in the landscape of the Down Under." But these sprawling, lifeless hexameters lacked even the relative excitement of the so-called Augural Canto. Along about midnight, I left.

Two Sundays later, Daneri rang me up -- perhaps for the first time in his life. He suggested we get together at four o'clock "for cocktails in the salon-bar next door, which the forward-looking Zunino and Zungri -- my landlords, as you doubtless recall -- are throwing open to the public. It's a place you'll really want to get to know."

More in resignation than in pleasure, I accepted. Once there, it was hard to find a table. The "salon-bar," ruthlessly modern, was only barely less ugly than what I had excepted; at the nearby tables, the excited customers spoke breathlessly of the sums Zunino and Zungri had invested in furnishings without a second thought to cost. Carlos Argentino pretended to be astonished by some feature or other of the lighting arrangement (with which, I felt, he was already familiar), and he said to me with a certain severity, "Grudgingly, you'll have to admit to the fact that these premises hold their own with many others far more in the public eye."

He then reread me four or five different fragments of the poem. He had revised them following his pet principle of verbal ostentation: where at first "blue" had been good enough, he now wallowed in "azures," "ceruleans," and "ultramarines." The word "milky" was too easy for him; in the course of an impassioned description of a shed where wool was washed, he chose such words as "lacteal," "lactescent," and even made one up -- "lactinacious." After that, straight out, he condemned our modern mania for having books prefaced, "a practice already held up to scorn by the Prince of Wits in his own grafeful preface to the Quixote." He admitted, however, that for the opening of his new work an attention-getting foreword might prove valuable -- "an accolade signed by a literary hand of renown." He next went on to say that he considered publishing the initial cantos of his poem. I then began to understand the unexpected telephone call; Daneri was going to ask me to contribute a foreword to his pedantic hodgepodge. My fear turned out unfounded; Carlos Argentino remarked, with admiration and envy, that surely he could not be far wrong in qualifying with the ephitet "solid" the prestige enjoyed in every circle by Álvaro Melián Lafinur, a man of letters, who would, if I insisted on it, be only too glad to dash off some charming opening words to the poem. In order to avoid ignominy and failure, he suggested I make myself spokesman for two of the book's undeniable virtues -- formal perfection and scientific rigour -- "inasmuch as this wide garden of metaphors, of figures of speech, of elegances, is inhospitable to the least detail not strictly upholding of truth." He added that Beatriz had always been taken with Álvaro.

I agreed -- agreed profusely -- and explained for the sake of credibility that I would not speak to Álvaro the next day, Monday, but would wait until Thursday, when we got together for the informal dinner that follows every meeting of the Writers' Club. (No such dinners are ever held, but it is an established fact that the meetings do take place on Thursdays, a point which Carlos Argentino Daneri could verify in the daily papers, and which lent a certain reality to my promise.) Half in prophecy, half in cunning, I said that before taking up the question of a preface I would outline the unusual plan of the work. We then said goodbye.

Turning the corner of Bernardo de Irigoyen, I reviewed as impartially as possible the alternatives before me. They were: a) to speak to Álvaro, telling him the first cousin of Beatriz' (the explanatory euphemism would allow me to mention her name) had concocted a poem that seemed to draw out into infinity the possibilities of cacophony and chaos: b) not to say a word to Álvaro. I clearly foresaw that my indolence would opt for b.

But first thing Friday morning, I began worrying about the telephone. It offended me that that device, which had once produced the irrecoverable voice of Beatriz, could now sink so low as to become a mere receptacle for the futile and perhaps angry remonstrances of that deluded Carlos Argentino Daneri. Luckily, nothing happened -- except the inevitable spite touched off in me by this man, who had asked me to fulfill a delicate mission for him and then had let me drop.

Gradually, the phone came to lose its terrors, but one day toward the end of October it rang, and Carlos Argentino was on the line. He was deeply disturbed, so much so that at the outset I did not recognise his voice. Sadly but angrily he stammered that the now unrestrainable Zunino and Zungri, under the pretext of enlarging their already outsized "salon-bar," were about to take over and tear down this house.

"My home, my ancestral home, my old and inveterate Garay Street home!" he kept repeating, seeming to forget his woe in the music of his words.

It was not hard for me to share his distress. After the age of fifty, all change becomes a hateful symbol of the passing of time. Besides, the scheme concerned a house that for me would always stand for Beatriz. I tried explaining this delicate scruple of regret, but Daneri seemed not to hear me. He said that if Zunino and Zungri persisted in this outrage, Doctor Zunni, his lawyer, would sue ipso facto and make them pay some fifty thousand dollars in damages.

Zunni's name impressed me; his firm, although at the unlikely address of Caseros and Tacuarí, was nonetheless known as an old and reliable one. I asked him whether Zunni had already been hired for the case. Daneri said he would phone him that very afternoon. He hesitated, then with that level, impersonal voice we reserve for confiding something intimate, he said that to finish the poem he could not get along without the house because down in the cellar there was an Aleph. He explained that an Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all other points.

"It's in the cellar under the dining room," he went on, so overcome by his worries now that he forgot to be pompous. "It's mine -- mine. I discovered it when I was a child, all by myself. The cellar stairway is so steep that my aunt and uncle forbade my using it, but I'd heard someone say there was a world down there. I found out later they meant an old-fashioned globe of the world, but at the time I thought they were referring to the world itself. One day when no one was home I started down in secret, but I stumbled and fell. When I opened my eyes, I saw the Aleph."

"The Aleph?" I repeated.

"Yes, the only place on earth where all places are -- seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending. I kept the discovery to myself and went back every chance I got. As a child, I did not foresee that this privilege was granted me so that later I could write the poem. Zunino and Zungri will not strip me of what's mine -- no, and a thousand times no! Legal code in hand, Doctor Zunni will prove that my Aleph is inalienable."

I tried to reason with him. "But isn't the cellar very dark?" I said.

"Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too."

"You wait there. I'll be right over to see it."

I hung before he could say no. The full knowledge of a fact sometimes enables you to see all at once many supporting but previously unsuspected things. It amazed me not to have suspected until that moment that Carlos Argentino was a madman. As were all the Viterbos, when you came down to it. Beatriz (I myself often say it) was a woman, a child, with almost uncanny powers of clairvoyance, but forgetfulness, distractions, contempt, and a streak of cruelty were also in her, and perhaps these called for a pathological explanation. Carlos Argentino's madness filled me with spiteful elation. Deep down, we had always detested each other.

On Garay Street, the maid asked me kindly to wait. The master was, as usual, in the cellar developing pictures. On the unplayed piano, beside a large vase that held no flowers, smiled (more timeless than belonging to the past) the large photograph of Beatriz, in gaudy colours. Nobody could see us; in a seizure of tenderness, I drew close to the portrait and said to it, "Beatriz, Beatriz Elena, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, darling Beatriz, Beatriz now gone forever, it's me, it's Borges."

Moments later, Carlos came in. He spoke dryly. I could see he was thinking of nothing else but the loss of the Aleph.

"First a glass of pseudo-cognac," he ordered, "and then down you dive into the cellar. Let me warn you, you'll have to lie flat on your back. Total darkness, total immobility, and a certain ocular adjustment will also be necessary. From the floor, you must focus your eyes on the nineteenth step. Once I leave you, I'll lower the trapdoor and you'll be quite alone. You needn't fear the rodents very much -- though I know you will. In a minute or two, you'll see the Aleph -- the microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our true proverbial friend, the multum in parvo!"

Once we were in the dining room, he added, "Of course, if you don't see it, your incapacity will not invalidate what I have experienced. Now, down you go. In a short while you can babble with all of Beatriz' images."

Tired of his inane words, I quickly made my way. The cellar, barely wider than the stairway itself, was something of a pit. My eyes searched the dark, looking in vain for the globe Carlos Argentino had spoken of. Some cases of empty bottles and some canvas sacks cluttered one corner. Carlos picked up a sack, folded it in two, and at a fixed spot spread it out.

"As a pillow," he said, "this is quite threadbare, but if it's padded even a half-inch higher, you won't see a thing, and there you'll lie, feeling ashamed and ridiculous. All right now, sprawl that hulk of yours there on the floor and count off nineteen steps."

I went through with his absurd requirements, and at last he went away. The trapdoor was carefully shut. The blackness, in spite of a chink that I later made out, seemed to me absolute. For the first time, I realised the danger I was in: I'd let myself be locked in a cellar by a lunatic, after gulping down a glassful of poison! I knew that back of Carlos' transparent boasting lay a deep fear that I might not see the promised wonder. To keep his madness undetected, to keep from admitting he was mad, Carlos had to kill me. I felt a shock of panic, which I tried to pin to my uncomfortable position and not to the effect of a drug. I shut my eyes -- I opened them. Then I saw the Aleph.

I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I'll try to recollect what I can.

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe.

I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

"Feeling pretty cockeyed, are you, after so much spying into places where you have no business?" said a hated and jovial voice. "Even if you were to rack your brains, you couldn't pay me back in a hundred years for this revelation. One hell of an observatory, eh, Borges?"

Carlos Argentino's feet were planted on the topmost step. In the sudden dim light, I managed to pick myself up and utter, "One hell of a -- yes, one hell of a."

The matter-of-factness of my voice surprised me. Anxiously, Carlos Argentino went on.

"Did you see everything -- really clear, in colours?"

At that moment I found my revenge. Kindly, openly pitying him, distraught, evasive, I thanked Carlos Argentino Daneri for the hospitality of his cellar and urged him to make the most of the demolition to get away from the pernicious metropolis, which spares no one -- believe me, I told him, no one! Quietly and forcefully, I refused to discuss the Aleph. On saying goodbye, I embraced him and repeated that the country, that fresh air and quiet were the great physicians.

Out on the street, going down the stairways inside Constitution Station, riding the subway, every one of the faces seemed familiar to me. I was afraid that not a single thing on earth would ever again surprise me; I was afraid I would never again be free of all I had seen. Happily, after a few sleepless nights, I was visited once more by oblivion.

Postscript of March first, 1943 -- Some six months after the pulling down of a certain building on Garay Street, Procrustes & Co., the publishers, not put off by the considerable length of Daneri's poem, brought out a selection of its "Argentine sections". It is redundant now to repeat what happened. Carlos Argentino Daneri won the Second National Prize for Literature. ["I received your pained congratulations," he wrote me. "You rage, my poor friend, with envy, but you must confess -- even if it chokes you! -- that this time I have crowned my cap with the reddest of feathers; my turban with the most caliph of rubies."] First Prize went to Dr. Aita; Third Prize, to Dr. Mario Bonfanti. Unbelievably, my own book The Sharper's Cards did not get a single vote. Once again dullness and envy had their triumph! It's been some time now that I've been trying to see Daneri; the gossip is that a second selection of the poem is about to be published. His felicitous pen (no longer cluttered by the Aleph) has now set itself the task of writing an epic on our national hero, General San Martín.

I want to add two final observations: one, on the nature of the Aleph; the other, on its name. As is well known, the Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental. For the Kabbala, the letter stands for the En Soph, the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher; for Cantor's Mengenlehre, it is the symbol of transfinite numbers, of which any part is as great as the whole. I would like to know whether Carlos Argentino chose that name or whether he read it -- applied to another point where all points converge - - in one of the numberless texts that the Aleph in his cellar revealed to him. Incredible as it may seem, I believe that the Aleph of Garay Street was a false Aleph.

Here are my reasons. Around 1867, Captain Burton held the post of British Consul in Brazil. In July, 1942, Pedro Henríquez Ureña came across a manuscript of Burton's, in a library at Santos, dealing with the mirror which the Oriental world attributes to Iskander Zu al-Karnayn, or Alexander Bicornis of Macedonia. In its crystal the whole world was reflected. Burton mentions other similar devices -- the sevenfold cup of Kai Kosru; the mirror that Tariq ibn-Ziyad found in a tower (Thousand and One Nights, 272); the mirror that Lucian of Samosata examined on the moon (True History, I, 26); the mirrorlike spear that the first book of Capella's Satyricon attributes; Merlin's universal mirror, which was "round and hollow... and seem'd a world of glas" (The Faerie Queene, III, 2, 19) -- and adds this curious statement: "But the aforesaid objects (besides the disadvantage of not existing) are mere optical instruments. The Faithful who gather at the mosque of Amr, in Cairo, are acquainted with the fact that the entire universe lies inside one of the stone pillars that ring its central court... No one, of course, can actually see it, but those who lay an ear against the surface tell that after some short while they perceive its busy hum... The mosque dates from the seventh century; the pillars come from other temples of pre-Islamic religions, since, as ibn-Khaldun has written: 'In nations founded by nomads, the aid of foreigners is essential in all concerning masonry.'"

Does this Aleph exist in the heart of a stone? Did I see it there in the cellar when I saw all things, and have I now forgotten it? Our minds are porous and forgetfulness seeps in; I myself am distorting and losing, under the wearing away of the years, the face of Beatriz.


El Aleph, 1945. Translation by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni in collaboration with the author.

Needs and Desire

-Every individual is in need for something. Need of love, sex, money, house, friends, family and relationships. When need exceeds it becomes desire.

-When there is desire for something that desire leads to action.

-When the act is not righteous, it might then lead to misery.

-But all of our misery will come to an end, when we are dead.

-Therefore, there is no need without deed. And there is no deed without need.

God bless you !

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Free us from sufferings

This is with reference to the article by Arun Gupto “Nepali version of catharsis” (May 12). I wish our ‘political gods’ would read it.

As the writer points out, the rising poverty, unstable government, deteriorating security situation and many more such acts of violence can easily put the nation in jeopardy.

Looking from a much broader perspective, eavery nation is suffering. Take Europe for instance. Currently, Greece and Portugal are facing severe economic problems. Even the US is suffering from a high unemployment rate.

Great leaders such as Buddha, Marx and Ghandhi among others were not asking us to follow them. They showed us the ways to do better things in life. One should not forget the fact that nobody is perfect. None of our political leaders are perfect, none of us are perfect.

I agree with the last line of the article, “In fact it is foolish to ask such questions because our leaders constantly indicate that suffering is inevitable.” However, this does not mean that we should allow suffering to go for long. We should find solutions soon. It’s the duty of the leaders to free us from sufferings.

Santosh Kalwar

Ratnangar-4, Tandi
Chitwan, Nepal

Published: Republica
Letter to the Editor

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

I laughed

I cried and laughed,

I laughed and cried,

between crying

and laughing ...

I laughed

They told me,

I am mad.

but

again,

I laughed.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Either/Or

Marry and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. Whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the stupidities of the world, and you will regret it; weep over them, and you will also regret it. Laugh at the stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way. Whether you laugh at the stupidities of the world or you weep over them, you will regret it either way. Trust a girl, and you will regret it. Do not trust her, and you will also regret it. Trust a girl or do not trust her, you will regret it either way. Whether you trust a girl or do not trust her, you will regret it either way. Hang yourself, and you will regret it. Do not hang yourself, and you will also regret it. Hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. Whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life.


- Soren Kierkegaard