softly sunken

but I still cringe as car wheels skid.

We can wonder what the world would be without us

but in spite of arrogance

we can be

like the trees, from time to time

we can move

mountains with our minds or

we can grow roots

let moss grow

extend thin fingers

into the crisp, waiting air.

I suffer under the burden of appreciation

leaning into the weight of now

instead

the heart beat of the moment passes, steady

richer in retrospect

ever I can return

to let the water

lift me up

I feel small sand on my legs

one day in the ocean, passed

without contact

part of the breathing

the pumping earth.

India is a country whose complexities are not easily known. Literature alone cannot fill an adequate map; one must visit. But can we know everything from observation?

Prior to a recent trip to India, I read A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. It is a book which embodies the tragedies India has endured, summing the country into memorable characters whose passions ignite the novel. The picture it gave me was beautiful, but incomplete until I saw India for myself. Suddenly the characters were very real, their histories existent and paving the ground I was exploring.

Mistry harvests a host of personalities which are as unique and solid as an individual passer-by walking the streets of Mumbai. One man trades his performance art act, involving a pet monkey, for a job collecting hair to sell for wigs. A legless beggar wheels himself on a small platform through the streets. A rent collector weighted down by his work struggles between duty and fulfillment. They and many others make the background of the lives of four main characters—Dina, a middle aged widow fierce in her demand for independence from her brother’s family, Maneck, a young university student from a mountain village who rooms with Dina, and Ishvar and Omprakesh, a tailor and his nephew the same age as Maneck, who come to work for Dina and eventually live with her as well. Dina is cold from her fight for freedom, the two tailors are resilient in defying the caste system which tore them from their old village, and Maneck, who has the greatest opportunity laid out for his future, has the imprint from all of their tragedies reflected onto him. They learn to trust each other and live together equally, and they know the happiest time of their lives until it is cut short and crushed. Set in the 1970’s, the living conditions are tumultuous as the Indian government has declared a state of emergency, breaking up slums and enforcing birth control procedures for population control. With the country’s vast population inequality is inevitable. The tidal wave of the changing times eventually sweeps over the characters, leaving them in states of ultimate tragedy.

The characters are built of true human traits through Mistry’s straightforward writing. Each is shown from the perspective of the others, and their natures shown through a wide scope of trials. On my arrival in India, they were brought to mind again and again; I looked up to spot them in the crowded streets. Their lives are transformed by the book into an epic portrait. I saw their faces in the people I met, and the unnamed city by the sea where they live I formed into the parts of Mumbai that I visited.

I saw the slums, the staggering numbers of people, but as I was not very long involved in the lives of individuals, I never saw the development of a tragic downfall. What I did see was the resilience and optimism among the crushing poverty. Of the little each does have, he takes pride in his appearance, always valuing cleanliness. She wears silk saris in splendid colors, jewelry adorning her ears, nose, wrists and ankles. Their gods accompany them through their everyday, their foods cover every taste. It seemed that a smile could always be given. Of course, all this is present in A Fine Balance, but it is sometimes hard to pull out among the heartbreaking climaxes, just as the struggles of every individual are incomprehensible to the naïve traveler.

Having read this book widened the scope of what I saw as a traveler, and the story rang true on another level as well. I realized that the characters, although inevitably trodden down, experienced a success of overcoming the hardships around them. The success, though temporary, exists in the moment. That these characters were able to have moments of happiness together is an achievement; its termination is almost irrelevant because nothing can remain in one state for ever. Each day is new and nothing is permanent.

When they build up an empire
step over stone, I climb
Counting that clouds will not cover the ground, that my tower will not
Crumble, tip and tumble
My airplanes
My trains and ships and trucked automobiles
My wiggling teeth my
Yellow skies
Will take me where I need to go, they will fill my head
    with perfume fancies fumble

How unfaithful are our memories
They forget
    us
They go out on an errand
Leaving no note

I remember loose teeth
    squelching excitement
Airplanes in peach skies
How the Eastest World was
    to me
One woman, blue silk on the balcony, combing her hair
Knowing her reflection
    Her laugh
How may latitudes away she stood
    from me
Behind the light and quiet curtain
The sleeping air
One moment
Will return on a commando blink

When technology fails
When the words
    trail
    away
When I know the curtain is between me
    light and quiet
How can I trust myself not
to forget?

We do not remember
    that we do not
Remember
There is only knowing that there must be something of
Which we have forgot

Then the enveloping ghosts
Crash in crescendos over from behind
And I know them, they let themselves
    be seen
Be heard with cries of recognition
Before settling
    once more
Into the downy cushioned corners of remembering.

The concept of criminal intent can be seen from a variety of perspectives. Not every crime is committed without complete regard to morals, and strategizing a crime can be the first step in manifesting a theory. Speculating and committing are two separate actions, however, when the murderer is spurred by guilt and fear into self-examination. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky dares to explore the psychological torture that the student Raskolnikov endures after he commits murder to attest one such theory that he believes to be genius.

Raskolnikov’s idea is that humankind is divided into two classes: those who simply maintain society, and those who move it forward. The extraordinary men in history have belonged to this second group, and because their actions are beneficial to humanity and the world, they stand above the law—crimes they commit to produce their contributions are simply stepping stones. Driven by frustrations of poverty and seclusion, Raskolnikov murders an old pawn broker, a rat of a human as he sees her, believing that it will be a personal and contributory accomplishment. But he kills the woman’s innocent sister as well, out of necessity, and it is not the ideal feat, cleansing and empowering, that he had designed. Fear of detection and repulsion at his action drive Raskolnikov through physical illness, to the very edge of madness, and into a mental punishment of intellectual suffering. He struggles at alienating his mother and sister, rejects the help of his friend, and finds solace only with a pitiful young prostitute in whom he recognizes a kind of stubborn strength with which she too bears the suffering from her sins.
The book would not work if Raskolnikov was not a likable, at least sympathetic, character. He is not a bad guy despite his manslaughter record; he is actually extremely bent on doing the right thing. He brings up the curious contemplation of making oneself blind to reason by over analyzing, and having everything thrown out of perspective. I could immediately relate to this, of course on a smaller scale. Raskolnikov is perhaps too smart for his own good, too intellectual to be rational, but once he fails to obtain the superiority he believes himself to be heir to, what is clear is that he is only foolishly human.

The narrative, though dense, is comprehensive rather than rambling. This was my first taste of Russian Literature, and I was actually surprised at how accessible the writing was. It covers the complexities of each of the many characters, molds a sculpture of every soul, and renders the interactions they have with one another. It is the other people whom Raskolnikov comes into contact with and the constant turns in events they impress that puts his internal frenzies into context for him. He weighs and totters between his narrowing options—freedom from the law or from his own mind. The story is suspenseful and foremost it is bold: it’s an analysis of human character and the extremities which our own minds can bend us to.

how can
we go on so
so casually
casually eating peaches. They’re biodynamic they’re splurty and lush
they came to my house this morning. Soft.
They appeared casually into my peaceful life. No never peaceful there
are things like traffic and broken wrists couldn’t play in the tennis
match last weekend.
While you were failing your bio exam you sobbed it got salty.
The same time the same exact moment
each
time you tap your blue faded low top Converse her bruised swelling
face twitches. RIGHT NOW in the shade somewhere
else
she’s dusty as she squints at the blood in the dirt where they raped
her daughter again she retches but no
no
no way out just more endless hopeless helpless
grotesque appalling horrific subhuman
gore guts guns bruised organs torn dried shredded

When the train slows
I look up and hold a gaze with a woman bourn by the subway wall
One more campaign for a call to consciousness
But not even karma can slow the pace of every shiny heel
That steps farther and away up the escalator into the warm sunshine of oblivion
I think of how her eyes cut into the camera lens so that her image
Could, maybe, survive
The ghosts of a nation walk in our footsteps

she can’t lift her useless leg festering in the sand she can’t
I can’t breathe as I watch her humanity disintegrate beneath my eye skin
I can cry against the fresh car window kick my door until my foot
blooms plum all over.
But chances are
in half an hour I’ll ask you if you enjoyed the film.

Prayers are not enough
So when I light a candle and let the incense smoke twist tears from my eyes
Time is burning down, life is waning and wax melts lower and lower
Oxygen fouls into carbon dioxide
And still the minutes leak on
Drip but do not break because
There is no bottom
There is no cry enough
Until no one is left to keep on breathing
In the broken pieces
Our clocks hang heavy while ash and dust slip into
Piles that won’t disperse in the wind
But hang in heavy clouds that blind from reason
From unthinkable corners
Of colossal unending
Of shattered humanity
Over and over and over

The ghosts of a nation walk in the chasms of our footsteps:
Turn no further away

New is now, was then, is old
Our birth
Spit out in waves of lava
The infant and the ancient, tumultuous together
Lie in rocky fields grown over with moss
We dig our roots into green pastures today
That run on to the mountains and craggy timeI, the dandelion, you, the buttercup my accomplice
Until your yellow crumples and wilts
And my skeleton is ripped in the wind
I wait for the sky to tell me that time is up
But here the sun and sea reside in kingdoms
That neighbor like backstreet brick buddies
And the stars are drowned sailors in an ocean unseen

Our lanky movements turn liquid
Our meanderings in the blind white mud of mind and sky
Require pre-meditation and floating thought
Held backwards aloft from high sodium content
Only attention and ideas travel now on velocity
True nature, interpretation from intuition
The perspective of respect
Opens up
We are raindrops on the car window
Traveling forwards but sliding backwards
Against a background out of focus flashing emerald and brown
The chain chirps
We swing forward, behind
And at each equinox the world stands still
For one moment, and then spins upside down again

The constant movement can be seen on the streets, where there are no lane dividers or crosswalks. The population is dense, the houses and tall buildings all of the same dusty color are crowded together. The highest energy is at the Khan ‘a Khalili market, where venders throw their merchandise in your face with friendly gusto and stalls crowd the tiny winding alleys built with a thousand different styles of architecture. All that is for sale-scarves, statuettes of gods and pharaohs, scarabs, genie lamps, stain glass lanterns, jewelry, hookahs, shoes, perfume bottles, and more-must be haggled over and reduced to at least half, if not a third, of the original price in order to fit the custom.

The men everywhere are flirtatious, calling out hilarious pick-up lines and marriage offers in figures of camels. The head-covered women are quieter, not usually alone. Their presence brings an awareness of the Muslim prominence for anyone who had not noticed from the starkly beautiful call to prayer that goes off several times a day, and night, a lone voice that rises above the city in slow melodic chanting.

Despite the men’s forwardness, and the self-conscience attempts to be appropriately dressed, I never once felt threatened. Traveling with a group in a small funky bus we were required to have a bodyguard among us. Several times police cars took the initiative to escort us, which was more entertaining than anything as their presence was obviously only there to make the American tourist feel more secure. The overall feeling was relaxed and welcoming, very much in contrast to an unfortunate stereotype of low hospitality that could sordidly be labeled today on a country bordering the Middle East. In the Cairo Museum that hosts an immense collection of very ancient artifacts, the security was alarmingly casual. The building was so packed full of statues, hieroglyphed wall slabs, and sarcophagi there was barely room to walk around. Many of the pieces, some four thousand years old, were not even behind glass.

Going to the pyramids was similar in the experience of being so close to something so old that was almost mixed in to the modern life. The first view of the Great Pyramid was the single most incredible thing I have ever seen. We were approaching from the city to the plain of Giza where the pyramids are, right on the edge of Cairo, and on one side of the busy road the outline of the Great Pyramid suddenly rose in the sky behind a line of apartment buildings. The vast ancientness was immediately apparent. I went inside the Second Pyramid, bent over and climbing on a steep ramp down a passage low on oxygen that went far under the earth and up again into a chamber where a pharaoh had once lain. The sheer massive size of the Pyramids and how well they have been preserved is nothing under astonishing. Around the bases of the pyramid camel-keepers offer rides on their strange animals to tourists. The tourism is obviously blatant, yet not: they are there, the remnants of a towering civilization, and that is all. The masses are welcomed to admire.

Cairo is a dirty, grungy city, but I have never been anywhere more beautiful. The smiling people never fail to give a greeting; even the curving script of their language was designed to be beautiful in Allah’s eyes. It is a place, significant in the world, where admiration sits waiting to be won.

On paper
We do not doubt the opened sails of words and lines
But faith sinks in sultry muck
Our concern amounts to nothing, our hollow words
Now crowded the night
In the rising hum of inaudible realities
Worry wrinkles are winding roads
We cannot listen to, absorb
We cannot grasp, remember
So
The ideas take flight and fly far from
We pour bubbling guilt by the gallon into our advertised reveries
What You, formal, always wanted, plural
Always plural
Never full
We, our temporary lives are drifting.

The night, just us
In the far off future nestled with
What might have been or will be when
We’re closer, still the same
As sunny afternoons in the shade
Reminiscent lines strain and dip
I am my photographer

The open night alone
With asphalt spinning rubber wings
Silent steps to the end
This is the religion without doubt
Roll through the eternal seconds
The doubt itself
When our words
Are what we mean

In 1900 the idea of dream psychoanalysis was unleashed with Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Dream psychoanalysis is the analytical study of the thoughts and emotions of a person through the interpretation of his or her dreams. Freud, who described dreams as the “royal road to the subconscious,” argued that dreams are an expression of repressed desires and our hidden inner selves. He believed they are surfacing ideas and desires that might as well be conscious thoughts, but have been suppressed and unnoticed. Usually the dreams dealt with concealed sexuality, often the result from something that might have happened to the patient as a young child. In Freud’s interpretations, nothing is ever what it seems to be and symbolism is everything.

Not long after, psychologist Carl Jung followed up with his theory on the “collective unconscious”, the part of the psyche that holds traces of the primitive mind, saying that dreams have the potential to help us become psychologically balanced. Unlike Freud who believed dreams were expressions of something that the mind was aware of but unwilling to realize, Jung saw dreams as partially containing entirely new contents that were previously unknown to the subconscious. He analyzed dreams as having two main roots: “conscious contents,” reflections from the previous day, etc., and “constellated contents of the unconscious,” many thoughts from the unconscious as opposed to the conscious mind, which have their source in both conscious contents and arise from a creative process. He recognized many of the same symbols and subjects, which he called “archetypes”, which have arisen repeatedly in the dreams of different cultures throughout time. He viewed dreams as the reflection of the dreamer’s personality, an interaction between one’s conscious and subconscious mind.

Dreams clearly hold a significant part of both our mental and physical health. The works of Freud, Jung and many others show that those who listen to their dreams are more in-tune with themselves. There might not be a simple answer to what dreams really are, but whatever the form of dream analysis, a great deal can be learned about oneself in dreams, and they hold a strong significance for our subconscious selves. A good way to start is to keep a dream journal by your bed along with the motivation to write in it when you first wake up. You just might find that just thinking of the subject can make you more aware of your dreams, and you can start sorting out you problems tonight.