Kashmir's Shak

Starting Courage

"Here art thou in appointment fresh and fair,
anticipating time with starting courage."
Troilus and Cressida
Act IV, Scene V

There are times when procrastination serves us well. Sometimes we have to cease being slaves to the impulse of doing whatever we think is right. Sometimes being in not knowing, lost in uncertainty, in the freedom that confusion affords us, there is a stirring that our deeper un-breathed breathes need to dislodge. Wisdom is rooted in quiet, uncomfortable truths. For what learning did not preceed through the door of confusion? What new insight did not spring out of a restless thought? Procastination is often the path to that place.

More often than not, procastination is disguised in activity. We are so busy rinsing and repeating outlived habits and thoughts that we forget to trust ou instincts. As a result we fail to see beyond what we feel.

Procrastination is neither good or bad, but what we make of it. It has a bad name because it is not always good. At worse it is a form of cannibalism. Using ones capacity to aimlessly consume ones existence and potential is not a capital offence, but killing each moment adds up. Over a lifetime, that is a living death.

The challenge is when we are conscious of our procrastination. When we can put our finger inside the wound of their own addictive thinking, and find ourselve addicted to such an addiction. We woe in the mire of intellectual masturbation. A bad case of over-thinking is all consuming. As my dear friend Jeremy Preedy used to call it "over egging the custard". Procastination is neither good or ill but it is what we make of it. The struggle in the space between knowing and doing, is as old as to be and not to be and all that shit.

If procastination is consuming us, there are three steps that can open the future. Free ourselves from its empty bondage:

1) Ask.Call a friend. Admit we are stuck. Ask for help. Reveal and revel in our vulnerability not as a shameful scar but as door to new beginnings. Let someone hear our nonsense so it can vibrate through them back to us. But at such times we must avoid friends who want to "help" us, lest they infect us with their distraction. A true friend is one who is wise enough to allow us to listen to ourselves through their silence.

2) Start. Break the momentum. Lets begin. Taste what it feels like to begin. Start right now. In the next 3 minutes start to do the one thing that we want but dread the most. And only give it the luxury of three minutes. Even if we do not finish it will not matter because at best we may arrive in a place that is not here. At worst it may give us something else to overthink about. However, we may find a point of view or touch upon an energy in ourselves, a perspective we could not imagine but can only know by making a decision or taking an action. Breaking the inertia of our thoughts requires a leap of faith. But once it is released, it creates its own energy. Carves its own pathway forward.

3) Play. Cease the vanity of taking ourselves so damn seriously, Our life is just a brief itch. We are a temporary craving. This silliness we call an existence, this too shall pass. So with only a finite number of breaths, why not let the next one breathe in the fallacy of this drama. Relish these costumes. Take this make up seriously. Fix this silly wig. If life is a game (which of course it is) then lets play at being here today. This moment will either become a memory we will cherish or it will be wiped away like dust in the wind like so many billions of lives before us. Each aching care blown away in a whisper. Pfew! It is gone. So why are we so hung up? Why are we taking this emptiness so seriously?

All of these require us to be surpried, to tear up the old script. Abandon our identity. To cease thinking, but do something different. Why worry so much about our identity? It is going to slip off our stiff cold carcass one day soon enough. Why not today? Let our old self be. Let it go. Move on. Do something that is not on a to-do list. Do just one thing that makes us afraid. Sit in the uncertainty of it all. Taste the fear. Meet the person we never imagine we would know. Ourselves.

"This dangerous treason lurking
in our way to hinder our beginnings.
We doubt not now but every rub is
smoothed on our way"
Henry V,
Act II, Scene II

Nothing Will Come Of Nothing

The painting "Poetry in America" contains two predominantfigures: For me, one of the dancers depict America and the other dancer represents Europe. The old poetry defends itself from extinction in the face of the new poetry.

Dali had a vital sense of the emergence of commercialisation, commoditization, globalization and the poer of consumerism. In Dali’s painting, the blood of Christ has been transformed into a dripping blood bottle of Coca Cola. A phone oozes black ink as the mass media consume "the word". The darkness of his vision of media is in sharp contrast with the light of Christ that is signified by the candle in the dancer’s head, the deep cavern humanity. Dali became more deeply smitten by his Catholic faith as he grew older.

In the "Poetry of America" two cosmic athletes, harmless sword fighters, dance around each other like yin and yang, completing each other, grappling through the air. The futile dance continues to revolve like the earths revolutions, as time runs ticks away in the background, rooted in the cradle of all civilization, Africa. A naked child seeks to confirm the "time of day" with a stick and tries to reconnect with the sun to dial in the time. All innocence is consumed with activity and consumption.

Here is how Dali replied when he was asked about The Poetry of America in 1966, in his own words:"The greatest passion of the American people is when they see little children killed. Why? Because, according to the greatest psychologists in the United States, the massacre of the innocents is the favourite theme, the one which is found in the innermost depths of their subconscious minds, since they are constantly annoyed by children, so that their libido projects itself filling the cosmic surfaces of their dreams".

A half century later, what would Dali see or say if he were here now? What would Dali make of our digitally connected, time poverty stricken, age of global consumption? Would his soft melting "French Camembert" have dissolved into a mist? Are the new and fast growing urban middle classes of India and China our ages new geopoliticus children?

Has the "Poetry of America" become the dance of the generation of globalised children? Turn on a television set, open up a computer or switch on the phone and the world is waiting to pour in from the other end. 50 years on we are more deeply, broadly and instantaneously connected than ever before. One of the consequences is that the culture of America has soaked the fabric of the world. Perhaps, half a century on, the two figures are the new poetry of America, dancing in the form of middle-class India and China?

"Nothing will come of nothing"
King Lear. Act I, Scene I.