One of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example,'The night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the distance.' The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. Through nights like this one I held her in my arms I kissed her again and again under the endless sky. She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too. How could one not have loved her great still eyes. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her. To hear the immense night, still more immense without her. And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture. What does it matter that my love could not keep her. The night is shattered and she is not with me. This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance. My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. My sight searches for her as though to go to her. My heart looks for her, and she is not with me. The same night whitening the same trees. We, of that time, are no longer the same. I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her. My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing. Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before. Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes. I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long. Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms my sould is not satisfied that it has lost her. Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her.

Writing

Writing is an exercise we are coerced into by our junior school teachers assisted duly by their invariably fat spectacles and equally fat wooden rulers. All Bengali parents think their child to be a protegee who will grow up to be either a Rabindranath Tagore or at least a Sukumar Ray. However jokes apart reading and writing are institutions we are luckily introduced to very early in life.

Unlike most people I began life with, i.e. cousins and nursery school friends I quite liked writing. I loved to see my name featuring in the index of the school magazine each year. I would run my fingers on the printed page where perhaps a half page poem or a two page story had been published. Call it self-idolatry or whatever other fancy term, I just loved it. And I still do. I would love to see my name at the end of any piece of writing. Just for that, if not for the sheer joy of writing itself, of the secret music my words played or the fierce duels they fought, i will write.

To express myself, to have my catharsis, to be as disagreeable as ever, to have my silent fight, to move away from someone and bear the pain with a smirk, to unconsciously fall in love or out of it, to put the right words in the right place and have that orgasmic thrill, to have my own adventure, to live I would write.

cherub or madman?

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.

Why could Othello not contain his feelings though he loved Desdemona so much? Iago might have acted catalyst but the insecurity which drove Othello was there from the very beginning. Desdemona was loyal. She had not for once given Cassio a thought which would perturb Othello in any fashion.

Cassio was an excuse. Also a poor soul at that. He just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. He had no fault. Circumstances conspired against him. He was killed mercilessly and he could never understand what sins he was penancing for.

What was Desdemona’s fault? That she loved Othello? That she rebelled against her father Brabanzio and walked out with the man she loved?

Such is the beauty of the Shakespearean tragedy, it is really no particular person’s fault at all.

Iago is driven by ambition, Othello by great jealousy. It is the fault of this last mentioned emotion which becomes greater than everything else.

For Othello jealousy is like an all pervading tide, which makes any monument of love and geniality it finds in its way fall. Like a wild wanton urchin it uproots the emotion of love from the heart of Othello and crowds it with jealousy, envy, vengeance, anger and revenge. He is blinded. Neither can he see the friendship of Cassio nor the love of Desdemona.

But is Othello wrong? He has loved, he has loved Desdemona too much. He is extremely possessive of her. The mere thought of her betraying him irks him. Critics have evaluated the play as the inferiority complex of a dark skinned moor. Would it have been any different had Othello been a white man? Does not a white man have insecurities, or is he incapable of such passion? Conflating the Appolonian and the Dionysian may or may not be one of Shakespeare’s agendas, but the idea is interesting.

Reading the play on those lines is not what is on my mind. I simply want to clear the name of one of my favorite literary heroes. A lot of loose words are said about the flippance and insecurity of Othello. The love, and the almost wild passion which Othello has is overlooked. He is not a great man. He is the perfect tragic hero. He has the shortcoming of common men. He isn’t God-like , nothing of Oedipus shadows him. He is a common man, who loves his wife too much to see or even think of her with someone else.

How many of us have not had similar feelings? All those Archies Card quotes of letting your love go is as I said effervescent as Archies’ Cards. The love, and degree of love of Othello is quite another thing, perhaps to be understood only by people who feel similarly. Cupid is not the blind cherub, but a blind raging madman.