de paris avec l’amour

#1: dreamlike to experience l’atelier des lumières! they are showcasing three exhibitions at the moment: Marc Chagall’s “paris-new york”; Paul Klee’s “peindre la musique”; “convergence: sounds and colours” by cityshake.

🌌 Chagall’s wondrous, russian folklore-inspired paintings are displayed on tunes of mostly classical music. the explosion of melded sound-vision coaxed tears, thrill and joy out of me, and it was fascinating to observe how the music manipulated my emotions – and yes, i chose this word very pointedly! by ‘manipulation’ i mean that my processing of the imagery, in the split-second that rested between the display of the paintings and the advent of the music, was often overturned by the music; an image of a woman with braided hair that i first registered as serene rendered me tearful when wrenching music sank in.

🎇 in the second exhibition, which stemmed from the premise of painting the music, the dynamic was overturned; it was the paintings that conferred meaning to the music!

🎆 as for the third exhibition, it was an exploration of synaesthesia (once upon a time, i wrote an article on this!) which invites you to listen to the colours! 🤍 fills one to the core.

the interplay of the senses 😍 would highly recommend a visit here to anyone who finds themselves in paris or in a city where branches of the atelier exist! 🌌

#2: i haven’t visited paris in many years & i’ve been remarking how fresh everything feels, as if i’m here for the very first time! then again, i was thinking to myself that even though the obvious cause-effect correlation would be having not been here in long, still, every place & experience could be fresh & new if i don’t fall in my modus operandi complacency of having been there before, having already seen etc!

there was a beautiful share i saw on here a few weeks ago, about a professor telling his students that even going to the supermarket, if experienced fully “without the goggles of habit and categories”, would make one “go crazy with pure sense and joy”. credit for this: alice in honeyland 🤍

the grief of women: reflections on Strī Parva

spent today absorbed in the père lachaise cemetery, and one of the things i was struck most by was seeing the many sculptures of female figures towering over tombs: almost all tearful or in distress. it made me think of Strī Parva, “The Book of Women” from the Mahābhārata, which exclusively focuses on portraying women’s grief and tears, who break upon seeing their men & sons slaughtered on the battlefield in the aftermath of the war. one of the distressed female characters, queen Gāndhārī, lashes out at Kṛṣṇa and accuses him of murder, declaring that he could have stopped the war as he is both omniscient & ever-powerful.

Kṛṣṇa rejects her blame and retorts that he cannot override the cosmic laws. he himself is subjected to them; the massacre was ordained, no one is exempt from death, and the cycle of life is definitive.

my understanding of this exchange is: he is not telling her that she should not grieve or that her grief is “wrong”; he merely offers her the opportunity to place it in a larger context and to use her distress to understand deeper herself as well as the web of nature / existence / cosmology. there is no one to blame or resent or victimise; life unfolds as is. and,

even what we understand as ‘negative’ feelings therefore can be utilised as a stimulus for self-reflection. i myself have spent a lot of time simmering in grief without considering what it could teach me, so this particular scene is very profound for me.

and, how beautiful is Kṛṣṇa’s revelation that he himself is subjected to the cosmic laws once incarnated! will elaborate on this in a future article or post 😊

*my retelling of this dialogue is not based exclusively on the critical edition but also on its variations, as this is one of the instances in which i find referring to multi-versions valuable.

photos: some of my favourite sculptures seen in the cemetery!