Moon, Art, and Me

[Photo Courtesy: Vinod Ellamaraju Follow him on fb: https://www.facebook.com/VinodEllamaraju or like his page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Vinod-EL-Photography/121288604621056]

I finally realized why I am so mesmerized by the full moon. Not for romance, not for his beauty, not for being the lone light in a dark dark night. No.

Because I identify with him. Empty himself and excruciatingly alone in the dark sky, with the self-lit stars being  light years away, he does what he is best at—he moonbeams what he is not onto others.

Art, at times, is in a sense, an artist’s ability to reflect what she sees and senses. It is also a longing, a yearning to transmit that light, that joy, that Being, which then collapses into a finite set of strokes, notes, words. A collapse that always leaves a sense of having not reached, having not attained, a collapse that trembles yearning onto the flowers and human faces we photograph, quivering into the words that necklace, into the notes that lap into melody.

And like the tides in the moonlit sea, emotions surge and ebb, dangerously and irrationally at times. Once on a Rakhi Purnima night, I sat with some of my friends with warm glasses of milk, on the edge of a fisherfolk’s boat on the Puri Beach. We were listening to my friend perform alaap to one of her favourite Indian classical compositions. The full-faced moon cradled on the horizon was also listening intently to her sing, when all of a sudden the Bay of Bengal arose in sudden fury and screamed through the beach engulfing us to almost our waist, as we thrashed and half-ran our way out of it.

Yep, there is a price to pay sometimes.

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