062 - Perpetually Receding Horizons
This letter comes from an island busy claiming things from the sea as if it were its own. Is it a debt or a loot in plain sight? And what exactly it trying to reclaim? What was it that was lost? A city crawling its way to an ever receding horizon. Writing from its expanding coastline and receding life, this is Bombay Daak.
...
However.
In The Modern Age.
The Universe was Expanding at an Accelerating Rate—
Making The Idea of Getting Home All but Impossible.
The Horizon was Perpetually Receding.
Home was Slipping Forever Beyond Reach.
Where Home Once was—
Only Television Remained.
The Suitors.
Excerpt from and excerpt of writer James A. Beard’s No Man, a free-prose verse novel.
This is a fascinating piece of writing. Every stanza, right from the start1 tells a story within itself while carrying the larger narrative forward. An idea of something lost, finding oneself, and sitting down and doing the work, of identity and the feeling of it all being just out grasp, never within reach. Experimental, yet engaging, and often entertaining, it is littered with modern truths that coat age old feelings with the most beautiful phrases.
Time Spent Well
High Expectations “..A lot of people say, “If you want to be happy, don’t have expectations.” And I think that’s a really good way to be unhappy for the rest of your life…”
Why Don’t We Have More Good Things? ‘Unfortunately enough, getting these cool things usually involves someone, somewhere, to…actually start doing them. That’s where good things come from, just some guys who choose to do them.’
Reading Well ‘And after finishing a very good book one is driven a little mad, forced to return from a world that no one nearby has witnessed. I have some suggestions on how to read well. If they are forceful it is simply because they are mine. Take what you wish.’
Time Spent Elsewhere
Sunday Matinee
Always drawn to the Middle East some for some reason2, and I am watching Falafel this weekend, a 2006 film following a night of Tou (Toufic) in post war Lebanon. Streaming on Netflix at a much better quality than this trailer.
Kabooliwalla
A short story 3
The three of us kids stare across the bay to where the setting sun’s turned the cliff dark. On the edge of the cliff sits an old mansion that didn’t fall into the sea with the others: the Cliffwatch. Its turrets and cupolas are wrapped with steel cables from the broken bridge. Looks like metal vines grabbed and tethered the building to the solid part of the jutting cliff.
Salsette Shutter Stories
From a night walk in the by-lanes of Khar Bandra
PS: Do you prefer if these issues arrived in the morning every Sunday? Let me know.
Odysseus was Re-Born in The Latter Half of The Twentieth Century.
He Listened to Rock’n’Roll as a Teenager—
though his Father Told him Not To—
Explored his Consciousness with Drugs—
and Wrote Poetry.
Other Daak Issues from Arabia - Arabian Psalm Trees and Summer
Back in its first season, what I wanted to share the most on Daak were all the short stories I had been reading. As the pandemic eased, and life got in the way, the time spent reading them reduced and faded from the schedules and plans. I decided early this year to change that, and seek and read more and share the ones that I really like here. This section dedicated to the first story I fell in love with, Kabuliwala.