Samlade dikter Collected Poems Part 3 – Del 3 2007-2011 Christian Lanciai The Forest (longer poem) 110 The Darjeeling lecture 297 Marriage – why not? I always tried to stick to the Platonic form of love as the most rational, reliable and relevant, especially in our age of planet-risking over-population. Quarrels was my horror always, and in matrimony they can never be avoided. I was once deceived and quite determined never to become deceived again, and I was never willing to end up a hero under any slipper. You can have as free and independent any number of good friends of any gender, but as married, one relationship must dominate all others, which was never in accordance with my democratic freedom soul. The final argument, that as a free man you can love the more, is maybe though the most decisive, vital and determining my fate. 1 Stuck in love What's better and what's worse - the nightmare of uncertainty or the force of jealousy? When the communication lines don't work and you are left like on a desert island in a void, the nightmares of uncertainty and jealousy pursuing you and haunting you and hunting you to death each night, not knowing what your love is doing in whose arms, while all that you can do yourself is wallowing in self-torment, like in the strait-jacket of cruelty of destiny much worse than any hospitalization; your sole comfort is that you still love her and will go on doing so no matter what she does, since no one can get out of that heart she has entered. Thank God for feminism Just don't let it put you down, that squeamish scrupulous meticulousness appertaining to the oversensitivity of female delicacy leading to the pettiest of pedantry. Forget all that and look to beauty, disregard the coarse uncouthness of the masculine barbarity and let it be replaced by all the virtues of true femininity, the modesty and delicacy of consideration and the touch of suaveness in the magic of the sieve of lovable romanticism, that alone makes life endurable by that unique spice of eternity called love. Forget the sexes and the genders, love is all that matters constantly transcending every limit and surpassing all in life that is affected by that petty and ignoble menace called mortality. Nepal There is no one braver or more stalwart and intrepid than a Sherpa or a Gurkha, sticking to the end in faithfulness, agility and bravery, a mountain people with incredible potentials and one of the poorest countries in the world, torn asunder by a fatal civil war 2 of ten long years because of foreign powers intervening, arming terrorists and anarchists with weapons to be able to impose dictatorship themselves. But Nepal is and always was the freest of all Asian nations, which the British wisely did respect and therefore never colonized but left it wild to only take into their service individuals, unconquerable Gurkhas and invaluable Sherpas, best of mountain fighters, first to climb Mount Everest, fantastic representatives of this so hearty people, hot and hard but nice and friendly, and, like every mountain people, warmer, more reliable and loyal in their hearts as if they were more human in the hardship of their mountain wisdom than all plain and ordinary human beings. Love simplicity When the cold attacks you savagely with deep freeze, let your love get warm and warm you up. When dampness and humidity strikes deep with roughness in your limbs, let sunshine love with comfort dry you up. When darkness looms assailing you increasingly and overwhelmingly in winter days, let love loose in your soul to light you up. When your love is away on distant journeys and adventures and you never know if you at all will see her yet again, let her in spirit in your dreams appear, just think of her, and she will never leave you, and thus will your love continue to remain with you in constant dreams as long as you just keep on loving. Another love definition Love is dying without dying, an eternal pain of pure delight, a torment utterly enjoyable forever 3 and a mortal fall into an endlessness of darkness into the abysmal death of life reborn to start again from the beginning this delightful craze of sado-masochism which hurts the more for its endurance and the deeper, harder and more painful for its spirituality, sincerity and honesty. The greatest lover was Othello for his jealousy, no Romeo, no Tristan knew love better than the Moor who knew it was worth dying for it and was quite consistent in so doing. So do never cry, complain or treat love negatively, but endure it and enjoy it for its sufferings, for it is certainly the greatest privilege in life that man was offered for his bold decision to at all take up this haphazard existence to endure and suffer for it with his love. The anti-modernist Is it wrong to be a realist? Is clarity to be condemned, since you are not allowed to be outspoken, as if direct honesty was something negative, while shadowy and fishy innuendos were preferrable. Is downright classicism condemnable then and no more allowed? What is poetry and verbal art if not free licence for expressive sumptuousness and loose imaginative speculation? If you give it then some comprehensible and realistic form and use some relevant correct syntax and grammar, so that it approaches something of a style, is that then to despize, denounce and scrap, since it is not in line with Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett? What's wrong with an obnoxious anti-modernist is that he is so shockingly a so upsetting radical in the completely wrong direction, since he breaks with fashion, tendencies and ruling nonsense and rejects the dissolution of all forms and language, heading strong against the stream by being clearcut and demanding realism and comprehensibility; and is it then so damnably completely wrong? 4 Impressions of India This fascinating continent, more populous than Europe is still dominated by the oldest of the world's religions quite unbrokenly since three millennia at least, making her the oldest intact culture in our world, enriching it in the historic process with one world religion more: the high morale, integrity and wisdom of the common sense philosophy of Buddhism, while at times disturbed by more intolerant intruders like the Muslims and the Christians, doing what they could to devastate the history, the culture and traditions of the ancient "heathen" India, which instead absorbed them to enrich her culture with them, adding constantly more faiths, more languages and cultures, more philosophies and outlooks on the world and life, thus constantly remaining basically tolerant and universal, which repeatedly her history has proved. In modern times there has been a considerable renaissance of Hinduism heralded by Romain Rolland, who introduced in Europe Ramakrishna with his followers Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore. The latter gave a universal voice to Hindu tolerance and wisdom cordially embracing every faith and heralding a world community and unity, like in a university of common faiths and knowledge, cultures, shared philosophies and mutual creativeness. Not only Kipling, Talbot Mundy, M.M.Kaye, John Masters and Jim Corbett, first to introduce national parks of wildlife, owed their lives to India, but Mahatma Gandhi was an Indian too, accomplishing political reforms and miracles by obstinate non-violence. One of his pupils was the Japanese monk Nichidatsu Fujii, rebelling against society, career and martial life by sticking to a beggar's life and making it his mission to erect peace stupas all around the world, especially in India, as a demonstration against nuclear weapons, having seen Hiroshima and Nagasaki, making it his goal to have all nuclear weapons in the world dismantled. He was active to the end, a hundred years old, when he passed away some twenty years ago, but his Peace Stupas go on rising everywhere, in Africa, in South America, in London, India and all over Asia, crying out the urgent message universally: "Peace, please!" Dharamshala Blessed haven of Tibetan refugees, they come to you through snows and hardships across icy passes of six thousand meters shot at in the process by insentient China soldiers, 5 as if the oppression in Tibet was not enough, but escapees must even have to run the gauntlet across the austerity of the forbidding Himalayas to in Dharamshala, finally, find freedom and a human treatment with full dignity as ordinary faithful human and compassionate Tibetans. During the horrific holocaust against the Jews they still in concentration death camps found the means to make the best af a bad bargain, stay alive, survive the Nazis and in places even make rebellion, like in Sobibor, Treblinka and the Warsaw Ghetto, and in later days look back with some nostalgic tenderness to those horrific challenge days, remember the communities and even love that strange existence of extreme conditions. In the same way the Tibetans face the challenge, make the best of it and never give up faith or spirit, certain that one day again Tibet will be set free, while nothing can redeem the Chinese occupation force from facing the severest accusations of the facts of history. Meanwhile, the thriving paradise of Dharamshala keeps on working hard with meditation and enlightenment and spreading world wide the immortal message of the sacredness of freedom, truth, integrity and wisdom, spiting all the mortal rotten lies of all autocracies in history. Kashmir War-torn paradise of inexpressible beauty with the friendliest people in the world, embracing any stranger with their love and overwhelmingly presenting to them this fairy tale of beauty and reality, of magic lakes of endless peace and mountains towering around them to enshrine the loveliest realm of India, torn asunder by politics, civil war and meaningless atrocities since 60 years with countless innocents as victims, like in any war resulting from politics, that established ignorance called power only causing miserable havoc by the irresponsibility of humankind.