The Rich Man and the Parrot: Notes

Parrots are ambiguous animals (bird). They are beautiful, full of colors,great to look at. Spectacular, literally! Humans love them, because they look beautiful, and most importantly, they can mimic human speech. Just finished reading a re-telling of a Persian tale by Suzan Nadimi called The Rich Man and the Parrot. The story was originally included in Rumi's Masnavi.

The high point of the story is, when the parrot tells his master who has so long denied him his freedom, "When my brothers held their tongues, they told me that the sweetness of my tongue was holding me captive. And when they froze and fell to the earth, they showed me the way to freedom. I froze and fell, too, pretending to be dead. You opened my cage only when you thought I could no longer fly away.

Great! Materials for my un-finished poem, I guess?

But, the parrot did not have any sisters! Brotherhood of Parrots! Huh! Seems like material waiting for my intervention too!

While this dissertation is in my life, and I am depending primarily on my Teaching Fellowship to feed me, I will have to spend every alternate day with prose and poetry. Ideally, I would loved to devote the morning to poetry and the evening to prose, with all the readings tucked in between. But, I can't! Since the dissertation is looming large, and the funding is exhausting itself, and everyday, I am moving closer to that day when I won't have any left at all. At this stage in my life, I can't deny the enormous ways in which being in academia has helped me. All those weeks of trying to yank out academic papers have done something hugely important for me. It has taught me that it ain't a work of art unless you have spilled some of your own blood on it or wrenched your guts!

So today was the poetry day. Actually this weekend is going to be a poetry weekend majorly. Because I am revising one of the poems, and I want to send it to one of my primary readers by the end of this weekend!

And finally I have begun to revise the draft of the first chapter of my diss. Shall I say, yayyyy? Or shall I just wait for myself to turn it in to my reading group? I am opting for the second one myself, but if there is anyone else reading this post, feel free to utter that non-verbal sound of pleasure for me!