Ursula had to become a child again, play hide and seek with her childhood friends, hide in the dilapidated building that stood like a fortress shadowing her house and the entire neighborhood. The building was only a couple of blocks away from her house, it often provided her the solitude, and the grim reality of life, with its overhanging gardens, unchecked grew indiscriminately in and around the building. She invariably went to the second floor to hide, it gave her pleasure to walk on those creaking stairs that led to the second floor, it was a confirmation from the building, that it was behind her, supportive, and she felt it incumbent on her to allow for the building 'self gratification'. A giant squid like marks on the roof of the second floor always amused her, she felt connected to those marks, often she would gape at the beauty of it, marvel at the sensual authority building had on her senses. All the neighbors commented on the bad shape of the building, they spoke in a conspiratorial tone about plans to demolish the building, they were all filling themselves with quasi-obligations towards the well being of the small community in the neighborhood, and they were afraid that the building housed dark and demonic creatures, very alien, supernormal. Some went a step further and demanded in a tone of political ascendancy 'what if the building crumbles down in one giant heap on a rainy day, we would all be lying under the rubble'. It did not matter for Ursula, nothing mattered, whatever they said. She read about the owner of the building in the local newspaper, an industrialist, a former gregarious and outspoken individual, turned into a reticent and reclusive person, who locked himself in the building. Different versions of the attitudinal shift were pocketed by different houses in the neighborhood, some said, he suffered from chronic illness, others thought he was a state convict and was hiding in the building. Her parents were not vociferous in their version of the story, but nonetheless strongly disproved of her going anywhere closer to the building. The deterrence demanded for a well cut out story, taking its threads from all the different versions available, and of course on the way up from the southernmost house to the northernmost house, the story was so well built and rapturously supported by all the houses while the story is till at their houses, that everyone embellished it with a great fur coat of imagination so the story picked up leaves from different books, and the final version thus said 'the man of the house is dead, but he often comes here on visits, he is tall, well built, muscular, with no eyes, but deep sockets of velvety darkness, 'no' children are to refrain from looking into those eyes, he would suck your eyes, and then you would become his disciple, a guardian for the house.
Ursula, as a child found all the stories fascinating, enchanting, mesmerizing. Unlike other children in the neighborhood, she developed an uncanny ability to present a skeptical face to all these horrific beautifications of an otherwise sloppy reality - no one really knew the truth. she wondered at the architectural integrity of the building, giant gates almost twenty feet high, supported by two thin strip like pillars, which gave an impression of loosing their ability to support the gates, emaciated as the days pass by, they were so small and thin, that they were invisible to a common intruder giving it an air of significance, perfect manifestation to some of the popular versions of the story. In her memories, she captured the majestic austere of the building, the grand coalition of architecture and sensual beauty. She dreamt about reconstructing the building after she grew up, she would be careful in positing supports for the building inside out, not tinkering with the original body of the building. She would have to get it painted in one whole color so not to add character to it, thereby showing reverence to the exuded character presently. As Ursula grew up, so did her attachment with the building, she no longer played hide and seek, but she always spent time in the building, often till it got late at nights. She would stand there before the huge windows, feeling the wind on her face, pushing her doubts and dejections into the far corners of her mind, sometimes she would lose those horrible memories of loss and despondency by merely standing there before the windows, wind pushing the memories beyond her, it was all in her volition now. She had certain correctness in her life, straightness; she would pursue informal atonements, polite and decent retrieval of concurrent memories and would stand there to do justice. It was all in her will, no one could let her down, for she had the building for her with the remarkable history of support. She felt the weight of building's person in her mind, she carried him, or was it her, she preferred the latter, for she clearly distinguished the abject, showy and pompous masculinity from the formless intact feminism. Building had a flare of feministic appeal in her cerebral colloquies, when she lingered homewards at night, the cold air gushing through the windows would gently caress her, kiss her and pat her, and the whiff of air past her ears when she left the giant massive territorial structure exposed the feministic aura of the building.
And then it happened, giant two wheeled monsters turned the building into a heap of rubble, purring scorn over her intimacies, mocking her transcendent and memorial relationship. She cried all day long, locked herself inside her room, she could not pull herself together, building was her secret, her other world, only hers, untouchable by any earthly desirous potent person. She was devastated, she slept under her bed in the dark, and wept until she dried out all her tears, she did not want any one to know about her intimate relationship with the building, it was and is sacrosanct, saintly and can spit venom if a sense of intrusion is round the corner. her parents thought she must have been in an altercation at the school, they kept reminding her that she should be more approachable, her defying compactness, unnatural grudge, ill timed eccentricities made her vulnerable to judgment, 'veritable obnoxiousness', incomparable to nothing that the whole school is acquainted with. She preferred to keep it that way.
By the time Ursula got into her ninth grade, the rubble of the building was replaced by a brand new building with lush interiors, intricate designs, extravagant and luxurious outfield. Building was just as massive as the old one; it looked pretentious in its design, jocularly reminiscent of the majestic and incontrovertible reign of the former building. The perimeter of the new building was covered with overhanging creepers trying desperately to hide the protective electric wires interspersed between them. Ursula despised the fall of seminal intensity of the former one giving rise to a disciplined yet deplorable and condescending frail air with no trails of intensity. The new building on a whole looked weak, offering her no support, granting her no return in favor of her emotional attachments to that place. The present owner was a short man, pot bellied, bald head, bald chin, and looked like a tortoise. She had seen him wandering outside at nights in the lawn, lonely, in solitude. She never saw him speaking to anyone, not to his neighbors or his servants; the house was always filled with four or five servants. there was something mysterious about this new owner, she became curious, and went to meet him once, but the servants would not let her in. she went twice, and was granted the same demeanor, she noticed the owner on the second floor watching from rather small windows as she retreated from the entrance. Then one day, suddenly it happened, she was returning from the school homewards and the main servant of the house walked towards her, told her, the owner had invited her family for tea that evening, and was looking forward for her acquaintance. She dressed auspiciously for the occasion, but kept her senses fairly neutral towards the eventful evening that lay ahead. When she finally went there along with her parents, they were showed into the main hall; the servant sat them on a divan, and went inside looking for the master. Ursula surveyed the insides of the buildings, main hall was large enough to accommodate a congregation of hundred plus, taller than three storey building, or was it four. The top of the hall narrowed down into a center like a mushroom, with a giant pendulum suspended from the center, supported intermediately by ropes tethered into the pillars located all round the hall. Each of these pillars again sprouted out from the center as thin threads and grew out into thick and hard rectangular structures on the second and first floors, gradually dissolving into one monolithic structure surrounding the hall on the ground floor. Its enigmatic design hidden beneath the walls of what appeared to be pretentious from the outside enamored her, and endeared her. she remained unheeded by the frivolous caricaturist exchange of words between her parents and the house owner, enchanted by the ostentatious display of artistic intelligence, with loss for words, opened her eyes wide, to remember this moment, to capture the relentless magic of propriety in the stylistic design of the building.
Ursula learnt from he parents that the present owner was an artist; his name was Paul Jefferson, an infamous painter from London, who had come to the village side seeking veritable artistic inspiration. Now she knew, why the Mr. Jefferson would walk in the dark, even past midnight, would not socialize easily with people, everything fell into place now. He remained a tangible mystery to her, he was approachable, but not adorable, he was admirable but detached, and he was like a ghost with perfection in guise of a man. She met him once again in the summer after her tenth standard. Her parents decided to send her to London for higher education; she went to meet him once with faint but resentful memories of his disapproval to see her on a couple of occasions before. 'he went to London and was exhibiting his paintings there after a long hiatus of 6 years', head servant was very understanding and mentioned twice that he would let the master know of her visit. But it would not matter now, she was leaving to London and would never meet him again.
On the way to London, she met a couple of guys traveling to the same school. She sat in the same compartment as she did, but refused to entertain them with replies to their silly queries. one of the guys, a handsome one, kept troubling her with his inquisitiveness, she could not get her self over the fact that she missed the opportunity to meet the artist Mr. Jenkins. she could have used the occasion to learn a few things herself, the artist's approach, the artist's vision of the world, their scenic beautification, often cleverly done, revealing monstrosities in plane English looking picturesque paintings, a glimpse of nature's hideousness, her unraveling brusqueness, unparalleled timidity, revealing herself only to the artists, exposing in the most unpredictable circumstances to an artist with an eye for speculation, an eye for formidable interest, a thirst for brilliance, and passion for grandeur. how superbly inane, nature appears to a common man, how valiantly diffusive she is in her covert operations, how commonplace she appears, apparently how lackluster she presents herself to a superficial and disinterested onlooker. She makes special privileges for an artist, she beguiles him into her bosom, exposes her weakness, her fragility, and her nakedness. Gleaming profusion of passion she grants, offers, and takes in return to let the artist know how truthful she is. The handsome guy disturbs her from her muse, her deep thoughtful reveries and she resentful to the approach, scolds him, suggests that he should check his manners. Ursula recollects her parents reminding her time and again, how important it is to keep her abrupt dismissal of characteristic friendly remarks in check.
Ursula's life at high school was not much fun; she kept revisiting her memories, not finding the present atmosphere convincing to make new memories worth recollection. She met a guy in the school, sort of a funny looking creature with a blunt nose that was reminiscent of few cartoon characters. She was in her teens then and sensed an attitudinal shift in the daily discourses. She knew that the blunt nosed guy 'Chris' precipitated the word that she was his girlfriend, not that Ursula cared about it, but she felt ill treated. She would join Chris and meet up with some of their friends, together they would all ingrain themselves in passionate discourses, but the premises always revolved around teenage attitudes. she longed for an intelligent discourse, something that can titillate her insides, something that would bring her might into production, something that would dispense a train of thought, a train of cerebral conscience, train that would quench its thirst on her memory impulses and find undeveloped and inlaid tracks inside her mind, then she would budge, relent to the train's persistent inquiry and finally lay the tracks for the train to explore. then it would happen, then the train would push aside the superficial layers on those unapproachable tracks, and after it retrieves, she would find, dug out, deeply seated memories out on the surface, throbbing with life, silently exuding remonstrance for the exposure, not withstanding the day light, would implore for her to cover them up, but she would not, she would repair their reticence, would cajole them and coax into exuding exuberance.
All those heavenly sacrosanct memories, which have once been out in the light of the day, but were covered with cushions of time, and turning them into lugubrious and languorous memories with the weight of time drying them out of their spirit, forgotten, carefree, would now be recovered. She would now explore all those memories which never surfaced which acclimatized to the conditions below, darker conditions, with no action, suiting them to the sedentary lifestyle. But, how, she would explore them.
On Ursula’s insistence, Chris took her once to an art gallery, she found the place inviting, the place needed her, she belonged there, she knew it, ‘this is where she has to be, this is what lacked in her life so far, the realization of the celestial acquaintance she had with this place, the place bemoaned her to be there, it besieged Ursula with unquenched raptures of passion. She has to heal this place, all the raptures, the place had, how its walls told her stories of the place palpitating with passion; it needed her to support and to keep the purported levels of passion in check’. Chris interrupted her; she stared straight at him with no affection, no reason, and no question, looked through him, burned his value and presence from her composed conscience and tossed him into the trenches of oblivion. Chris disgusted by the arrogant display of nonchalance, saw himself out. Ursula moved on, with her life, and with her growing affection to the place, paused at a particular picture, a portrait of a beautiful and charming young lady in a mirror; message read that it was a self portrayal. Ursula imagined the woman sitting her self before the mirror and painting, she was perplexed at the mastery of woman's art. What did she go through, when she drew the portrait, how did she see herself, was she aware of her beauty, did she merely beautify herself in the portrait as a means of augmenting her selfish pride and esteem, a quality unachievable for women. But, she brushed the last thought, dismissed without much thought, for she knew a s a thumb rule, beauty of art is not in expressing beauty, but the frailties in it, and observing the frailties with an artist's eye would summon an air of confidence with overtones of beauty thus achieving seemingly frailties, but conjuring beauty from around the corners of those frailties.
The woman in the portrait, seated before the mirror reflected her gaze outwards with a self sufficiency on the inside. she spread her gaze inside and was virtually slanting her gaze outwards through her reflection in the mirror, arresting any observer like a rabbit that would stand its ground staring into the torch light on a dark night. Little does the rabbit realize the impending and inevitable danger lurking beneath that torch light, with an innocent disposition celebrating the stark and poking light until finally it discovers its fate.
Ursula searching for her questions, finally found the questions, only now, she has to find the answers to these questions. She has to vent out her passionate questions, so they would play out in the realms of answering apostles, let the questions find themselves revealed to the answers, then slowly and gradually answers would find coexistence with the questions.
Her brow perspiring out of enriched joy, Ursula existed in different universes at the same time, one where she is prone to the impossible concrete realities of the world, one where she existed merely as a memory in the world of abstraction. she did not like the real world, the materialistic world, people exploring poles of narcissism, people loving each other, people submerged in the cleverly constructed labyrinthine world, showing no inclination of swimming towards the surface, people who deliberately shut their senses to the sea of awe, sea of hollow intensities that existed outside their fluid world. how can she share her breathing space with all these people, she does not belong here, she cannot be forced to exist in concreteness, when she can as well escape into abstractions, she will not let the creatures of concreteness present epitomes of their culture, for their profoundly myopic vision of the universe greatly detaches them from the unexplored, unconquered world and they would only be as capable in building heroic images as would their limited vision allow them.
She must gracefully depart into abstraction, into the world of ever changing objects. the world of abstraction, where objects live in abstracted formats, would in fact stay stable in an abstracted sort of manner, but would appear as a changing flux for an observer from the other 'concrete' world, she must tune her senses to match the levels of abstraction or she would have to face the danger of ‘being unable to apprehend the beauty of abstracted world'. Ursula dreaded the thought of living in the abstracted world, but perceiving the objects in a train of changing flux, merely as formless images. Only an artist's view of the concrete world would outlive the concrete perceptions in an abstracted world, they would identify the objects not as formless flux, but as bodies with form and substance, they would arrest the change in flux, freeze the movement of the form from dissolving into formless, vague imagery.
Ursula's attention to detail fetched her better results in apprehending the beauty of an object, but she failed inexplicably in all her vibrant attempts to pursue the beauty, she would often identify it, apprehend it, masterly capture it, consume it, let it suffuse through her body, but failed pathetically in bringing it back to life, to fill the inanimate with substance, to delineate the corners of concrete images, to pronounce the veritable, to propose ingratiatory remarks. She got annoyed at this disability, the seemingly dubious disparities in capturing the beauty and delivering it. Her artistic intelligence searched for a vehicle to transport them into the world of concreteness, her senses transported them inefficiently, ineffectually, torturously deforming the gorgeous and brilliant seamless abstractions in her mind. her senses so rich and demanding all the time, in a quest for beauty, traveling hither and tether in divine proportions, in violent and smirking debauchery, in overtones of hunger for beauty, brought home an abundance of beauty mocking vehemently at the arrested outflow, at the supersaturated resources waiting their turn to flow outwards. The paucity of vehicles demanded that she find out her faults, correct them, and maim them so badly that they would never grow back.
Chris after having a row at Ursula, broke the relationship, declaring her a subject living in a world of fantasy, but ironically expressing displeasure of her accumulated injuries from the past, he added that she found joy and pride in exploring the multitudes of beauty, but could not get over the fact that she was hideously at ease in not proffering the captured images, that she subconsciously hated everyone around her and could not let them judge her abilities or worse would not allow them the borrowed pleasures from her adequate supply of objects for their pleasures.
She was impure, improper, unsuited for artistic extravagance, unsuited for exhibiting her fermented and deeply pompous irradiated artistic expressions. She would have to soothe herself, vent her grievances, channel her frustration and purify her expressions.
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