Where the streets have no name

I want to run
I want to hide
I want to tear down the walls
That hold me inside
I want to reach out
And touch the flame
Where the streets have no name⁽¹⁾

One night I had a dream. The land­scape was delight­ful and serene, and the moon was smil­ing up above, show­er­ing the lit­tle hill amidst for­est with its calm­ing sil­ver rays. I was approach­ing the beau­ti­ful place. Couldn’t see myself though. I was hid­ing aside, in shad­ows, behind a screen of leaves, flow­ers and a tree. Krishna was on the hill, and sev­eral of his beloved gopis, all dressed dif­fer­ently and beau­ti­fully. They were all smil­ing and it seemed that a moon­light is try­ing to beau­tify their glow, body lus­ter and their hap­pi­ness. In Krishna’s eyes they seemed even more charm­ing and he was more enchanted. After few whis­pers they started to dance together. Krishna was danc­ing with every girl at the same time. It was a breath­tak­ing, most won­der­ful sight.

As girls were mov­ing gra­ciously, they’ve observed each other too, with their beau­ti­ful, rest­less eyes, and were smil­ing both to Krishna and to each other. Then, they’d touch their moist lips with gen­tle fin­ger tips and blow the kiss toward the other girl and smiled cheer­ingly even more. In such a charm­ing way each party exchanged kisses and lov­ing glances, and thus, as I under­stood, they were exchang­ing their feel­ings, lov­ing sen­ti­ments. And when another girl would reach such a kiss trav­el­ing gra­ciously through the air, and put it on her lips, then a new mix­ture of love would be tasted and both the girl and Krishna in the com­pany of that girl would enjoy even fur­ther. They were increas­ing the love in each other and pleas­ing him even more.

“Oh that sweet bhava”, dar­ling Syama said then smil­ingly, almost unad­dressed, but as if he was con­vey­ing it to me, know­ing I’m there. “With­out such bhava, the joy­ful and over­whelm­ing love sen­ti­ments between each other, between each one of you, there’s no love divine. There’s no expe­ri­ence of the most beau­ti­ful taste of life.”

And they’ve con­tin­ued to dance, clos­ing together, cir­cling in smaller cir­cles until they all stopped, inter­min­gled and embraced each other, shar­ing lov­ing glances, kisses and touch­ing each other’s cheeks, shoul­ders, arms and bosoms, remov­ing tiny drops of enervation.

The image started to fade and for a few moments it seemed charm­ing Krishna and gopis are look­ing towards me, mak­ing cer­tain I hold this close to my heart. I’ll never for­get this ador­ing vision, com­ing from a place … where the streets have no name.

– Zvon­imir Tosic

(1) Where the Streets Have No Name is more like the U2 of old than any of the other songs on the LP, because it’s a sketch — I was just try­ing to sketch a loca­tion, maybe a spir­i­tual loca­tion, maybe a roman­tic loca­tion. I was try­ing to sketch a feel­ing. I often feel very claus­tro­pho­bic in a city, a feel­ing of want­ing to break out of that city and a feel­ing of want­ing to go some­where where the val­ues of the city and the val­ues of our soci­ety don’t hold you down.

An inter­est­ing story that some­one told me once is that in Belfast, by what street some­one lives on you can tell not only their reli­gion but tell how much money they’re mak­ing — lit­er­ally by which side of the road they live on, because the fur­ther up the hill the more expen­sive the houses become. You can almost tell what the peo­ple are earn­ing by the name of the street they live on and what side of that street they live on. That said some­thing to me, and so I started writ­ing about a place where the streets have no name.

– Bono Vox, U2 lead vocals, in 1987

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 15th, 2009 at 07:29 and is filed under Cursum perficio and tagged with Krishna, name, prema, Radha, rasa lila, streets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.