writing as habit/ there will be typos

 Anything remotely resembling habit quickly becomes the habitat for worst impulses like a creeper canoodling a concrete wall (so much for icky imagery.  This is more inspired than I am letting on. There is a creeper gnawing through the living room wall, fangs blaring when observant but remarkably pliant and docile from a distance-- part of the grad school aesthete you know. Hah, creeper in living room ). 

Anyway, long story short, THIS IS IT. This will be the hub to visualize all the mess, knots in my head, literally the place where I wrestle with conflicting thoughts and make a free wheeling attempt to run a wooden comb through all the unwieldy tresses. There won't be much beauty to this madness, but indeed, there would be some sort of method. After all, isn't this the place to organize the mess.  So here I shall be thinking through some of my present obsessions. 

politics : always the politics but this time with the poetics

pedagogy: what is even radical inclusivity sans Derridean hospitality? There I said it.

attachments : shout out to Berlant, Ahmed and Hartman

literary : again, what gives when we consider the literary without the political or as a function of the political or at loggerheads with the political. That said, I am a Glissant loyalist. In fact, I should name this blog rhizomes.

Identity politics : And against Paranoid reading.  this is a special category. enough said.

love : against erotophobia

desire : pretty much desire for everything...desire for reattaching our alignment with the real. what is the real anyway?

writing : writing as an act of radical hospitality. And writers who inspire and provoke. 

I am not sure much good will come from this obsessive need to calibrate every thought nugget, to pulse it into digestible granules ala Adornean babyfood, but this is a very crude attempt to inject life into tired reasonings. To re-verve and reaffirm our attachment to the political by reminding myself that tired desensitization to constant impulses will not get you, me , or anyone else anywhere. If at all, it will definitely accelerate the gutting process. 

Anyway, in other news. I am teaching hopefully my last in-person course in a while, starting tomorrow. There is so much anxiety and unreconciled desire that I am not, yet, comfortable letting on here. After all, I am aware this is public flailing and even then, one must put up a show. But let this be a space to dial down knee jerk reactionary responses and participate in the hard work of thinking through this mess, with patience and care. Again, aware of how political care economy is, but hey, this is me pulling the strings in this space! I am militantly committed to preserving the sanctity of my hard limits. 

Also trying to finish the dissertation this semester. Long day's journey into night.

Feels good to be back here. Last time I checked, I was really whining about unrequited love. haha. Some pleasure in the foolishness after all. 

 There will be typos. 

late night mutterings.

This year has been an important year.

 Nothing can quite match up to the continued extravagance that has been this year.

And now at this unearthly hour, dulled by the searing cold, I feel strangely situated and adrift at the same time. There is staid contentment, laced with a tinge of melancholia- of roads not taken and words not uttered -of bridges not burnt and quests, hurriedly abandoned midway.

But above all, there is hope that next year will be as extravagant as this one.

All the jazz.

 I have spent the past two hours digging up my old posts and reading other old, forgotten and now defunct blogs of friends, acquaintances - the works.  I have obviously been cracking up at the sheer immaturity and the startling level of transparency displayed in most of these writings.

 In a time, when  words are weighed out in terms of rhetoric and carefully constructed sentences that reek of a certain cultured eloquence-- these writings stand testimony to the fact that there was a time when we were brave enough or probably young enough to lay bare our souls without worrying about being judged. We were not so much taken in by a turn of a phrase as much as by the turn of events which deserved a worthy mention on blogsphere.

Most importantly, it made me reflect on the girl I once was and the being I have morphed into today. Interestingly, each one of those events which lie concealed in this blog under a haze of flimsy embellishments have been so instrumental in helping me morph into this being that I do not so easily recognize now.

As I lay cringing in my bed for the better part of the two hours, eyes glazed from the fixity of gaze that held the laptop screen in rapt attention, old memories were rekindled- churning out easily recognizable patterns that my life can be broken into; the same fears, the same insecurities staring back at me like old friends reunited after years, embracing- silhouetted against the backdrop of a setting sun and rapidly falling dusk while I zoom in and out of the frame- never too far, never too close but always lingering- ALWAYS lingering- just within reach.

For all the smugness that I can grant myself for having accumulated some amount of sparing wisdom, there is a deep hollow inside - for things that can never really be ever filled up to the brim. There is always a price. For every reckless joy and every wanton sorrow, there is some compensation- some creases that need to be ironed out, some bloody price that has to be paid. For who can be so blessed to drink deep from the chalice of both sorrow and happiness without having sacrificed something in the process?

There is no love without pain and only the love that has exulted in the deepest throes of pain can be worthy enough to be recorded for posterity's sake. No other love is great enough or noble enough to warrant such singular distinction.

And blessed are those who have seen it all.

Blessed are those who have quavered from the sheer intensity of it all and have experienced the state of being broken into a million pieces.

And amidst all this mindless cacophany, you find a part of yourself being born anew- soaring in the endless sky- rising like a phoenix from the ashes and in that single moment when you are poised to fly, you are infinite- a million worlds nested within but so delicately congealed into that singular mass.  This is when you find all the reasons that is reason enough to worth risking such a love that is so delicately fragile but grotesque in its intensity.

A part of me does not believe in anything that I have typed out here. The part of me which is too cynical and too weathered to negotiate the possibility of such occurences. All of this looks good in movies, old Bollywood movies-soulful and melancholy like a Geeta Dutt number. But there is a certain specificity to this kind of melancholia. It hovers around you, enveloping you but never quite touching you.

And then there is another part of me which believes that one day I will get back all my reasons to risk everything for a cause that might tremble against the limits of sanity, but in all that trembling insanity- I will be complete and infinite. And it shall always be worth the effort. Always.

I can't help but crack up inside as to how easy it gets, when you try churning out long drawn , meandering sentences with a generous smattering of misplaced punctuation, in the quiet silence of darkness- all in an effort to sound grown up and mature- when in reality you can never live up to all this jazz. :D 

Lost in translation

Fumbling with letters, feelings and the multiple voices in your head- a curious patch work of words clumsily sewn together which transform into one of those fancy quilts that adorn your bed. So much and I mean so much is always lost in translation.

Beautiful, poignant words; of the poetic kind can lift your spirits like a jesting wind raise those fallen leaves in autumn- just an inch before the wind dies down. But there is a mad rush: a flurry of excitement which precedes this inevitable death that can be read in the collective swish of leaves being picked up and dropped. This is what beautiful words do to you. There is a soaring feeling inside which dies an eventual death.

But in that brief instant of soaring, you experience a million worlds erupt within you, of watching fireworks burst into the night sky and of feeling more alive and more real than what you have ever experienced before. 

long after the music is heard no more.

Sometimes it takes a special kind of hearing to hear most of the words that are left unsaid, even when the obvious reality prods you into hearing otherwise- there is always some music playing in the background. You need to strain your ears to hear it but when you can do that, you will feel the music engulfing you in its soft, feathery grip as you viscerally feel your heart soaring and plummeting to the rhythm.

And long after the final cadences are played out, you can still hear the music around you as it trails farther off, leaving a wispy haze behind.

Note to self.

I am 23 years now- that is technically 5 yrs since I soared and plummeted into the world of adulthood, both in equal measure ; the soaring and plummeting that is.

I don't feel like an adult. I try to behave like one. I really really try. But I am not sure how much that works.

But then I have these disturbing moments of epiphany and I can actually feel myself growing up, you know in your head you are 5ft and a decent 4 inches, make that 3 ( i am trying not to be too ambitious here ). You are strutting about in high heels, hair swishing back and forth. There is a collective intake of breath as you enter the conference room and all eyes are upon you as you flash that winning smile, which smiles back at you from the gleaming backside of the recent book that you have authored.  There are cameras flashing at your direction and every word that you speak is held in rapt attention. You look quite the picture-you with your winning smile in all that sartorial elegance, deftly answering questions with a cultured restraint that can only be acquired over years of practice. You smile a poised and well practiced smile.

 For all that is worth, it is important to get the whole act right. Doing anything otherwise would be just killing it- like dislodging a strategically positioned rock and bringing about a landslide. Who cares if you have never known love or feel terribly hollow and empty inside- it is still important to pull yourself together and get the whole Act right. Therein my friend, lies the emblem of true showmanship- when you can pull yourself together even at that precise moment, when you are sinking deeper into the abyss but you still retain the poise and dignity. You smile even when you are breaking inside. That is my friend,true showmanship !

My hitherto 23 yrs of existence has been spent in a flimsy pursuit of trying to get this whole act together. Not all of it has been futile but yet again today, in the slowly gathering darkness, I realize how much of it has been in vain. Here I am, quite a standard mess in the most standard way that you would define a "mess", struggling with dreams and aspirations, more imposing than my diminutive frame. I, who have always been vertically challenged can only dream of soaring-flying beyond the hitherto untrammeled seas and oceans, past huge expanses of valleys, over the raging rapids, riding the waves- never slipping, never retreating, always guiding myself forward.  I cannot resign myself to walking or simply running, for fly I must and fly I will.

 But all this drama can happen only in your head and in the face of real adversity, you stumble only to cower behind a protective force; willing yourself to believe that this protective force will fight your battles and help you in putting the said act together.  Of course, you do not have the wisdom to understand how this action could permanently impair your agency-clipping your wings while hanging like a millstone round your neck. And that is how you kill your own dreams, a little every minute- beating the life out of them, till they lie dissolved in one squirming heap that is forever rendered immobile. Dreams are mobile creatures.They bring momentum and agency in your life.

You kill something fundamental within your own self, every moment you judge your own dreams and seek refuge behind another person. Every time you dissociate your dreams from yourself and try to transmute your ideas and beliefs with someone else's beliefs and ideals, you are guilty of adulterating  something that was intrinsically yours in the purest form possible. You are guilty of becoming the lyrics in someone else's song and the paint in someone else's painting. That is one of the very worst things you could do to yourself- killing your own dreams by viewing your life as an extension of someone else's life.

Most of this is written as a reminder to my 23 yr old Self.

Disgrace

 I rarely discuss books here.

 There is a reason for this. Books are an ubiquitous presence in my life. Talking about them with a convincing degree of reverence intact does seem stretched at this point. It is not like I am proclaiming myself to be widely read or trying to brag about my erudition here. It is just that, at this point I rarely come across a book that sustains my interest till the end.  After a couple of pages, I will inevitably find the narrative slipping into a predictable mould and that would be the end of it.

But Disgrace by Coetzee has achieved some sort of a rare,singular distinction, given my erratic disposition and infinitesimally small attention span. It is one of those rare books that I have read twice - at one sitting without discarding it unceremoniously.

I remember the first time I read this book, I was in eleventh standard. It was a different time then- something that seems almost surreal in retrospect. There is this particular thing that going back in memory does to you. Even the most unpleasant of memories take on some sort of a delicate sheen, when viewed from the distance of a few years. This always comes with the risk of appearing too impersonal,with an underlying sense of subtle smugness. This comes from knowing that you have been through shit and conquered it with some amount of grace, that indeed looks laudable in retrospect.

There was me- all of sixteen years, a bespectacled nerdy teenager, fielding obstacles that looked insurmountable at that time but seems dismissively juvenile now. I was also battling serious academic issues which got worse by the time I was in twelfth standard.

The annual examinations were just about to commence. I had already failed in Maths and Physics in the internals. For all my inconsistencies , I managed to behave out of character by manifesting a startling level of consistency in the reckless way I failed most of the science subjects then. I had, by then steeled myself and learnt to look at such events as temporary outcomes that are necessary for sustainable growth in the future.
I was a rather refined optimist who was blessed with this exceptional quality to silently goad oneself on, even when things looked disastrously bleak. I never lost my cool, which did not go down well with the Mater who was literally tearing her hairs out, at my unwillingness to react more aptly to the dire situation I was in.

So on that day, I had shut myself up in my room while my mother raged on outside- a veritable tornado that did not show any signs of ceasing.  This was the only book lying on the bed. My mother had taken care to remove all the non-academic books from my room. This one remained as a glaring reminder of how inefficient she had been in her task, I could not help but think at that point.

The next three hours passed in a haze. I drifted in an out of the narrative. Everything descended into an ominous silence once I was done. This book rendered any banal response to the world around me so despairingly obscene. I could not just sit still and not be shattered in the very depths of my being about what I had just read. Everything seemed so strange and unreal. The fact that I had failed in my internals did not seem as devastating to me as this book did. I was sixteen- not so well schooled about the ways of the world then. It understandably affected me in a far more visceral way than what it did today when I was reading it for the second time.

In the six and half years that have transpired in between, I have thought of this book many many times-on occasions when I have read some other book by Coetzee or come across some incident, that has really shaken me up in an uncomfortable way. i have however never discussed this book with anyone before. I just never felt comfortable about it. This book was so personally felt that it almost seemed like a transgression, to  discuss it with any kind of added embellishment that comes in the name of literary criticism. I could never adopt the required neutral gaze that becomes necessary, when you have to come up with a nuanced critical argument. I could not measure out in sentences what this book exactly did for me.  Herein lies the beauty of Coetezee's deliberations and the dexterity with which he wields every word. The glaring economy in the usage of words that promotes any sort of emotional excess, does precisely what it consciously tries to avoid- one is left grappling with emotions that are beyond one's control.

I do not think I have ever read a book as nightmarishly absorbing as this one. The grating diction opens up to you- speaks to you in a way, the only living can. Most other books gives in to the lure of conscious posturing by the author, who is always conscious of the fact that he is being assessed with every sentence that he pens down. Not this one. There is a certain degree of nakedness in the way the subject has been treated, which makes me want to fall in love with Coetzee over and over, again and again. I have never come across a more honest writer.

All of this, so that you go and read this book NOW, if you haven't already.