How can I make use of this disease in me that springs up every now and then? How can I convert this profligate outpour of something not shameful......

I was very conscious of the lady’s countenance; I could not get over the fact that she disdainfully spat caprice and malevolently rebuked me with a seriousness never before confronted (I have never). She must have thought me of a fool living in his own paradise, quite unwilling to share his wealth and richness with the people around. It was not that presumption that bothered me; rather it was that the intentions (of mine) haven’t really been my own of late. To put it bluntly, I wish I could clearly write down my own purposes, likes and dislikes. Little more clarity would be appreciated. It is as if talking to someone inside me, pleading the person inside me of shelling out some weeds of clarity.

My laptop and me-the relationship is turning into something more than between a machine and a man. Every single time, as I open the laptop, the black keys with white letters are seducing me, and I am beckoned (grossly weak word), I must rather say I am seduced, and I type into the keys with a pleasure that is at once orgiastic. Each key stroke evokes a different response in me, the muffled noise that the keys make when I type with my left hand (thanks to the QWERTY keyboard) incessantly; it is as if I am typing on myself; that I am a key board myself.

The keyboard must have transformed me and I no longer no what is right, whether I am the progenitor of thoughts, I am not sure any more. The key board seems to dictate to me, seems to convey with its elegant lay out, the supple features and cubic keys, must have been the brainchild- an artist’s rendition. I am feeling quite sleepy now; I must have drunk a lot of milk. This thas occurred to me now. Rather a strange one. I should be able to write more frequently than I usually do, if I were to write ramblings, of abstract nature, of no clear structure, with no beginning and no ending, pure stream of consciousness. But would it be fruitful, in the end, would it matter, for I would want to be quite clear on that front. How can I make use of this disease in me that springs up every now and then? How can I convert this profligate outpour of something that is not altogether shameful?

“I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”

Those words from T.S. Eliot forming visions in my head, my jeans is all crumpled from yesterday’s journey, quite a distasteful one, for I had to sleep on the side upper seat and it was rather inhospitable, I wonder how any one more bulkier than myself would have tolerated that part, I can imagine them having an altercation with the TT that comes to check the tickets. So far the day had been a good one. Sachin got out at forty this morning, and I read few mails of some intriguing nature. That was all, now I am feeling very sleepy. And, my typing speed has dropped and I am quite conscious of it. It must be my royal armchair, for this one swings and is cushioned to perfection. I love my chair. I wish I could remember all these moments, just pack them all up in a suitcase and push it into the dark corner of the attic there in the kitchen. This is the time I want to remember, all my writings are but my efforts to remember these days. I want to remember that I was like this, that I had lived some of the most happiest moments of my life sitting on my royal armchair after a plentiful dinner; and my mom sitting by my side telling me things-what to do, what not to do, mostly about my health (she is particularly worried about my back, she knows that I have an aching back that I carry throughout the day wherever I go). I want to remember that I had lived these days, a great many live by without ever realising that they had just lived in those practically best and the happiest times in their lives, they just don’t pay attention, and the moment is gone, as fast as it had been there, it vanishes into thick nothingness.

But on the other hand, I know, I have just realised it, and now I am happy. The knowledge that I had been aware of the time (fully wide open and aware) when it all happened, prepares me for the rest of the life. Every single day after this day, I would sit and remind myself that unlike the whole world of people, here I was one of the very few that were aware of their apotheosis, the cusp of happiness, existed at the pinnacle when it was still there. This is it, and I can live happily, for i have nothing more to ask of life, I have had the best that life could proffer on me. I have conferred with myself, the verdict is right here, judgement passed; I have won with myself, won against myself. I have become one with myself.

If I hold a blade between my fingers (rather sharp one), it would cut into my skin and blood would gush out as if it had been waiting there all its life for this very moment to happen. “British steel”, the poster said with the names of Judas priest’s band members in the background-a sharp razor held between the thumb and four fingers. I love their music, every single track from British steel and painkiller. Now, someone is talking in the hallway. I must concentrate. Is that grandma’s voice, she must be dreaming. Well footsteps, she is awake now, she has trouble sleeping through the night. Someone left the elevator’s door slightly open, did not quite lodge it firmly, for the alarm is ringing…and now it is gone.

What can I write? This structure less writing, these form less ramblings are not so easy after all. It is easy to summon all the thoughts, but when one is sleepy, one must give in I suppose. Shall I stand up, the heat is unbearable now, I am suffocating, must turn the fan on.

I woke up this morning, and read a short story by Muriel Spark. In that she writes about a baby that is born omniscient; that the baby hears and is totally at ease with the people around it. But, the baby can’t speak, when it does, all we hear is some squealing that resembles the police siren; with all its strength and might the baby kicks at the cradle, but the kicking is feeble; the screaming is anything but sensible.

From that story, I gathered that it is perhaps easy to go on rambling nonsensically about oneself, for it is all there in the head, and all it takes is a little more effort to put it on the paper. But, to create something out of those shiny tiny little shrub of thoughts in the head and make it something else, something so dramatically different that the reader would not for the life of his comprehend the writer behind the story. To conceal the writer is the greatest challenge a writer faces. T. S. Eliot said that in his own poetical mood. For a writer cannot completely forget or ignore himself, because that would be too obvious, it would be shockingly defiant of a story teller. Every writer has and shall begin from his own corridors, then he delicately (in some writers case, quite violently-such as in the case of Italo Calvino) pursues a course of building monuments in thin air, he watches as the monument is built brick by brick, plastered and whitewashed to perfection. Then he whips open his pocket knife and makes a neat cut into the monument that stands so tall that he could actually feel it from the balcony of the fourth floor he is in. from here, he sketches out a door, a window and gently taps against the pillar that extends right from the floor to the top.

There he stops, now he invites visitors to go through the mirage of beauty he has created, some writers relish in the fantasy they have created, some go a step further and make that creation their own abode. Such is the beauty of Muriel Spark. She, in her short stories created fantasies that are unbelievable delightful to read. But she doesn’t stop there, she created much more than fantasies. She has seated herself in those fantasies as a character or a creature, or as a substance, an object. Whatever the case may be, she purposefully escapes into the world of fantasy, but after the creation is complete, she pulls out herself and launches into it. Such is the beauty of her writings. She lives in entirety, in all of her stories. Right from the first line of her writings, she presents the mundane happenings with a frightful brilliance of aristocracy (of writing). Then there are the moods, the vicissitudes, the clever sifting between the fantasy and reality, between the dreams and hallucinations, between the day and night.

“Between all these, lies the shadow”

T. S. Eliot was a fine man, very brilliant man. I cannot think of any line of his poems that would not meet the frugal standards. Some might appear extravagant, and somewhat out of place,incongruous. But the man was a genius, his sly and witty remarks on some of the tragedies of expression are earthly and humane-makes me believe that a lot more is achievable in one’s life than what has been already (if it has been already).

What a time it could have been, to be alive in those times and read those poets and writers. When all the modern writers thrashed the legacies once and for all- Virginia Woolf with her celebration of life in the form of stream of consciousness, James Joyce with his interior monologues that ran for hundreds of pages before briefly converging with the story line and audaciously hopping over to a completely different person, as if did not matter who said what, as if it did not matter whether there was a plot or not. Virginia woolf never introduced her characters as the writers before her did (such as Jane Austen, George Eliot). She merely plunged deeply into her story, and never even bothered to present her characters (the old fashioned way). She developed a completely different perspective, in it the characters themselves are revealed through the maddening diversity of thoughts, the agitation of mindless activity that with screeching intensity permeates the mind’s sphere. Through such an intensity, she crystallised and presented to the pulverised remains of the demented curiosity the reader is occupied with (by that time), the characters. She believed that life had no plots, life had thoughts; life was not a novel that has a fresh and appealing beginning, then an introduction of characters and the ending; no, she asserted that life was not like that at all. It is never the way we imagine it is. For Virginia Woolf,

“life was not a series of gig lamps that blow out one after another, instead life is a luminous halo that lasts from the beginning of consciousness to the end”.

None came closer to her. She was enough. Who could have thought that a feminist was there in her writing, she craned her neck forward to listen to the fellows at the other end of the spectrum, but when the time came eventually, she with a smitten force and spiteful vengeance wrote

“for a woman to write fiction, she must have a room of her own”.

There is evidence a plenty that every generation ignores their own writers, poets, artists and philosophers, but they measure them up against those of the past. That thought again was Virginia Woolf’s; but she was referring to the Victorian times and comparing the writers of her own times, when she painfully declared “masterpieces are not made overnight….writers toil their way through the enormous burden of the expectations around them, about them, in their heads, ringing bells of despondence and dejection” (slightly paraphrased).

And there was T. S. Eliot himself, he would say “I have measured my life with coffee spoons”. Ah! Those words hurt, they leave permanent gashes on my mind. In his infamous poem “love song of Alfred prufrock”, where he wrote

“I wish I was a pair of ragged claws,
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”

I wondered for days and days together. Those words ringing in my head, I could not think of anything but those phrases, the man was a genius. He (much like Virginia and Joyce) thrashed the legacy systems and invented newer ways, something pure and seminal. Joyce’s Ulysses chronicles not dedalus, but something else, entirely disconnected with the book or the characters is going on. When I closed the book after a second read, that night in my dreams, I lived through the whole of the book, from the beginning where Dedalus is looking through the window.

Then, there was Bertrand Russell, he was a man of rational thinking. He is my favourite philosopher and writer, the man was a prolific writer. So many books on so many topics, he finished everything in just one life. One life is all it took for that man to write a library full of books, and each one has his quality written on it.

“do not fear to be eccentric, for every thought now accepted was once eccentric”

He was a giant philosopher, one above accurately depicts a greater part of his philosophy. He would take every single blister on this skin of civilization and reduce it into mathematical axioms. He had a thorough knowledge in all the fields of study-physics, mathematics, philosophy, politics….what not; the man wrote just about everything. Such a fine gentleman too, after all this, he wrote

“do not be absolutely sure of anything, not even of my own philosophy”

It cannot get any better than this. And there was D. H. Lawrence. His writings dealt with the innermost of human elements, from there he began and only briefly surfaced, rest he just admired from the innermost of the elements. Such an ambitious yet ridiculously popular for all the wrong reasons. Anyway, he won the case against “lady chatterly’s lover” in the court (after a very long time, the book was published much before the trial). There were sections of the society that burnt “the rainbow”, mostly people talked about ostracizing him. All this may not have bothered him. I believe what must have bothered him the most was that his painfully erudite philosophies that were presented in the most admirable fashion (that being fiction), were overshadowed by the hue and cry. All this, the pandemonium and the shouts of lechery had nothing to do with his works, but him, the person. He must have struggled inside, for the readers were burning his books, even before they read them. He must have died inside, for no one really bothered to check the metaphysical overtones of his works that were far more superior than what the words and phrases meant. He must have wished to dispel all the allegations with one stroke of his pen, when he wrote

“Never trust the teller, trust the tale”

I am only presuming, but in all this, all I am trying to suggest is that- I wish I was born then, between all those writers, poets and philosophers. Between those moments of ecstasy, epiphany…theories, philosophies, glory, redemption, chaos, birth of seminal works, death of legacies, individuality, thrashing serfdom, popularising originality, imploring thinking. Bertrand Russell through his works, urged every common man to think.

How could it have been, to share the planet with all those people? While they produced works of genius, one after another, to be in the middle of all those happenings, to be part of something very literary. Nothing could come closer to that momentous entrancement. Those were the times, times of free thinking. George Orwell’s comments capture the rarity of the past we hold with reverence today.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means to tell people what they don’t want to hear”

And the war broke out, millions of people died. In the midst of all this, artists, writers, poets and philosophers suffered from angst and terror. Eliot’s wasteland, Orwell’s 1984, Woolf’s night and day, Russell’s innumerable books on war came out in those tough times of torment.

They have all celebrated “thinking”, and have professed that it is only through thinking that the civilisation would progress. If the nation should progress blindly on some abstract lines, it is not really victory, but an illusion of victory; not progress but an illusion of one. Such a progress would eventually break with the first smell of free thinking.

Most of these writings were phenomenally transcendental, but they were also accessible, meaning, all the giant dictums were reduced to mere fiction sometimes (and presented in the most palatable manner), and poems other times (presented with a technique that is alien to none in this world of literature), and philosophical tirades (as Mr. Russell did, what a show that has been form him).

I am quite apprehensive about this new style of writing, I am unsure if it improves my ability to write, what I am sure is that the quality (as I identify with it today) is dropping. The style is not really a style but a lack of one. It is the structure less writing that gives me more pleasure than the refined ones, for I thse I can relax my sense and follow them. Where as in the former ones, I have to let go of myself first, survey the surroundings, stand firmly with my feet on the ground, and then and only then let my senses into the play.i.e, I precede my sense, and hence I prepare the ground for them. This makes it very inhospitable for the senses to frolic; it certainly keeps them in check and the orders of restraint distil sharp intones from them.

But in the present form of writing, there is no distillation, for by the time I reach, the ground is littered with my sense overplay. All I can do is gather one up turn it upside down. Feel it and retain it in my memory (or drop it in my sack hanging by the shoulder blades). This way, I have seen them both. The distilled version is formal, the not so distilled version is –I don’t know who it is for. Perhaps it is just an exercise, I would not know what to make out of all these writings. But I do know this; I will read them all once I get older. I will read them all and I will perhaps be in a better position to see my transformation throughout my life. The account of my life is all there in my writings, but I cannot gauge my transformation/progress yet, for I am still myself. Hence, I have to wait for my older self to gauge me.