Early days in January....

Early January 2008
There isn’t much to write about. The wind is howling outside and I’m sitting in the warmth. My imagination lies to waste and the heavy dregs of a depressive stupor are wafting through my mind. There is nowhere to go. Nowhere to run away. There is nowhere I want to go anymore. Even the mindless or the mindful thought or desire of death has long abandoned me. My mind has run dry. The thoughts about life and living occupy me no longer. The thoughts about the thrills of reaching a super-conscious level of awareness don’t excite me much. Death troubles me – acts of wanton killing, brutality, violence, bloodshed horrify me and hold me in their vicious grip. Yet I was no different as a child and I have done not much to make the world any better than it was before I arrived. The fact that we humans might either execute ourselves within seconds with a mindless nuclear war or through painful decades (or maybe a couple of centuries) by killing what’s left of our environment bothers me somewhat yet not enough evidently. I don’t take to the roads in protest nor do I strategize meaningful plans so that we may save ourselves and our planet. Poverty, hunger, violations of what should be inalienable rights make me feel desperate at times and uselessly helpless at other moments.
And so I wake up another day and yet another. Brushing my teeth and going through the motions. What difference does it make, I wonder? And I’ve been asking the same question ever since I can remember. But still the answers elude me. I’ve been a natural theist, an ardent atheist, an agnostic and then once again a believer. Yet even God is silent. And I haven’t found anyone else who can give me an answer. And I want an answer ‘pat’. Articulate, intelligible and easily applicable. No finger pointing to the moon, no one hand clapping, please. No zen tricks. What difference does it make, pray I ask, if the world does go up in smoke, if humans do wipe each other out, if people die miserable deaths, (leave alone innocent animals since we still haven’t been able to take care of our own species), if one race wipes out the other, if we kill our planet while we remain embroiled in meaningless pontification about climate change or natural resource depletion? The planet has gone through periods of extinction. And then through some scientific, metaphysical, mysterious quirk and quark of fate – life came back again. Yes, sure if at the end of the day we do wipe ourselves out we can have the satisfaction of nodding our heads sagely and saying that we were no better than the rather dimwitted dinosaurs.

…I agree that we seem to be a rather grotesque race of beings. Fighting, killing, plundering - yet capable of producing works of such rare beauty and grace that one feels blessed. Most of us seem to lead life along the peak of the normal curve. Humdrum, dreary lives broken up by no great joys or sorrows nor euphoria or grace. Yet others lead the lives of your veritable obese fish in a very small pond and imagine or maybe really believe that they are God’s gift to human beings. That’s all very fine, I say. Let them lead their lives and I’ll lead mine. But wait. The thoughts criss-cross. I know I must make a difference. I know there is something that we’re missing. I don’t know what I will do or bring but there is something I have to do in this lifetime. (Of course I don't know whether these are the empty thoughts of a madman..er...madgoat in my case). But then there is another problem...for the life of me I can’t get any reasonable or rational answer of why I should care or even, since I still “claim” to care and desperately want to make some difference what I should do about it. What is my role on the planet? Or is that nothing but mindless arrogance once again? A day ago, was it or a week – I asked and the old answer boomed back for the nth time “What do you want?” – Well that’s not an answer now, is it. That’s a question. The thing is I know what I want to do although I don’t even know whether that would make an ounce of difference. Yet lately I find excuses never to do it.

Yesterday, I met a student of mine after a long time. He’s one of my favourite students. We had a long conversation and at one point in the midst of our twisting rambles he said, “…and one needs to remind one’s self every morning about what’s important. It’s so easy to forget…” and I knew and know exactly what he meant. Following one’s dreams. It’s so cliched. Knowing what one has to do. Knowing what one must do. Knowing what one wants to do and then doing it no matter what the odds are of ever “making” it. These take an immense amount of courage. And probably even more than courage at times it takes focused discipline, concentration, boundless energy and a patient mind. I’m wondering now whether we all innately know what we must do with our lives. I know, of course that there are no guarantees. There are three Van Gogh prints in our house. One is where I can see it, two of them I can see in my mind. He’s made a difference in my life. He didn’t know that when he was painting that a century or so later an Indian sitting in the mid-west of the U.S would feel strangely buoyant and more hopeful about life after seeing one of his prints. He lived and died miserably with no fame, no money and probably no happy sex, leave alone love.

Yet what is this circle then that I keep travelling around? My bouts with insanity have been reduced to morbid bouts of paranoia, and nothing else. No further illumination after the first three or four rather bizarre, frightful, yet interesting stints. I have no interesting dreams when I’m sleeping, I don’t have many curious or interesting thoughts or new thoughts when I’m awake, I’ve lived so long in my head and taken an aloof pride in projecting myself as an introvert for so long that now my tongue gets tied in knots with my throat and teeth and brain when I do try to speak, and if that were not enough – I’ve just lately started noticing that I’ve started getting these frightfully angry or nagging or frivolous thoughts for at least 5 of the 8 hours that I’m awake and my brain in functioning. I’m angry, depressed, or strangely melancholic most of the time, and seem to be retrograding at some alarming rate into levels of such airyheadedness that it disgusts me when I notice.

And then there is the matter of memory loss. A serious problem when you can’t sensibly narrate the story of a book you read barely a month ago.I have realised with an increasing sense of dismay and quiet and sometimes not-so-quiet horror that my memory has gone completely haywire. I simply cannot remember facts, figures, quotes or lyrics anymore. The only way I remember the names of the people I read about is if I come across their names more than twenty times. I do remember incidents and people and contexts pretty well – some of which happened more than a couple of decades ago – but other than that (and some books that I read most likely at the same time), I’m losing my memory or whatever’s left of it. Yet that is a losing battle. I don’t know whether it is because I don’t concentrate or whether I’m bored but even that cannot be the whole story. For I don’t even remember things that I want to remember or things that I read because I want to read them. No, even my losing memory – although it horrifies me is not what is sending me into an increasing state of numbness, deeper dejection, not to mention horror.

Yet let’s leave all that for a moment. I’ve been realising with a rising panic that there is a deadly listlessness that’s slowly choking me. It’s the listlessness and mental laziness that drives otherwise pretty bright folks into the realms of passive non-existence. Now sure, if one is happy being there – there’s nothing wrong with that. I believe it’s better to be a passive survivor than to be an idiotic rabid mealy mouthed ‘doer’ who spouts the politically correct rhetoric but has not one ounce of human sensitivity or grace. Yet what has started haunting me lately is that the one ability that I imagined I had is turning out to be nothing but a figment of my imagination!

I cannot play any musical instrument, I cannot sing, my dancing scares my friends, I cannot paint or sketch, I cannot play any sport at a competitive level (although I strongly believe that I could have won many a Gold Medal for the 100 metre sprint, if I’d started training early enough), and I can’t seriously believe that being an academician in some little castle up the hill is going to make an ounce of difference to me or anyone else. In any case, the very thought of it makes me want to stuff a sock down my throat and gag myself (why? Maybe I’ll write about this some other day).

It’s my inability to string together sentences and make an interesting tale out of them that’s sucking the living daylights out of me. It’s my inability to write funny lines, poignant lines, evocative descriptions and thematically centred arguments. One of the things that make me happy, that make a difference to me – and really this is quite personal – is writing. The other things that make me happy will be something that I’ll write about some other time. But for now this is it. I love writing. I’d take it up as a profession if I could. At least that’s what I’ve always most vociferously and most brashly claimed in private and in my conversations with the walls and an imaginary friend. In some moments with some rare (real) individuals I’ve even confessed that this is what I want to do. That being a writer is who and what I want to be, above all else (what good does that do?...Who knows!).

But then here’s the twist. I always say that – but then what do I have to show for it? Nothing. I have no short stories that I can whip out. I have no essays. I have no reviews. I have no poems. And then here’s the further twist. When I’ve tried sitting down on some odd days to write something, anything – maybe a short story that’ll go to places that I don’t go, maybe about a character whom I’d like to meet, maybe about an incident which becomes something other than what it was becoming....Can’t think of a story line. Can’t think of a description. Can’t see anything about the character. Oh. Okay. That’s fine. Let’s write something about “real” things and real people. Let’s write about the hiking trip in –23C. Hmmm. Too long. Too short. Too strained. Too constipated. Too incomplete. Okay then. Let’s try writing on “desire leads to suffering”. My mind drew a complete blank there. No stars. No catherine wheels. No sparks. Nothing. A deathly silence.
…Okay. Okay. I admit it. I’ve been running away. There’s been a 'readymade story'. There’ve been images. There has been a 'dammed' stream of consciousness. A story that has been chasing me for close to a decade now. I just have to spin and weave and wait and watch and wait some more. And sweat. Bleed some. Maybe, maybe not. But then I’m being chased, and I don’t know where I’m going to be if I start running! I wonder whether “m going to squeak like some pipsqueak of a firecracker and then whimper and pop out of existence even before arrival. I wonder what’s likely to happen if ‘it’ doesn’t read the way it’s supposed to; if it doesn’t flow the way it’s supposed to, if it doesn’t blend and melt and dance the way it’s meant to. The way I can feel it – it lives, breathes, walks, wakes up and moves inside me (and I can happily ‘imagine’ that the story is ‘all there’). It has a vibrancy which is so brilliant yet fragile that I worry myself to death that it might disappear if I touch it. I sense it. I did…and now it’s gone. I don’t know anymore. I’ve been too scared out of my wits to touch it again.

…For one day when I tried writing there was such a load of tripe that dripped out of my hobgoblin of a dotpen that I stopped in disgust, horror and fear (note: it was the pen’s ‘fault’…). I wasn’t trying to write 'it' all this while because that is precisely what I was scared off. Here I hear about writers who later go on to say that stories and lines and sentences and characters come to them fully formed and they write it out with a flourish. There’s nothing of that that’s happening with me. I see images. I sense what I do. Lines nor sentences come to me. Nothing that I dream of when I’m asleep tells me what I’m supposed to write. So finally after being arrogantly convinced that I could write the whole thing any time I wanted to because it just needed to be written, I spewed such rare garbage on paper that I haven’t gotten back to what I wrote. I don’t remember exactly when I made my first attempt.
…Whenever it was – what has alarmed me over the course of the weeks is that I’m slowly but surely degenerating into some turnipy vegetable with not much going on in the bonehead but with not even enough to express on paper. And trust me when I say this I have never had a problem writing pages and pages for no one but myself with pretty much nothing going on in my immediate world. Yet these are truly dark times for me. Lately, I’ve been nagging the one person who has put up with my mad bouts, my desperate bouts, my cheerful bouts, my flaky bouts. The one person who puts up with me every single day and night. The one person who really does not expect much from me apart from my being there or here. I don’t even know why he wants me around as a physical presence but I guess I’ll never stop wondering about that – no matter how long or short a time I’m with him hereafter. But the worst thing is that I’m nagging him inside my head. I’m becoming one of those lazy, despicable and bored ‘silliwomen’ who do nothing but crib all the time for no reason and therefore when they do have a point nobody wants to know about it because it’s covered up in too much stink. The silly, frivolous, whining women whom I could beat with a stick! Who are passive-aggressive and cannot think because they have nothing to think about…

These are indeed frightening developments and the scary thing is that these thoughts – the nagging and the whining thoughts have been coming not from me. Not from the 'me-I-know'. Not the me-that-I-know-I-am. I’m quite sure about this because they are exceptionally random just now. They come from the outside much like little seemingly innocuous viruses and they keep up their prattle until I swat them away. If you’ve ever tried meditating, you’ll know what I mean. All the same the boredom that has come in with those nonsensical naggings and the irritation eventually gave way to an absolute horror that I could think such things (note the ‘I’), and slowly into evil almost passive acceptance. The horror has returned now. So hopefully the cycle will be reverted and I shan’t have those nasty thoughts anymore. ‘The poor me’ thoughts or the ‘hrrmphh’ thoughts. The rest of them are way too evil for me to even pen down. At least for the nonce.

And all this because I’ve been running away. I know I have work to attend to. The everyday work that brings me my bread, eggs, coffee and cigarettes ) reverse order of importance). And not being one of those ardent, madly prolific writers I must earn my daily bread. I need certain material comforts of life, and in order to write I must have certain basics. At least I need them. Yet I realise something for the umpteenth time and very consciously that when I do not write for long bouts of time I become quite nasty. Inside outside – I become mangy and rotten and quite despicable. It doesn’t matter what I write. Sometimes it does. But that’s for later. I must bring my ramblings to a close for today. Tomorrow, I shall continue. Be more focussed and aware and more alive. Thank you God.

......I’m pleased to report that things have turned for the better…and there will be more comprehensible posts in the future….
16th March 2008