The act of writing is one of solitude.
The image I have is of a deserted whiteness.
There can never be a sense of ‘closure’ or ‘laying to rest’.
Notes from an imaginary notebook
I am yet to imagine. . .
No fingerprints on the last glass of wine.
Nor any footprints on the clouds as you climb the stairway.
No letters. Thoughts. Unread books. Not even a discarded bookmark.
No dreams. Unrealised or fulfilled. Or nightmares to breathlessly wake up from.
No impression of your reclusive body as you sink into your bed for the last time.
Imagine leaving nothing behind. Not even a trace.
Imagine. That which inhabits the mind and fills it with longing. Therefore, Melancholy?
Imagine being a refugee in your own mind.
Migration. Of thought. And Self. From one state of being. Of emotion. Of presence. To another. Or many others. One feeding the other. Often parasitically feeding off the other. As in the more powerful emotion will win the tug of war. The weaker being drained of strength and left to decay. In a landscape of shifting ideologies and political leanings; in a setting that espouses the philosophy of both the commodity and the spectacle of the Self; Often the Spectacle of the commodity itself is as alluring as the promise of something aspired to but never gained in another sphere of emotion. There is a downside to aspiration. It has built into its very desire a sense of leaving something behind. Of abandoning. And therefore, of being abandoned. The comfort of leaving one’s nest for something new, however exciting, promising, desirable is still an a-sundering. Therefore, a sense of unease is a state that will visit one’s Self both metaphysically and as a bodily invasion.
In Dreams. There is no Alice. There is no Wonderland. There is wonder. And there is arousal. Of the imaginary. A tactility in the text that conveys the illicit and the unmentionable. There is a sense of ‘discovery’. The kind that hints at the excitement of a journey into the unknown. Accompanied by a sense of anticipation. The kind that an explorer must feel at the start of an exploration. Or a lover? What lies in wait? Demons or angels? Who knows? The kind that visits our dreams. Images that ‘glow in the dark’ as they slide in and out of our minds in a state of deep sleep that feels like wakefulness. How does that artist dare express in paint what the writer does with such ease in words? The sensuality of colours or is it again that ‘dreadful reality’, the imagination, that refuses to easily cohabit or mingle. Imagination at war with itself and Others with a capital O and its neighbours. Sharp. Bristly. Edged with an armour that is hard to pierce. And yet does precisely that. It allows itself the vulnerability of the dream-state in which all is porous and therefore nothing is as it appears. Hard. Soft. Metal. Cloth. Everything merges into one. This is what the seemingly opposing imaginations—yes plural—try to achieve. A harmony that sets out to deceive.
Now imagine
‘That which is elusive’. Find it. Hold it in the palm of your thought. Articulate its radiance through any form of creativity you call your conduit, for that is what any creative action is: a ‘transience’ through which art reaches its audience.
How?
‘Wear only your second skin’, shed the one that has trained itself to dullness. Let it respond to every single thing. Soak it in. Absorb without smearing your self.
Now shut your eyes tight till they hurt. Open them slowly, inside your head, so that you can learn a fresh new way of seeing.
Why?
Because
‘He never heard of reason.
If he did, he pities it.’
The image I have is of a deserted whiteness. Desolate and uninhabited. The sheet of paper stretches into the twilight. Barren, solitary, introverted, hermit-like in its desire for seclusion. Companionless. Unfrequented except by thought.
How do you create loneliness? And its close Other, intimacy? Without which you cannot write.
The act of writing is one of solitude. Like diving into the innermost, blindfolded. Of turning eyelids into tightly clenched fists. The nails dig deep. Drawing blood from the darkness.
Of waiting for language to find an opportune moment and reveal itself.
Of digging into memory that is elusive and often helter-skelter in its desire to be untamed.
Of chasing ‘butterflies with nets of wonder’ often with the cruel intent of preserving them like dead flowers between the covers of a book.
Of seeking your muse, night after night, with the remaining glass slipper in the hope that it would fit.
There are words that are welcome. Welcome words. Genial and hospitable. Magnanimous and large-hearted. Words that have kind faces creased with the wisdom that comes with years of usage. Sculpted words that know the pain of the mallet.
There are words that are not so welcome. Unwelcome words. Met with suspicion as they thrust their way forward. Words that have to prove their identity in a post-9/11 new order where a passport is a document of mistrust. And hostility. Nomadic words that have no choice but to remain in perpetual exile. The Jews of language. Imagine mailing letters home and finding them returned unopened with the legend ‘address unknown’.
There are words that come to the feast wearing masks. Disguised figments awaiting the witching hour when they will turn into mice and scurry back into the dark. Unless... unless they can be unmasked to reveal their true selves.
Words, like mourners at a bereavement, inconsolable. Devastated and stricken with grief. Wearing the garb of deep and profound sorrow. Intense. Emotion writ large upon their countenance.
Then again:
‘Every now and then it is possible to have absolutely nothing; the possibility
of nothing.’
—John Cage
People die. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes not so quietly. I often wonder how I will die.
‘My breath leaves my body in dreams’
I am at a wake. Listening to the mourners gathered there. They cannot see me for I am recently dead. Or newly arrived. I can no longer tell. Not with certainty. Anyway. Perhaps those who have some experience in these matters can. People who knew me when I was alive are all around me. It would be more correct to say that I am all around them. One by one the ones I had learned to call ‘my friends’ take the stage and extol my virtues. Men and women both. Singing my praises. Saying things to my back they wouldn’t dare say to my face. I feel the women outnumber the men. As they did when I was amongst them. Alive. Now in this new state of absence I find this not the slightest bit odd. In fact I must admit I like it.
However, there is one amongst them I fail to recognise. A woman wearing a burkha. Her face and body concealed. Austere. Black. When it is her turn to speak she merely stands there and stares in my direction. She then reaches down to the hem of her burkha and lifts up the front. And reveals legs made up of papier-mache. On closer inspection it turns out to be paper. Not just any paper. Quality letter paper. The kind people use to write handwritten letters. I would go so far as to say that her legs appear to be made up of letters written in black Chinese ink by a fluent hand.
I remain standing where I am while she plucks each letter and proceeds to tear it into hundreds of tiny pieces. It is all done in silence. She is soon surrounded by an ant heap of meaningless text. There are no more letters to tear. I am not at all astonished that she no longer has any legs.
‘My language trembles with desire...’
I am at a dream. It is also that which I am dreaming. Dreaming the dream that is being dreamt by me.
By me alone.
I seek words that will emote. Move restlessly across the stage refusing to stand still ignoring the urge to pause. Words that will seek translucence in a pool of light. Words that are nimble-toed and taut. Those that appear to skim the surface of the wine-drenched stage. Bliss. Full. Incandescent. Rhythmic words. Like fireflies.
Like a herald the twilight at the lakes fills the air with expectancy. The fading light will bring the fireflies to play upon its edges. A lad not quite out of his teens will capture seventy-seven or more into a large glass jar. For he has promised his ladylove. She who has no memory of this quest. Nor time enough.
It was well past midnight when I came back to the theatre. Made my way through the basement door and up to the dark stage. I placed the jar of fireflies on the stage and slowly removed the cloth that had concealed their brilliance.
I then opened the jar and let each glowing word escape into the dark of the auditorium.
For those of us who find ourselves in Purgatory for the rest of our post-Gujarat lives this business of forgetting and its reverse, remembering, is a cross that will have to be borne. There can never be a sense of ‘closure’ or ‘laying to rest’.
Not even in our imagination.
Unknown and alone, I have returned to wander through my native country, which lies about me like a vast graveyard . . .
—Friedrich Holderlin, Hyperion
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Naveen Kishore is a poet, photographer, theatre lighting designer and publisher, Seagull Books
