Mademoiselle Prose
May 15, 2013 § 2 Comments
There is an entire generation, manufacturing poetry. Exceptions exist as they always do, but consider the point that i know only one poetess worth the title, out of all blogs i follow. With writing becoming a to-do thing, everyone is a writer. i’d better not exhaust myself addressing the pseudo-writers. But those out there, with that irresistible urge to write, i write to you-
Write prose. Avoid poetry unless it swims out of you like a dream. In general, force yourself to write prose when your writing forces you to write. Poetry is a princess and yes, with all her whims and fancies. It is impossibly difficult to follow her. She follows you, when she follows you. All efforts unto her attention are useless. Mademoiselle Prose, on the other hand, is a mirror.
The intense satisfaction of spilling your heart out by writing a paragraph is unparalleled, even by Poetry.
Write Prose. For she will speak back to you in harsh tongues. She will lead you astray and won’t hesitate betraying you when you live any less. Your honesty will be mirrored in her skin, and for all the blanks in your head, you’ll see right through her. While Poetry is flirtatious, mysterious and fun; Mme Prose is your own mud stained hand. Bridging the abyss of identity with the grooves of your fingerprints, the prominent nerves of your forearm, the rough of your palm.
She’ll take you to the ancient village beyond the river where truth in itself is profound beauty. Where mystery and grace aren’t so much a fancy as a single reflection of reality. She’ll hold you by the arm and force you to write real, coherent thoughts. She will not let you afford the all-too-fashionable obscuring the second half with a fancy word. She will not let you hide when you are lost for words. Mme Prose, like a 90′s mother, will not let you slash your pen to blur out an emotion into any notion of abstract art.
But buoyant writer, beware. Let this also not delude you into something you are not ready for yet. Truth is good, truth is in fact- great, but unless it is a zen master i am speaking to- understand that the moment in which you stand naked across yourself- you will begin to see a world you’d hate about yourself. You might realize that your skin, contrary to your most ardent of beliefs, and may i say pride- does not even cover up half of you. Bones mangled into heaps of unfamiliar art. Prose, with her childlike honesty and Nature-like indifference will put your hands into, and make you feel your own guts or the absence of them. This is no dreamland, no weekend retreat, no inner-adventure trip. It may very well be your well of indignation and horror. She will chew you and spit you out, if you don’t respect her from inside out. She is ruthless, and knows far too many half-men for your own good. And if you plan to domesticate her, produce an employment out of her or even have her in your arms to let the world know of your worth- know now that she is vicious.
In the winds of her fury, she’ll give you dreadful silences that you won’t ever be able to fill. She’ll curse you with sleepless nights which movies, books and people won’t be able to take away. A singular glimpse of her face, and you would get rid of all entertainment for all your life. She would become the one barometer of the breathlessness in your panting lungs. She commands the power over you to make you loathe the very thought of yourself. If you plan to take on her just because you read this, in some deluded sense of an ego-trip- know again that she will make you cum and moan even before you run out of your first fill of ink.
She’d take away your hobby of words and reveal if you have an ignited passion underneath, or the hole of it. And god forbid, be it a hole- there is no mercy. If you break the thin crust of your human meaninglessness and fall into your own hollows, the only way out would be rising onto yourself. And it is tedious, mind-numbing, suicide inducing and gut wrenching. The world- the outside world will not be able to pull you out back. She’d give you visions as you would fill the 9 mile deep trench with words- with the real words not evaporating the next week. If you do make it out of that pit of your own unworthiness, you’ll be a Man. So this journey you plan to undertake will not be as you’d want it to be. It would solve no equations of utility and worldly-worth. You won’t even find more than a handful people in the world with eyes that see it.
You’d climb out a prophet.
The God of small things
May 5, 2013 § 2 Comments
22-04-2013
New Delhi
i finally met the only person i have ever longed for, for so long- Arundhati Roy. i will be keeping the triviality of How behind.
Meeting her was not satisfying in the means and channels that i wanted, or rather expected it to be. In fact, it had a tinge of bitterness bitter reality to it. i had expected it to be satiating, drowsily satiating. It turned out to be an something unexpected, something i wasn’t prepared for and it has been, in a certain sense- awakening.
i am a man who carries as little assumptions and constraints about how life is, can and should be, as personally possible. Not that i expected otherwise but she under-did me- she cruises at a lower, slower, simpler altitude. She does not believe in drivers, cooks or servants. She lives alone for most of the time, away from her family. Like Mary Roy. Her way of living itself is profoundly distinct, and way beyond my wildest imaginations of solitude. Sitting there, my complication contrasted itself against her completeness- like baggage i was ashamed of carrying.
With all my everything, i was in a sense worthless to her. The worthlessness brims and borders on the horror that she shrugged me off, or more accurately- her nature did. i, as another external person, was completely out of her accord. She did not shrug me off, but rather revealed to me how her nature, her spirit- effortlessly keeps to itself. Walks alone.
Had i been a little less evolved, i would have comfortably fed myself the psychiatric lie that she doesn’t really know me. And that i am just another fan from the faceless, nameless. Only if she knew how good i was. No. It is not so. She has ascended to such heights of individuality, she is so evolved a person that she doesn’t really need anyone in the sense that the commonwealth does.
She ‘negated’ my devotion, my proposition to serve her in any way she deems fit- without efforts! She opened the palms of her hand- only to show me a lonely completeness. The completeness of an Overman. And standing against it, i saw my sense of societal-worth hanging, stenching around my dwarfed stature.
i met Rahel. Rahel without her Estha.
Madness V
April 30, 2013 § Leave a Comment
The geniuses are, by the matters of a certain physics- just accurately profound, just in sync, in accord– to the tongues, ears and eyes of the commonwealth. Vibrations that- just click are madness-es Above, is inconvenient insanity and below is the all-too convenient utility.
Towards the end, it appears that- truth is the line between the convenient and the inconvenient, seen through the personal scale of magnification. The world scales details, zooms-in in a sense- to fill the one perceiving to his personal depth. And therefore, there is no- one world. This is a parallel paradox, involving instant, real-time physics of being and becoming.
Coming back to the worldly world- second grade warriors brick, and gluttonous wise men mortar- societies. Lost causes of lukewarm passions swirl and mirror the porridge of invented games of a certain physio- and psychological unattainability. Lives, real lives aren’t difficult to relish in singularity. It is the pursuit of keeping the interleaved paradoxical constraints that wears a man down, into an ideal social being.
Journal entry
April 30, 2013 § Leave a Comment
118- Poem
March 18, 2013 § 4 Comments
Your life is the most precious thing in the world.
Without ornamentation-
of vocabulary, prose and poetry
strength, passion, ghosts
applause, subtle knowing
a gush of joy- brewing in a stranger’s heart
castles, guns, and roses
solitude, perfection and meaningful closure
Without pain, remorse and
his eyes on your skin.
forever, fleeting glances, wild fires or waterfalls
islands all unto yourself, books, cryptic talks,
eyes gleaming with memory, memory and audience.
Without a stretch of loneliness
grief and individuality
scales of worth, heroic becoming, madness
and fits of improvements over your yellow skin- brazen, golden or ugly
a promise- kept or broken
Without
this assurance.
Already.
Ghosts I-V
March 16, 2013 § 5 Comments
Prologue:
He was up against past. Against a ghost, he ‘unknowingly’ rubbed out of a lamp.
It was useless, it wouldn’t get back in. The ghost would haunt her forever.
He could not win.
He felt a solid lump in time, a nick beyond his reach, traveling further and further away. He was not too sure of his feelings, apart from the following two things- “control was slipping away”, “an almost sinister life-form grinned at him, as he saw the lump receding”.
He was very sure of another two things- “wines taste of their grapes”, “he himself was the cook”. He knew definitively that he did not poison the Queen of hearts.
Poison is not always a ‘thing’, it is more often a disbelief, a notion. A crack rippled across them, and her defenses promptly wedged it. She, in all her honesty and faith could not pull the wedge out, he realized. Something told him that the thoughts of a permanent taint and imperfection, were the constituents of the wedge. Metals, show a unique adhesive quality called cold welding. Put them close enough and they stick as good as ever.
He was up against past. Against a ghost, he ‘unknowingly’ rubbed out of a lamp.
It was useless, it wouldn’t get back in. The ghost would haunt her forever.
He could not win. Not until she skipped onto his side.
She was fighting his ghosts every night, all night.
He did not even know hers by the name.
Epilogue:
Ghosts, my grandmother noted, were only as black as the black within us, and only as permanent as the night.
