Dreaming

My phone was dying at invigilation yesterday and this is dangerous for more practical reasons than I care to admit. If there is a question paper shortage and there is no one outside that you can plead to, then the student and I are both somewhat little screwed.

Yesterday however, there was no question paper shortage and no emergency except the thin voice in my head that wondered where that lovely blog I used to stalk all those years ago was? I typed in all the combinations of the two words I remembered with a 5% battery. Phone died, I felt weak, so I stared into space.

Today I sat at my table after invigilation and googled the link without any hassle, and the blog just came on, like magic, and I was returned to all those evenings and afternoons I spent years ago reading this blog, imagining independence and cities and independent women in cities. I felt more fondness for this writer than I have felt for anybody in months and wanted to run to her and tell her all about my life over a tall bottle of wine. That she may not be in town or be entirely uninterested in what I have to say is a fear I don’t have to deal with at all because reading her is a pleasure that will remain even if we don’t talk for months and years.

I read her and then I was moved into the kind of sleep that is yellow in its dreams. I must have napped for 10-15 minutes. I have no memory of what I dreamt about. But she was there and I was there and we were both chasing each other in a city that I was trying to reach in my sleep. I slept urgently and when I woke, I was grateful for having known her and to continue to know her. The dream was written in her language, with long and winding sentences that make me giggle and sigh and think of how much I love eating oranges.

For now, I am going to return to my dream and think of cities and how much they’ve given me and how much I love them.

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French press with a Russian twist

“…and in the violence of her feeling she did not notice how they both walked into the house and sat down to tea”

The Darling by Anton Chekhov

Read this short story and felt betrayed. I should’ve read this when I was 19. 23. 27. It’s a good thing I read it now or I would’ve had to add 34 & 35 to this miserable list.

The story is about a woman who is either perpetually in love or waiting to be. She allows herself to be consumed by the men she falls in love with and thinks it neither wise nor necessary to keep some of her to herself. She begins to speak like the men she loves, borrows their speech, colours her world with them and makes their moods hers. In their absence, she refuses to see herself as a person, and feels challenged by the meaningless of feelings and objects around her.

She survives heart break after heart break and is driven to the edge of loneliness until accidental motherhood comes calling. Here, Chekhov stops.

I was moved by this woman who gives herself so foolishly. I was moved when she went from one heartbreak to another because she saw it as moving from love to love, never quite knowing that what she was perhaps looking for was the chance to feel like a person again. It made me see how differently I love now.

Reading this then would’ve meant insurance against believing that the only way to be a person was to be somebody’s something.

But then reading Annie Enraux’s Dairy, 1988 was a reassurance of sorts for all the time and energy lost. That the best and worst of us love being loved. What to do? It was a pinching reminder of our ability (read: stubbornness) to remain fixed on the fleetingness of love despite the tickingness of time and the general busyness of life.

She is writing and waiting. She is attending events but also waiting. She is caring for her two children and she’s waiting. Seems to me that we go about performing the non-love activities in life (regardless of how central they are in our lives or we in their lives) as if it’s playing in an autopilot way in the background. And the heroine in us, despite being the fucking heroine is only waiting – not even performing.

Was reminded also of Dorothy Parker and Roland Barthes.

Finally began Wolf Hall. Found myself, quite unwillingly, back on a hospital bed in Payannur where I first started reading it and couldn’t read a word after page 4, having just come out of surgery for an ankle fracture. The rod and screw sitting tightly in my post-surgery foot protested every time there was Cromwell’s bone, rib, eye socket being crushed.

Now, I am not only enjoying the blood bone-crushing but also feeling most wonderfully taken by Mantel.

For Square Haunting

There’s something about the way Barathi reads that makes the writers she reads feel deeply and fiercely read. I envy her capacity to slide under the skin of your words, find the heart within them and give it more life than you ever could. This is how she writes as well.

To think that even my most ordinary thoughts and sentences find a home in her body/mind is to know that when she sends them back to me, I am going to catch them and when I do, I am going to fall hard. Sample this sentence: “when a space is sought to create art, such a space too, in turn, bears the complexities embedded in the artist’s method and being. Simply put, artists often have to create the space they want to be in because such a place did not exist until then” — this is all her. And that’s why, to get to know her as a writer, a reader, a person is a gift.

Sometimes Dalit women writing makes men’s dicks fall. I’ve seen this happen. I can give you proof but I don’t want to put dicks on my blog, there are enough of them in the world. I used to think that their dicks are falling because they want us to return our SC certificates but they are falling because we are writing and we won’t stop writing no matter how much they cry.

To have on the one hand, this fear of women writing, and on the other, women who celebrate women’s writing makes me happy.

I wish I spend all of this year reading more of Barathi and people like Barathi who make it possible to imagine a world where we are read in the way we want to write.

UNSTILL

Mind is crisscrossing. It’s a web connecting too many things and I came here to slow down.

I woke at 4:30 am feeling very happy because it had been raining and the sounds from the open window made me smile first thing in the morning. I lay in bed for a few more minutes, prolonging joy, wondering if I was only teasing myself with the promise of an early morning or if I was actually going to wake up and get one.

4:45 – I got up, went outside. It was dark and the rain had washed the streets and trees. Smiled more. Came back to bed and started reading. I am still with Patchett. Last two essays in The Story of a Happy Marriage. I am loving it. Went to the kitchen, made hot water, sat in bed sipping it, reading. It was still raining.

5:30 – Day broke. Went outside properly and smiled. Came back, changed into my walking clothes (oversized blue sweats and black yoga pants), took phone, earphones, Patchett and went for a walk. I listened to the soundtrack from Vita and Virginia as I walked. The music was composed by Isobel Waller-Bridge, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s sister. Fuck them both. So talented.

Many fruits were fallen pachak on the road. 3 mangoes, 2 purple berries, 3 red berries, one half-eaten banana, and half a jackfruit. Took a few pictures. After 15 mins of being consumed by V&V, I walked to the park, went inside an enclosure, sat on a bench and read. An old man came to do various exercises. We left each other alone. I read for 30 mins and came back home.

I took coffee with Patchett again and spoke to the parents for a while. Came back to bed to chill and read a bunch of essays that made me think think think. Grateful for these mornings. Was distracted by Hamzy’s Korean food-eating videos again but only mildly.

1. You Really Need to Quit Twitter
2. Is Google Making Us Stupid?
3. Habit by William James

Ignoring the doomsday headlines is not difficult because I recognize that we are already anyway doomed. The irony of being led to all these essays through twitter is somewhat charming.

Bookmarking these for later:

• Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, Janet Malcolm
• The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm
• Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf 

Must return to Vita and Virginia.

Ann Patchett

• 

I am drowning in Ann Patchett. When I read her latest essays now, I catch a fleeting hello, a nodding glimpse to something she has mentioned in her older essays which I am also reading. It’s like I am stitching. She is making me re-arrive at the personal essay as a form of journalism. Many gods of journalism, who cannot stand that other people read and write will die about this. But what else is new? They die about something or the other every day. But read Ann Patchett – she is remaking journalism, both the ‘serious’ one and the chota bheem one.

Whiny muffins like me who cry about too much work should read her essay ‘Nonfiction, an introduction’ where she outlines the beginning of her journey as a freelance writer. She says she learnt how to swallow pride as she watched some of her best sentences get chopped up by editors who worked with knives. She learnt, she says, how to write better by anything and everything that came her way. One day she’d be writing about ballroom dancing, another day about boutique farming, and some other day, about a lip balm. She soaked in everything she wrote and didn’t complain. In the end, it would all come together as she returned home to write what she really wanted to write – fiction.

“Somewhere along the line I learned to experience only the smallest, most private stabbing sensation when I watched my best sentences cut from an article because they did not advance the story. Ultimately, this skill came to benefit my fiction as well. The conversations I had had so often with magazine editors were now internalized. I could read both parts of the script. Did I think that was a beautiful sentence I had written? Yes, I did. Did it further the cause of the novel? No, not really. Could I then delete it? It was already gone”

AM had once said that to be a writer, one has to become small. There was so much to carry in that sentence that it made me afraid to think that I’d never be able to do it. But it’s true. Becoming small is the only mark of a writer thirsty to learn, a journalist hungry to see.

‘I wrote greedily and joyfully’: Natalia Ginzburg

Wrote this sometime in November last year. Wanted to release it from my drafts-section, so here it is.

The department runs a certificate course in writing called Polemics for our Pandemics, where I teach a few sessions. Today, I took Natalia Ginzburg’s ‘My Vocation’ to class. I first read this woman in 2019 and thought no one had made writing seem so doable, so touchable, so lovable. Reading her was very freeing. It’s something I don’t feel very often and I was so thrilled and terrified of what I’d read and how she’d written that I didn’t go back to her for a long time.

At Moe’s Books in San Francisco that same year, my friend Simão picked up her novel, Family Lexicon in Italian, and I, only barely recognizing her name jumped. “Ginzburg”, he said, to my sheepish ‘OMG NATALIA GINSBERG’!!!. After that, I combed through every bookstore we were taken to, hunting for an English translation but I guess I searched badly. I am sure it was there and I didn’t look properly.

What I felt that morning in 2019, when I first read My Vocation was a throbbing freedom in my chest. No one had ever written about writing like that. And I know that tomorrow I will wake up and find another woman and say the same thing about her but it’s why we read no? To find more and more women who can teach us how to be and feel alive, despite love, and life, and other things.

I was looking forward to seeing this class because I haven’t taught in so long and it’s probably why I haven’t been myself since October. I feel like myself when I teach more than when I write. We wrapped up regular classes in October and since then, it’s like my days are full of me and I don’t like her at all. Most mornings since then, I have woken up feeling nervous about not knowing which version of myself I am going to get. It’s like living with a moody, ill-tempered husband. I can tell it’s a decent morning if I am able to fight the thing that I usually tend to think of as soon as I wake up. If I can’t, then I am fucked.

Reading about Ginzburg’s belief in her vocation returns me to mine. What a solid, spectacular writer. It’s her I was going to rely on when a former student who wrote and still writes like fire on ice was going to go do law. I almost took a print-out of My Vocation and handed it to her. Later when I sent her a copy of ‘The Little Virtues’, she loved it and that made me love Ginzburg even more.

Ginzburg unknotted a nagging worry I’d fed for a long time, often feeling caught between the desire to give everything away to one essay or one story and resisting it. Shouldn’t I save a really good detail for a book? For something bigger, brighter, better?

She says:

“I realized that in this vocation there is no such thing as ‘savings’. If someone thinks ‘that’s a fine detail and I don’t want to waste it in the story I’m writing at the moment, I’ve plenty of good material here, I’ll keep it in reserve for another story I’m going to write’, that detail will crystallize inside him and he won’t be able to use it. When someone writes a story he should throw the best of everything into it, the best of whatever he possesses and has seen, all the best things that he has accumulated throughout his life.”

And I’m still learning how to give my writing everything I have. It hasn’t been possible to do this in the past couple of weeks. In these covid murders that the government has determinedly orchestrated, how does one find the will to accept that at this point, we don’t know if we are waiting for things to get better or worse…worse than this?

Featured Image Credits: Southwest Review

reckless

Today, I felt recklessly free, and therefore pleased.

It began last evening when I made uppitu without any instructions hissed behind my shoulder. It was not bad at all. This morning, I made tea after class, and as I was taking it to my room, I was very aware of feeling absolutely at ease with myself. This hasn’t happened in a long time. I don’t remember if this has ever happened before. Never been home alone like this and I almost can’t seem to contain how happy it makes me.

Then I read this essay and felt my neck become cool as if someone was blowing into it to wake me up gently from a most wonderful sleep. I picked up Mrs. Dalloway soon after because reading that essay made me want to feel read by the book. Then I listened to this song by Lucinda Williams and felt cheated for not having known about her before.

With Lucinda Williams on loop, I read this essay on Hemingway by Lillian Ross. These lines — He called Dawn Powell a wonderful writer who “has everything that Dotty Parker is supposed to have and is not tear-stained.”  made me smile as if Dawn Powell was my baby.

Read Dawn Powell in the evening and felt reassured. Two gems: ‘Nothing or nobody outside yourself should be so important’ and ‘The one thing I will work myself to death for is the protection of my own laziness’

Here’s another song by Lucinda darling – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvzJ39m4vsA&ab_channel=moliken3