August Again
the abruptness of life and finding oneself recognized in poetry
The past two months didn’t make me feel the presence of my writing block as other lazier banalities occupied my head. But this month as the necessities of life crashed in one after another and then all at once, leaving no escape but to get things done, leaving no space for release for the emotions to make themselves seen—my body reaching saturation multiple times a day while the mind remained unattended—the urgency of my own words made itself clear. That’s what this August has been.
I have pinned down August to be two faced like the two poems of Mary Oliver titled ‘August’ written across a decade.
One written in 1983:
The next written in 1993:
The first half of the month was gone in the effect and aftermath of my fever and its dreams (coming in coincidentally the night after I watch Loving Vincent, a few days after I discovered the above poem), the second half in changing the anatomy of our house and routine to accommodate my mother’s fractured ankle, she got hit by a bike on the way to school. She is now in grandfather’s room which has the attached bathroom, which two years ago was rearranged to be the living room after he passed away. The bed is brought back again, the sofas escorted out. Three days now to his death anniversary.
It was a Sunday. What I remember is the unbearable heat. I didn’t sense it until after the Sunday lunch of Baba’s cooked chicken and Ma’s cooked prawn when I went upstairs, me and sis realized that the AC in her room is not cooling. The heat was now creeping on the skin and beating on the walls. Baba asked me to go to his room where the AC was on. I didn’t want to drag all the pillows and blankets downstairs, so I instead slept in my room for the afternoon. My body was radiating with heat when I had woken up. Splashed water on the face and afterwards stuck my back to the almirah to take the coolness of its metal. Switched on the lights of the rooms and went downstairs. Asked Ma if I should prepare the tea, yes, one, two, three cups of milk tea, sis already had bournvita, and black tea for Dadu. Dadu asked to be taken to the hospital as Baba was helping him to get freshen up waking up from the nap, ‘‘but it’s not safe now with the Covid situation’’, Baba reasoned and that if it’s an emergency surely then we would, to which Dadu gave a small laugh, Baba would tell us later.
I served him his black tea with three spoonfuls of sugar as he prefers instead of two which I usually give him and three biscuits. As the milk was boiling Ma began to make chicken burgers from the recipe given by my cousin sister who visited us a few days back. Finishing our tea and then the burger we were stuffed to full. Later in the night when I went downstairs, seeing the remaining prawn watered my mouth even though I was not a bit hungry, I had it for dinner with plain rice.
The heat hit back after the dinner. Me and sis readied our bed on the floor of Baba’s room to sleep for the night in AC. The morning before sis said (yet again since our inverter, fridge, water pump, my study table broke all in this year and now this AC) that 2020 is just tragic as the news of death of Chadwick Boseman popped on her phone screen, yet again since we lost Irfan Khan, Rishi Kapoor, Sushant Singh Rajput, Saroj Khan, since the Australian wildfire, the Delhi riots, Amphan and the Yemen crisis. Amphan was the closest to home but none whatsoever of an apparent loss, none whatsoever like a hole of its shape in our lives to look at, none whatsoever to know, to simply know.
I woke up the next morning in an abruptness I've dreamt of before in mares, both asleep and awake, the lasting feel of which when only thought of makes one's gut heavy and tight, that only perhaps if I don't breathe it won't come true. In truth, when it happens, nothing really happens, everything has already happened by then, you only wake up to witness it. Ma came wailing and I woke up looking up at her asking what happened, my left hand already waking up my sister.
Dadu was no more. Last day's heat was still there, ever existing amidst all the silence, and subsequently all the chaos to arrange for the funeral. Summer never seems to exit while it's still all good, it always overflows to have a mourning end. I went to my room as more and more people started coming. I had no mind for small talk, so I finished the book I was reading that I've dragged on for days.
Now two years later people are coming in every other day into that same room to visit Ma and I can't hide away in my room this time—I'm saved from the small talk though as Ma still manages that. We are again loaded with apples and sweets that people brought on their visit. We had our customary Baba's cooked chicken today for the Sunday lunch. I'm again in between things, doing nothing in particular, yet again suffocated by the heat of the dying summer. Routines persists with alternations fitting along with time.
The clouds densened by evening after Baba came back from the funeral and everyone else had gone back. He suddenly looked so old, clothed in white or maybe I never saw it before that he is, infact. The heat persisted as I went to bathe. Switched on the lights and made tea, one, two, three, four cups of milk tea, the four of us. It rained heavily late in the night and the day following. The heat was gone, entering into the first day of September.
*
Looking back to that the day, the thing that kept haunting me was the abruptness of life. Usually people don't cognize the comfort of a routine, they go on without questioning, without realizing the gravity of emotions they hold within, until it comes to a sudden halt. That is when luxury of creative expression becomes a necessity, a companion.
Like when Ethan Hawke said in a TED talk:
Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking of poetry, right? They have a life to live, and they're not really concerned about Allen Ginsberg's poems or anybody's poems. Until their father dies, they go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don't love you anymore, and all of sudden you're desperate for making sense out of this life, ‘‘Has anyone ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?’’ Or the inverse – something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes. You love them so much, you can't even see straight. You know, you're dizzy. ‘‘Did anybody feel like this before? What is happening to me?’’ And that's when art is not a luxury, it's actually sustenance. We need it.
Or when Ada Limón said in the interview by Lauren LeBlanc:
I think poetry is a way of carrying grief, but it's also a way of putting it somewhere so I don't always have to heave it onto my back or in my body. The more I put grief in a poem, the more I am able to move freely through the world because I have named it, spoken it, and thrown it out into the sky. Everyone has grief that they carry and sometimes we have anxiety and depression about anticipatory grief. The thing that I’ve found that helps is knowing we are all in this, someone has gone or is going through the same thing. Poetry helps us with that too. Writing. Reading. As James Baldwin said, ‘‘You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read.’’
The events of that day kept whirling in my head for a week until I wrote them down as if finally lowering it to grave. At the end of the note I had added this poem by Emily Dickinson, finding a kind of assurance in discovering the lineage of the emotion I was carrying then to have existed forevermore.
What I consumed this month:
Alphabet - Inger Christensen (poetry in translation)
Autobiography of Death - Kim Hyesoon (poetry in translation)
A Room With A View - E. M. Forster (novel)
A Mathematician’s Apology - G. H Hardy (nonfiction)
Radial Symmetry - Katherine Larson (poetry)
Writer Anthony Doerr on the Power of Books, Writing and Literature (youtube)
Cleo from 5 to 7 - Agnès Varda (French film)
Loving Vincent - Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman (animated film)
Close-Up - Abbas Kiarostami (Persian film)
Atonement - Joe Wright (adapted film)
Until next the newsletter,
Try reading some poetry.