I have dreams of my writing saving me; I have mares of my writing abandoning me. There are days I see it everywhere—in every object's shape and shadow, in every colour and texture the senses can perceive; there are days I can't find it anywhere—all senses succumbing to nihility.
When I started this newsletter I was into nine months of quarantine, had a non-existing graduation where I simply collected the marksheet from college, was still happier to be staying at home, reading books that had been sitting for years, watching old classic movies from around the world on YouTube. Now being in quarantine for another nine months since, every newsletter has become a reminder to not let be unmindfully swept by time, to look into this place with curiosity, with attentiveness, look more closely into the everyday missing details from our memory. I always loved how I looked in our bathroom mirrors, now I have come to recognize how the mirrors collect light from the opened window, pastel walls, marbled floor, to make me see the me as the world sees. I love waking up early, although I rarely nowadays, but just early enough so I could stand behind the shadows of the open curtains and watch the sunlight pool in the corner of my bed. Sometimes I put my pillows at the spot, it takes in the warmth and smell of the sunlight, making the morning last in the room for a few hours more. In the late afternoon, I love watching the marbled staircase turn golden before the skylight tears away from the eastside.
There were heavier matters I used to write on fluently few years back—when the reality of matters was still at distance, behind the uncertainties of what will come by, not what is left to gather—the pretence to know or have known was easy to come by then as being the pretender I had nothing at stake for my naivety to be unveiled. So you can pretend all the way through until you catch hold of the matter or to at least delay for consciousness to settle. I soon circled out of these lopped lies of wisdom, exhausted from having to keep up on knowing better.
I am not exhausted this time, that's a pity, the times I have been exhausted before have been fruitful, it makes things happen faster—you forgo, then forget, and start foreseeing. I am only tired now, waiting for things to get better, which things I do not know, better how I do not know. Exhaustion gives you closure, in tiredness there is only longing. Tiredness also gives way to questions—is writing about such obvious mundanity required? Why do I bother to collect words every other week to put them into some sense? (In historical-cultural context, it is the Western notion that time is money and productivity is living that has made us question the value of everything we do in terms of results that will only come by in the future. We keep the sanctity of the future unquestioned and the present at stake—never fully perceiving the value of the only thing we have: our time. All of these matters only as long as we are here, ceasing all futures to exist as one's present ends.)
As for me, as the pretence walked out of the way, there has been this raging violence of silence reclaiming its space. Silence is best realized by sound. Words come to perch on my silence and chirp about the mundanity, the obvious—I hum their same old melody for some time until I get tired and the melody lets out a sigh, breaking apart.
When there is enough work for the day to get done with, suddenly the tiredness expends to obligations, you get involved in completion of those obligatory works that you yourself come to forget that you had ever done anything less before, that you were at a time free, so to say, to do whatever you wanted. In those fascinating ways things have a way of happening, whenever these constraints have increased I have found myself to create more, to consume more. I become an avid audience to life's givings, ready to take and make something out of it. Time becomes a more intimate relationship between the mind and the body.
What I consumed this month:
Articles
YouTube
Art Assignment (playlist)
Movies
Sadgati - tele-film (1981) 4.5/5
In the mood for love (2000) 5/5
Pele: Birth of a Legend (2016) 4/5
The Best Man (1999) 3.5/5
The Best Man Holiday (2013) 3/5
Mississippi Masala (1991) 4/5
The Darjeeling Limited (2007) 4/5
Hawaa Hawaai (2014) 3.5/5
Emma (2020) 5/5
Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013) 5/5
Books
Blue Horses - Mary Oliver 4/5
The Doctor and The Saint - Arundhati Roy 4.5/5
Diving Into The Wreck - Adrienne Rich 4/5
Anecdotal Evidence - Wendy Cope 4/5
The Old Man and His God - Sudha Murty 3/5
The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz - Baum 3/5
Ending today’s newsletter with a existential/nostalgic poem (depending you are a cynic or romantic) I wrote this month.
Like The Banyan Trees
They say we lose the will to change the
world as we grow older
Am I growing younger then?
Today the google photos' memories
popped a picture of me
From two years ago in my notifications
I got scared of my own face.
It looked unlike what I saw in the
bathroom mirror this morning—
Will be twenty two in four months—
The mares are accumulating in the
crevices of forgone memories
of twenty years and ongoing.
The daydreams are blooming, growing,
flourishing, like the banyan trees—
Been before I inherited them,
Will remain after me, until chopped off.
—
Until next newsletter,
Fill in the crevices of time with the tenderness of mundane details.
In shadows of silence
With a mind churning with thoughts invoked by this newsletter, I shall find amusement in the minutest of hoye and fill the spaces by, as you beautifully put it, the tenderness of mundane details. <3
All these little things reminded me of my days when I used to stay for about an hour on the terrace noticing little details wondering here and there and now I feel guilty for burying my face all day into the phone playing video games or watching webseries😶