Apes, parrots and children

Apes, parrots and children 

Birds in birdcages swing. Checkered marble floors gleam. Wooden perches sit on the high chest. An ape follows arms and legs behind a shadow. Birdcages swing.

Anguish of the senses when pain erupts, spreading across miles of nerves and fibre. Demands falling, hopes getting notched down, compromised, compromised, until the bare essence is left to desire. At least, what feels like bare essence to desire. Order of the world rapidly rearranging its contents within the husk of its form. Knowing, known, ordered, becoming as comfortless as a torn blanket.

Old telephone sits with its coils of words trailing under the table. Sheets of paper get blown about. The gusts coming from the open window down the hall, in the wall. The sunflower pot on its sill, looking outside at a still calmness. Rolling clouds, recumbent skies, green meadows swelling and falling.

Potato-ooze-love

Is potato-ooze-love as Herzog puts it, really that much of an oddity, a fabrication in a relentless world? Of course, I shall never know in exactly what sense he used it, whether he uses it to mean the same things as I do. Potato-ooze-love makes any place habitable, any house a home, any quotidian (another controversial word) sense remarkably utopian. Again, my utopia has been coloured by beautiful, very rich, clear, huge advertisements of the ‘good life’ (is it a habit to italicise words, a bad one at that?), where moderately attractive men, women and children inhabit perfect dirt-free home spaces, have shining, well-equipped kitchens and sit all day absorbing homes (books, actually, but I’m going to preserve this particular Freudian slip) and letting themselves be absorbed by creative hobbies. It’s such an ideal to aspire to that one can go through life striving for it. But even my fantasies begin to get fatigued, the scenarios unattractively repetitive, and for a second, wait, wait, is it really a dream? But quotidian things (ah, such a word), by the virtue of being drab, and unremarkable, reinstate my dear-old potato love. So most of the time, I’m somewhere between the two, trying to hedge a delicate balance, and yet trying to accommodate something new.

I’m always striving to add that much bit of significance (potato-ooze) to everything and I mean everything. Doesn’t mean that I’m always successful. Everything in this world, for me, has to be aligned, fitted to an ideal that’s already there and is always being formed...by everything, it seems. Making a card for a birthday, cooking for one’s mother, trying one’s hand at baking, going out somewhere to make a romantic date even more romantic, and in short, always adhering to certain notions of social conduct and aspirations and limits, I don’t know where this leads. Is this even me, I think at times. Are they even my ideas, my desires? Of course not, is the answer it seems.

Even when I’m writing  this, I’m aspiring to a certain kind of middle ground between eloquence and candour, such that will reflect my current state of mind to my successive ones. I always come back to the writing aspect. I don’t know, it always gets me. Every single time. Candour is a word in the language, another symbol in a series of symbols standing in for something else. Technically, I should have put candour in quotes, since I’m referring to the word and not its meaning, but what the hell, it’s all the same to me. Language is an artifice, used to structure more artifices, the artifices of our existence, for example, without which we cannot seem to function. Again Herzog comes to mind. It’s funny, since I find the book a drag. Truth, a world with only truth in it would be unendurable, or something on these lines. That’s what Herzog said. Nothing matters, everything goes. This is also where I end, every time. With a frame of mind that’s so confused and stretched beyond means that everything slips in... and out. The gaps are too wide. What does it matter?

Affect

Utter hopelessness. It is good to imagine a voice, a dialogue, dialogism. It is therapeutic. Genius rebuk’d?

Comforts of the flesh. Atavistic selfishness creeping into every pore. Since words don’t signify what they signify, what’s the use? Empty signifiers. A world to delude people.

Order and method. Comforts of the flesh. A theory to prescribe what to like? Aesthetic theory of fine art. Simulation/simulacrum. What’s the use?

Am I a reductionist? All things meaningless, hence no point in engaging in fruitless endeavour. No fruition. Word fetishist.

 Deep syncope.

Forest

If a forest is a symbol for a forest, doesn’t that take away from its character? Is it necessary to connote beyond itself, to point away, to point at something else, or is it necessary to contain meaning in a ball? ‘Forest’ is a symbol for the idea of a forest. A real forest is representative of all other forests. The lid does not stay, it cannot bear to stay. Forests are a particular arrangement of trees and land, shrubs and weeds. Only trees and land and shrubs and weeds do not make up a forest. Objects are just that, they are independent of purpose. When ordered in a certain manner, they become this : the idea.  

Forests were so arranged from the beginning. It resists meaning, it resists comprehension. The convexity of such places, their heartballs’ rolling about, yet nested, repelling all attempts.

Miranda's words

T o write about something is to kill it, like imprisoning a butterfly in a killing-bottle and slowly watching it die, with the greedy anticipation of seeing it pinned on board. Actually, it isn’t anything as sensational as that. But the process, the very fact that impressions are milked of their aesthetic and literary connotations by freeze-drying them and wrapped carefully in cling wrap, changes their original properties; by trying to confine them, we can only maul them beyond recognition, so in fact, what we capture becomes something we didn’t want to capture. However, by employing the royal plural ‘we’, I’m only attempting to gain approbation for something that I personally perceive as my failing. In composing this anecdote, I’m in fact embodying the process, each word that I’m using is a further blow driven in the carcass. I don’t recognise it myself.

When writing about the failure of writing becomes a literary topos available to everybody like shops selling toothpaste, it does not retain its anxiety, does it? It becomes formalised, structuralised into a conventional form through which aspiring writers are expected to express their ballyhoo. Like elegies, pastoral or otherwise, which have served to structure the unwieldy emotion of grief, the ‘meta’ approach has dwarfed all efforts to interrogate a deeper sense of lack in language.

To tell the truth, if assessed critically, every incident in life possesses the ability to be transformed into the talking point of a literary circle. But whether we want to inflict such violence on our impressions is a choice that rests with us alone.

Mrs. Dalloway and fever

And there is this thing called fever. Somehow, ‘fever’ never seems to gain the appropriate amount of nullity that ‘jor’ stands for in Bangla. Jor is a numbness, a dullness seared with painful clarity. For it is then that the light from the tube light reveals its atavistic quality, strangely yellow and hurtful. The moisture dried on your cheeks seems to stretch the skin until you’re sure that it’ll tear. The television in the next room, perfectly innocuous when you’re normal, plays out like the brass band in the street, except that the sound has been distorted to resemble waves. The world’s physicality thrusts itself in your face when you’re lying face up, blinking at the light and trying to shake off the disorientation that threatens to sway you. But all this is frightfully linear compared to the true nature of these impressions when they are being imprinted on your mind. Whenever this happens, I feel immensely thankful for the activity that keeps us sane. The television, mealtime, coursework—all terribly trivial when considered in the clarity of detachment—acquire this central role of rescue, so at once they are derided and sought for. To leave all this and go back to...nullity, is a painful prospect. But then again, it isn’t completely correct to call it nullity, for as I mentioned before, we are then laid open to a host of impressions, mostly unfavourable.

These reflections take me away from the desire to pet cats, in general, or ruffle bird feathers. The undeniable defiance of the pale curve of their heads, and their refusal to be petted (stray cats, that is) adds to the vision of the physically satisfying act of fingering soft, warm fur. Birds, especially crows, otherwise brazen in their attitude, would instinctively shirk my contact. Even if I’m bringing them food. They would wait until I have placed the food and retreated a little before swooping down to feed. That’s why I steal long, lingering glances at them when they are preening themselves after a rainshower, pecking this feather and that, exposing pale grey bellies and pale grey rings hidden in the creases of their slate-coloured necks. Sleeping cats are a speciality. They tempt and they thwart a desire for contact. While it’s easier to pet a sleeping cat, it is not nearly as satisfying.

They also take me back to my fears as a child, fears of blue-distempered walls lit by ancient lampholders, of greenish-blue doors in the dark, of lights in general. A light here and a light there could evoke startlingly different responses. Artificial lights, mostly. Daylight never troubled me. But the tints and shadows produced by artificial light in generally unfamiliar, stark surroundings brought out these feelings of irrational fear and revulsion. Also, I remember dreaming of our bathroom, newly whitewashed and empty because it had been stripped for painting. Only a fat geyser near the top and nothing else. This fear of starkness lingered for a while.

Takeaway

The order was placed at the counter. Violent steam and a heavy stench of food enveloped the space. Everyone was in a state of mechanized frenzy, while some had dropped out of the order to snatch a bite or a morsel of gossip. It was a place that readily made your acquaintance, never renewed it. There were oil stains on the ceiling, a film of dust mixed with soot on the tables. You might get blackened elbows if you rested them on the makeshift ledge to enjoy your meal.