Abracadabra

You would not believe that it was just like a John Dickson Carr mystery. We (my illustrious brother and I) embarked upon it quite accidentally (but of course you knew that). Among all the Japanese audio cds that my father brought home, there was one with four, or five Japanese girls in fancy brassieres on the cover. Now, I ripped the transparent binding on it, and in order to demonstrate the ingeniousness of recent cd marketing, took to unravelling all its paraphernalia – namely, the folded-in pseudo-brochure with more girls and lyrics on it. Then, after having laughed over it at leisure, I sought to restore it. Now, comes the puzzle. The front cover is identical to the back cover, and there is an extra cd jacket which is exactly like the front cover, in the tradition of paper jackets for hard-bound books. Now, once taken apart, I was sure that a certain nauseating photograph of lilac ponies with flowers went inside the front cover, so that once you open the case, it is on your left-hand side. The folded-in bulky brochure was hedged under the flap that held the discs. With this idea in mind, we (it was very much a concerted effort) fell to putting things in their places. But it proved to be an impossible task. We cursed Japanese technology, we praised it, we cursed Japanese technology and praised it. We cursed each other (mildly), and then we cursed our fortunes that set this demonic cd case in our paths. But we always met with a wall, literally. It was like the printed covers were magicked inside and once torn out, could not be restored to their former lodgings. Then my brother got hold of pincers, and tried tugging the edge of one through an apparently solid wall. And then it hit him (he claims it had hit him once before, but apparently not hard enough) that of course, the whole thing was in reverse, the front cover the back, the back, the front. Now this is a case of extreme instruction which cautions against the dangers of lilac ponies with flowers and pom poms and innocent Japanese girls in fancy brassieres. No, but the fact that it is easy to confuse that which one instinctively abhors, and trick our brains into remembering false facts which were in reality, inadequately observed.

But you might enquire why you were made to read this long paragraph. You might even remark (which I’m steadily realising with a sinking feeling) that you do not grasp the allusion to John Dickson Carr. Well, to put it fairly, John Dickson Carr was a man who excelled in writing mystery stories which tricked your brain into remembering false facts, and now, probably, you are drawing towards a dawning enlightenment. But if you haven’t read any of his stories, you probably haven’t experienced the feeling of having ontological facts, on which everyone has been banking the story, pulled away from right under your feet. Yes, it’s a dizzy, even nauseating feeling. That’s what we felt.

And, even then you might ask, what is my personal investment in this, or how does this story relate to me? Well, in answer to that, I’ll try to describe the terrible ill-at-ease feeling that gripped me when I had the baffling cd case in my hands, or more when my brother held it. It was a feeling which stemmed from the fact that it knew it would never be consummated. Or alternately, you could call it a feeling of the feeling of never being consummated. It was a gnawing, restless feeling, which could never reach an outlet. And that had plagued me for days now. Of tingling inactive hands and feet, which knew leisure but couldn’t work. Having the cd case restored in an illusion purged that in me, which writing this is bringing back.

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.