Sunday, December 31, 2006

December 31, 2006.

December 31 - a day to ring out the old and what a day it is turning out to be. I have been awake all 10 hours of the Gregorian day and I am yet to see any sign of the sun. The sky is a dull aluminum gray and it has been raining almost continuously though not heavily all morning. A good sign of the year that has been in my life: I mean fitting sign, of course. The windowpanes are clearing up in the water but there is none of the romantic pittle-pattle that one always reads of in novels. Only a dull sound every now and then signifying nothing. Still it is soothing, this depressing gray scene with the desolate trees, leafless and birdless. I hear a faint sound of twittering - maybe some birds have come back from their winter homes, knowing there will be no snow this year. It must be a pretty hard time for the birds, I imagine; what with all the trouble of migrating thousands of miles, there has been no real snow and now, a week after Christmas, the only sign of the gloomy winter is the sunless sky; it has not even been too cold, just a late fall kind of finger-freezing, nose-reddening, but essentially bearable, cold. People are getting along fine though. It will be much easier for them to stand 6 hours in Times Square waiting for the ball to fall. Closer home, there is not much life in my place, the university grounds are deserted for the holidays and the town has never been too lively anyway. The McDonald's opposite my window has been doing steady business all day. Cars of all hues and shapes, waiting patiently by the red sign to order, and collecting their bags, at the counter, like Oliver Twist and co. getting their miserable lunches; only these Macs will be eaten with relish. I have been alone the last few days in my big house, locked in actually and haven't stepped an inch outside the last couple of days. Food has been the grub I cooked 2 days back, rationed slowly, and I think it will last me 3-4 days more. It must seem obvious that I sleep a lot but there has been very little sleep surprisingly. To add to my nocturnalist woes, I have now become an insomniac. The time, though, I have spent fruitfully. A couple of movies and a few games were inevitable but I have been reading and writing quite a bit. Academic work mostly but have also spent time on Orhan Pamuk and Ellman's Joyce. Pamuk is quite pedestrian in The White Castle but more about him when I am done with his complete oeuvre. Ellman's Joyce has been totally good, however. As a general rule, I do not like biographies but Joyce is special and I wanted to understand his life so I could appreciate his art better. Pure gold this biography though I suspect it might not be the best written, even among those about Joyce. I have also been spending some time on puzzles to stimulate my sleeping brain cells. Wonderful these things but I dont know how long I can keep up that activity. I wonder what the waste management guy must be thinking of me: lights on at 5am and working at my desk. Surely someone in the world will have charitable thoughts about me. Or maybe he knows too that it is just one of those nerdy losers who cannot get out of their rooms for f***'s sake. Forgive the vituperation but sometimes loneliness gets to me. Solitude I do not mind though as it has been a strangely placid few days, the last ones that I have been alone. Unaccountably the rain has stopped now and I will too but is it not better sometimes if there were no stops? The rest is tomorrow.

Saturday, December 23, 2006

A Confession

For those few of you who have been reading my posts, I have a confession to make. Not that it is something that has escaped your observation but merely to ease my own conscience: most of what I write is tripe. It is not to say that there is very little of honesty in what I have written but art by its very nature is mendacious and I have merely kept with the tradition and have experimented ceaselessly for effect and for fun. Most of my writings are stylistic eperiments and this is reflected in the arrangement of the pieces, a constant juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous ideas. This would be too little for me, though, and I have laboured to introduce in each piece stylistic variations. Again, merely interchanging one transparent style for another over the course of a work is not something particularly novel, and so I have mixed in flaws, absurdities and contradictions, both stylistic and contentual. And so these writings have been the presentation of a variety of styles content to be receptacles of the mere parsimonious contents that I have chosen to convey in them. The scatter-logical aspects and the innuendoes in what I have written best be as they are now: beneath the surface. The Book of the Winds was a major experiment I have been working on, some 500 pages of variations with simplistic themes but I have lost the patience that I had assumed rashly I would possess to complete it: it was to ooze a strange allusive style with the contents flawed, in both obvious and subtle ways. Now I do not think I can continue with it; but I doubt this will matter much or to many.

Before I continue on with my experiments, it will be useful to make a manifesto of my creed:

Art is mendacity. Its source is a truth, its product a lie; and its pupose, though, possibly, the elucidation of a truth, is, oftener, merely a self-serving expression of beauty.

The purpose of the artist is to confront a hard, cold truth and to produce a lie, an expression of the truth in a direct or a twisted manner. The lie may be prior or posterior to the truth or to the artist; the artist may be prior or posterior to the truth. The only constants are the confrontation and the alchemical production.

The purpose of the reader is to confront the lie and to get to the truth. The lie could be a straightforward representation of the truth but still is a lie insofar as it is not the truth.

Truth has no purpose. It just is.

To speak unphilosophically of it, in writing, the artist tries to express, through himself, an idea, a truth. When this expression is straightforward, in that, for the reader, understanding immediately follows perception, the art is simple and there is merely a giving of alms. When the expression is a challenge to the reader, in the process of attaining to the truth through an interpretation, there occurs an exchange as reader and artist meet somewhere in the middle, forcing them to conront new truths.

More unphilosophically, in the primitive novel, for example, the story is all-important and style is merely a vehicle, an accident. The purpose is merely narration. In a more refined novel, the style is given a greater role and the reader is challenged to understand. Taken to an extreme, however, when style becomes all-important, the novel forgets itself and becomes an experiment in linguistics or mathematics.

Anyway, this was supposed to follow the previous instalment of The Book of the Winds:

Interlude

"But grandfather, surely this is no interesting story that you are telling me! I mean it is so slow and so not fun! I think I will just go and play with the bears," little Ronda piped to Beron. The silver-haired Beron laughed and replied, "Of course it is not fun. It is not supposed to be. You wanted to grow up, not I; and this is the kind of story that grown-ups are told." "But grandfather, I thought being grown-up was fun. And I don't mind the story terribly except that nothing much happens in it," Ronda complained. "Oh a lot of things do happen in the story, my child. Only it is not all told. Grown-ups aren't like children. They don't want to be told everything directly. They like finding things out for themselves," Beron replied. "I like finding things for myself grandfather. Remember the little harp that you hid under the mistletoe in the front garden. I found it out myself," Ronda proudly reminded him. "Yes. And this is just like that. Only here you do not know you are looking for a harp. Much like life. Only a lot easier. If only people kept looking for things in books and left the world to itself. But what will be will be," and Beron put the pipe that smouldered near the bookstand back in his mouth, piping away another of his sad dreams. After a while, he called Ronda back to his side, "Come child, let us go on with the story and listen carefully now. Learn to hear more than what I tell you and to understand more than what you hear and see and you will be fine. And tie the loose ends of your pigtails by yourself like a little woman. You wouldn't want me to do it for you now, would you?"