Often during the day when the sun is over my head between the lectures amidst all the work that I’m doing, amidst all the vanity that I hold for the work that I’m doing I often feel this unkind absence of writing the essays and this absence of writing has been very unkind to me, I wish to get back with it.
One of the most profound conclusions that I get about these periods of break is not nothingness itself but rather the idea that not having to say anything and not wanting to say anything can be the same thing. I would not like to explain what I mean by that rather I would like to leave it as it is to prove my point.
To get back with it I must write, to talk about something I must first consume something. To create something, I must abandon something. Sentences are often like poems that ensconce behind the forms of films…they hold enough foundation to stay tall but still wander around in search of something not desperately, but romantically. Critiquing doesn’t make sense sometimes. Living becomes a task and gnarling is metamorphosized into barking. Once you touch the fan and once your legs are above the ground, you don’t make sense because the music goes on, the room stays the same, and you stay there helpless…dogs keep barking and the pigeons continue copulating.
Pain often is associated with the idea of nostalgia, and the rhythm of memories is often massacred because of them having gone forever, sure there’s a glory about the good old days but only at the price of pain that we ever get to fully experience this glory…It’s bad pain for good glory. It’s memories at the stake of ideas, it’s understanding at the stake of feeling. It’s always this instead of that or it’s always that instead of this.
“The tyrant dies, and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins”
Soren Kierkegaard
You keep coming back …
I often complete my essays when I feel that I’ve completed my narrative duty, I swerve the pattern beyond the paths of conventional plot holdings which makes the reader think they’ve experienced something absurd but in reality, all the stimulation that is being produced is through a verbal illusion. There are no deeper intellectual insights hidden, why should there be. I hate the idea that we’ve been brewing over the years about reading. Reading must not be seen as an intellectual task but rather only be performed if willingness and enjoyment are there, like anything in life.
Writing becomes a challenge when you don’t have any propaganda or meaning to serve out of it. The idea can drift completely from catharsis to suppression, from expression to denial, and then silence. It becomes false rebellion and even ulteriorly political. There is no redemption, no salvation, no pain, and no glory in this piece. It’s a cumulative mass of individual meaning-making words that lead nowhere. I do have some things that I would like to write about, we often accidentally or subconsciously indulge in 2 different things the very same way.
I saw an image recently titled ‘The falling man’ which feels very quiet and eerie. It’s an image taken by Richard Drew of a man falling from the World trade center during the September 11 attacks in New York City. We can see a man in the air and further imagine him falling down and getting crushed into pieces yet the photo makes me believe that he might just stay there in the air. The emotions that are stimulated while watching ‘Agneepath’ (1990) are the same. I’ve always felt the narrative catharsis of the film to be quiet and eerie, the poem that is being narrated is in itself a victory and a defeat.
The photo of the falling man and the poetry in Agneepath feel the same because they are quite similar in a larger context. The photo that is clicked speaks with the conditions of living, whereas the poem that is written is designed to speak with the conditions of the romantic. There’s a minute gap between these two things in which there is this quietness and further eeriness that makes it a haunting experience. The difference between this piece and emotion-stimulating art lies in that minute gap where one does not at all carry with it any pain, glory, salvation, or redemption while the other is full of pain, glory salvation, and redemption.
