Prefatory Note
I promised myself that the next piece of nonfiction I wrote would be a "serious" piece that I could add to my memoir-in-progress. (Is it really even in progress?) Oh, well, at least I tried. But the white space on the blog, or perhaps just the possibility of the fictional white space remaining unwritten presses down quite heavily on the mind. So I decided I would write. Also, many thanks to my lovely co-poet Moriah Purdy for her brilliant epigraph idea--looking up definitions before/ as one writes. Needless to say, this one is still in the smithy.
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move., v.
a. Of a person or thing: to go, advance, proceed, pass from one place to another
b. spec. Of a celestial object: to travel in a regular path or orbit, or to appear to do so because of the earth's own motion; to exhibit real or apparent motion.
e. colloq. To go quickly.
3. a. intr. Of a person, a part of the body, etc.: to change position or posture; to exhibit motion or physical activity. In negative constructions (freq. in imper.): to remain still, not to stir.
d. intr. To bow in acknowledgement or salutation. Obs.
b. Of something mechanical: to revolve, to work. Of something on hinges, as a door: to turn.
c. to move to mind: to come to mind. Also to move of (also out of) mind: to be forgotten
9. intr. To incline, tend (to something, or to do something); to be favourable (toward a proposal). Obs.
10. intr. To proceed, emanate, or originate from. Obs.
--Oxford English Dictionary Online; accessed thanks to GMU's brilliant library
When he came into my life, I think I was most impressed by his ability to not consume caffeine and operate normally. Not even juice, actually. No. Just milk or hot chocolate, and that too, only on occasion. He was reticent and wasn't just someone who grew to enjoy my relatively bland Tambrahm booking, pepper rasams and whatnot; he actually grew to find something in common with me. Of course, we had no idea that this was nothing except a sort of elemental holding together, a sort of containment within a unit that did not draw out our individual desolations. Basically we were both outcasts, or more significantly, fancied ourselves to be. We had our individual insecurities. Perhaps his was the insistence of his family on his lack of academic and overall "achievement." My problems seemed to be quite the opposite-- I was tired of trying to be good. I wouldn't necessarily qualify as an overachiever, but I think I was sort of suspended between my desire to do what needed to be done (get on with life, choose a career and all that delightful growing-up) and what could not be done but lay somewhere just at the horizon, between those gaps, those boundaries, those self-contained vividities.
This Ramzan I felt our differences really consolidate. And I really look at that process as a constructive uncovering of what lay simmering underneath, a legendary, almost cliched clash-of-faiths/ civilizations scenario. One of those days, he came home and we decided to watch a movie. He sat next to me and I switched on the video, but the whole time, we were both thinking of how I was some kind of distraction, an infiltration of this sacred space, this silence that one needed to think about God (not Gods-- "us" Hindus and our postmodern comfort with multiplicity and simultaneity of divine existence confounds others). I withdrew, which I am sure is more frustrating than reassuring for the other people around me, since that only makes me more blatantly aggressive, more prone to clatter dinner plates, open the fridge loudly, spend whole evenings grading three student essays and guilt-tripping people on the phone with allegations that I have been "abandoned." As intensely aware I may be aware of these realities, I am no less inclined to act differently, even though I (in)sincerely try. From the first day we started talking, I spent an average of an hour or more talking to him, giving him updates on purchases, beverages consumed, general people-watching results, poems, etc, occasionally cajoling him into defining the nature of long-term commitment.
That was precisely the problem. In his rubric of existence, there is no place for "long-term" outside of the sacred precincts of the five pillars. This is not meant to be a demeaning statement, as perversely opinionated as it may sound. I empathized with his desire to understand what lay ahead of the lived experience, but I believe I was always the quintessential Balachander side-role character-- occasionally emerging from her preoccupations to essentially steal the proverbial cake from under the lead actors' noses. If you remember the role of Kalki's landlady in the film by the same name, you may recall her transition from being the wallflower, to the abused, the confident and then almost passionately invested mother character. Of course, the main character, Kalki, remains the focus of the film, but this other woman, a mixed bag of happinesses and betrayals comes off as having the richer life. There is an immediacy in attempting to be nonchalant or matter-of-factly while constantly struggling and failing miserably at doing so. There seems more satisfaction inherent in that struggle.
Recently, a friend, and perhaps it is most reasonable to admit that more than one friend, actually, suggested that I loved the drama, or rather, the dramatic itself. I may have tried smiling wryly, but I really doubt it turned out that way, because if anything, I am rather transparent about my insecurities, which is what makes me seem rather dramatic. And besides, the attempt at a wry smile is perhaps more dramatic than actually flashing one. So, what remains is this foiled attempt at being something and this something, I have grown to think, is the notion of the witness. Sometime midway through my writing program, even as I was teaching and learning how to guide my students towards this writing "ideal" that did not exist but had to still be discussed, I read poetry that was constantly called that of witness. The word interests me precisely because it is so closed--a gap, a line, a horizon pretending to be a boundary. For a writer, a poet especially, being a witness becomes an ethical obligation. (I think I've heard most poets in the US echo this sentiment, especially Srikanth Reddy and my guru Susan Tichy). This ethical consciousness becomes not a by-product of the poetry but a necessary consideration for the project of the poem. (The "project" of the poem, loosely put, is that which the poet thinks or aims for the poem to achieve, as broad as that sounds, and also how the poet intends to achieve this). So, in essence, my poems don't just land up being about my experience as a post-colonial female but emerge from a conscious realization of that process. (The Tamil word for realization is very important here-- uNarndhu, which indicates that the process is more dynamic and experiential than "realization" suggests).
However, as the term itself suggests, being a witness also implies that on is to some extent on the sidelines. As Susan Sontag says in her essays on photography, one must relegate oneself to observing primarily even as one experiences physical or less tangible things so that the process of recording begins even at that stage. There is some extent of reflection required, in inward-turning, I suppose. I think it's important, as digressive as it seems, to look back at a review of Rick Barot's book Want that I wrote for Eric Pankey's class called "21st Century American Poetry:"
Yet again, using these considerations of beauty, Barot brings us back to the question of the poetic self and what its “ethical” expression consists of. Do Barot and his poems’ speakers identify with the “old poet” of “Say Goodbye..” who is “so silent with grieving/ that he has to be given the word of his farewell,” or does Barot place himself as the young poet from “Psalm with a Phrase from Beckett” who is grappling between “narratives of desire” and presumably, the “Captivity Narrative” itself? Barot probably wants to reach out or atleast reshape the young poet, by suggesting new possibilities—“Let the offered living hand/ be an oar…/Because that is your singing too.” It thus seems as though Barot has reached a stage between his “old” and “new” poetic selves—a point where he acknowledges that it is acceptable to “drink the blue sludge/ of airplanes” as well as consider the more oblique “words exploding just under/ the ground.” In other words, he may be ready to exercise his poetic will simply for the sake of beauty, for the sake of drawing a picture, for rendering as if on canvas.
Barot also seems to find comfort in the “dark,” a word that he constantly repeats like a mantra and a space that he dwells in. The dark, especially in “Psalm…” is the space where the poet is considering where his ethics lie, and Barot masterfully provides the answer to this question in the title of his last poem—“Like a Fire That Consumes All Before It.” Even as a poem about history—about the beauty of rain and the sheer destructive energy it possesses during a flood—this last sequence of eighteen ten-line sections carries a certain reassurance, an affirmation that the poet is both witness and witnessed, a documenter of history, as well as the documented. Barot reaches this conclusion exactly halfway through the poem, in the ninth section, where he admits:
…There is never
an answer here. Only that you have to need
the justice of looking, even after everything else
you’ve seen.
One could possibly say that Barot’s poetics here acknowledges that the poet must, painful as it may be, see and color the world using the self, and must always be at odds with this “requirement.” After all, if the storyteller doubts himself, how does the listener know where the “truth” truly lies? Yet, that is the implicit level of trust that history places upon poets, and it is this trust that Barot wants to complicate. If this collection of poetry indeed is an answer to the question posed by Antonio Porchia in its epigraph—“I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received,” the answer is startlingly clear and complicating at the same time—that the poet must continue to invent, reinvent and engage with the world, even if the act of rendering the world is complicated, and possibly even limiting. Poetry, after all, as Barot’s collection would say, may be “bleak with story,” but is one legitimate re-enactment of history by that poet, nonetheless.
The key idea here is the poet's role as both witness and the witnessed. The act of transcribing, representing and presenting experience also makes one a witness of one's own selfhood, one's identity as a person and as a writer. And so, it seems to be that as my own conscious and focused investment in this process increases, my awareness of my own self increases. This is one of the most conscious and studied kinds of meditation one can indulge in, provided there is a near-obsessive need to understand what one wishes to achieve from a poem or why one chooses to place those words on the page in that very arrangement (which is what Jennifer Atkinson tells me very regularly. She is the wisest living poet I have met and is my other guru).
It becomes problematic for me, therefore, to write about my failed relationships in this context. Instead of worrying about what this says about me, the individual, I become more invested in how I choose to present these failures to my fictional reader. But let me address you directly--friend who has known me but have not really known what I have been writing about, friend who is hoping for more than friendship, occasional friend who resents me for this ostensible self-righteousness, friend who will never read this, mother, father-- I write this for you. I write this to tell you that I loved someone, just as you have loved me or loved your own at some point, listened for the occasional sound of footsteps on the porch, the scent of the fall breeze heavy with drying leaves and pine and a sunless clutching. I did not love to lose, or to slam the door in their face. I hoped for the same footsteps to return. I hoped to stand at the door with the same lightness always, the same understanding that bridges had been built, that your prayer mat would fit into my world full of elai vadams and arusi kolams and panchamis and navamis and chaturthis. This constant orbiting of the relationship became my goal. Did I necessarily lose sight of whom I loved? No. Especially not at the cost of the self. Now, I let go, not easier, not swifter, not more willingly, not only because I have to or because it comes naturally, but because there is no natural, there is only the gained, the experienced, the controlled. The choice to hold my breath underwater may seem natural given the construction of the body, but it is a choice nevertheless, and it is made in that instant one steps into the water and sinks lower, to that point where the water tickles the nose. It is a desperate flailing, a slipping between gaps, a pause, a slippage between meaning, between the pasts and the presents, regardless of whether emergence ensues or not.
What follows is not a holding on, not a letting go, not a constrictive word-space that I can use to contain that moment. It is a lived (moment). It is the being (not merely the act of, the process of, the experience of, etc). So, it is not gracefully, naturally or any such adverb-ially that I move on. I move on with misgivings, with a constant desire to understand the spaces within my self, to realize, to rise, to be liberated from all these muliplicities. And, in the process, love again, not only easily or naturally or with the ease of the archetypal perfectly-poised woman, nor with the awkwardness of the archetypal angst-er, but with the simultaneous awkwardness of that imagined horizon.
Welcome to this beauty. Poor Kevin Spacey died in vain at the end of American Beauty, indeed.
