"neurospicy", a zuihitsu
by aranya
I don’t do well with labels, and therapyspeak, really. I often feel like a dinosaur, as I discover, much later than others, linguistic formations that describe familiar complexes and structures of feeling and personality. It is truly a great joy to discover that there is a vocabulary for the many things we experience - even as witnesses. While I do not necessarily succumb to the finality of “diagnosis”, I am aware of the power of some of these words in attempting to harness and unleash, with affirmative nous, newer ways of being and loving, in a world saturated with emotion. SideNote: Nikita Deshpande’s Diagnosis is a favourite, when it comes to navigating this terrain, for me.
Perhaps my suspicion is rooted in the anxieties of a childhood surrounded by adults who, excited with the newness of terms such as ADHD, “trauma” and such, dismissed them with such gusto - that even their constant critique served as a kind of invocation, an inability to move into the world these words described. I am still wary of laying claim to the knowledge of these psychological spaces - say of “personality disorder”, for example. While I understand that I am addressing a range, a spectrum, and each of these phenomena are unique, and even heavily debated in the world of psychosocial practice and discourse, the ways in which they are articulated help me identify patterns of behaviour. This is a crutch to sociality, for me. Even if a person is not the label - the patterns of behaviour in association, and relationship, are true, the experiences are real. This language, does the opposite of gaslighting. It illuminates by way of a preferred approximation of conceptual truth. Writing into it, I believe, only moves a little further, in deepening that illumination, with some responsibility.
I read the words “…build a co-dependent neurospicy home…” on a dating app profile. that wish intrigued me….. so i wrote a zuihitsu…
neurospicy ~ aranya like blue neutrino but almost. I mean to say we are the world we are the people. in the cavernous grottos of our sinuses, engines of desire strobe into vision. we are the feeble fire that crackles in the mushrooming dark without knowing until it’s too late to turn back turn tail. assail. let the armies of our dissent pillage the conversation. our minds sizzle with turntable music, with the soft percussive thump that grows larger with time. the way owls’ eyes glow in the dark. the way a small village is wiped off the face of the earth as the world looks elsewhere. imagine a cat firecracker-ing across the blue pupil of the sky, its tail a festoon stolen from an afternoon dream, from which the girl with the blue lapis earring wakes up smiling. alive in the grass, she is born again in the gazes of everybody who is not looking. When she yelps in surprise at the red ants gathering around her grandmother’s toe-ring—the little rascals, like shameless relatives eyeing the silver heirloom at the wake, are drunk on the job. how grief comes knocking after death, catapulting despair into the commerce of relationships. call that a 'friendship economy', you bigot. Is it not beautiful that the word for the celebration of something finishing is the same as this tired body greeting the day? her laughter is ordinary. cliche as a meme. not the kind that grabs you by the scruff of your imagination and hurls you into space the interface the everlasting scroll. as I drive I swipe past the empty windows with my ring finger. I dismiss the 1x1 kholis that are yet to be christened. inhabiting a home is giving absence a name. This city is a lexicon of people who have left. For one reason or another. Slowly, one language dies, making way for another. Speak to us of those times? Remind us how they went. tell us of patience, and what it meant to pry open the vocabulary to speak to the detritus. Have you walked past the construction sites? Have you stared into the rotting maws of this metropolis? where even the speed breakers are patriotic? Jai Ho. Have you seen the chocolate-box architecture of cement-pools? The dambar has to cool before it can serve its purpose. Before it firms up under the feet of those who will build this city. they sell their souls to the moloch of the future. they offer up their years of waiting in one quiet conspiratorial whisper. their fate is worse then Sisyphus. not fire. but jalbandhan. the kennel tick hangs from a blade of grass. it spends its entire life in wait for the dog who pants past, tongue out like a divining rod; and in that moment, legs outstretched, it discovers the gift of that quiet furry heat, the oblivious hospitality of its host. I think sometimes, a tick sucking blood out of a brown dog, might have been love, if it did not hurt. but then what love does not hurt. there is a chilli that grows in the konkan. its red tail is a question. you’d think it is the destiny of the konkan chilli – the bedagi – to be crushed in a flaming union with coconut. but I am its tyrant. its death is significant only to me. it is the memory of my grandmother that gives this dish its taste. the chilli attained the absolution of its breed when it started to shrivel. I merely honour the corpse. such a naughty word – spice. garland me now with the quiet mischief of your lips. pucker up in my hands, grow long with the weeping day. chase me in my dreams. laugh at my earnest disappointments, tease out the morning when I first saw you open your eyes before me, when i learnt that melancholy was more persistent than joy. when i laboured to grip its damp shock of longing, when I held you in that sweet despondence. tease out the smallness of that despair. when I learnt you were no goddess. merely flesh and bone, and breathing breast; a world I could never know outside of your eyes. only love could sit in that crevice left behind by immortality. sometimes the small god of beginnings vanishes like a thought.* our love is the aftershock. we are surprised by our own smallness. grateful to hold the other’s, grateful that they chose us to share it with; grateful that we could see the strangeness of our lovers vanish like a thought.
*i invoke vinod kumar shukla’s explosive “vah aadmi naya garam coat pehenkar chala gaya vichar ki tarah”… in my translated borrowing…..
in the last few days people have been writing in, asking me about the book, “Where Can i find your poetry?” Just to reiterate - the book is available on amazon here.
If you don’t like Amazon you can buy the book on the Copper Coin Website here . (Please note you can also place international orders on the Copper Coin Website! :)
i hope the days are kind to you
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