The first line is the hardest, is it not?
There is no greater enemy than the blank page.
But sometimes an image gets dislodged from the throaty soil,
gathering its wits with the quiet swag of a flower
that does not know itself, and tumbles into song.
Paper has memory. This is why we write.
I woke up early this morning and went for a run.
(There, done. The first line is out of the way)
The run is not the thing of consequence. What occurred to me as I passed a patch of mogra preening unconcernedly beside some firangipani, was the sharp contrast of colour, and how it danced in the mind as a kind of vita. I am fooling myself, perhaps this jouissance has little to do with the epiphany of sight, and more to do with the fact that exercise is the self-help guru’s go-to mood enhancing raambaan upaay. The thought that followed this realisation of colour was the fact of Holi. I must admit to feeling a sense of elation. I stopped for a moment to take in the torrent of various liberal critiques that followed this realisation - privilege, patriarchy, manchildren taking over the streets, public menace - eggs, acid, bhaang. This we know. It exists.
We live in a world where the rabble rouser is deified. But rather than fighting this phenomenon, social media influencers counsel reconciliation (or dismissal - ‘ignore’), even with the trolls. Some turn this violent impulse into a more manageable category. Embrace the critique. That naysaying voice is one among the many that rises, in the moment of creation of the work of art. The artist knows this. The consciousness that has emerged is one of trained intuition, which gravitates towards solitary open fields and bird-less skies.
We are not outside of language, but I am convinced that we can move beyond it. Even dream is built on a bridge of language. But can we read text in dreams? It is said that the language part of the brain is less active in sleep. So the dream, perhaps, lives outside of language (even if it is built on the system of language)? But we know truth the way we know music.
If we think in the opposite direction - the moment of erecting a wall implies a creation of place. Conflate identity with place, and we find the beginnings of power. What is to be done with power? The rabble rouser has an answer, no?
Indulge this tautology for a moment. I promise you, I have a point. Let me illustrate by means of an example. Say we give this rabble rouser a name - Tree. Tree might appear to be a contrarian. But tree is an honourable man. Tree was once a weed, but who decides, and moreover, who’s counting? Now, Tree is an intense person, not to be taken lightly. Tree has roots that go deep, and his canopy allows him the luxury of the philosopher. Tree thinks deeply about the world, but always askance, searching for the truth. Tree finds humour in the mundane, revolution in the banal. In this, tree is a dear comrade, a kind friend, a stoic, and even a confidante.
Tree is a perfect embodiment of gadfly politics. The gadfly operates on a principle of offence, masquerading as dissent. Insult to Enlighten. This is a slippery slope. But i think there is the seed of a politics of self, a way of engaging with reality in a dialectical mode that does not require Hegelian synthesis. A dear friend once explained this through the modality of performance. I can cut you because you can cut me. This articulation denies even rehearsal. Tyyari kills the spontaneous eruption of sensation - a hunger as old as time, a wonder that is bound on a golden thread across centuries of evolution. Perhaps the joy that erupted in the face of the first human who discovered fire is not very different from the glee that the thief felt when he stole it from the gods?
I would see this impish duality in my Ustad. He would smile mischievously while scuttling a raag by sumdi mein putting a note that was not “supposed” to be there. This bothered evolved listeners no end. But then, after a concert, he would listen patiently with a knowing smile, to my philosophising about the ‘beautiful mistake’ or how we know a thing only through adjacency. Simultaneity allows the singularity of realisation to become knowledge. This is why laughter is an activity of community, and of intelligence. The smile could perhaps, be an introspective impulse.
This brings me back to the moment when I thought of colour today.
I used to add colour to my poems - highlighting certain turns of phrase. I still do sometimes, maybe, when a word or a phrase takes me by surprise. I remember seeing this design cue copied by other pages that shared poetry, a couple of times. A friend shared such “plagiarisms” with me. But what I saw as care in curation, or a way of reaching the lazy reader of poetry, was sometimes seen as a hindrance. I understood this quite soon, but I persisted for some time, until I found poems that made me want to do to with them what spring does to the cherry trees. I wanted to bathe them with colour (yes my preferred aesthetic is kitsch or bazaar). Perhaps no other curation embodies this more than this Aracelis Girmay Poem:
Please do take the time, if you haven’t met this piece of writing (and the animated video). Spend time with it. If you don’t like the colours, read it anyway, like a gadfly would, buzzing persistently. Aracelis Girmay’s art is expansive, and deep, without compromising on the lightness of the lyric form.
There is no ‘new poem’ I am going to curate today, but I will re-share below the song I am listening to. I had shared this before on Eid, 2021.
Let there be colour.
The post can be found here (it also contains translations of some parts of this qawwali, and another poem):
I hope you are well!
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