if i choose to develop, nurture, contrive
sorrow – and not just sorrow, but any emotion or state that interests me, that
fulfills an orientation (and which emotion or state would not at various
points?) – i am not some neowerther, a schopenhauerean pessimist, a christian, for
i neither mourn nor leap, and laughter is as much part of the palette as any
other colour of the heart. if i at times might seem to favour sorrow over
laughter, or some sensation over another, might it be for no other reason than
as a sociopsychic autocorrection. the world in its amusements, volitions, and
absurdities can be wearisome and i at least must wonder, viscerally, if its
diet is imbalanced. we are all tiny experiments in an infinite laboratory.
who would not, in this age of relentless will
and forced happiness, desire to use sorrow and anonymity as materials, as
simulations and play, as contentments and travels.
i have been to india 19 or 21 times, each visit
a mockery of the previous ones. so i have stopped going and remain in the
provincial land of my birth. for mockery led me to the end of my heart and
there i found an absence i perhaps had been seeking. while i had been writing
for decades, only then could i write.
by the time one realizes that one is on a path
and what that path has been named and the dialogues about that path from those
who have walked it and those who haven’t and those who have been found broken
by its sides or those who take a tourist interest in it and travel over it in
helicopters and that that path is – like all other paths – engaging in a
dialogue with all these in their various manners and knowledges – and has any
experience worth noting … one is not only nearly dead but in a very real sense
has died and so the human dialogue of paths is a conversation among the dead.
in this way writing is little different than any other road.
a confusion (but there are many) of writing in
an age when writing has lost its meaning through an excess of meaning, through
an excess of proliferation, through abuses of familiarity (these common
violations) is that it is easy and common for those of all paths to write about
their paths and thus consider themselves writers. and so, inevitably, they must
be considered. but when these writers are encountered and they clearly have
walked a path or more but have hardly set a foot on the path of writing – its
terrain, struggles, deaths, false ecstasies, predators, roadside inns, flora,
and so on (there is no need necessarily to demonstrate any ability to
articulate these experiences conceptually, analytically, but they need to be
demonstrated somehow, certainly minimally in the writing itself, however subtly)
– what then, other than confusion?
writing is an art of having things fall apart
in realms of the unscene.
it is easy to write. all you have to do is
decide not to run. not to run, and to disbelieve in time.
when you become disillusioned with
disillusionment what remains is illusion but through the lens of
disillusionment, and this renewed illusion is a ground of writing.
one becomes what one writes; if one does not
write (other than in the ubiquitous purposive or transactional sense in which
everyone writes, to accomplish something outside of writing) one becomes what
others write.
