About Writing

But after all writing is but a guided dream,  wrote Jorge Luis Borges.  Is writing  about boundless fantasy then?  Would Edward de Bono  paint it  lilac, purple or  mauve in his special language of colour, implicit being the senses that enhance the state of dreaming…., dreaming  one’s life away?  Or is  it the inability to deal with the world you have been given, to try and make it so much better  than  the basis of your own reality?  Surely it is the deep need to seek  order and structure in the lives of men where none can really exist, to trim the untidy and ruffled edges. Writing is all of these things and much more. It is quite certainly  the desire to lead  a multiplicity of lives,  to feed a gargantuan craving to live larger, outer and more, which if you cannot,  devours the seeker in its need. And conversely too, it is about honing in;  about finding the centre, like  the trapeze artist who, in his acrobatic swings  finds   rhythm without,   to balance the fulcrum of his body within. It is about smell and taste and the joy of all the senses. It is about laying  out the substance of your entire life, your most intimate feelings and thoughts. It is  about living each day so that you may  distill it upon a word, a line, a whole page. It is about crispness laced with passion. It is about the aftertaste- of life,  as in the aftertaste of liqueur.  It  becomes agony and heartache,  the  lonely furrow that must be ploughed.   It becomes  the silence of that which will come, the foreboding,  the kriya before prakash sets in.  It is that which binds time,  which though transient,  through the act of writing becomes eternal.  The exquisiteness of writing is all of this and still more and more. Quite foremost it is about truth,  the way you see it.

“…Die

“ If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!

Follow where all is fled.”

 Wrote Herman Hesse in "The Journey to the East ".

He could have been writing about the act of writing and so could the French writer  Andre Malraux in his book Anti Memoirs, who, in describing the hold of Gothic naves or the pyramids of Egypt have,  on a man’s imagination, says  it is the binding  “ that something else exists, which is not appearance and which is not always called God.”   “The harmony between man’s external drifting and what directs or disregards it gives them their power and their impact.” 

What then to be a woman,  to live and  work  propelled by dreams, to follow where all is fled?  To be a writing woman or would it be a writerly woman? Double jeopardy? Doubled agony? With doubled ecstasy? For at birth itself the voice within, was for me,  also,  the voice  circumscribed. 

As a person of the pen I bear the cast of two wounds, of two incarcerations, none of my choosing. The first, when the world was internalized for me, decreed that I would be the feminine, the yin, the receptacle of the seed rather than its sower, the bearer of  my children.    In its biological definition I was diminished at birth,  by it being  forgone in the culture I inhabited that I was to be hedged into the role of a lesser being, to chart a future that would  indemnify the smaller,  the less  powerful,  with  its  perception of the   singular, the grain of wheat, the blossom of first fruit. It  is  within  this  sphere, of circumscribed  spaces that I sought and continue to seek  self-expression. So for me writing became an act where it was a testimony for  identity,   words   searching   to  redefine this space, to characterize my relation  to the larger world and to somehow enhance it. 

The second wound was  of   tongue, the language of my education that I would read,  write and speak in—English---for which  I feel essentially privileged and essentially denied.  Privileged for the worlds it opened up and denied for those  it closed as a consequence.  For it brought about migration from my own small district town,   without  my ever  having left my  soil.   It imposed upon me the loss of the fragrance of my own land, of my inheritance of generations, of the paucity of knowledge to express the smells of my own earth, of the pain of in-articulation. Sweet and sour, it became the heart ache within. For how does one translate a Gangetic landscape in a foreign tongue?   Its heat, its festering,  in the rhythms and vowels of another’s  sensibility? Its vast stretch of plains of mangroves and  yellow flowering mustard.

But it was not a barren migration. Not at all so. For through this very same wound, in its place, and as a replacement,  I was given  the richness of other  vowels and consonants that allowed me to absorb, savour and participate in another landscape,  that nurtured my visual senses, enhanced them too,  with another sensibility, one  the sun  illumined, of  autumn leaves strewn beside a lake, grass green and freshly mowed, bare brown barks of trees, red berries in verdant green bushes thrusting heads out of  freshly painted fences,  out of neighbours’ gardens. I can see myself in this particular landscape,   at the back, further down, near a cottage, an English cottage, behind it a  one room shed, for a gardener’s tools, wooden clapboards peeling,  and I seated.  I can see myself clearly, through that dew-shaded glass of that front door, with an easel, a dirty apron about me, painting, painting furiously  the myriad colours of autumn in a very English garden.

Language wrapped  these new colours into my visual and written discourse so that I no longer felt orphaned, but nurtured by them, I sought another wholeness. If I could not have the wholeness of one,  I could have two halves conjoined to make one entirely of my own coloring, neither white nor brown,   one simply what a woman decreed to be a language of her own  nurturing.  

Words; 1013

Manju Kak