I am finally working hard to finish up with the Ph.D. The deadline I set for myself is the end of this year. I don’t know what I will be doing after that, anything would suffice as long as I can write. After long days of wrestling with math stuff, for which I have a reasonable talent but towards which I feel no real ‘heartland’ affinity, when I get to the Cave, I closet myself in the bathroom and wrestle with at least 100 pages of a book every night.

While one has to read very attentively to be able to write, I am usually too tired and perhaps not self-motivated to sit down and do the writing. And then muses, external to myself, to provide me that starting spark, as always are in short supply. I should use those last few hours of a day before the calendar changes, more furiously. Anyway last night I was wrestling with Saul Bellow and his collection of non-fiction pieces ‘It All Adds Up’. The broad theme, if there is a broad theme, in that book was to observe America and then take a measure of its depth.

Bellow makes many points about how in a world filled with ‘distractions’, it becomes harder and harder to pay attention to the essentials which include beauty and truth. This bears out in my personal experiences and then those ‘kaput’ relationships. In those useless transactions what really happened was the attention was fixed on superficial questions such as ‘is she going to dump me?’, ‘is she bored with me?’, ‘is he the knight in shining armor?’, ‘do we have great sex?’ and so forth.

One clear symptom is that very few seem to want to absorb anything of value, be it great books, great music or great art deeply, as well as want to create anything of great value out of their own selves. Instead as Bellow puts it, here we have our ‘voodoo’ music, various intoxicants (TV included), purveyors of ‘cool’ ideas and various amusing sexual sampling schemes.

Also this well called USA, which to young people as we were once four or five years ago, peering over the edge seems to be the route to dreamland and so forth, on arrival morphs into Disneyland. Surrealism and irony seems to the governing principle. I used to wonder why I couldn’t stop laughing during the period of time I used to read the Wall Street Journal. Was it the absurdity of the world? Or was it the absurdity of the world, which is also embodied in me? Of course one can escape from it all by not paying any attention to it, by sticking to one’s own kind, living and interacting in a limited ethnic ghetto, with limited excursions into the other world. This is what I sometime call living ‘Desi Lite’, i.e., pretending to live as if US has everything ‘Desh’ has and thus is not any different.

Another idea I had of US that is slowly turning into an illusion, was that of the ‘melting pot’. In real life very rarely does this melting pot happen. The fresh arrivals stick to their already present substantial groups. What I have, only very lately, been observing is that some of those who were already here, and thus descended from people who had arrived perhaps 200 to 300 years ago, still hold on to their ethnic ‘roots’. My guess is this is that tribal affiliations run deep in men. I am going to explore this idea further in my writing.

Evening. I monitor the sun’s descent by how the colors change on the buildings faces. The blink of a radio tower, a white blue glittering eye. My face on the window, raked by contrails of jets landing due south. Why has it been so hard to live silently, following the arc of days, faithful to the tasks given and the tasks realized? A compact mass of black wings, birds that look like bees. Silence here, silence over the wires, on the rooftops, waving in the branches, silence knocking on the unquiet heart and Joni sings ‘I wish I had a river, I could skate away on/ But it don’t snow here/ Stays pretty green…’

The sky is now a wash of blue blacks and crimson. Downtown skyscrapers take on a sharper definition as lights come on and as night falls. And lines of Reinaldo Arenas run through my head like stock tape ticker, ‘I run my hands over her keyboard and suddenly it all starts up. / With a tinkling the music begins, and then speeds up more and more.’

And I realize it is time for me to write too.

Do fall leaves as they fall change the spin of the earth, just so?

But with words, I had spun the north arrow, spun myself into a series of mazes. Where lies the answer, if not there?

A saying comes to me, "When God gives, He slaps, yes slaps it on so thick, that His shoes are torn to shreds". Only He seems to be quite miserly with truth.

My frayed words must have arrived at your light house, perhaps wearing epaulets of an U Boat navy. Were you brave in confronting them?

My body, thus after the stripping, is bare, ready, waiting in the chamber, for the interrogator. A solitary desire is still flickering, in fear, in resignation, like an almost dead fluorescent street lamp.

Perhaps at a certain point it will sputter out. Or perhaps a child will shoot a hole through it, with a BB gun.

The past then will take its proper place. An old restaurant bill fished out of a wallet, a slip of paper with a poem written in your childish hand, a face stuck in a group photograph that becomes harder and harder to identify when sight goes first, followed on its heels by memory.

Then night will come. It will come, with that forgetting we call sleep, towards the end of every line.