Having read about 60 pages of Naipaul’s letters to and from various people, mainly his father and his sister, I am amazed by the richness of those letters even if they to a large extent contain gossip. This however pushed me to do some writing of my own. So the plan is to keep a journal, where I can write letters to myself or my various different selves, not quite unlike Peossa’s heteronyms. It would help to have a regular writer-ly habit, given that I have decided to finally proclaim that as my “calling”.

Oh yes in the course of the day, I do write, but I think it’s the nature of this elusive bit and bytes email beast that preclude one from holding forth on various topics at a certain length as well as to stop babbling about all the day to day gossip. I still remember those blue air mails, how I had to think, filter and sieve out all the junk and write only about the most pressing things, then all those overpowering adolescent emotions towards V, the recipient of the said letters. Email denudes all the finesse and skill one might develop as a writer by inducing sloppiness and laziness.

I think I should also do as Tom does and start keeping folders of all the correspondence I have with A and C, two people with whom I do discuss writer ly business. L also writes from her vast and diverse real experiences, and sometimes writes well. However sometimes such biography can just end at recollecting facts such as “I did this in such and such year”. It doesn’t offer the reader any insights into the locale of place and mind that might have caused that to happen in that way. However I shouldn’t be too critical as she has been in the think of things more than I have been and possibly ever will be. This blasted reclusive intellectual air (or is it shyness?) that I have will prevent me from going too “far out”, not that I don’t like myself a little.

I was also (mildly?) pleased when I ran into Andres on the way out from VILLA and when his wife said “Oh so this chap is the Poet”. I had previously cornered him, as a part of a much larger crowd, and forced my “poetry” upon him. And I am guessing, he possibly got more pleasure out of my fumbling than any others in that group of people, whom I had invited over to celebrate the everyday “human” business called supper. He has the three lovely black labs of which one is most nicely named Mozart! I suppose the dog can woof in sync with Mozart’s music. I think I can use this dog as a part of a tale or a poem.

I am also thinking of taking up Spanish lessons next semester at Tech so that I can eat from the mother lode of Spanish literature (Borges is in, Neruda is out?) without any middling interlocutors. I should see if Andres can lend me a hand in this affair. Maybe speaking the tongue will help me uncover (or is it refine?) the sensuality that language and people speaking that language seem to possess.

The Turkish family is leaving Uncle Sam in the next two days. The epsilon can now speak English just like the natives. Here I am reminded of the rather nice exercise Lenin’s folks did as he was growing up; a different language every day of the week at the dinning table. This must be one thing that helped our dear proletariat’s czar from getting shot by the blue blooded czar’s KGB. Childhood is the most fertile period to pour language into one’s brain and the only thing that got poured into mine was English via that South Indian Brahmin-ish (Iyer or Iyengar?) rag, The Hindu. The two years of middling French during the First Holocaust didn’t help much in “romancing” the Belgian not that I wouldn’t have gotten over her blonde haired green eyed loveliness any sooner than I did and be bored with her head or the lack of it.

Coming back to the Turkish family, they are sorry to leave the affluence of this gilded cage. I have to admit that, life here is quite lubricated if one can make minor efforts to wrestle with the dead presidents. Toys abound in all the dazzling stores. I don’t know how much of inner life or for that matter cues/ideas/inspiration this monotonous landscape offers to a writer. Perhaps this Mac Donaldization of landscape will cause all literature would be reduced to the “adventures of the shop-alcoholic” genre.

Take Atlanta, what can one write about it? Perhaps an urban Faulkner can make use of Buckhead, the caravans that head in that general direction every weekend, the shootouts recently reported in the local rags, to write a “Barn Burning” equivalent? I find that extrapolation hard to arrive at. Perhaps Eminem (rhymes with M&M) is all 21-ist urban America will have for a Faulkner or a Steinbeck. Is consumerism then to blame for drugging the people to the turmoil than swirls among the human beast, individually and collectively?

Perhaps Wendell Berry’s “Jayber Crow” holds some answers before this sub takes a dive into that one third waste of human life, also known as sleep.

He wakes and sees that he had fallen asleep under the tree where he was reading. Winter light is streaming through the woods, angel’s hair that is being washed by the creek. The water looks inviting and the sky above is smoky blue. His heart is filled with a great tenderness, first towards the woman and the child that he had been carrying on his mind.

He walks into this dell of tenderness and stops there for a while. Everything and everyone that life had put him into opposition with, come out of the shade. People he hadn’t seen in years, some who were dead to this world for many years. He sees his grandmother’s hand and hears her voice telling him stories from her youth as he is lying next to her, his young hands feeling her skin. And then he sees his childhood friends, in a circle waiting for him to throw the ball he is holding in his hands to one of them. Where are they now? Lost to time, they are physically as gone as that field in which they gathered every evening for their games. Now only tall buildings stand in that field, he was recently told.

He walks further, deeper. He sees his friends of youth, amongst whom he came to become a man. And behind them he sees those, whom he fought. His fists had punched that face and his heart whirled, a cesspool of hate, at the sight of that face, for many years. However he sees more than those acts alone. He sees the cracks in them running through the ground and into and beyond him, joining him with them. He didn’t know that then. And this awareness is quite recent, the woman and the child brought him into this awareness.

He also sees his dreams, those he had thrown away after breaking them apart, hanging as the numerous silken filaments from the tree branches. He sees her towards whom he was driven by unclassified passions that flow under the bedrock of human need. He sees his failure too, in the choices he had made; where to stop, how to reckon the thickness of the rock and how deep to drill for the secret water that never came, that never rose to his lips.

He feels tender towards his own mistakes and to the way he had hit himself, in anger for making those mistakes. He feels tender for those who in their mistakes hurt him and he in his pain, in blind reaction, lashed back at. The creek is rippled by a cold wind. Perfection perhaps then comes through acceptance and continuation of the doing. And the awareness of beauty only via watchfulness.

He walks back to the edge of the woods, singing a song, complete with this awareness of the man, of the woman and of the child.

A snowflake? A formation of massed Roman Legions, left on Babylon's dust?

Where is the exit? Turning at each curve of this maze, which pure color shall I encounter?

Blues piled deeper on blues? Or Mississippi; black clay, white cotton, Muddy rivers of both water and song?

The paper is somehow mute. I am rattling it to reach your unheard voice!

art work coming up