The next book acquisitions of mine shall be Borges’s “Fictions” and “Non Fictions”. Borges’s mythology (for every writer in the process of writing creates his own myths and mythology) has been called labyrinthine. And the few short stories that I have read of him have indeed this maze like structure to them. I suppose this comes from his voracious reading and retelling of all that he had read.

A few nights ago I came upon Borges in an anthology of Latin American short stories, rather I went looking for him. The story was called “The Other Death” and dealt with two versions of a death of what was presumably the same person. In the first thread the chap dies a natural death after he had become a recluse. The reason behind his reclusive ness is revealed to be because of cowardice shown during a skirmish and the shame that resulted. In the second thread however the chap is killed honorably on the battle field as he behaved in a valorous fashion.

So Borges sets the death of this person as the labyrinth that all past essentially devolves into and how memory fluctuates. He writes “to modify the past is not to modify a single fact; it is to annul the consequences of that fact, which tend to be infinite.” It seems to be that Borges was hinting at the fact that when we become the storytellers, which all human conversations to a certain extent are, we tend to lie, we tend to twist the facts, even if a little bit.

In an interview of Borges, I read “when I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.” These books for me would be R.K.Narayan’s Malgudi, which still could be conjured up in the 80’s (pre multiple TV channel, pre “liberalized”, pre infotainment) India and then, because then USSR wanted third world minds to slant towards it and thus heavily discounted, the great Russians; Chekhov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Yes we did read Browning, Keats and Wordsworth who occupied the last few middling pages of our school English textbooks. However my memory of those poems is quite dim.

Also in a conversation with Ai, she commented that I should lift up this intellectual portcullis (“teach, learn or get the f**k out!”) of mine and let all the “riff raff” in. This when I said I need to experience life more widely to be able to fashion literature. I think my doubts in a way mirror what Cotezee wrote in his memoir “Youth”, wondering about how he could produce literature if he is stuck behind a desk at IBM London, fiddling with programming and now sucking on the marrow of life.

Perhaps there is some truth in what Ai said. However the problem, as I have observed in the past, is that even if I lift the portcullis, my mental castle either (here I am guessing) is too forbidding or is quite un-Disney like for their liking! For example I tried to be friends with a doctor at V, I allowed her entry. However she almost resented the amount of stuff I knew and in the fact that I like to stick my nose into every smelly hole! And I grew tired of listening to her monologues on dietary habits, her calorie intake, her exercise schedule, her “Buddhism” (yes sir Buddhism a la chewing gum) etc.

This means that I am cranky and need to pack up for the day as I brace for the turkey massacre!

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.