Roses and Broken China

J:

Will wait for your thougts. Jonty and others, where are you?

t

Sadna, why not? I would love to read a story like that. :-)

Temporal, I am still thinking and re-thinking your friend`s e-mail. Very interesting. Will let it percolate a bit more before responding. Would like to hear other people`s thoughts/feelings on it.

Jawahara, Jonty, Sameer and all others mentioned in #16:

You would be interested in reading the thoughts of a friend. I have his/her permission to share them with you. I have added some related footnotes.

Lve

t

_______________________________________________
MY GOD SMILES


Dear _______:


It is midway between midnight and dawn here – have just returned from the hospital – and am unable to drift off to sleep – cannot really wake you up – what will M think? So I will send this email -- You recall what some Chowkwalah wrote to that chappy in Pakistan whose brother was kidnapped or murdered? I was surprised at the lack of fallout – not really, we are an apathetic lot --- fallout at the event and fallout at what he wrote –makes me think if we really read and assimilate or not read or listen, but merrily sing our tunes and move on to another branch?—then you mused about inner peace and lack of concern at how others may brand you --- to which arun gupta out of Dilli, Mirza’s Dilli enquired specifically about your faith – and you replied to him (Footnote 1) with which he was not satisfied -- I pondered over it --- your reply made sense to me – but I will add just this bit –MY GOD SMILES – perhaps you wanted to say it and did not or perhaps you never considered that angle – but that is the way you are --- I know --- your god is merciful, peaceful, at rest, --- not the vengeful thundering talibaan god-- I am sure he, HE? does not mind whether you use caps or not--- God, god, Allah, allah, eeshwar, Esshwar, malik, bhaghwaan, --- sorry yaar, you gotta suspend your word abuse patrols here – or it will disturb this flow --- just this once – it is important I bare my soul now without check --- we can seek forgiveness at your altar of Devi of Words later --- you are a strange bird, bud --- okay well, rare --- you know I read Chowk, but never comment -- save with you -- read SR --- I know what you will tell him – know it – don’t be quirky and tell him differently just to prove me in the wrong --- you will tell him – perhaps in not these words that you don’t need the attention nor the money, hence you will not do the novel --- his gypsy soul will understand yours --- as I said earlier MY GOD SMILES, as does yours, Rohit mentioned all those writers – I’m inclined to go for “artists’ --- it is not that these artists have a dark soul or they intentionally probe the dark -- they are merely mortals --- how they stand apart from the ‘mere’ mortals is built in the nature of their sensitiveness -- everything they view or observe is carried by them on their back up the peak of sensitivity – often this passage is hazardous and arduous and in the process their back is hurt – but they do not give up -- sort of reverse of Saqi’s Jan Mohammed Khan (Footnote 2)--- and the load they acquire over this passage gets heavier and heavier--- and it sometimes momentarily alters their perception of the reality -- and they find themselves shorn of vestiges of hope -- for themselves, for those around them, for those yet to come -- but I also see in their efforts the rise of hope – for we can only attribute hope to any creativeness – even the hope for death is but hope for better things -- have just returned from the hospital, did I tell ya -- well, I will come to it shortly – let me finish this train first -- this hope – dark at first, gloomy if you will, stark or whatever emerges from their inner selves because they are sensitive souls --- if they are not sensitive they are not ‘artist’ in my book --- and by the very nature of that sensitiveness they are consumed by it - in most cases -- the revenge of life on encroaching sensitivity? ---- drugs, alcohol, consumption, drive – are just manifestations -- thus, to me their portrayal of the dark is a hopeful sign – a huge dark flag in the vastness of the desert that humankind cannot ignore ---- and then there are other mortals --- who knows they maybe equally sensitive, but have sorted out sorrows and shadows differently, who also climb uphill every living moment ---- who feel the same pain and disillusionment but who have a different way to dispose off the burden along the way and at the top --- I enjoyed the artists you named --- who can argue that they were any less sensitive – so in the final analysis – oh, yes, we have agreed in the past that there isn’t really any final analysis – but at this moment ? can I say to each his own and escape from here ---- but I have not come here to escape – perhaps I have – as I mentioned I have just returned from the hospital ---- the young plant is withering --- wilting before out eyes ---- there is no hope, no help --- except in the realms of spirits -- such a cheerful person in so much pain ---- and I think if there is justice anywhere – to compound ---- you know how I am unwittingly involved in the slow disintegration --- slow meltdown of ---- you know both the couples -- one together for four and the other for seventeen years --- all four basically decent and nice beings --- this environment has affected them differently – so they drift apart and fooled themselves and those around them into thinking all is hunky dory -- and then I start getting these calls in the middle of nights – and am unwittingly drawn into mediative efforts --- soon, very soon any reservoir of hopeful adrenaline evaporates and lo it is replaced with their despair – seemingly unresolveable and irreconcilable differences --- these three spasms alongwith the regular carro-tussle has been rather detrimental --- or have they -- this is first smile of the day ----- no, as long as we live we face and overcome crisis --- yehi to zindagi hay--- who insan hi kiya jo mauj-e-hawaadis kaa samna na karay? -- as I drift off to some sleep I know, and you know tomorrow is another day – and we will smile and face what comes --- thanks yaar, --- will drop in late today …….



Footnote 1:

temporal # 45:“……. In my mind I am a Muslim. In addition to Allah, and Prophet Muhammed I believe in tolerance and respect for everyone else on planet earth.
I hate obsessive excesses be it in the guise of religion, politics or social mores.
I believe in the moderation and goodness of the human spirit.
I believe in living and letting others live.
I believe in being a good neighbour.
I believe in being a good corporate citizen of this earth.
Whether I follow the tenets and rituals of my professed religion is my business.
I hate fundamentalism of any stripe.
I am not devoid of hatred. I am normal. But I hate hatred. It irks me forever.
And I am at peace with myself.”

Footnote 2:

(This is my translation of a poem by Saqi Faroqui)

WOUNDED CAT IN AN EMPTY SACK

Jan Mohammed Khan
this is no easy journey
in this empty gunny sack
life suffocates
Jute strands pierce the heart
and on the foggy cornea
coins of moonlight cascade
and darkness overwhelms the body


Today on your bare back
who’d lit the fire
who’d fire the coal
who’d blossom the blood stained
flowers of strife?

My fiery claws are listless
today the journey is not easy
Presently this path abruptly will stop
at the dirty pond
and ensconced in the loneliness of my coffin
I’ll embrace sleep
water to water, dust to .....
And you’ll have to move on-------
move on as if in trance
And you cannot fathom that invisible sack------
you can’t recognise your own sack
Jan Mohammed Khan
this is no easy journey.

Jawahara

Thanks for such an evocative piece. Just wanted to share some thoughts. A lovingly-cared-for house, lush gardens, a barren woman within, a beautiful floor and moisture creeping in through the foundations. All this made me think of the peepal saplings and other green shoots that always grow in cracks in walls and other hospitable masonry anywhere in the subcontinent. The impetus of nature and burgeoning life is hard to resist anywhere in that region, however black the darkness of circumstances, or however deep the blackness of the rest of the worlds` literary trends :-).

So, is it not feasible that our childless protagonist responded to the irresistable call of life inside and outside her house`s walls and gates and invited into her home at least on one occasion, half a dozen or at least 2-3 orphan destitute children to enjoy a meal on those shining well-kept floors. And this experience led to her growing old and gray in her remaining years just keeping up with them, tending to their needs and fostering them into adulthood while bringing new meaning into her own life?

Tell me in my huge ignorance about this subject whether world literature has room for this, or such a scenario only merits a newspaper story, if at all:-)

Sadhana

I had posted something yesterday which did not make it into the InterAct section. Oh well! The gist of it was this.

I wonder if it actually takes more talent to convey a writer`s (artist`s) message through a ligter touch than the darkness which I favor? Try as I might I cannot `do` humor, or even something that is not totally dark.

Which ties in very well with Charles Schulz, of course. He was able to convey so many emotions through light humor.

So I continue wondering, and scrapping my pathetic attempts at light writing. *sighs *

re: temporal

Charles Schultz (RIP) may not be as `dark` as the others, but he did create the most neurotic character in modern literature. No one expresses the hopelessness of man`s condition better than our man, Charlie Brown.

Why someone would create and not want to share his work isn`t an easy question to answer. Why did Salinger become a recluse, writing volumes but publishing not a whit? Did he think nothing would ever stack up to his classic Catcher? Was it because he had seen fame and was terrified of what more of it could have wrought? Who`s to say. It`s genius` prerogative to do as it pleases. Who are we to demand of it?

re: Happy One (Are you really, I wonder...;-)

I managed The Trial OK, and enjoyed (and was very frustrated by) it, but I couldn`t make heads nor tails of GG Marquez`s Hundred Years of Solitude. I think I need to go to the original Spanish for that one. Or maybe it`s just the story itself. (I quite enjoyed Autumn of the Patriarch.) And reading the Russian and French writers in English has never been a burden. Though there`s nothing like the original, I`m sure.

Jawahara,
another superb effort. I hope that
you will write a novel soon that will
take this CHOWK group into the next league
of the writing craft. Take this house of yours to Random House!

Ras

Re: Jonty #15

``why does someone become a writer? Is it mainly for selfish reasons- as a form of catharsis, to purge himself of all those fears, subjugate those demons?``

Obviously thats not the only reason but it has to play a really big part I think. Depression takes a writer deep within his own coccon and the creative process does help him break out. But that aside I think it is easier to draw poetry from beauty than to eek out profundity of expression from dispair. That is why these folks are great writers.

``BTW, what`s all this about Kafka`s masterpiece being...The Castle? I never heard of it. Surely he means The Trial.``

He does mean The Trial. About Kafka... he never quite did it for me. I mean aside from the allegorical aspects and the social commentary. I`m sure the translation loses about 90% of it. Wish I new German. I imagine what it must be like for Pink Floyd`s The Wall to be translated to Urdu and then sung by Jagjit & Chitra. Thats probably what Kafka feels like in English.

Jonty #15, SameerJB #14 and Jawahara #13:
and B, U, S, S, S, Z, M, & F:

-------ON CREATIVE EFFORTS-------



Why does one write, create, paint, sculpt?

Obvious answer: to provide employment to herds of critics and detractors.

My feeble attempt at humour aside, all creative efforts are born off an urge. This urge provides the initial spark ---- the catalyst or motivation. Fire in the innards of the mind nurtures the urge, granting it shape, muscles, form.

Between the ‘embryo’ and ‘child birth’ this creative gestation period could be a minute to years. Instant gratification or long periods of uncertainty and tussle.


Reclusive, sensitive, dedicated, mixed with controlled insanity and stretches of normality.

Treading a fine thin line between rationality and impulse: conventional sanity and unconventional insanity.

Most writers (artists to you Jonty) mentioned by Rohit Chopra tilt slightly away from this fine balance. But not all. Mushtaque Yusufi, (Urdu humorist who redefined humour and satire), Ogden Nash, Charles Schultz, Art Buchwald are just names that come off the top. They appear not so ‘dark’ when compared to Rohit’s list.

Raised a question and attempted an answer. Will like to hear from you guys. Will leave with another question.

Having ‘created’ why do some do not share the creative efforts?

regards, as usual

t

Nice article, but I don`t think it really says anything new. It`s practically a truism that the happy, well-adjusted person does not become a writer. No matter their ultimate outlook or state of being, every writer is driven in some way, shape or form by the apparent hopelessness of the human condition, what Conrad`s Kurtz so famously described as, `The horror! The horror!`

But that`s the artist`s burden, to see things more clearly, and feel them more acutely, than his fellow man. Which makes me wonder, why does someone become a writer? Is it mainly for selfish reasons- as a form of catharsis, to purge himself of all those fears, subjugate those demons?

BTW, what`s all this about Kafka`s masterpiece being...The Castle? I never heard of it. Surely he means The Trial.

temporal: Thanks for posting an excellent article. A very good book you might like to read is,``Solitude, A Return to the Self`` by Anthony Storr. He discusses several famed artists and writers who were extremely recluse and produced their best work in solitude. This depressive behavior is lot more common among men than women and believed to be physiological (harmonal imbalance) as well as psychological. I look forward to reading your next post.

I like it! But now I am depressed and have to re-read Maureen Dowd`s column on McCain`s vacation ............. why do most good writers have to be so ominously dark ......brrrrrrrr! Maybe I should go back to Zane Grey - there is nothing like a good mindless Western to get your adrenalin going ..

Thanks for the positive response on this story guys. Satyavadi, I shall strive to participate on the forums more. Anything to raise the Indian presence :-)I am amazed to find how many people read Siliconindia, BTW. A good thing I imagine.

Temporal, excellent article. I have often wondered about that myself. Speaking of myself, I think, even as a child, I wrote about things that disturbed, scared or traumatized me. Perhaps, an individual quest to make sense of the dark, senseless things that seem to happen with amazing regularity in most peoples` lives.

Jaya, for instance, was written after I found out about the death of the first person in my age group that I personally knew. Perhaps it was a feeble attempt to examine my own mortality.

Sometimes, I feel like I lead a very schizophrenic existence, because in day to day life I am almost naively idealistic. And, many, including my husband sometimes (gently) make fun of my abiding faith in humanity and humaneness, while I write so ceaselessly of the dark side. Have not figured that out myself.

I often wonder if that is the motivation of others, like the great thinkers in the article.

Of course, depression and/or dysthimia in ones personality might also be one of the many individual reasons and motivations.

I`d like to read others` thoughts on Rohit Gupta`s article. Very interesting. I need to read it a few more times. These are just my initial reactions.

Jawahara:

Enjoyed the story.Evocative!Like most others said,it was not only a trip back in space but in time also.

I love such stories.Thanks again!

wassalaam.

Jawahara and friends:

Please read this. Will come back to this later.
The question that is hovering in my mind is what makes some writers always examine the dark side of mind? And at the other end of the spectrum who amongst us searches for the light at the end of the tunnel?

t




Writing, Madness, Despair


Rohit Chopra






Imagine a world so messed up that schizophrenia is the only response to it.

That world might exist. It`s the world you, I and the guy next door might be living in.
It is a disconcerting idea: one that immediately raises hackles. As controversial critic and psychoanalyst R D Laing would no doubt have discovered when he suggested, a good 20 odd years ago, that perhaps madness was a perfectly logical response to a century that had seen two world wars, a Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an Auschwitz and a Dachau and countless other instances of horrific barbarity.

Needless to say, in the last two decades, the madness has not abated; genocide spreads its nasty reach across several continents. From Bosnia to Indonesia, the bloodshed drives home the message that there are very few things one human being will not do to another. Closer home, one only needs look at the morning paper to lose faith in humanity.

The resistance to accept such a thesis is understandable.

For no matter how much we curse our zeitgeist, no matter how rotten things get in the State of Denmark, we hold on to the idea that the universe we inhabit is fundamentally normal, if a little frayed at the edges. We save our discussions of surrealism and alternate realities for a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Madness is best kept at arm`s length, as is everything that madness is a metaphor for: the dark side of humankind, the killer around the corner, the beast within, the monster of history and the shameful past.

But there are those who choose this madness and despair, or perhaps it chooses them. Writers and poets who look into the heart of darkness and tell us what we are most scared of knowing. That there is no God and no Justice. That evil exists in its purest, most malevolent form, and gets away unpunished. That there is no hope and no salvation. That claustrophobia and nausea is all there is to existence. That wherever the light reaches, the dark has already reached and is there waiting for it, impatiently tapping one foot.

It is not a matter of sheer chance that madness and its familiars -- despair, desolation and darkness -- are among the great themes of 20th century writing. And while it is a literary sin of sorts to confuse the life and biography of a writer with the writing, it is surely more than a coincidence that some of the most significant writers of our century have been depressive or even suicidal.

Many of them suffered nervous breakdowns. Some died mad. Some, if nothing else, retreated completely into themselves, and lived out their days as asocial reclusives. Some took to alcohol and wrecked themselves. Others let drugs do it for them. T S Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Bruno Schulz Kafka, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, J D Salinger, Robert Pirsig, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Yukio Mishima, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Larkin... the list goes on.

It should be said here, however, that the figure of the writer at odds with society is not a particularly new one. In the specific context of English literature, the idea of the writer as a tormented genius sprung from the Romantic worldview.

The Romantic poets, especially, gave us the image of the frenzied seer who, in his trance-like state, was privy to truths that lesser mortals could not have access to. Obviously, this meant an isolation of sorts from the teeming mass of humanity: a privileged loneliness which was the burden of the artist, at once a curse and gift.
Yet, this isolation was not necessarily an alienation. Shelley could still stridently proclaim that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. For that alienation -- for the shrinking of the poet`s voice to zero -- one had to wait till the beginning of the 20th century for a poet named T S Eliot.

Eliot, through his poems, The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland, made a statement about the relationship of the writer to contemporary society. No longer was the writer someone who could confidently make a statement about the world he lived in. The image that Eliot forged of the writer was based on the vision of a different sensibility -- the writer was someone who, through his work, was holing out against an inevitable corruption of the soul. Sometimes he succeeded, but equally he failed.

Of course, not all the great tormented souls of the 20th century created wonderful literature simply by virtue of the fact that they were depressive. Of course, not all writers who write on madness, despair and all that is dark are necessarily depressive. Of course, not all great writing on madness and the bleak underbelly of life is unremittingly pessimistic; often, as in the case of Heller`s classic Catch 22, it is more than generously laced with the kind of black humour that elevates and uplifts the spirit. Stories of emptiness are often stories of salvation as well: in Eliot`s Wasteland, redemption lurks on the horizon, in the words from the Upanishads, ``Give, sympathize, control.``
But there exists, at the same time, a kind of writing where it is always darkness at noon.

Where a clinical nihilism forces one to reach out for a sun that has gone dead. Such writings ring with a strange, prophetic truth: it is the shriek of a blind man whose insight has been purchased at the cost of his eyesight. More often than not, interestingly, writing of this sort does not concern itself directly with the horrific -- it takes as its domain the metaphysics of the human condition in a godless universe.

The high priest of this is Kafka, arguably the single greatest writer of the 20th century. If you want to experience failure and desperation in their most unadulterated form, read The Castle. At once fable -- which Rushdie counts as the central literary form of the West -- allegory, theology, novel and poem, Kafka`s masterpiece is the story of a man, K, who attempts to breach the bureaucratic set-up of the castle in order to meet an official. He fails to make any headway whatsoever and his efforts disintegrate into a classic tale of impotence: he is completely reduced to a cipher. Philip Roth calls The Castle a book concerned at every level with not reaching a climax. It is true: reading The Castle is a frustrating, choking experience, like being wrapped in a shroud and not being able to breathe.

The same relentless despair is manifested in Kafka`s famous short story, Metamorphosis, where a man turns into a cockroach and slowly finds himself alienated from all those who, seemingly, cared for him earlier. To call it a classic tale of alienation is to use a phrase that has been sullied by excessive undergraduate pseudo-intellectual angst, but that is indeed what it is.

The other classic nihilists of our century are the existentialists. Fascinatingly, the metaphor of repeated failure appears in Camus as well. In his collection of essays The Myth Of Sisyphus And Other Essays, he invokes the mythical figure of Sisyphus to describe the pointlessness of the human condition. Sisyphus` task is to roll a boulder up a hill till he reaches the top, but he fails every time and is condemned to keep trying till the end of time.

Camus was a far more gifted thinker and writer than his fellow-existentialist, Sartre, who often used his fiction to mechanically illustrate philosophical points. However, Satre produced at least one literary masterpiece -- the play No Exit. In it, the deathtrap moves from the metaphysical to the physical. In a memorable, damning line, the play leaves us with the talismanic anthem, `Hell is other people.` It is a pointedly frightening thought, for what else but the social circumscribes the ambit of meaning in our trivial lives.

The Beat writers -- Kerouac, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg among others -- were another group of writers who flirted with relentlessly apocalyptic visions that were based on a nearly total rejection of all that society, as they saw it, stood for. Openly contemptuous of the bourgeois world, they used drugs to tango with the very fabric of reality.

While their experiments with mind-altering substances were nothing new -- they had honourable predecessors in Coleridge, De Quincey, Rimbaud and Huxley -- their conviction about the poverty of the normal and the ineffectuality of representing the `real` through conventional literary forms marked the Beat ethos as original. Though they often sound like prophets of doom, the Beats, it must be said, do not share the stance of pointed resignation and defeat that mark the other great literary pessimists of the century. Kerouac, easily the most talented writer of the lot, often explores a sort of redemptive mysticism in his work and Ginsberg`s work often displays a Whitmanesque ecstasy.
Yet, the Beat worldview is not always positive and negative in balanced measure. Sometimes, like Old Testament prophets, they damn with rhadamanthine judgement. The best example of this is the Ginsberg`s talismanic anthem, Howl. The first four lines serve as a comment on the signs of the times. They may also, with equal relevance, apply to the figure of the contemporary writer:

``I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. . .``
No less damning is the poet, Philip Larkin, who once famously said that depression was for him what daffodils were for Wordsworth. Larkin was, to his credit, not a chronic pessimist though he came pretty close. After all, he is the man who gave us the lines, ``What will survive of us is love,`` and ``Sexual intercourse began in 1963/Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP.`` Yet, in another poem, This Be The Verse, Larkin in his droll way can be more nihilistic than perhaps any poet in the last half century. I haven`t read a more angry, bitter statement.

The poem is reproduced here: make what you will of it.

They f--k you up, your mum and dad
They may not mean to but they do
They give you all the faults they had
And add some extra just for you
But they were f---ed up in their turn
By fools in old style hats and coats
Who half the time were soppy stern
And half at one another`s throats
Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as early as you can
And don`t have any kids yourself

Good one. Also liked your article in SILICON INDIA magazine http://www.siliconindia.com. Also saw your picture in the magazine!!