To anyone who still reads this

I’ve been unusually busy these four years. What have you been upto?

The part that I dislike about my job is that it has grown dull, repetitive and boring. But, that doesn’t mean that there are no other avenues to learn new things. There are. I just wish some of the older leadership here could be more indulgent, encouraging and purpose driven. Instead some of the young people around me are immensely talented and their zeal for learning and their scientific spirit (the spirit of asking why? Rather than accepting things at face value because there aren’t any apparent rewards at the end of the enquiry) towards working has impressed me and motivated me to learn newer facets about my domain. The dull parts, I think, are necessary to give greater color and life to non-dull parts.

I am reading a lot as well. It is that phase of my life. My life goes through phases. This right here is the phase where I read and read and read. I devour pages after pages. And then a phase will come when I will even refuse to look at a book. These phases – they come and go without any regularity. I have a little impassive voice inside while reading and I brush every emotion with the same undulating, stoic voice of a girl of thirteen (why a girl?) – this girl with a dainty figure and slender shoulders wearing a light colored frock with puffed up sleeves which cup her smooth naked arms. She sits with her back hunched against the wall and a window to her left secure in the knowledge that nobody can interfere from at least two sides – she has got them covered. The hemline barely covers her crisscrossed knees which look like little polished river stones in the filtered light from the curtained windows. She is barely aware of her physical form and all that matters is that she gets through her pages. She doesn’t care for the side characters in the story. They are perhaps necessary for the narrative but she is oblivious to their fates. She is concerned for the main characters and it is necessary that they have tragic underpinnings in their lives. She hates happy endings and though she doesn’t want her main characters to die she eventually wants them to go through some sense of loss and feelings of a better life they could have had, if only, if only …

One of the common reasons given for not writing for a long period of time is writer’s block – the inability to think and write up something that is or appears substantial or meaningful to the writer and which he thinks will bring something for the readers. When I read ‘The art of motorcycle maintenance’, it explained how there is no such thing as a ‘writer’s block’ due to lack of ideas but instead from an overcrowding of ideas. People are thinking so many different things at the same time and are trying to spit them all out at the same time that eventually nothing comes out. The thing to do in such a situation is to note down all the ideas on paper and then work out on them in a step by step manner.

 But that is not why I didn’t write. I had plenty of things to write about but I was (am?) ambiguous about letting it all out on a public platform where a few friends and a few strangers read me. One part of me wanted to write it all out, let out my personal frustrations (yes…that was all I had to share – my supposed failings and my unending grief about them – my continuing list of things that shamed me and my unending struggle to deal with them…I was a full-fledged drama queen, a volatile moping adolescent, a depressed middle-aged man all at the same time) and offer them for public consumption. I felt it would be somehow assuaging in letting my emotions take the form of neat MS word calligraphy, neatly tucked in good-looking properly arranged paragraphs and syntaxes and bounded within proper grammar – a tangible form to my catharsis and a way to declare my whining to the world. And then there was another part of me that said- why bother? Who gives a fuck really? Does my sadness really need an audience? Was it authentic and serious enough compared to the miseries out in the world? Was I really afflicted? Or was it just how I wanted to feel in absence of any real crises in my life? I mean I had a comfortable life – good food, neat house, access to running water and 24-hours electric power. Half the people in my own country don’t have access to these and neither can they dream to dream such atrocious dream. How much of a chance my ‘depression’ had in front of such hardships around me? At least my depression had a chance of getting out of its depressed state…

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

A saint is a person set apart for their holiness. The saint is still a human being, of course, still a sinner. There is a famous quote by Fr. Bernard Carges that says: “A saint is a sinner who keeps on trying.” But the seriousness of that trying, the relentlessness of that trying, marks the saint as beyond a normal human being. The saint thus becomes a model for everyone else struggling to make difficult choices, to behave well when there are so many motivations for behaving less-than-well. But it is even more complicated than that. It was always acknowledged, from the time of the early Christian saints, that the vast majority of human beings would never achieve a saintly level of holiness. So the saint is both a model and an impossible standard. The fact that the saint takes on the task of living life at a higher and unachievable level adds meaning to the lives of everyone else. For many centuries, human beings seem to have enjoyed stories of the saints as a way to acknowledge their own limits. People have been glad that saints exist and simultaneously glad that they do not have to be saints. There is a tension in those two feelings but not, I think, a contradiction. Confronting a saint is like confronting a better version of yourself, a version that you know you cannot ever become. The confrontation creates feelings of inspiration, then frustration, and then acceptance.

For insulting the Quran, “‘Thousands of people
dragged a Pakistani man … from a police station …
(and) beat him to death,’ police said Wednesday.”

Is it even possible
to insult a book?

Has it a soul within its leaves
a heart that beats
an eye that winks
a cord running through its spine
descending from a thing that thinks?

Is a book of inky lines
(of characters not themselves sublime)
capable of being hurt or ridiculed
or cheapened by critiques
either of the wise, or fools?

Has it veins between its covers
salty with the blood of lovers?

Is there something in its pages
(even if put there by sages)
that warrants death to critics?

Is it a thing so lame that priestly brothers
(arrogant, imperious, parasitic)
who worship sheaves of ink on paper
must, for its sake, snuff the holy breath
of others?

by Jim Culleny

11/6/12 (from 3quarks daily)