#Scurf128: Aimless thoughts from the wasteland of my existence
The fugue of in-between days when nothing seems to happen
Dallying along the dull lanes of no observing and writing, in the last few days I’ve largely drifted (although agreeably) through a haze of creative ennui. If this were a movie it would be shot beautifully on warm 16mm, casting a languid, if wry eye, on the restless contours of creative unproductivity alongside a life thrumming with too many other things.
I’m suddenly besieged by a sense of frustration of not getting to write the way I want to, of not putting in the desired amount of time I should ideally in my writing, reading, thinking. I read essays after essays by contemporaries and wonder why I didn’t write this way, or why I did not think of it first. When in reality the answer is that I did think of it that way, but I hardly have the time to shape the contours of my writing life in that way.
I straddle a full-time job that has (for the first time in 30 months) become overwhelming, alongside a personal life that is rather brimming at the seams. In addition to that I have been on personal travel (quite a bit of it) which has added to an overall scattered sense of self. As I write this from Calcutta, a woodpecker beats relentlessly at a tall coconut tree. The wind is hot, days longer than ever. A sultriness permeates through the walls. I am bad at taking the heat, that too in coastal cities — but I try. To add to this all, I am also on a self-imposed arduous but also deeply enjoyable journey of learning a new language. Although it is admittedly teaching me a new way of being, on most days it none of it makes sense.
All of this, and before I forget, my flailing health, which is nothing as major so as to occasion a leave of absence from all else, but is nagging at me from the inside and outside (in the form of others pointing it out). This smattering of life and its living creates a fugue, leaving me with little time for much else. I am grateful for getting adequate nourishment in terms of the people around me, food, water and sleep. But my other steady source of sustenance — writing, reading, thinking — seems forlorn.
But then most creative types have their phases, I surmise. It’s a thought, a placeholder for where worry should be, as I delicately try to weed out the negative, making room for the pragmatic. There are times in life when living takes a precedence over creating, and that might also show us the way it should ideally be. Or not?
I also understand the fact that we all operate within the brackets of phases in life and that it is wrong to constantly keep account of who is doing what. This sense of competition, even if at a nether cost, reflects my humanity. In keeping tabs, and closely reading the work of peers I am also giving myself the room to be vulnerable, and perhaps that is the way in which I scratch at (or against) the flow of time, leaving, making or finding something in the trail. Perhaps this too is language, finding a new way of being outside of these everyday travails that mar the other side of a creative person’s life.
This thought bleeds into the line of thinking that there often exists a place where living ends and creating begins. In reality we, most certainly, exist in the quagmire of these in-between places between creating and living. These are sterile but also sometimes reap fruit in the form of a novel idea, a new window or a fresh approach. Writers are often quoted saying how a fully-developed piece of writing emerges from a well-lived in life. This in turn queries on how much life is worth just living and how much is worth writing about?
With a day job, a personal life so full, a chock-a-block calendar with myriad appointments, where do I even begin to squeeze in the time to think about what to pitch, or write next? This also has other repercussions. A fragment of my day job bleeds into my personal writing, while a slice of me remains aloof from my weekend writing. This goes on as an unending cycle, yielding into interesting results that sometimes surprise even me.
Juggling these two, trying to be my full, warm and present self in both, I sometimes am able to strike a wondrous, if off-kilter, balance. While on other occasions, not quite much. Yet it agonises me to see that some people have a slighter better luxury of time, when they can not only go long but also dive deep on a topic of interest. They write with novelistic ambition, scholarly clarity about topics that I too hold dearly. In that I want to become what Rachel Sugar calls a “time millionaire” in her latest Grub Street dispatch. She describes it as someone who doesn’t “have a lot of money, but…a lot of time.” Sigh.
I wonder then, maybe I do have the time and I am purloining it on a piecemeal basis, one essay (review, post, poem) at a time. I dive into an assignment thinking I will give it my all, but find myself coming up for air pretty early on, and then abandoning it there. In the process I wear myself out, wring out the inclination and instinct of creativity and reduce the work to just that — work. While speaking me on the phone a few months ago, novelist and friend Dur e Aziz Amna made a gentle intervention: “What about your novel? Only you will have to write it!”
It broke me a little but in a kintsugi kind of way.
It has been months and I’ve yet to start any work that’s even close to a longer project, but I now know that’s something on the horizon. Now I don’t pitch as much as I used, better still, if I do conceive an idea, I try to develop the piece further through Scurf. In this I am left wanting for a better byline, but it also gives me the precious gift of the work looking like what it is — work in progress.
As the walls of life open and close around me, another vital thought beams through. I do all of this for myself. That a nail-biting sense of competition exists is mature but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There can be that shade of jealousy, a pinch of inadequacy, but not at the cost of the work.
Creativity is a process of slow burn, of subliminal growth and a benign acknowledgment. There is a slowpoke air to it, in the way it materialises out of nowhere, out of literally nothing. Sometime its just out there for you to press at, while at others it lurks ever so slightly, hiding behind the shadows, waiting for that trick of the light to land on its feeble moonlit face. In this I learn that I, too, need protection from my own self. That distractions need not always be just unhealthy emotions about other people’s work, but also the way I end up situating myself in those fleeting few minutes at the end of the day.
In a way this sense of dissatisfaction, of not being enough, ample, sure can be good. But it also has to be a guarded space of caution, from where I try to tease out a sense of languorous, artistic, creative bandwidth. Till the time I write something that comes close to satisfying me or a piece through which I break out of my own mould, I will continue to relish this shifting sense of uneasiness. It is vague in origin but hyper specific in its location in my time table, and my mental and physical life. And for that I consider this wasteland of existence halcyon. Its here that confusion soars, chaos lurks and leaving a rumble in my creative jungle.
As the day draws to a close, I open the windows to let the warm air in and shuffle the neatly stacked, air conditioned thoughts inside my head. There is enchantment to be found in looking away, for that is where we sometimes unearth the palimpsest of impending work. Ruminating about the patchwork this kind of living leaves behind, I find myself suddenly too full of words. Turns out, if anything these paragraphs are proof that boredom does breed a deliciously inventive panoply of thoughts (aimless or not).
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that weird thing of "I could have written that"...
Wonderful piece on juggling writing and reading with everything else!