#Scurf130: this is a stream of consciousness essay
Why are we so concerned about so many things, and more importantly why can I not write everyday
I write this post the way I chat with my mother. Without a filter. Guileless. Innocent but also stupid. Adulterated but in a readable way. Over the last couple of years (read: since I started publishing my essays) quite unexpectedly my writing style veered from the stream of consciousness to a highly fabricated, positioned, situated format. I would say that it is an outcome of wanting to write for publications which require you to have a voice, a tone, a familiarity (or the opposite of that). There is some room for irreverence too there, but perhaps not too much of it. And anyway I am Indian, so I wouldn’t know the first (or last) thing about irreverence.
But that is not what this essay is about. This newsletter is about being able to type out one after the other thoughts, the way they come to my head without the fear of judgment, scrutiny or trolling. These are thoughts that take the shape of unedited, slightly warped, skewed air bubbles that once used to make up the insides of my conversations with friends.
Here I tend to think back to the time when I could talk unfettered, with callous, cliched abandon with almost all people in (or even outside) my life. It was a pretty off the cuff personal diary-ish kind of comfort I could exercise, not having to think, guess, second guess my own words. Unless I was hurting someone, I could just say what came to my mind. Now I can talk in that way maybe only with my husband, mother and a tight group of three friends. And this talk needn’t really be about life and larger subjects, but just generally chatter about my life, the lives of others, us normal people.
Yet I wouldn’t consider those conversations private. They are spaced out, usually comprising of a lag caused due to availability of time, difference in geographies and the likes. I know, for instance, if I send out a text to my friends they might not reply immediately. And that, too, is fine. From fighting it earlier, in a way now I have come to embrace the lag. It adds a necessary or even unnecessary levity to our conversations. Like lol your piddly thots arent so impt so as to break my friday evening no SM fugue. lol.
Talking, really connecting in a way that felt like words spilling out of a diary’s pages. That grain of it at the basest of levels comes through as though effortless, rustic, homegrown. Like the corners of a dog-eared book, at once all too familiar and distant. The gauzy blues and burnt oranges that now make up the interiors of our chat boxes sadly do not have the time or scope for this variety of exchanges. The contemporary taste palette of our conversations has morphed into a rigid space that does not leave any scope for spilling, sharing, stitching. It’s more about muddying, making light, repartee and the saddest of them all “reactions”.
Off the cuff chatter and — its bete noire — a more aware form of conversation actually stand in stark contrast to one another, highlighting their differences while contributing to a sense of human harmony. Aware exchanges are more stiff like the orange safety vests that pop against a bright blue sky while we take our seats in a pedal boat. Stream of consciousness (SOC) talk unrolls itself like cobalt ink, spilling itself when written into a tangerine notebook, smearing anything that comes in the way. With age while I gathered more intelligence on the first kind of writing, talking, and thinking, the latter stands arbitrarily rusty streaking through the blue-gray light of my dull dawn conversations.
Now, even when I try to write (which was never the case before, writing just used to happen), at first the narrative threads seem to congeal, but as the words spread out, the page falls thin, they slowly begin to unravel. This sends me into tizzies at times, as I scour through my email for old scribbles, essays, rants, chats, complaints… really anything. I never kept a blog in the oughts, or even till the start of the last decade and so I’ve lost almost all access to more of that kind of writing than that kind of thinking. I thankfully still do that kind of thinking and talking (with a far, far fewer highly selected group of people) but feel unable to unlock the drawer inside which I forgot my SOC writing ability.
Even as I look for that kind of writing prowess, what I am after is never quite clear, which tends to add to the air of mystery and confusion that permeates the entire endeavour. Puncturing through though are unscripted interviews and deeply meditative interactions with writers, artists, poets, photographers on YouTube. They restore my faith in the presence of that kind of beauty that existed without much preparation. Especially in the spoken and written word. Listening to interactions with poet Eileen Myles, poet and novelist Ocean Vuong and old, really, really old interviews with Karan Johar do the trick for me. They satiate a deep purple hunger while also sometimes leaving behind a tepid, even lukewarm sparkle of inspiration.
Perhaps this searching for SOC now is also a way of maturing from being a bit too all over the place to having a more shaped, composed outlet for my thoughts. Slowly, however, I am beginning to understand that I could use both these schools of writing. It could be a state where little traces of SOC are able to emerge from within a structured essay with a beginning, middle, and end (JLG <3) is something that I aim to arrive at. Maybe it will be so that those traces will muddle up the story of the essay, but I’d love to be able to feel through the tactile abandonment of having found it in the first place.
An essay I wrote last year comes to mind.
Outside the sky is an inky shade of deep blue. The kind that holds promise of rain, but also of smog aplenty. On most of these nights, I succumb to ennui and despair, and pull out the tiny bottle of tequila from the drawer. But today, I have chosen to ink these words on the page.
I wrote this short dispatch on a winter night, unable to fall back asleep after menstrual cramps woke me from an inky shade of deep sleep. This is perhaps also the kind of writing I admire and continue to consciously and subconsciously aspire to. But then again, the editor here was generous enough to run with the essay in its most crude, earnest, wanting form. How many other editors would be willing to do that? Possibly this is why we have our own newsletters. Where we write the way we want to, unshaped, smelly, foul over excessively saccharine. Take it or leave it.
These days I am gravitating towards more such SOC twitter accounts while also looking for spaces around me that could instil inspiration. Earlier this month I was in Calcutta attending to my father in law as he was in a minor surgery. While tending to him, waiting for hospital things, running errands, I ambled through the moderately cool and yet humid aisles of the hospital thumbing through one of these SOC profiles on Twitter. It gave me immense satisfaction, instilling a pleasure within and rekindling a lost vigour for that kind of writing.
This photo is from the interiors of a neighbourhood restaurant I have almost come to take for granted. Its menu so cliched, its prices ever so high, and yet there is an easy, ruminative quality about it I’m unable to put a finger on. It could be that its easy ambience, and almost always near emptiness (except during Pujo) that draws me to it. It also charges within a fire to at least once dawn the hat of a pretentious writer, and go sit to just write there. And one of these days, searching for my stream of consciousness writer self, I just might.
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