#Scurf136: Friendships as aesthetics
On all the ways I have been losing myself this year
This year I didn’t just obsesses about writing, reading, intimacy. I held these loves of my life aloof, with a keen-ness hitherto unknown to me. And it was brilliant. It was more than that. In doing this, I took the straw of that worshipping I had reserved for something less and made it burn as if it were heartwood at which the rest of my loves could all warm our cold, cynical hearts.
This year I spent with people that made me glow, relationships that grew roots, friendships that grounded me. I felt the jagged edges of the world and its cruelty too, but the people were the balm. There was warmth to be found in sitting around tables, on chairs, on the floor, around a bonfire, passing warm toddies and soft cakes. The kindliness was sometimes silly, at others, it was poetic. Books were discussed, as was poetry. There were conversations, lulls, deep moments of reflections. I also cried, circled in other’s company, warm in another’s arms.
You just stick to your own obsessions for your whole life, and sometimes something happens and you think you are on a new level—you’ve changed—and then you discover you haven’t changed at all and are still haunted by the same things. — Mia Hansen-Løve
2022 quickly became the year I ran out of old obsessions and gave myself fully into the new and unknown. For the past two years as much as I had enjoyed, for instance, the thrill of creating, writing and publishing, this year I poured myself into this newsletter instead. This became the year when I finally decided that perhaps there is more meaning to be found in not doing what the heart so badly wants to. And in that, too, somewhere I found tenderness.
Turning on my urges. Going against the flow. Silencing the humdrum around. Charting out my own solitude in a sea of nerves and jitters. Books, walks, runs, music, movies and my people — silver, solid, stock-still.
Why are people important?
They fill you with the good things you’re missing, skipping, leaving. The hidden beauty, the unseen mystery, the poetry and drama in the everyday.
With friendships and people navigating is key. It’s not that there will suddenly been a magical springwell of love. One should especially be carful not to diminish the importance of others people’s words. But after leaping through all these hoops, the fog lifts and emerges a truly pristine closeness.
This was also the year I lost good health, put on kilos, shed some, gained more pimples than in the last three decades, lost hair. As I went through the crests and troughs, fraying, becoming someone else and then finding myself again, I found meaning in going against the flow.
In doing so I also traversed the long way from being the one who sat alone and soldiered on, to the one who was the beating heart of all conversations. The centre of numerous heart-to-hearts marrying loves, joys and sorrows. All through this, I have been equipped with a naïve foolishness.
The truth is that finding your own tribe of people is far more rewarding and accommodating than living in a pulpy fiction of lip service friends — you make plans and they fall apart, you meet for a day and then forget each other, you lie and seek revenge.
It is winter now, and these friendships and this going against the flow is the fire roaring in my life’s hearth.
These small things really moved worlds. Through these days, weeks, months I actively thought and shot less for friendships and more for a memory. In doing so, in being in my own life as a pure verite observer, I gained something immense. The long haul of turning up ever so frequently became rewarding.
Each of my films are like diaries of my life. Not that they are all autobiographical—I don’t mean it in that way—but my films are companions for me. I’m trying with my film to understand life better. I’m in a constant quest. It’s not like you’re in school and trying to get some better notes. — Mia Hansen-Løve
Working in small bursts. Being with this motley group of people. The usual shebang of things. The rhythms, the cadences, I did everything that came to me intuitively. In this, I was constantly sculpting and chiseling the object of my life as looked at from the lens of this year, especially through the looking glass of aesthetic strategies.
(How does any of this make sense to anyone who is not me?)
Cobbling together this other patchwork, connecting, disconnecting, going outside, sleeping not more than 8 hours, exercising, running, singing, listening to music, and inevitably finding friends who weren’t as aloof.
It was a bit of a slugfest but it helped me earn my stripes of the year, create lyrical interests and frontload life with meaning. This kind of world building can be baroque, opaque, even unmooring. But I was invested in this particular subset of choice in my life in this timeframe. I think this also meant that I was enjoying what I was doing, what I derived joy out of and what I found rewarding.
At the end of the year writing this from the comfort of my bed with a hot water bag close up, I think about softness. On reading my words I want people to think that there’s nothing more comforting than a paragraph written by Anandi Mishra. I know that’s how some of you think.
And that is also what I, in a way, love about 2022.
It was this year I understood why a street I walk down in the summer feels completely different in winter. With the seasons, the air changes, and so does the milieu. But something else also shifts. Intangible but very much present. Pressing itself on me from the contours of my existence. I change from inside as a person, leaving a past self behind with each turn in the leaf. While I still don’t know how this comes to be, I can intuit the inherent poetry here. For instance, the summer light in my part of Delhi is just as strong as the winter bite.
This is also something I think a lot about, as now I’ve been in Delhi for close to six years in this stretch (and 1.5 in a former one). Delhi has now become an indelible part of my life and it is now the city I’ve most lived in (after my hometown). Would my writing have been different had I been living someplace else for this long?
What are you trying to emphasize this end of year? What do you want this recap to smell like? Does it look jamuni? Does your new year resolution have a texture?
A soft, pillowy dream comes to me. 2023 will be the year of the novel.
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"through the crests and troughs, fraying, becoming someone else and then finding myself again, I found meaning in going against the flow" -- this is all so lovely, thanks for your words Anandi!
I hear you. Writing my Substack helped me tide through a lot this year. Thank you for for you words always.