#scurf170: Gary Indiana: the humanist in the bathtub
read his latest essay
I’d quote the full length of the essay here but I’d rather you wander over to the Granta website to let it cast its spell on you. The otherness, avant gardeness, foreignness of ageing, of being fazed out by life itself somewhat made me think (albeit very narrowly) about the way we live and be and exist in Delhi.
There is a lot more that I can identify with here. Gary’s essay about age and greying and growing old spoke to me so directly, it somewhat made me jump out of my skin.
A close friend, Alok, getting back to normal health, wrote this little dirge and Gary’s essay made me revisit it:
Death to Buddha
'Be mindful'
Isn't this what Buddha said?It happened strangely
Escaping death in a nick
Redelivered to life
In the skillful Godly hands
Named Dr .Panda
Back to life
A Rebirth
The first was unaware
As body trained and mind grew
This was Mind fully awake
Body learning
To breathe
To walk
To cough
Each pain
Each itch
Each part making way
To conscious self
Have I been delivered to be
Enlightened?
A satori from under the knife— Alok Bajpai
27/01/24
I wish I could post here this picture Alok shared with me this morning from his living room where he’s sitting and reading this little book about the mind and its myriad little connections.
Gary’s essay, Alok’s health — I could read them both as glove cups. Just around this time came my birthday that made me think of nothing else except myself and the Indian Union budget and this visit by someone so dear so close so everything to me.
On our SM we behave or at least we are made to behave as if we’re nearly not there. Even if we’re there, we’re not. There’s shame attached to the being there, the being present. So just a few moments ago when I changed my whatsapp profile picture, a friend swooshed in with loaded words that would’ve meant so much to my 2012 self. Now… nothing.
How does that connect? Where’s the segue?
In a time this essay, Alok’s poem, his health, this someone’s visit, my own birthday and being able to celebrate it with the one who matters — all of this is interspersed with a meaning that’s impossible to comprehend. That hours after wrapping up my birthday celebrations we both left for the same work-related event where we walked tens of thousands of steps to uncover a technology both of us are on the opposite ends, of only enhanced the everythingness of the evening that came before.
The first half of my birthday was hollowed out of any meaning and connotation in part because of the admin work that “being-at-home”, takes away from our beings but mostly because of the knowledge of Alok’s ill-health. It’s only last night when I saw him in my dream as his hearty, laughing, “cool” self that a kind of a knot opened itself inside me. Something lifted.
Cut to this morning when I received this photograph of him, reading in peace, in a pair of frayed pyjamas, wearing a loose shirt, a sly smile playing on his lips, his posture sprightly… an image of him growing back into his self.
As Gary says in the essay:
It was just a face. And here it still is, wised up and cruelly weathered by decades of disappointment. Like your own face in the mirror.
So many more thoughts to unpack. Until next time.