“Everything there looked foreign,” you said. That must have been in one of our early conversations though not the earliest. You were talking about your return years later to a city, the home you had run away from. I thought your tone indicated dispassion. And I must have muttered a few fumbling words of commiseration in response as if there was immediate understanding. They sounded mangled even to me, and in all probability, I was pursuing another line of thought, as in, “how good you are at making faces” or some such thing. While the unsaid tends to surpass what finds expression, here’s a matter I must tell you, because its strangeness stupefies me more than I would usually admit.
Is it possible to run away from somewhere without clearly recognizing that intention? What’s truer is perhaps that I did not possess a language that could make any sense whatsoever to address the embarrassment of that estrangement. Because, even though I have been living in Bangalore for well over a decade now, only when circumstances found me settling down for a couple of years in another city did the idea of home, that its tentacles drag one back, began to sink in. I hadn’t fled from the land of my birth as the girl in that Bon Jovi song does when she sets out with the resolve to make a clean break. But like her, I too had learned fast what could not be said back in that village, or perhaps anywhere in Kerala without consequences. That lesson still holds. And in hindsight, my leaving pretty much amounts to a kind of escape— the same way an arranged marriage can sometimes look like an elopement in retrospection— although made recognizable only through the comfort of distance and the callousness of time. Maybe displacement and place are concepts that mutually feed each other. In any case, it was the oddness of displacement that made me suspect that even though Kerala’s map boasts of three cities, it cannot offer what I found delivered anonymously at my doorstep in Bangalore.
*****
Many of my fellow Malayalis would find that claim outrageous. Armed with verifiable statistics, the ‘know-it-alls’ among them might even proceed to bombard it because doubt presents a quandary that a certain kind of shared pride is sure to call out as offensive. They are of course right about the well-trumpeted achievements that scaffold that pride. But when they get all riled up, and make their case in one voice that likes the sound it makes more than anything else, they also paradoxically make my doubt stronger. The latter, although, occupies a small place, that of individual experience re-lived in memory where it finds its changing shapes. After all, only the individual has memory, while the rest is the result of consensus arrived upon about heritage, culture and so on, within the meaning-making frames needed to arrive at that general agreement in the first place, and which has a way of overriding the reckoning that while good things occur in a place, other kinds of things also tend to play out [i]. And what this writer submits on the basis of her personal experience is this: it’s exhausting to live in a place where the collective pride is about enlightenment or prabudhada— often an inheritance that’s trotted out simply for being born there— where ‘common sense’ prevails, previously agreed upon by others.
*****
The quintessential feature of a city, it’s often said, is its throng: the crowd milling about on its streets where everything is situated cheek by jowl. But when entities and establishments are thrown together in a busy vastness, the general pace of living and the consequent aloofness in the air also often lend a certain degree of anonymity though among other things certainly. Perhaps because vastness, busy-ness and many-ness when acting together, churn out disparate results that thwart uniformity in small ways on the ground-level even when it’s assumed.
Do I hear someone sneering, “Yeah, yeah, keep joking, but the traffic in your city is still nightmarish”? Or a whining protest that “your ‘garden-city’ turns into a furnace in the summer months”? Or on a louder note, a dismissive verdict about rising xenophobia here? It admittedly lands me in a conundrum where I can only nod in agreement again. As when confronted with one of those creepy multiple choice questions, the correct answer to which is ‘Option D’, but which also simply gazes up at the other three options.
But then, what has ‘box-ticking’ got to do with abstract feelings like love? And how is one kind of uniformity of culture better than another anyway? That possibly explains why utopia, for all its promises about a bright future, cannot help harking back to the Greek syllables that make that word, which, when combined, mean ‘nowhere’ [ii]. My anticipatory bail claim, though unenlightened, only tells a story in lower case, of my relationship with Bangalore, this badly managed, bewitching city which somehow lets me be.
*****
Speaking of which, I mean, a person’s enchantment by a city, you had suggested that I look up the artworks of Marc Chagall. And thus it was that I came across his 1913 work, Paris through the Window. I zoomed it on my staring machine, scanning it from left to right, and then, top to bottom, more than a couple of times, much to my little dog’s annoyance who, I suspect, prefers desktop computers to laptops. And since you weren’t here to chit-chat with about it, I did what I could.
The Paris Chagall sees through the window is made of a mosaic of overlapping planes in a burst of colours. The Eiffel, dwarfing every edifice around it, soars into the sky. Fully attired bodies of a man and a woman lie supine on the ground in front of it as if they had jumped to death from the top of the grand tower. A parachutist seems to be descending. He cannot evidently fly using that contraption. Beyond the window-pane, a train with its wheels up in the air screams stillness like a dead bird. In the foreground, a human-faced cat with doleful eyes is perched on the window sill. It seems to be waiting. And next to it, a Janus-faced man, Marc himself, is seen in profile. One of his faces, turned eastward to his native land possibly, is painted blue. So is his right palm on which is drawn, right at its centre, a child’s version of a human heart in yolk-yellow, or maybe a fallen aspen leaf.
This vision of Paris is also a dream retrieved in memory, that of his lost home-town, Vitebsk. The man at the window ruefully yearns even though everything he sees seems to suggest the impossibility of a return. It endearingly chimes with the general tone of his autobiography written when he was leaving Vitebsk for good. At one point in this extended reverie, he even speaks of his homeland as a deflated paper balloon hanging from a parachute that has already collapsed. And in Paris, when inside the Veronese room at the Louvre with “its Manets, Delacroix and Courbets” to be specific, he feels that he wants “nothing more” [iii]. But as in this mournful book, through much of what he painted, Chagall kept conjuring Vitebsk to whatever semblance to life it could thereafter assume.
Paris through the Window perhaps also resonates with a curious trivia. That Janus in mythology was pictorially imagined as the god of doorways or archways, and that the word itself has etymological kinship to the Latin word for door, ianua. Door to where Janus, and from where? Some place with a blurred circumference perhaps, accessible only once boundaries between categories of common logic like inside and outside, past and present, dream and reality, and so on cease to matter.
*****
Ridiculous as it most certainly is to append to the above my own modest circumstance with no worthy tome to be composed anywhere in sight, I spend a lot of time doing nothing much in my eleventh floor balcony. The view outside is not exactly spectacular in the Parisian sense. That it doesn’t face another balcony is but more than agreeable. And because the window opens to a large swathe of land with tall, gravity-defying buildings like the one I live in few and far between, with the rest clustering only at the horizon, there are still trees huddling in disarrayed thickets across the no-man’s land behind and around three or four storeyed apartment blocks. They almost fully envelop smaller tiled houses from another time. But the Jacarandas that line residential avenues in prettier parts of the city are rare here. Under the vast expanse of the inverted bowl above, whose changing colours claim everything it surveys, the ground that presents itself to my field of vision has the appearance of a common backyard.
Packs of dogs gambol among morning joggers on sinuous by-lanes that peel away from the main road. Morning after morning, the more spirited among them chase the garbage truck until it disappears from view. Stray patches of wild grass, verdant only after it rains, soak the sun in the bare land at the far left. It used to be one of the ‘lakes’ the city was once known for: a furrowed sheet of glass in daytime, and something more nefarious in the night. Now it’s just an empty stretch with garbage-strewn ditches by which bovine beings look for food, or contemplate whatever it’s that they do, and miniature people play cricket.
Before the dead lake, a five-foot-tall, weed-smothered, stone structure on four pillars, all tilting sideways to its right presents a charming mystery. So little remains of it that it’s hard to make out what it might have meant once. (But it often calls up a centuries-old wayside structure back in my village called ‘load bearer’ because its purpose was to extend some relief to pedestrians who lumbered up and down that road with heavy loads on their head.) And beside that obscure relic, the makeshift digs of construction workers from far and wide squat in a winding row. A streetlight next to these ramshackle boxes scrutinises the flat tin sheet of their roofs. Fasten the gaze on that light long enough after darkness falls, and its column would soon tease one with a rippling glimpse of the concentric circles Van Gogh often employed to convey the visual effect of light streaming down from a streetlamp when looked from a distance. As for the shapes of lives inside those boxes, I cannot claim to have seen anything.
But on pleasantly cold late evenings, when everything loses its contours in the dark, and a smudged sheen gussies up the window frames all around, this slice of the city tricks me into an intimation at once of evanescence and eternity, as if it was offering me a loving peek into its secrets. It charms me. I sense that charm. It makes me grumble, “What a dingbat!” I can’t help but stare.
*****
Ever since I stopped teaching (that I suppose is only one of the several responsibilities of adulthood I have shirked, though not without shame sometimes, like driving, to name another, I mean driving a vehicle, not driving my mother crazy), staring at nothing in particular from my balcony once my husband leaves for work, has been the one non-activity with which I figure out what might be done with the march of hours ahead. Having had his second ‘breakfast’, Theo would have invariably found a corner to curl himself in by then. And the apartment itself slides into slumber when he does that. But there is no particular rhyme or reason to what I end up spotting from my perch. Now and again, what turns up is a small assurance.
The comforting thought that there are three or four places in this city to wander around when I get tired of being by myself. Places where one might do nothing. Places where no one watches over, keeping time, unless I choose to sleep there that is, which I don’t. Now that I have shut several doors with their own registers of sociality, these places have gained heft and significance. But these haunts may not be places where someone might drop in to spend ‘quality time’ (not a great idea to kill something that has positive qualities I suppose). And when I say ‘places’, I also narrow it down to what that word implies when used to refer to some cosy nook, in a larger, inhabited space. In other words, even as they are located in public spaces, they are quite like my balcony.
*****
One of these unobtrusive perches is a stone bench with a pale-barked teak tree to lean on right next to it at a cemetery in Shanti Nagar. That, in turn, is a long stretch flanked by burial grounds bang in the middle of the bustling city. A ‘basic bench’ in cemeteries is quite a marvel, isn’t it? It seems to offer something we otherwise attribute to things of nature like the shade of a grand tree, for example. The enclosed-ness characteristic of human-made objects, it appears to have waylaid. I’m almost tempted to anthropomorphize it as an invitation to the human eye to “loosen your limbs, tuck your feet underneath, and lay down your burdens.” (The ‘load-bearer’ I mentioned earlier, coming to think of it, is actually a taller, heftier bench although not meant for anyone’s derriere.) But the bench in that cemetery was not something I discovered on purpose. Only one of those random things that purposeless wandering surprises one with.
Another, much older burial ground in Ulsoor— one without benches although— has a gatepost from which glossy posters of MGR and Raj Kumar, in the company of Lord Hanuman, all wearing orangey-red lip colour, extend an unexpectedly bright greeting. The tombstones, several with Tamil inscriptions I cannot read, are densely overrun with dodders, mile-a-minutes, and what else I can only guess. A few older graves have pavilion-like structures. The plaster on their pillars has long since come off. One or two even have caved in domes. Although not meant to be sat on without sensing the inappropriateness of doing that for obvious reasons, one might still occupy its steps if one needs to rest.
A few bounds into its sprawling premises dotted with majestic trees would take one to a small shrine dedicated to ‘Kali of the Graveyard’. Amid so much that conveys disintegration, the shrine looks alive and intact. Incidentally, it also commemorates a former priest who had gone on a pilgrimage to Tamil Nadu and never returned. A flex-sheet carrying a life-size image of the man drops down from one of its walls. On it, he stands next to an image of the idol, and the word “Missing” held between parentheses lunges at the onlooker. Rumour has it that his wife decided to take up his mantle when she got tired of waiting, thereby starting a rare tradition of ritual priestesses-cum-caretakers of the fearsome goddess and her abode. Their descendants, I was told, have living arrangements inside this unwieldy compound. I don’t know where exactly though. I also swallowed another question: which necessity presented itself first, the search for a place to live in, or the call of sacred duty.
It was one of them, anyway, who pointed to me a severely rusted iron screen next to the shrine’s sanctum sanctorum with hundreds of stainless steel locks left on its latticework. Maybe it was a suggestion to make an offering, or that’s what I managed to gather from her Kannada, which I thought still had the nimbleness one associates with spoken Tamil. Those locks might have nothing to do with the fact that ‘prayer’ and ‘precarious’ share the same medieval root. And perhaps it’s stupid to think that everything comes with an explanation. One still enjoys making these connections. One then has a good mind to go lyrical in terms of ‘locked anguish’, ‘prayers in knots’, ‘hair-nests in lungs’ etc. But one might also consider quizzically, “but they have been given away for safe-keep, and are not to be tampered with”, or “see, the key has already been thrown away, willingly for once”.
Does all this make you cringe? The extent of the morbidity of the taphophilia in me that you have just had a taste of? But, to dissuade you from that impression, I would make another claim. That, unlike when sitting on a park bench, at a cemetery which generally has fewer footfalls, one is left to oneself even if grieving is the last thing on mind. I also entertain the wayward thought that, that bench or one of those steps isn’t maybe all that different from a seat in front of a dead artist’s work in some gallery, or before some relic from the past in a museum. In their own ways, they all house memory perhaps.
One doesn’t know, in any case, what might leap to one’s eyes. A common bird might even alight on my perch, a starling or myna, as we call it in our neck of the woods. If I don’t startle it with a sudden movement of my arms, it would ignore me royally but impersonally like only those of its ilk can. I might even be startled, in return, by the blaring yellow of its feet, three wrinkled toes pointing to the front, and one to the back. It’s possibly a baseless fancy but I relish this musing that no part of the human body betrays our shared nakedness than our bare feet. But it never occurred to me to consider that a bird’s feet can look naked too, frail and vulnerable as well, when met with up close. And to think again, such a common bird…
An ornithologist once told me that birds breathe more efficiently than humans. And that, birds have tears like us, which is vital for healthy eyesight apparently. But the most jarring of those revelations was that a certain kind of moth drinks the tears of sleeping birds. Tears as protein replenishment to some winged-body: my jaw hit the ground when she said that.
Drawing a perverse delight from random information that stealthily dislocates, or from asking questions without proper answers is probably masochistic. What would you say to that? And considering the worlds we inhabit, that is another long shot in the dark. I keep putting words in your mouth all the same. A ventriloquism of sorts, my protein supplement.
*****
Another perch, in a place nothing like a cemetery because here the crowd rules: the low compound wall of an old house in a largish property on Church Street. With broken stained-glass windows, doors hanging loose from hinges, mossy balustrades and brickwork in various stages of ruin, all of it seen from under the foliage of a jackfruit tree at its gate, ‘Falnir House’ once had the time-warped appeal of a haunted house. Actually, it was only a property under litigation. As it happens almost always, legal disputes on unoccupied properties located in urban hotspots get resolved sooner than later. ‘Falnir House’ was thus recently replaced by a multi-storeyed monstrosity of an office-space. Its façade fully covered with cobalt-glass looks sinister. Efficiency must surely be the mantra it buzzes with. Maybe its innards are occupied by people who resemble the characters in Office Space. But there’s nothing to leisurely lean to anymore at its entrance. Even if there was something, someone paid to do that would most likely shoo me away. These days, I flare my nostrils, and cast malevolent stares at it, as if it had dealt me a personal blow.
Now, Church Street with its cobbled pathway, often reserved for the exclusive commute of pedestrians, is hemmed by swanky cafes, pubs and restaurants amid older, humbler second-hand bookshops like Blossom’s, Bookworm, and Goobe’s. Here and there, the walls of parking lots still have graffiti left behind by artists with impersonal names. One by ‘Guess Who’ features a bare sketch of a cow. Its body is superimposed with geometrical patches in the shape of meat-cuts. Underneath the sketch it says, “Picasso ate a lot of beef.” Another by ‘Tona’ is equally minimal with two stencilled figures of children, a boy in a hoodie and a girl in a printed frock holding an ice-cream cone, and standing shoulder to shoulder. They stare back at curious passers-by. Other than what might be intuited therein, they have no message to convey.
On some weekends, busking poets and artists occupy the steps to Blossom’s which seems to rest in a world of its own. Old and seedy it is, but also undeniably delectable. The young creators who infrequently take over its frontage sell hand drawn postcards in return for whatever an interested stroller might choose to pay, or extempore poems in a similar exchange, composed after asking a few questions. The content and shape of the poem would be decided by those accidental answers. Consider the following conversation from several years ago:
Poet: (after pleasantries) “This will be fun! Give me a word, any word.”
Random stroller: (doubly awkward when she remembers that she is awkward) “Erm… I don’t know…‘Joke’ maybe…”
P: (giggles) “Okay, that’s good for starters. Now name a movie you like.”
RS: (considers Psycho but…) “Paterson I think.” (“Is he going to giggle again?”)
P: (with a smile of recognition on his face) “Aah, I know that one. But you tell me why.”
RS: (wants to disappear now) “Umm… I like his poems and the world in his head.”
P: “Five minutes, okay? You might want to look at them meanwhile (points to the trestle tables before the bookstore on which postcards with quirky art prints are displayed).” “Nice ones are there!” (Sits on the topmost step to the bookstore.)
His typewriter, a Remington, is red, and lacquered. Or just new.
RS: “Oh, okay” (doesn’t budge, takes out her phone to look occupied).
An uncertain amount of time passes. RS decides to have a look at the postcards, and dawdles to the table nearest to her. But it’s too late for that now.
P: (calls out) “Hey, don’t go, I’m done! (Gives his lines a once-over, grins at it) Here, hope you like it.”
Typed on handmade paper that looked as if it was dunked in black tea, and dried in the sun, the poem was named ‘Joke’. Nothing screamed for attention in his words. Paterson’s dog who likes to chomp down poems even had a cameo in it. But what would he have come up with, had I named Psycho as a favourite movie? I quashed that thought immediately of course. And pretend to be busy thereafter, if or when I run into the buskers.
(And where to practise that pretension, other than at Pecos which is right around the corner? As arcane as ever, and in quiet defiance of the norms that govern the market, it still holds its ground. Yes, yes, I haven’t forgotten, I have already raved about that old pub to you, until your ears developed a droning ache in their recesses.)
But by all means, what animates Church Street is its horde, the city’s young folks who resemble raucous creatures that swarm in search of light after the rains. The malls that have cropped up everywhere haven’t yet stopped these febrile beings— girls in skimpy outfits and boys with beards that look as if they took a ruler from their long-discarded school bag to mark its edges— from sauntering up and down this street which makes it their own domain. They haggle with trinket sellers on the footpath, gorge on panipuris, click ‘groupfies’, and burst out in loud peals of merriment. And Church Street, abuzz as it’s with action, doesn’t mind some loopy dandy-impersonator on its periphery. Earlier, I could paste myself to the wall I mentioned, without actually sitting on it, smoking a cigarette, or with a cup of tea from a shack on the opposite side run by a boy from Patna, and eavesdrop on conversations. Or watch these exuberant creatures who refuse to wait for life to happen, and radiate a kind of vigour that seems otherworldly to me. They look at home here. They would look at home in some famed city in Europe too I think.
A lackadaisical reluctance possibly prevents me from appreciating the world they inhabit because I envy the casual bravado with which they seize their place in the world. Such unapologetic clamour for gaiety, which makes them seem like a single organism, can sweep away everything on its path it seems, even when one accepts that as individuals, and when left to themselves, they might be different creatures. But here, if anything unites them, it’s their appetite for life.
They rub something on me, or perhaps it’s the other way. I steal something from them. That must be what happens when I stare at the locks on the iron screen at that temple too. Or wherever else the intoxication of imagination does what it does, and powers up a simulation of life. Without doubt, even when prompted by other people’s miseries, which can be life-inducing to the watcher when the itch to turn them into people in a story peaks. Writers then, for all the romance associated with them, are quite the scavengers.
*****
But notwithstanding my envy (which a wise, mad man called ‘the pudenda of the soul’ perhaps because it’s shameful and pleasurable at once [iv]), it’s frightening to imagine being young again since what it inevitably fetches to memory is a time of near-total cluelessness. Then again, the mislaid wish is not exactly that. It’s about not wanting to return to what it meant to be young in a kind of past where girls who shut the door to their room to sit inside and do nothing would set tongues wagging.
But no seasoned runaway can sing praises to the existential significance of closed doors, unless the freedom to open or close it at will rests with the occupant. Surely, to stare at the luminous glass box of the all-night diner in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks is one thing, and to be caught inside it without reprieve, quite another. One can only look at it, entranced by its magnetic radiance. Even when one feels a kinship to those hermetically sealed creatures [v], once it gets noticed that the gleaming emerald of its interior doesn’t come with a door, it turns increasingly grim, a beautiful trap.
On a related note, no writer who sends out anything he or she patches together can claim to be a total recluse. There is always the silent wait for the echo no matter how faint. Even if it turns out to be the once-removed response of a sleepless child imitating a cuckoo’s call at the crack of dawn, and still in its nightshirt. Even if it happens to be received in the manner of another child, armed with a cotton twine, waiting to slip the knot around a dragon fly’s legs.
*****
I might have led you on to believe that I absolutely resist any nostalgia for my natal home. But people, perches and incidents from that oubliette, so to speak, keep returning in very many costumes, at times answering an arrow sent backwards, but mostly unbidden. Why else would the ‘mattress-fluffer’ in Kolkata, who tramps about with a tall instrument that looks like a harp but sounds like a morchang, band with the itinerant nadaswaram player I spy on from my eleventh floor perch? Perhaps they pique imagination only because they bring back to life a wandering mendicant from my childhood known then as ‘Coat Swami’. That moniker owes its emergence to the accident that he was the only one around who wore a jacket then. It probably also doubled up as a pillow. The mothers of the village, anyway, had long turned him into an evil kidnapper with a fondness for cranky children. I think of all three of them as men of no place and all places at once. But then, I have seen them only when they were on the move.
Often, though not always, connecting dots retrieves the child’s sense of delight in recognition. Maybe while making associations, the mind occupies no definitive time. Nor any particular place perhaps. Maybe, as long as memory functions, there’s no total escape from the place of one’s childhood. One runs away but remains tethered to that world of first references.
*****
The skittish twaddle above might have also given you the impression that some writerly epiphany strikes me every time I stare at something or other in idleness, day after day, across the last few years. I was of course fibbing. For, idleness, pleasurable as it certainly is, tends to clone itself, and one doesn’t know what to do with it or oneself then. Indeed, it was only after I was transplanted amid the infernal racket of Park Circus in Kolkata, where I endlessly cribbed about feeling empty, that I began spinning the kind of rambles you are reading now. A jumble which has no sustained argument to make, and does little more than taking a stab at something repeatedly and from different angles, since deferment is its instinct, and a fair amount of doubt, the wind under its wings. The latter can be insidious though, and no matter how its inebriation pleases me since it keeps pointing to ‘somewhere else’, it can also smash the life of thought on hard things with long roots.
In Kolkata, I even fantasised that Montaigne’s ghost lurked somewhere in that drab apartment (along with you who were still unreal to me). But then, I wasn’t writing from a massively populated library in a chateau with two towers, with the credo of Sextus Empiricus on the walls of its study [vi]. To make matters sillier, it took me a few more years to notice the chasm that lies between Montaigne asking himself, “What do I know”, and me doing that. But I cannot dodge the facts. It was Kolkata’s torpor which buoyed the unpleasant discernment that I’m only a tourist of the ruins and not its resident, unless it snapped its fingers awakening something that was barely alive. This project of idiosyncrasy to inch towards a not-completely spurious experiment at letting resuscitated creatures plot, parry, and play was thus already a belated attempt pushed forth by a city that seemed to illustrate the meaning of the word and myth, ‘limbo’.
Well, so much for my love affair with Bangalore! Or perhaps, those idle hours of wandering in wonder in my city had already roused some dry hops, yet to meet a pitcher, or a pair of lips.
*****
Writing, it’s said, is a solitary walk. Neurotics obsessed with words then are provisional truants from the world of action. Because it’s thus, in isolated non-activity that he/she/whatever (a watermelon perhaps?) learns to pay close attention to the world outside, the thing that’s germinating within, as well as the creature perched on that egg. The human mind that threads together words then must be like an eye that can pirouette 360 degrees on its socket, while also plunging within, in which situation, however, it prefers to steer clear of deep sea monsters.
But even to begin thinking about what attention is, demands a kind of attending to, that throws the sense-making faculties in an eternal spin. Outside of it, one can only perhaps consider actual fields of experience where it has some relevance [vii]. In a kindergarten classroom and a military parade ground, it’s the voice of authority. Serial killers, I suppose, would closely follow the routines of their prospective victims. So too should someone whose job it’s to make a profile of a perpetrator still on the loose. Buddhist monks employ it with equanimity for their own ends. Doctors and nurses are expected to closely attend to the people under their ‘care’ but whether they actually do it is another question altogether. Let’s just say that some of them indeed make an effort. At least, Patch Adams did. (Okay, that’s my white coat syndrome intruding into our tête-à-tête.) And there might be others I don’t have much clue about, like market researchers who closely watch buying behaviours, for example. In various professions then, there are degrees and kinds of attention, as well as, more importantly, purposes. Let’s count among this crowd, writers as well, including the boundlessly bountiful bounty hunters among them.
But jokes apart, paying close attention, especially the way Simone Weil characterised it, I fear, is a near-impossible striving, unless one is capable of the inhuman (how else would one qualify it?) severity she imposed on herself. And that is why the recent resurgence of interest in Weil in certain circles, in her assertion that equates attention and generosity to be specific [viii] (it was even proclaimed from a podium, of all places, in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s movie adaptation of an Elena Ferrante novel, absent as such in the book), becomes suspect. And the kind of airbrushing it’s given, to make it rhyme with proud celebrations of the self, dished out by one or another kind of identity politics, cannot help revealing itself as an unintentionally ironic project. A botched trip that can begin, only after assuming that a heterodox thinker like her is redundant in contemporary times.
Because, to turn it into a prescriptive political-cum-ethical formula requires that no attention at all be given to how her refinement of this numinous concept that has ancient roots throbs with the many contradictions her thinking could straddle. For one thing, she denies herself any chance at living up to that adage when she confesses that she is unable to think about anything without also thinking about herself. For another, the relationality she imagines between the two parties of this equation occupies the same terrain she envisions for her own relationship to her idea of god as one who has already absconded. The creator who has abandoned his creation hence casts a shadow that demands what she calls the ‘decreation’ of the one who tries to pay attention. (Perhaps it’s the same incongruity she probes when she says in an aphorism that to love is to consent to distance [ix]. If so, attending to someone might mean honouring the in-between space of incomprehension that cannot be totally expunged.) Thirdly, this kind of attention as a means of navigating the world in actual human encounters, when imitated in a writer’s act of creation— that supremely ‘god-like’ performance– (its egoism reaches a crescendo in the case of personal essayists I suppose, gee, how splendid!) — lets loose baffling questions. And that, Charles Simic notes, rests with the presence of form, which necessarily interposes by making a creation, this little miracle possible, but which, in turn, allows that possibility by absenting the confounding simultaneity and formlessness of ex-static life [x]. So, does that leave us with an absenting act that’s the exact inverse to Weil’s vision?
Let’s also place alongside the above, another appalling dilemma that Witold Gombrowicz raises in Cosmos, a novel that’s in itself, a surfeit of things, obsessively watched. The young protagonists of this book are ‘bored to death’, literally so, one might say. They are also trying out an escape from their respective pasts. In that shared weariness, they freeze-frame things, people and everyday incidents, and discover patterns and repetitions across them. They conflate everything that’s hungrily watched, and now there are configurations or constellations whose ambit keeps expanding. The young men have already taken on the role of sleuths in a detective story. But detection bizarrely precedes the committing of crime in this world, and causes it to happen. And that’s so because noticing patterns which aren’t there in the first place helps pass time. It also enables temporary forgetting. And finally, because it’s pleasurable, even onanistic. But this kind of attention only brings forth more neurosis and terror. So, absent the superimposed form– in this case, the crime story that they set in motion– and we land with a thud into the maddening indefiniteness of life. Within the form, and when it comes to people, there’s always the danger that they too can be turned into a still life.
The protagonists of Cosmos perhaps illustrate an extreme but possible case. And it’s Gombrowicz’ detachment to them in narration that makes its terror real. Then, maybe it needn’t be a totally hopeless situation if, as Anne Carson says, moving through the self in writing could itself be a means to ‘decreate’ it [xi]. Simic doesn’t completely disallow that chance either, as long as the pendulum swings between that which is (the not fully ‘seeable’), and whatever it resembles, and which means staying with what he calls, in a phrase borrowed from Hegel, ‘indeterminate immediacy’, or again, echoing Emily Dickinson, ‘the uncertain certainty’ [xii].
Great! So, now there are two things instead of one. But how does one reach that space of movement between them? In other words, can one know if one has closely attended to someone? Is there perhaps another dismal possibility that too much of it might entail a situation where the perceiving self gets consumed by the indeterminacy of its subject? And if that chance remains, wouldn’t too much of it be as dangerous as too little, although in a manner that’s opposite to what happens in Cosmos? I don’t know the answers to any of those dreadful questions, do you? Maybe, just maybe, we try to pay attention without knowing where it might take us, or because we don’t. And while it remains that we cannot fully comprehend or address what else motivates it, whatever generosity that attempt might contain, if at all, perhaps involves the difficult alternative to see the people we look on as human beings. That although is hard to hold in definitions.
But often, the juridical bench presides over the half-written plot. And at times, it is easier said than done to separate feelings entirely from whatever can be corroborated otherwise: imagine paying attention to a certain politician, as cocky as ever, even now when he barely made it back as the head of a government, but whose face keeps leering from all possible surfaces, or a bigoted authoritarian who keeps selling the revolution. Conversely, there’s also the wriggling foreboding that perhaps no human being should aspire to reach a state of mind where staring at an apple adequately replaces the act of eating it [xiii].
Are we then back in square one, and precariously perched there? Simic, anyhow, ends one of his essays on attention not with a promise but with a prayer, “May that awe be forever with me”, “of living in two worlds, one of which is unsayable” [xiv].
And might one add to that a few more wishes perhaps? May there be cities where one doesn’t have to be somebody all the time. May they have perches where our little follies aren’t a crime. May they allow us our private indulgences, like a cuss word or two when we stub our toes. May we be well out of some woke person’s earshot at that moment. Tonight, you and me, let’s drink to that, shall we, from our respective cities?
Endnotes
[i] Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Penguin, 2004.
[ii] Cioran, Emil. History and Utopia. Translated by Richard Howard. Arcade, 1987.
[iii] Chagall, Marc. My Life. Penguin Classics, 2018, p. 96.
[iv] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Man Alone with Himself. Penguin, 2008.
[v] As Olivia Laing does with élan in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone.
[vi] Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live or A Life of Montaigne. Other Press, 2010.
[vii] Ibid. Bakewell’s thoughts on attention as seen across Essais led me to this consideration.
[viii] Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. Harper & Row, 1973.
[ix] Ibid. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Arthur Wills. University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
[x] “Simic, Charles. “Composition”, The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays and Notes on Poetry. University of Michigan Press, 1985.
[xi] Carson, Anne. Decreation. Jonathan Cape, 2006.
[xii] Simic, Charles. “Streets Strewn with Garbage”, The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays and Notes on Poetry. University of Michigan Press, 1985, pp. 116, 117.
[xiii] Weil, Simone. “Contradiction”, Gravity and Grace. Translated by Arthur Wills. University of Nebraska Press, 1997. In her devoted biography, Simone Weil: A Life, Simone Pétrement rightly muses that encountering her subject’s life would make anyone feel ashamed. It also terrifies.
[xiv] Simic, Charles. “A Clear and Open Place”, The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays and Notes on Poetry. University of Michigan Press, 1985, p. 109.
