Today is a Prose Day

Today feels like a prose day. What runs in my veins, what shines before my eyes, a monolith of silence can only be interpreted by sentences, not poetic lines. These sentences are as different from lines as tadpoles are different from silkworms. Tadpoles grow into something; silkworms stay as they are. Both, interesting organisms in the cosmos.

I want to reflect on this week – one of those weeks, where nothing particularly interesting happened on the larger scale of things, but small things changed and therefore changes happened. For example, I finished a teen show called “Never Have I Ever” on Netflix. I don’t know why. It stereotypes the Indian-American experience to the degree where I was rolling my eyes non-stop. But I stuck through. I also watched “Behind the Curve”, a Netflix documentary about Flat Earth conspiracy theorists. I want to say that it opened my eyes to something, but most of the arguments seemed pseudoscientific to me. I think the patronizing attitude some scientists took towards these flat-earthers – that they were potential scientists that fell through the crack – seemed the most interesting to me. Have I been close to falling through the cracks? Or has my privilege, in terms of pills or therapy, always stopped me from going completely cuckoo? What makes me think that any of this is real, after all? Maybe we all are living in a terrarium and not a globe; who knows?

Next week is the Induction for my PhD program beginning at Leeds Beckett University. As you could probably sense, I’m losing my mind trying to stay steady. But I think its okay to be nervous and excited. This is a new chapter; a whole new experience awaiting on the other side. I have two expectations from life as I go through this new chapter – one, that my mind does not play tricks with me as it did a few months ago; two, that I go through this experience with an awareness of all the resources that can help me. These two expectations, or lowkey prayers I am sending out to the universe, contains everything I fear, everything I have buried deep into my psyche, everything I do not want to remember.

Some day I will write about losing my mind. That day is not today.

To happy beginnings and finding new arenas of pleasure. 😊

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The Blue Moon

Once a blue moon, something would happen that messes up certain plans. There will be forces on either side which hold you and get you through things that not just make sense, but also, try to harm you. Certain things are meant to be let go of.

            Once a blue moon, there will be happenings that are terribly upsetting. And that’s okay. There will be consequences for every single thing that you do. Once a blue moon, there will be ways for things to unfold in better ways. There will be things that work, things that don’t.

            Once a blue moon, your energy will be depleted. There will be words to take care of. There will be work, there will be joy. There will be everything that you need there to be. Things will happen on its accord, because you write. Because you’re there. Because you let things be.

            Once a blue moon, you will be the joyful shining moon that you are. There will be enough for everyone to feast, because people feast on the blue moon. There will be wooden spatulas, there will be curses, there will be spells. There will be yew trees, Geraldine.

            Once a blue moon, your work will see the light. Your differences will be recognized. Your treatments will ensure that they work for everyone else, as well. There will be enough to go around. There will be enough to go around…

On Beauty and Justice

 

Often we wonder about our meager contributions to the world, the small changes that we have made as existing, active entities. I have found, among sheaves of pages, art and among the eyes of fellow unlucky ones, despair. In this same world, where such blinding beauty exists in words, lines, shades, shapes and symphonies, there also exists both structured and random ugliness in lives.

 
In art, we seek the ideal. We reach out into the void to create beauty and ascribe labels to the techniques of our quests. As for the pain in the world however– working for justice seems harder, darker, a braver feat. While beauty is of the universe, justice is of the society. As a denizen and child of both, I have no choice but to seek beauty and justice. And yet, there feels this need to rate one above the other — to prioritize, to choose…

 
Beauty or aesthetic art for justice is not a rare concept. But how much change can that bring about? How much of pain can beauty take on? Will it ever be enough that both are sought, or will one be compelled to choose? Even if that happens, it does not make sense to leave one for the other; for what becomes of the universe without society, and what even is society without the universe?

A Note on Transience

We paint galaxies and golf courses, write sonnets and villanelles, act roles of a tyrant, a slave and a priest– willfully, to rediscover the very things we recreate. We create to make space for the present and make sense of the past. We create so that the future can analyze and exact wisdom, can criticize and marvel at mediocrity. Because from the vantage point of Today, nothing seems brilliant. In fifty or hundred or a thousand years, our very existence may seem like a testimony to excellence, to persistence and to infinite domination. So transient, this art. But then, what isn’t?

Changing Skins

The disorientation you feel after putting down a good, or even a mediocre book, is a testament to the human tendency of escapism. You might not want to get lost in the contrived philosophical, borderline impossible lives of unreal teenagers and yet, and yet in a whirlwind of language and good metaphors, you awake after living in the dreams of those very characters.

Or them having lived in yours.

Does it matter? Because at that moment of awakening, after those few hours away from your predictable, dreary, plot-less life, people around you and those characters seem interchangeable. Your self seems terminable.

You could simply wear another skin and become that single most interesting character, who is the ‘saving’ grace of the book. As if that could make up for your inability to ‘save’ the real world, like you dream of.

For that moment, like those few hours, lost to rhetoric, you could breathe from a different skin.

And it’s difficult to wake up from that- the awakening is even incapacitating, until you manage to jot down exactly why it is so, and slowly prepare your brain to return to reality. Not to mention, comfort your own suddenly insecure skin.