Writing me in, writing me out

The Ragpicker is wary and tired.

My previous post was an angry Ophelia’s retort to Hamlet, therefore connected to my Fable. I know I have lied just now but why can’t that be true too?

Ponder. What do I do here? Write myself out? Am I writing myself to a striptease? Few days ago, I was explaining my blog to an innocent stranger. I knew every word I was conjuring rings true but is not, the way I have also done it in response to another request from Sanjida here. But believe me, even these lies are true. If you are either confused or yawning I am promising to be ‘lucid’.

Every artist writes herself out and simultaneously hides herself. I have learnt this lesson from a few women-bloggers to whom I have recently paid a humble tribute. The Ragpicker was not only weary and tired but also confused, because he takes this blog too seriously. I was thinking whether it is juvenile to go on writing like a lovelorn teenager about the much hackneyed thing called love. Few weeks ago I not only changed the template because it makes navigation difficult and because the template looks literary but also drastically trimmed my categories. I know I am risking reduced SEO but I thought that I have received my quota of visitors. This blog has been hit 5,000 times according to the stats, I know few of my regular readers, I don’t desire a greater traffic. This blog is personal, not trendy, neither informative nor does it intend to reach the top lists. Now I want to be difficult. I think love isn’t a juvenile affair to write about and I know I am writing myself out. The Ragpicker is an artist.

I define art as all-encompassing, writing, painting, photography…the difference is quantitative, not qualitative. Let me take painting or poetry as a model. What is poetry? As a teacher who hates to be esoteric I try to place things initially in very simple terms to my students. To them I have defined poetry as an exercise which wrests away words from the socially accepted, constrained lexical ‘meaning’. Thus each word gains connotation in a certain context, within a certain syntax of language and emotions…that’s poetry to me. That’s art to me. When I look at Van Gogh’s later paintings, I don’t look at sunflowers or churches or crows or wheatfields. I watch the yellows, I watch the hasty and bold brushstrokes…because brushstrokes in late Van Gogh appear as brushstrokes…a static medium is suddenly evoking swirling motions. As a student of cinema I know that the introduction of motion within staticity also introduces something else: time. So when I watch those yellows and brushstrokes I know I am watching the nervous desperation of an unloved man who knows he is on the brink of either total madness or a suicide…he doesn’t have much time left at his disposal, he embraces the beauty of everything under the sun, he paints frantically, throwing aside much decorum of the notions of art. His yellow is life, his brushstrokes are his impending pull on the trigger, its all about his love of life which he knows he will desert soon. He changed the ‘meaning’ of colors and ‘revealed’ brushstrokes as elements of painting, not as a means to be hidden, but as an object of representation in its own rights. Yes, he drew brushstrokes only.

Yes, he was painting himself even when he was not painting his many self-portraits. But its hardly a romantic projection of the self into the world, here is an artist who seldom aggrandised himself. He was one of those visionaries of modern art who knew that the artist must systematically refuse the halo, he should not be the superstar, he drew himself ugly and wounded. Art is a continuous rebuilding of the self which is being so continuously fixed by the society. Quoting TS Eliot dear Sanjida (urggh! I am not actually fond of this more-Brit-than-the-Brits-themselves-American, but he wrote some beautiful early things)…and uncannily you will notice how this imagery also appeared in your post too!

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The eyes which fix you in a formulated phrase. The women knows it better. Deduced: artists need to explore the feminine within. Forget it! Notice the self like a pinned butterfly on the wall and the artist spitting the ‘butt-ends’ of his days and ways. Butterflies and cigarettes. Yes, you will be fixed and you need to spit it out like a well-consumed cigarette. You need to rename yourself, reinvent yourself, mutate, disguise, hide, unskin. The only difference between our non-artist fellowmen and us is that they are not actually aware of the process they undergo and we are not only aware of it, it is the staple of our trade! Yep, we writers, painters, players are involved in a continuous process of breaking ourselves down and gathering ourselves up into another shape when society is continuously fixing us up in formulated phrases. Each line I write, each pixel you gather throws up a correlative of our selves…like Van Gogh’s yellow, like his brushstrokes.

So my previous post is Ophelia’s retort to Hamlet and also my lovers retort to me. Both is true. Ophelia never wrote it; she artistically used words only when she has lost all her senses, it was her vain, egoistic and arrogant lover’s job to dabble with words, feigning madness and turning clouds to weasels and elephants. She did not write it to me too, I wrote what she should have written about me…in the process tried to negate myself, broke myself down, but never constructed her through those words! I…wanted to…be what she is…in relation to me. I knew that it is simultaneously me who is being depicted and also the ‘Prince of the Danes’. To give just a clue: I am not to be found in the content of the letter actually…I am there in the language, in the register, in the syntax. Read the content, you will witness a women giving her man the long due; read the language, it is a man writing…that’s me.

I…wanted to…for a moment or two…to be…

Did I lie again?

So desparately I want to get laid…(sigh)

This post is connected somehow to this post of mine written in response to a request made by Sanjida (read her post here).
22/09/2007 Another response to Sanjida’s post: The Readers’ Underwords