Still writing me in, writing art thou?

Apologies for the bad pun in the title. Continuing from my last post which was a bit incomplete (yes Sanjida, I was battling a drowsy brain too; I felt too sleepy); let me quote a gentle, caring, beatific blogger-poet first. She wrote yesterday

Try to breathe tomorrow in,
Try to exhale today away.
For the future is the hunter,
The past is only prey.

Yes, tomorrow thinks it’s won,
It’s faster on it’s feet,
Still, it should remember,
You are only what you eat.

Past lives and painful memories,
Repressed and left for dead,
Pick up the pieces that you want,
Sweep the rest under your bed.

But, no matter how you slice it,
All the pieces play a part,
Managing to come together,
Creating singular works of art.

~smj

Samantha wrote similarly before, I recall quoting her in a couple of posts of mine (use the search box once). But I think in this poem, in the last stanza there is the suggestion of the simultaneity of a new liberation and old sufferings. How you pick and choose memories to cope up with quotidian survival and then how all returns, the contradictory, disparate, contrapuntal pieces of memories to produce “singular works of art”. Its liberation because something is created, a piece of beauty, and suffering because they all come back, hinged to the words you weave. Writing me in, but writing myself to art.

When I mention ‘art’ and ‘beauty’, I know I am sounding archaic. There is something in this times I inhabit which render them temporally immigrant. Admitting: I am feeling certain unease using those words. Beauty is a nostalgia now, but art is something I am urgently clinging to, now that I am passing through a certain painful phase of life which I have stopped comprehending, letting myself sway in the winds of life.

Why I am maintaining that blogging is a unique kind of artistic practice? Because I have no other means of expression? Because I have left none at my disposal? Too weary and hopeless about publishing a book? Too impatient to be read long after I have written? Too scattered to be disciplined under the rigorous frame either called a novel, or a short story, or a collection of poems? I am just excited by the immediacy and speed of blogging, which reduces the distance between a breathing body which writes and ‘a self posited by a finished artwork’. I am excited about the typos, the corrections made after a couple of days along with a new line sneaked in. Blogging is fluid, like life. Blogging – of my sort – narrativises across the posts what I described as a “continuous process of breaking ourselves down and gathering ourselves up into another shape” in my last post and where else but in the blogosphere will I find an immediate resonance of my words in Samantha’s poem? Probably she was typing those words when I was typing mine. A book has its temporal dimensions. Unlike receiving performative arts (or even cinema, the queer melange of the plastic and the performative arts) you read a book according to your time. You literally take your time. But writing and reading blogs almost correspond to the rhythm of Life, not the personal/subjective life, but the broader all encompassing Life, a ocean of pulsating events beyond you. Seldom someone exhausts reading even a favorite blog; one misses posts, catches hold of one and reacts immediately…if the reader is a blogger too.

This excites me further. One can hardly react to a film immediately with a cinematic response, or a book with an ‘immediate book’, but one can react to a post with a post immediately almost…the way I am doing to Samantha’s and Sanjida’s. I am also excited that while this response is as immediate as being almost physical, bloggers are so fond of pseudonymns. Bloggers are like the moon in a cloudy sky…now here, then hidden!

Okay, you say, Ragpicker is being too bucolic and languid these days; he is aging. Nothing specific to blogging, those things, ‘cause the entire web is about that. Look at the forums and social networking: similar masks and impulses…But in a blog you are engaging in a literary and creative/intellectual exercise which you are hardly doing there! And I am accentuating it. Look how I have selected my template in such a way so that I have one post displayed in a page and so that a reader does not have an uneasy feeling of being cheated when she eyes an almost unpopulated page. I force myself to type at least 1000 words: I have stopped writing scrap-posts or note-posts in prose.

When I am looking back (or up) at Samantha’s poem, in a curious way I am being reminded of blogging. A blog, unlike a book, is temporal, with a past, present and future. I am thinking about my blog and the past few weeks when I was not being able to post anything due to my exhaustions and depressions. The home page was showing a post which was dated days back…the intervals were painfully gaping open my inactivity, my writer’s block…in more precise terms (now this is too personal) my ongoing inability to express. Thinking of Paul’s blog which has sadly halted in a particular day; each day the post at the top speaks out the piling up days of silence. As I was trying to “breathe tomorrow in” during my days of troubled articulation, fingers poised over the keyboard but unable to strike, I knew I was trying to “exhale today away”. And in a blog like this, I am only what I eat!

I know there are posts buried deep under the archive, “swept … under (my) bed”, “repressed” (literally! How about the archives being a personal blog’s unconscious? okay, that was bad) and “left for dead”, because I never recall (read ‘hyperlink’) them back. But still each of these posts is seemingly autonomous and alone, desperate to get connected (through hypelinks to Samantha, to Sanjida, to me!). I know I am slicing myself up in posts, I wish “all the pieces play a part, manage to come together…”

If Samantha’s poem was about the rites of passages of a self distraught with darkness momentarily being illuminated by a poem which blooms…this blog writes my troubled self in while I write out another self through occasionally illuminating art.

Related post: The Readers’ Underwords