Self-portrait in Gratitude

Patricia Sweeney commented here thus:

I’m stunned by the range and depth of honesty of this that is so much more than writing, in a total unearthing of this landscape of the self. You’re a miner working in a dangerous place, and yet I want to urge you not to stop here. Keep going, I say. Meanwhile, I extend my hand.
Salaams,
Patricia

First, earnest thanks. I am not in a position to second observations on my “range and depth of honesty”, Patricia, but the spatial imagery which you used has touched me enough to reply you in a separate post. I won’t repeat what and why I wrote in that especially self-lacerating post; but one should mention that it was triggered by a certain post and a blogger-friend to which and whom I have linked there. Mine was not an excavation of the self; I reacted and to react against such atrocities, I thought the pain I ‘performed’ is one of the ways.

How dangerously can I probe into myself? I know the zones at the edge of which I might just falter and halt. I started writing last year after experiencing a major crisis in my life, which is very apparent in this blog but it is an event which I don’t wish to discuss much, because it does not involve my life only. When I started writing, this mining and unearthing of the self was, of course, a project but I never wished to confess. I knew vaguely that it was a reconstruction of the self through mourning something. Thus, when I am reconstructing anew, it is not exactly detrimental to my psyche if I dissect my earlier self because it is something I have abandoned. If redefining self is what I will be doing, then I can lighten my shoulders of many burdens too, many assumed and imposed identities. That’s what I am doing.

You write Sufi poetry Patricia. I am enthralled by its beauty but I know that I cannot attempt it, because unfortunately I have lost faith; I cannot imagine the divine and believe me, that’s painful because I have condemned myself from such a source of peace and tranquility. But I still can learn a lot from the processes of the Sufism and something which haunts me is the final state of fanaa, which is not self-destruction as the word might suggest, but self-dissolution. Think of the marvelously ecstatic: a supreme bliss of love when the self is just not there! Just this idea: a love in complete absence of the self reveals that all ideas of love we are immersed now are essentially selfish, selfbound, self-centric. In my way, I am, very slowly, cerebrally if not existentially, pursuing this idea of evaporating the self. I know that its impossible in our de facto quotidian existence. But it might be possible in the logical existence of my writing life.

I am a political being. I wrote politics in the mode of prose for three months in this blog and I have vehemently stopped writing so; though I don’t regret it. My mode is poetic now even when I write prose, I will continue writing politically in the poetic, though I will garb it in such a way so that the non-poetic beings can’t engage with it. So when I am talking in terms of the self and person sexuality becomes so important to me. Because it is that zone which, supposed to be the most intensely private and personal, is the landscape of the self most colonialized and structured by the hierarchies of power. Writing is an act of exorcising…

I wrote this here couple of days ago when one of my beautiful blogger-friend came under a particularly nasty attack:

Once upon a time sexuality meant living and suffering intensely, a way of defining one’s own existence, coming to terms with one’s own latent beauty, many a times against the regulations of the order and emperors. Sexuality was a quiet content affair, not playing to the gallery.
Art is about resistance and Culture is about order that satisfies the regal whims and market’s dimes. Culture is fixed, defined, complete, prescribed. Art is change, flux, transgression, crossing boundaries and moving to those dangerous zones beyond words in the dictionary…

Dangerous zones. I don’t fear attack from external sources because I know I am not so threatening to the institutions I oppose. But I know it is dangerous within, fighting with those remnants of institutions which I have already internalized. So I have an inkling of the ‘danger’ both of us are talking about: being left with nothing to sew my wounds after I dissect myself and the heady anesthesia of compliments from friends like you slowly running off its steam.

But your hand is extended! There are hands which wouldn’t have been there thus if I hadn’t written in such a vein of melancholy, madness and masochism.

After thanking you again let me, Patricia, re-articulate this poem of yours with a little liberty of mine in the last lines

Surely this separation is a particular madness
No one save human creatures would pair and then part – intentionally
Like a thousand lovers before me
I memorialize your features
and inhale the heady stuff of you
And like a thousand lovers I turn one more time and see you
You give me courage
Winds of hysteria rising, you push me up again and again
to the sublime high from where I can look back
to the center of what I was once myself.