When The Words Stop

I was reading a conversation between a writer I admire, Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian-American born in the mid 60’s, and Teju Cole the Nigerian-American writer, who is currently getting much attention in the US.

Some of what they talked about made me think:

Fiction and non-fiction. Truth? And its opposite? As if the ‘non’ turns the writer’s truth into ‘un truth’? Also, the question of the static-truth as the only fixed reality—versus the more elastic evolving and dynamic constantly changing ‘truth’ that does so in one way for the writer and perhaps in another for the reader.

Hemon says something I liked: In Bosnian, there are no words that are equivalent to “fiction’ and “non-fiction”, or that convey the distinction between them. That is not to say that there is no truth or falsehood. Rather, the stress is on storytelling. The closest translation of “non-fiction” would really be “true stories”.

And this from Cole: Painters [for example] know that everything is a combination of what’s observed, what’s imagined, what’s overheard, and what’s been done before. Is Monet a non-fiction painter and Ingres a fiction painter?

The interesting thing is that both of these writers are a part of a ‘marketplace of labels’. And the market we all know ‘categorises’ for the sake of its own convenience. Writers know this. All one wishes for is to be allowed the pleasure of being ‘dragged’ into a space where one has not been to before. A place where this ‘truth’ is created. The labels do not matter and need to be ignored. As long as story-telling is at the heart of that which is being narrated.

Now these ruminations appear inadequate in the face of a new ‘reality’—this coating of dust that has settled over us all. The truth is that it has cleared the air and the rivers at one level and at another, it has challenged our notions of fiction and its opposite the ‘non’. No one knows the true nature of the beast. Guesswork and doses of scientific conjectures leading to educated guesses passing off as truth.

And yet, this long Pause?

Pause?

Imagine walking into a space that invites you to empty your ears. Of sound. The street. The machine that cushioned you here. The car door. The dark-glasses that come off your nose. Your foot-crunch. The briefest of walks. The glass door you push is the last thing you will hear. Exit the world you know. Enter. Pause.

[Not a whisper. Or a hint. Only the deliberate suddenness with which our lives were abducted kidnapped seized trapped into the eeriness of the new word, lockdown, forced ‘down’ our throats as if to choke us into silence. This, last, italics is one more variant of a thought that hounds me. Here is another: we know they are trying harder to control us and our lives our thoughts our every movement. No longer a thing of futuristic novels. It is here it is now. Nothing new or amazing we have all across generations grown up with different forms of control by people in power.

There was a time before this fractured time, as there will be time, after. The question is whether this ‘fracturing’ was man-made. After all Time, at least for me, has always been steadfast. At least in its stillness-motion. Its ability to adapt. To itself. As in adapting to time and circumstance? Maybe. And the ability to multi-task while being nimble-toed as it side-steps all impediment and carries on. Regardless. No stopping.]

‘Time’ stood still on the mottled floor. Slate grey on steel. Matte. The floor, an incline. Away from her. Gentle slope. Pushing herself back. From the waist. Swishing down the ramp. Like Naomi in a Parisian rage she glides amidst the flashing bulbs. At the end of the ramp lies the floor. A different grey. Walk on the water. Step by step. You know how. Or sink into the riverbed. Drown. Pause.

[The only answer this strange irrational time has thrown at us is that there is a lot of time in hand. However anxious it may be in its design and nomenclature.

Then again as I keep saying to Varun my musician son it’s okay to not have answers in this time of our vast floundering. Struggle hesitate falter. The uncertain nature of a disease versus Nature’s attempt to finally cry halt and appear to take charge to course correct to resist.

I also keep saying to the powers that govern us that it’s okay also to not know your way into the darkness but you need to let us your citizens see that you are trying—like the rest of us—to find a way out.

Instead we get doublespeak and subterfuge and reprimand for asking questions.

‘On earth a godhost gives

Order to nature

Which god shall I cry to?

Whose acts will answer me?’

No longer citizens we are swiftly reduced to being supplicants in our own land. Nothing is denied us. Everything is denied. We can do exactly what we wish to provided we ask the questions they want us to ask. To criticise is too self-immolate. Beg instead for forgiveness? For what? Or else face charges of sedition—imagine the weight of this word in 2020 or for that matter 2025 when the simplest thing in a right-winged majoritarian state fast getting rid of its liberal disguise to slip into a pristine and pure fascism-a is to find yourself under permanent arrest without recourse to any kind of legal support. Prove your innocence? But to who? The judiciary is an extension of the executive. No longer playing see-saw on scales balanced by a woman forced into blindness? Purity of Judgement? No longer. Just control. All is controlled. Our worst algorithms have come home to haunt us. The nightmare is no longer something we dream up. It is dreamt on our behalf. With unfailing regularity. And we get what you and I have often shared in our letters: new laws to keep us under surveillance—in India we now have a variety of identification papers smart cards voter id cards tax cards—supposedly for our own good. Everything is passed into ‘law’ quietly under the cloak of the pandemic. Authority. Is allowed. To do anything. With our liberty our mind our physical incarceration. It hacks into every part of our individual unique private life-selves. Mind control. This is not new. The litany of unlearnt lessons must be exhausting. A certain resignation must surely set in. We have walked this way before. In life and in literature. And yet we must carry on.]

The thing about bankrupt ears is the chiselled sight. Enhanced smell. The tactility of the erotic. Touch. And movement. The latent Nureyev in me twirling on toes that have turned twinkle. The silver that runs the length of the left wall applauding the dance. Leap. Twirl. Pause.

[Nothing human shall remain, human. So de-human-ise. Again, not new this. Our country is well on its way to an apartheid of Muslims. But it won’t stop there. ]

Lights that blink butterflies around your flower-eyes. You’ve let the sun stare at you. For much too long. Chairs sit atop the ledge that overlooks the martini-waters of a cool dry river as you fish your noontime away. Where did you think you were? Where do you want to be? Pause.

[This is us for the rest of our lives. Who knows. All I know and share is this anger. But you and I are far too ‘reason-able’ beings. As in abletoreasonbeings. This causes difficulties. We see the simultaneity of both despair and hope as intertwined-beings. Twins that were never ‘severed’ at birth but instead remained glued to each other like a bad quickfix advertisement. This makes us hope. Strangely. And regardless. No matter how dark it gets. I don’t have the words. I have the words. I think I have said this before but it bears repeating: I never subscribed to labels like ‘postmodern’ which in any case is well out of the door nowadays; being a ‘transient’ even temporary phenomenon. Nor did I ever have faith in one ‘grand order’ imposing itself on our world. So yes, when all that we grew up believing in slipped into a ‘fluid’ state and turned into something else the philosophies we espoused also needed to be packed away and be replaced by fresh thinking. We fall back on the intuitive. Not just in the way we traverse learning and acquired knowledge but also that which we  experience. This is not a position of defeat. On the contrary. But it does result in immense personal suffering. Our inner landscape gets mauled. Fractured. Like the time around us. The ‘intuitive’—this time ringed by single quotemarks is a source of strength because no one no government no corporation can take this away from us.]

Lie on the bed at the bottom of the blue. Watch the orange from the river-sun make its way up. Up. Motionless reverie that plays with the clouds as Time lies on her back. Recline. A chair that embraces her body as it softens the dailyness of her life. Draw the drapes. Draw the drapes and let drowsy eyelids have their way. Dream the sleep.

[There are times when ‘bearing witness’—with all the weight of many lifetimes that the phrase bears—is almost thrust upon us. Almost as if Time itself choose us to be the ones. Through these months of my ‘pausing’ I did make many notes. As did others around the world I am sure. ‘Keeping notes’ is something you will be familiar with. It requires space within one’s head. To respond without too much artifice to what we record, explore and receive and make what we may of it.]

Make-up images. Masques. A life in theatre. Performing the masks, we wear. Your name in globes of light. Silver-lined bricks that reflect your fame. Pale grey wine-glasses with gold rims that long for your lips. The feast beckons even as the clocks chime the end of day. The beginning of day.

[Translate the times. Remember that the act of translation is not a ‘deliberate’ one. The truth of imbibing, of learning—theatre, for example, was a huge learning—is that you are not practising a ‘strategy’ or even a ‘method’. What gets translated is the practice. Learning as it translates into a dailyness of practice. The practice of surviving in the arts, in publishing, in a chosen field of ‘cultural’ conditions. All of which then translates into the act of ‘reading’ the passions of all that is possible to do, to create, to ‘midwife’. Because both as theatre practitioners and as publishers we we make possible. We are conduits through which things ‘happen’. Or: the translation we speak of is a constant state of ‘practice’. Never static or frozen in time. Therefore, responsive and dynamic to the moment. So, the theatre remains the single most vital part of my ‘playing’ publisher.]

Pause.

[A way with word-objects. The placing of one with another. The relationships that as a writer you manage to carve out of the ‘everyday’. Matchmaking. Or simply breaking age-old rhythms. Creating fresh music where none existed. Imposing. Grande.  Silver. Not antique. Definitely not opulent. Distinctly blue of pedigree. ‘Overwhelmed’ with desire. To touch. To gaze upon. The written words. Vying for attention amongst the Mountains. Gold, silver and black shadows carved out of the daynightlight. Piled high. Like books. Subject by subject. The binding: hand stitched steel. The lettering on the spine: burnished silver in the golden light.]

Pause.

Fast forward. Play.

My day begins and ends with reading. Writing. Here are a few thoughts from others that I offer to you. Because they resonate with my feelings and that which we are all undergoing? Perhaps:

What are the marks of innocence? Candour—a beautiful word—truthfulness, simplicity, a quiet involuntary bearing of witness. [My emphasis]

—Iris Murdoch, The Bell

And this:

“You can rule me out,” I said. “I’m not involved,” I repeated. It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw: I took no action—even an opinion is a kind of action.

—Graham Greene, The Quiet American

This last is of course impossible as we are discovering. Our moral and political involvement and the variety of motives it reveals. There is no longer space for the entirely neutral. Nor do I desire this mode of being.

There is also this other thing called rage. I do not for a moment think our rage is misplaced. Or redundant. Yes, it needs to be ‘harnessed’—not because rage is seen as a negative luxury but because it needs to channel itself into action. This is nothing new. You know it better than I can articulate it.

All I can say is that most lack the depth of reading that simultaneously produces both rage (on our terms) and its immediate opposite instantaneous calm. This calm is what most lack. This calm is what leads us to clarity. As in a precise reading of situations. Nothing accidental about the way we are being subjugated.

This is quite bluntly put a malevolent plan. It has its origins in every single fascist handbook. We know all this. There is no time to waste. Not on spending our ‘rage’—by now calmer already—on shallow journalistic forays or writing in ways that attempts to see ‘their side’ of things. Neutrality?

I am thinking of so many of our writers and poets and playwrights and filmmakers who are saying: it is time to take sides without leaving any room for retreating from our positions is the only way now to fight.

I am alarmed anxious full of despair and longing to sacrifice everything I have to achieve an ‘action’ that bears some kind of fruit. However long-term. But it is wishful thinking. We need to come up with ways of continuing in the only way we can: by doing. Doing. This doing what we do—our writing, our getting on the air and appealing, our trips to sites of protest—in India our Shaheen Baghs (where a women-led protest against the new draconian Citizenship Act took place), our JNUs, our Jamias (universities as spaces for free thinking and therefore dissent) and our farmers’ protests. Our presence too is a form of activism. Don’t let the despair fool you into believing otherwise.

Notes to self.

Interestingly, the night has become just another word for the dark. If I push this further this bit of the night-dark is friendlier. The kind that suggests safety and warmth because there is light literally when one is in the supposed safety of one’s home with the night just within reach. Safely distanced by glass windows that slide shut as well as its opposite. The possibility that an ‘opening’ is within reach is a fine feeling.

Of course there is the other truth you and I succumb to: exhaustion. Both mental and physical. At least we used to. Now the physical for some of us is no longer a ‘truth’ but a hope. One stays awake out of pent-up energy. Also labelled at times as ‘anxiety’.

You only plan to publish what in your opinion needs to see the light of day. The relevance to a new readership, the attention you as publisher devote to their reading spans—that is not your job. Your job is to publish and make all attempts to find a readership. Patterns of readership are always changing. Different technologies offering varied ways of imbibing literature will always be there for the printed book to cope with. But the trick is not to fight technology. The idea is to continue to make beautiful books and let the work you publish speak for itself. There are enough readers for every so-called and often imagined non-reader.

A combination of different levels of trust. And instinct. The instinct of others who you welcome into the ‘curatorial’ space that you inhabit while deciding which book needs doing. The selection happens at my level as publisher. Through my own reading and therefore, by extension, a circle of affection created by colleagues; the reading of translators one has grown to trust; other publishers; a circle of authors who share their own feelings of the kind of texts we should look at; accidental stumbling into books through conversations, travel, book fairs, more conversations. Each one of us has our own methods. Mine our trust and relationship based and strongly laced with a level of comfort with what others call ‘risk-taking’.

I do not see myself as having a front seat to anything. Our world changes far too swiftly. To stay in the driving seat for any length of time is in itself an act of resistance. This is what our work in the arts is about. To resist current ways of or modes of art practised by any group of individuals and institutions is not the way. One needs to constantly be a part of our world and aloof within it. Aloofness is actually a positive condition if you look at it from the point of view of not allowing any kind of strictures by either the governments in place or the creators of the artistic production to hinder you. You need to carve your own way of being a part of the overall human condition. One that is fraught with fear at this moment. Integrity is as much a personal-political state as it is a public-political one.

I don’t think our ability to discuss ideas will come to an end because of the ‘technology of idiocy’ that is deliberate and seductive in its lack of engagement with anything that has meaning and depth and the slightest shade of the intuitive. Now more than ever we need to read and concentrate. Even more important is the necessity to write or as Brecht would have done ‘sing’ the times. The New Normal will not necessarily be a compassionate and kind one despite my naive romanticism about it. It will be dark.

You need to keep writing more than ever.

And yes the writing will never stop. Yes I will grant you the fact that it may shift platforms surfaces even be writing that is ‘spoken’ (sung?) across emails and phones but the ideas must not stop from breathing circulating while we breathe.

‘The virtue of being inventive.’

‘Inventive’ is an intriguing word. It suggests that you suspect strategy here. No. Each area of activity and concern are explored as we respond to issues, our times, the causes that these times we live in throw up and so on. Inventing solutions. Not for survival in a monetary sense but in the sense of inventive content. Not just ‘us as books’ but as activity and yes, you guessed, as practice. We invent so that we may do. You engage in conversation with the times. No running away. Survival is an accidental by-product of all of what we do. The opposite is unthinkable.

later

when

you were to ask me

about what happened

I would open wide

my mouth

and show you

the sores

on my tongue

To repeat what I started with. This time in italics:

. . . these ruminations appear inadequate in the face of a new ‘reality’. . . No one knows the true nature of the beast. Guesswork and doses of ‘scientific’ conjectures leading to educated guesses passing off as truth.

A related thought: photographs? What is the truth or the non-truth of an image? For example, my photographs that claim to be a way of channeling my rage towards an act that I recognise as ‘creative’. So, creative as truth? Or as fiction? Who cares! The photographs need to ‘work’. The rest is distraction. There is also the time-honoured question of the photograph as ‘testimony’, as ‘witness’, as ‘proof’. Look at the empty streets of New York and Paris. Particularly during the ‘Time of the Pandemic’. How much of all this is truth being created through the eyes of the photographer while freezing the moments that are unfolding before the camera lens. Choice and omission. Choice as ‘erasure’? For what you leave out is gone. Disappears. Or do the photographs only point towards that which is left out? At this moment everything is left out and the photographs need not resort to selecting frames. Point and shoot at the vast ‘emptying’. And what of the ‘text’ as a written practice that accompanies photographs? In books catalogues exhibitions. Sometimes creating little fissures between the two. Almost slyly pointing you in a direction away from the truth? And the unfolding ‘Now ness’ of Gaza? Where real time images numb the self. Where nothing is ‘left out’. No matter what you ‘frame’ there is more and more of the same ‘outside’ the frame. Making a mockery of ‘omission’ and ‘selection’.

How may some of these thoughts engage with history? In particular, with the amnesia of nations who forget with as much ease as they bomb the mountains of Afghanistan while their own backyards are full of injustice. Then there are so many of us who cannot forget. Cannot easily extricate themselves from history. There is no way to leave history. Partitions for example. You can leave countries but you cannot avoid carrying their histories within you even as you forcibly migrate. The history is in your body as it were. The body as a habitat. One that carries stories. Back to ‘bearing’ witness.? For all that you refuse to forget. Except now. In this Time I have repeatedly labelled ‘irrational’ and what others have called ‘unpredictable’ there are no punctuations for all appears to be fluid the days and the hours have been rendered (or is it sundered) meaningless.

And what of the accompanying fear?

Pause.

[I leave you with a recurring dream.

I remember that it was an old projector. The kind that shuddered. With each revolution of the reel. I also recall that there was no particular chronology. Or fixed order. To play them. No fixed dream. Only a dim memory. Of stepping outside the dream I am dreaming. But making sure that I am still in the dream I have stepped into. While I continue to dream the one I was dreaming in the first place. Before I wet my feet. In the blood that was all over the floor. I had to step out of it. Into the clear cold spring. Flowing in the dream. I had just stepped into. The one I had begun to use. To wash my feet. Rid my soles of the blood. Cleanse them. All the while keeping the blood-soaked dream playing behind my eyelids. Like a memory grown dim. Wiped out by constant replay. I continue to step out. My feet wet. From a dream yet to be dreamt. My eyelids swollen. Full of the dream they are rewinding. Like the one before. Trying to rub the blood off my feet. Jumping. Stop. Start. No longer stepping. Out of the dream. Into the blood. The water is no longer a clear spring. Or if it is. It changes swiftly. Into blood blood blood. The reels are out of sync. Again. The film often stops. Out of breath. Or a torn sprocket. Needing to be fixed. Spliced again. Restart. Start. The water in this dream. The one my dim memory is screening. The one I stepped into from the earlier one. Or the one before that. Is rising. It is no longer water. It is. The blood that soaks. Into my memory. Rising. I step into the dream. The one I was dreaming in the first place. Even as I step out of this dream and walk into the next one. The one with the clear spring water. No longer clean. The blood has risen. I no longer remember. That the film has no fixed dream. The projector shudders. Grinding to a halt. As the water drains out of the dream. Drowning me in blood.]

(Views expressed are personal)

Naveen Kishore is a poet, photographer, theatre lighting designer and publisher, Seagull Books