This post will mean anything only to my regular readers. This rambling post, I don’t know how long it will be, might turn out to be a landmark post. Okay, let me shun that pompous beginning…
I was particularly disturbed when I wrote my last one, and somehow, each of the five responses had been epiphanic to me. Epiphany lies in the state of imagination of the beholder, so you will never understand - radicalancient, jane, ritwik and particularly lou - where and how you touched it. The touch…was mine only.
For generations of a some not-so-distant future, if this blog stays and wordpress servers never crash, one might find the portrait of the psyche of a typical Bengali male, as Jane described my posts twice or so, a kind which is rapidly fading; I might safely say: here is one of the last bastion of survivors.
I.
One of the best has deleted his blog. I remember Radical Hypocrite’s swan song, where he mentioned me in my proper name (I fondly remember). Thankfully, all his posts are saved in my coffers and he said when he was going:
The tale awaits the listener for there’s midnight now, imagined or otherwise, and silence, if you will excuse the sound of dripping water, for there is always a damn tap somewhere that refuses to shut its mouth, and the nocturnal sounds of the highway, the solitary car speeding by, the whimpered stillness of buses that have concealed their sighs and bones in a blue scrappy paint …all the tired whispers of the men who have lingered in the roadside stalls, repeating to themselves the stories of their homes or the dreams they once had of coming to this big city, of making it big and all other beautiful breaths of despair and love.
…I’ve almost stopped opening my heart out to people for the simple reason it’s very difficult to explain the occasional spells of serious depressions I suffer. And I won’t do that again, not here, not anywhere, not while I live.
…How many times did I tear off the pages of my favourite books, break the earthen idols of Hindoo goddesses my mother devoutly worships, how many times did I hit myself hard against the wall, hit my face with a fist pulled hard, bit my hands and legs, all to force teardrops from my eyes? Pain in pleasure, pleasure in pain, self-mortification, as the bastard psychiatrist told me when I parted ways with the only dream I had consciously lived till now.
… I shall end at the beginning, I shall return to that privileged instant of my life, my lost, forgotten shared dream, my religion, though I am and will remain a conscious heretic…and when you were old enough to see a flock of shrieking, brightly coloured birds flying off overhead, darkening the sun, casting huge shadows, birds of your individual dreams dreaming about a collective, flying away, and having lost your Icarus wings, beyond repair, tried never to make sense of it all, you’ll never understand how difficult it becomes at times just to pretend being ‘normal’.
I don’t blame you, envy you, loathe you for not knowing all that. Each of us have had enough quantities of self-loathing sufficient to last and overwhelm our lifetimes. I thank you again for bearing with me. See my heart, mutilated by pride and once maddened with fidelity- I’ve opened it up here for you. For once, I’ve ceased to be a hypocrite to myself…
I can’t write better words…but I am not going away!
Only a Bengali, living anachronistically in this strange city of our can write such words, when a history of a bit more than a century of his race haunts his mind. It was the story of men; the women have just started to speak it out. We dreamt of a flock of shrieking, brightly coloured birds, darkening the sun, casting huge shadows…across the planet, we saw our shadows fly…
We reveled in the death of a dream, dying of loves.
II.
My last post is a disaster of a kind. For a whole day or more, I saw the third section not getting connected with the previous two, sticking out as the only truth of my face. The first one, after the prelude, mentioned three reactions to - as I said it - the trivial, the symptomatic and the horrible. Now I smile a bit when I see that I couldn’t describe the last one; my keyboard stuttered there, incidentally the most riveting of those abominations: my tryst with pain had a halt. It has reached its limits.
Yes readers, this year-long journey of blogging was a tryst with pain. Writing created a kind of rhythm, a rise and then a sudden fall into crashing pain. My sincerity towards writing, my honesty lied in the sustaining of that moment: when pain engulfed me and I curved my words out of my flesh. Because we always mourned the day the music died…
Through poems after poems I talked about the dissolution of the self into the suffering of the ‘other’. This ‘other’ was not mere grammatical others. I talked of the moment when the body is abandoned and love still lingers in the shrunk limbs and ribs. When a man understands that the dream of liberating all suffering under the sun has been soured, the frontguard is demolished and the rearguard had their retreat, he has nothing to lose but a history of being a man, he yearned for the state of that longing and suffering which only she was able to…throughout history.
Suffering: the answer blows in the wind why. Longing: for a better day. I have seen it with my own eyes how you do it. A bastion resigns the fight and witnesses how it still goes on, waged by them in their quotidian ways. He wonders where the manifesto lies, what is the war-plan. He understands that it is, almost, the same thing running. Once upon a time, young men abandoned the city, went to the countrysides to wage the war and tutor the underdogs about their own war. The young men only discovered, in unknown bloody terrains, that they are nothing but city-bred idealists, true but tender like calf-love. Now they discover, they are men only, in the wrong side of the power-court. It’s not easy, crossing over to the other side. Getting rid of your class-sensibilities was easier than getting rid of the power-strictures written in your body. To get rid of your body you need to overwhelm yourself with unknown emotions.
So certain posts appeared where I screamed that she suffers… everywoman… this was the suffering which the history of those dreamers paid scant attention to; but this is the suffering empathizing with which the journey of Bengali modernity started in the 19th century and then, as it was destined to be, deferred and abandoned. Then it was the age of reform; now, one can’t repeat those pompous claims, it was a private journey of undoing oneself, without the ego-trip of emancipating the other. The drive was engendered due to autobiographical, therefore silent, circumstances. I talked about lives elsewhere, or that ‘life is elsewhere’ and how he is a Love’s Ragpicker, picking up abandoned poems written by her. But as one of my students twisted my pen-name into a delicious pun: “life is nowhere!”, no-where and also “now here!”; the way one reads it.
Somewhere in the last post it had a halt. Before analyzing rape as a ur-form of all crimes of power I failed to feel it through my words. I always treated my words like little bits of bodies; I reached the limit. Qualifying; I didn’t ‘fail’, I didn’t try it. And therefore, the third section in my last post lacked the connection. It didn’t properly explain why I was wallowing in a history of blood between the masculine and the feminine. What actually hit me hard, like the revelation in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown… I couldn’t ‘perform’ the pain anymore.
As he said, “pain in pleasure, pleasure in pain, self-mortification…all to force teardrops from my eyes”, it has to stop somewhere. As Lou said, how long will we go on bearing spectacles of self-inflicted pain? The woman in question, the ’symptomatic’ of the triad of abominations in my last post, displayed how her body cyclically got rid of possible futures. Yours truly has similarly displayed the painful abortions of many possible pasts, might be in a metaphoric way (well, the pleasure lies in turning the pain into a metaphor). The great Bengali dream of a better world is strewn across the evening skies as possible fetuses of the past. I am not saying that the alternative to this is the first woman in the triad of abominations: lend yourself to a banal spectacle of groping or the horror of the last one: submission to a lifetime of humiliation like Mr Fritzl’s daughter. There might be still another way left… I am saying it now.
Yes reader. I read the humiliation of those three women as three ways of submission to the horrors of overwhelming power. Like a triptych it was before my eyes: a woman lending herself to be groped live by a banal comedian, another one displaying her miscarriages in a pretentious show, another one living a life in the cellars to be raped by her father for years. Now I read them as ways of defeats. As Ritwik said and I understood later: the theme of my last post was ’shame’; I meant ‘anger’. I still feel there is something more in it… In my way, I identified with the sufferings bordering almost to justifying masculine power; I overlooked that these are nothing but plain, hopeless submissions. This is negative identification, my typical extreme way of identifying with the victims of power. I am not commenting on those women any more, I am reading against the grain of my ways of seeing it. This is not the way to undo yourself, there are other ways of identifying with her…
I was not identifying; I was projecting myself unto them.
Poor erstwhile-radical Bengali male did it because he has historically started it: abandoning the fight and facing straight the relentlessness of his opponent’s blows. His face might turn into a pulp but he will not touch the ground and he will still stare straight and bloody in his eyes! But as radicalancient commented: “as long as I am happy, I am fine. I wasn’t named “the light of happiness” for nothing!”
That’s the words of a true fighter!
I must learn how to be fine!
III.
As I mentioned, this post will mean anything only to my regular readers, if my posts are blessed by staying in their memories. This post explains, though in a pretty tertiary way, much of the preceding 126 posts. It was not a designed journey; writing is seldom so programmed. But I had a fair idea of how my writing self was being born out of it; and I knew the deep-structure of meanings and motivations: my life of intellect and emotions of past one year. I am not saying quits; I am just ending a phase, closing a chapter. I need to think of the next…
But the tryst with pain ends as I have reached the limits, or have understood my limitations…
I once started a series called self-portraits and was particularly happy with one. For months I had been working on another one; I thought this time I will jam - like in the earlier I jammed with my friend Inam - with Ritwik Banerjee’s poems. Sorry Ritwik, can’t keep up with your writings! But Let me just present you the self-portrait proper, they always were lengthy proses ending with my dabblings in graphics!
You can still read the words which meant to be…
I also fidgeted for months because these work uses lots of original images. If the artists of the original works are offended because I have derived from their original images, I offer my apologies, your works had been inspirational!
Image Courtesy:
The Girl and the Bird by Daily Dose of Imagery
Dark knight by Daily Dose of Imagery
Abstraction #2 by Paul Politis
Nature’s Greatest Form by Joe Nicora
The Last Light by Jens Hoffmann
Catch Me if You Can by al lim
