To be an Artist among Other Things

The night when Colerdige,
Heavy-hearted,
Bore his crying child outside,
He noted
That the baby’s eyes
Caught the reflection of the starry sky,
And each suspended tear
Made a sparkling moon.

A Story

So, you are ready to read? Are you comfortable reading stories? I ask especially, since some stories could be really demanding. To read a story, you need to volunteer and, to an extent, even strain. Sometimes, even then, it feels like you haven’t really put your finger on it. Writing is only trying to measure up to what one has read.
I quite understand that we are getting nowhere with such meandering prefatory dialogues. I better tell you the story that I thought I should tell and shut up, lest you ‘click over’ and leave as arbitrarily as you have come here. Please don’t. Let’s come to it – the story.
Note that we are going to read a quintessentially romantic story and that I give you unrestricted access to the main characters: you can fix names to hold them in, plan a genealogy to place them in, or even design and build a house to put them in. in that sense, we are going to construct this story together because I feel I should consider your claim for autonomy (you don’t want anyone to dictate terms, let alone whole stories, to you!), hard-earned knowledge (you always took pride in the fact that the story-teller must depend on you for identifying his story’s manifold ‘socio-cultural implications’ and mapping the story’s ‘complex layers of meanings’) and fine-tuned sensibility (remember how your chest grew heavy with admiration and awe at the sight of an author in the book stall; how your fingers lingered lovingly over a certain hardbound; or how you dug your way to glory and –finally – found a ‘worthy’ book from the heap of ‘trash’ in that second-books stall near by the New Stadium). In fact, I’m almost disappointed that you are more knowledgeable than me; I feel extremely insecure in having to think about you who push those specs a little up your nose, shift your weight in the chair and bend inquisitively over this page. So, out of sheer respect (add ‘a latent inferiority-complex’ too, if you will), I offer you the choice of names, neighborhoods, castes, creeds and appearances of these characters. As a matter of fact, I make sure that you decide on all the important attributes of the story (including its climax), while I merely present a scene or two that might go into it, and anticipate a final stroke of genius from your key-tapping fingers to make it a perfect story.
It is all about this anonymous man who woke up one morning and found that he is fatally wounded in the soul and has to die. It is a very still morning. Not even a faint breeze outside. All leaves stand still. He decides to confront his end rather languorously, and dresses himself in dark trousers, a silk shirt and a moustache that he finds abandoned near the washbasin. The man proceeds to wash himself carefully. He frowns in the shower at the thought of strangers sloshing buckets of water over his soon-dead, cold, stony, pale body. He decides to put on a frowning face at the moment of death so that he could claim some sense of self-respect with those corpse-washers. He grins. He proceeds to inspect his body closely, fondly: the uneven coloration of the skin, betraying the arrangement of flesh beneath it; its pores, now wet, through which hairs sprout; the molding and texturing of skin at the corner of nails. Then he prepares to look in the mirror, to see in it the most tragic and hopeless of all creatures. As he moves to the mirror, he remembers the opening sentence of a novel he has read last week: “Man is the only animal that dies before it is fully grown.”
The story proceeds in time. It is twilight. He decides to die in the arms of a woman, comfortably. And we see him smoking his favorite brand of cigarette, lying lost in the kind arms of a tall beautiful anonymous woman.
“……,” she posts an unasked question into the air. This unasked question drifts forward and upsets the sets of smoke-rings he was carefully crafting into the cold air.
“Yes?”
“Who are you? Really?”
“Who are you?” he returned.
“I’m not sure, but I can cook and fix your clothes and sleep with you” said she, “and when you’re tired of me you can say good-bye and I’ll be gone. How do you like that?”.
He didn’t say anything.
“See, there’s some soup boiling in the kitchen right now. Can you smell that?,” she asked with a gleaming eye. He waved off the cigarette- smoke that floated below his nose and breathed in. She’s right. There’s something spicy boiling in the kitchen. He liked the smell.
It was getting very hot in the room so she lifted his head slightly from her lap to take off her shawl. “You really need me, you know,” she said.
“What I was thinking about was that I want to ask you some questions that will help me fit some things together.” He said.
“What kind of questions?”
“I don’t know yet”, he said, “About what you like and don’t like mainly.”
“Well, sure, we can do that now”
He said, “I thought maybe I could ask questions about what your attitudes are about certain things. What your values are and how you got them. Things like that. I’d just like to ask questions and then later may try to put something together.”
“Sure,” she said, “What kind of questions?” She noticed that his cigarette had accumulated a small ash-stick at the burning end, since he has been thinking for a while.
She aimed at it and let out a playful sigh so that the ash-stick broke.
“What really matters as far as a question is concerned is its ability to understand the other person’s pattern of likes and dislikes,” he said. “What constitutes a society at large is its pattern of likes and dislikes, you see. And when the world sees that it better have a history, it tries to extract it from a given set of likes and dislikes.” He said. “However, I see that you are a completely different person and your preferences would never match mine. So, whatever question I might put to you, and whatever fancy I take on to convince myself of your preferences, in the end there is going to be a grave incompatibility. A silence. So…” he stopped noticing that he was not making any sense.
She was running her fingers through his hair, and it seemed it didn’t matter to her that she didn’t know what he was talking about. She breathed keenly at the smell of boiling spices from the kitchen.
“Give me a second. Let me just see what’s up with our soup.”
She goes to the kitchen. The soup is done. She uses a stainless steel handle to lift the pot off the stove. And, pours the liquid into two small bowls with a splutter of bubbles and a cloud of steam.
He leans on the wall, takes a final drag on the cigarette, and since there are no ash trays in the room, tosses it through the open window, into the withered garden. She brings in the soup bowls and they both smile at each other and drink the liquid down.
The sun sinks lower in the hills. After talking for long, feeling thoroughly exhausted, the man sinks deeper into the arms of the woman with a final question. “Why am I all alone like this on this end of the world?” he asked, his voice muffled. She whispers back: “You’re not; I’m with you.” She smelt like monsoon winds. At that moment, he realizes he need fear no wound, however fatal. The moon whimsically decided to give the night an extra-doze of moonlight. Without her noticing it, he scratched his nose expecting to find his moustache there. But no, it has fallen off somewhere.
You, the reader, catch him exactly at this moment. Pull him out of his peaceful night. Drag him into your day. Like an experienced psychoanalyst – well, you have always been very precise in recognizing what went on in others’ psyche – you lay him on the couch and ask him questions. Find out whatever you can, about his wound. Be sure to locate the way he is connected to me and you. And once you have made your diagnoses, show him the door. I know he will be a little puzzled as he steps out into the high noon outside. He will feel drained out, now that you have extracted his meanings completely. And he will also feel that his wound has grown into some sort of sickness. I hope that she can comfort him, and that she explains everything to him once again, when he finally drags his tired and hot feet into his living room.

A QUATRAIN ON LOVE

Half out of sleep I watch your sleeping face.

Behind your eyelids' restlessness I see

A dream that waking may not quite displace:

If there were equity you'd dream of me.

SPEECH AND MODERN PHILOSOPHY

1

Although language occupies a position of special importance in philosophy, the 'linguistic turn' of the discipline, i presume, need not by itself predispose those who make it in favor of the earlier schools. indeed, a primary interest in the kinds of logical issues that occupy language-centric philosophers tends to have just the opposite effect. i'm just trying to draw some general conclusions: and as it happens with such broader plans, here, i talk about things as i have learnt them - as in, the way i was taught them. exceptions and debates will therefore find plenty of room.

Originally, philosophers interested in the workings of one's mind tended to think that it should be possible largely to bypass the utterances in which the mental functions are expressed and to concentrate attention on what directly takes place in the mind when we percieve or remember or whatever. however, this assumption was soon challenged in the history of the discourse, philosophers and psychologists expressed grave dissatisfaction with the outcomes thereof. questions were raised and doubts expressed about the reliability of the kind of introspection such inquiries appeared to rely on. It seemed like it is time to account the 'spoken truths'. the apparent accessibility factor of language and language use effectively contrasted the elusive and private nature of most mental functions. what someone says, unlike what someone thinks, is not hidden from public view; it is expressed in words that anyone can hear or, if they are written, see. as such a public fact, moreover, language lends itself to joint, cooperative inquiry as introspection hardly does.

Thus, language soon occupied a privileged place among the topics that come under the general rubric of 'the mental'. and in the consequent developments of psychology in general, the language one used for talking about mental functions altogether displaced those functions themselves. for example, it is quite in this spirit that a philosopher would propose that dreams be simply dismissed as mental episodes and that the stories people tell when they wake up be substituted for them. as speech or writing, these stories apparently were not thought to be problematic in a philosophical way, as dreams are. and this is where i think one should be able to see through the incontrovertible space that language has come to command in the discourse (regarding the mental).

Speech as a form of behaviour is a form of objective inquiry, it is also a vehicle of truth: it has a semantic character that other forms of human behaviour do not have. it is possible to apply the concept of truth and falsity to what is said, as can hardly be done in the case of other bodily processes. nevertheless, truth-value on the basis of mere objectivity is equally illusory. the Naturalistic assumption of bypassing the speech to locate mental functionings relied on an illusion - but substituting the truth of utterance does not change the basic nebulous nature of the inquiry much; we still are already-believing in a non-objective privilege.

As such, speech does perform an essential function of mind - without generating any of the puzzles usually associated with mental functions, at that. nonetheless, an approach to the philosophy of mind through language and speech merits far less than what it has been made out to be.

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this was written months back. i shelved it then. the write-up felt incomplete and abrupt. when i checked now, i thought i might as well post: the way i would have completed it, has totally slipped me. and i dont feel like adding on any new fancy endings either. i'd rather go for a newer trail in the same direction, a second part, sometime.

'

CITIES, SLUMDOG AND DEV D

What is a city, any city, for us - its dwellers and connoisseurs? Eclectic noises, clamor of metals, machines, stacks of dirt, filth, money, perfume, narcotics; enormous reserve and onrush of electricity; water, food and bodies on sale; tall concrete triumphs – how do people draw the life that is pitted against these? And how does one configure the city-experience in his creative adventures? Is there after all a quintessential city experience? Or is it that they are all unique in rarifying what tribal logics they sucked out of their once-boorish grounds?
A city frames its dwellers’ lives, ideally, in a mechanically replicable pattern. Some denominators are, therefore, ubiquitous in the field: cities would not be identified as ‘cities’ if they did not have these common signposts – say, modern physical and mental health supports, a discreetly empowered policing system, a pre-eminence in making statements about Governance, or economic highhandedness. There exists a Concept City from where all borrow.
Unlike a village, let’s note, a city is “planned”, and executed accordingly. The enucleation of the spontaneity of life/chances from within, is latent in the concept of a city. You seldom have plans that expect spontaneous turn-outs – well, that wouldn’t be a plan, then. An ideal ‘well-planned’ city is subject to infallible and constant surveillance, and be therefore resignedly predictable. It must be artless and open to the watcher’s eyes.
Paradoxically, however, the idea of a city prides in its luring promise of privacy, albeit anonymity. ‘No intrusions on your personal life’ is one of the principal grounding comforts in the urban system of living. One is linked to a public network where things fall into prescribed places with the exactness of an industrial production unit. Individuals, privately, are not marked; their ‘individuality’ does not count – the sites that circumscribe an individual’s city-based identity is a dummy place, where another character could pop up and substitute at any given moment, and make no significant difference to the machinery. The conception of a Village differs radically. Characters there, are anchored in individual roles/functions, though (perhaps, because) Village is always already a fantasy. In a city-scape, your possible affiliation with other characters is a matter-of-fact attendance. City is identified with its real population and its potential to hold a larger population, which testifies, as against the case of a village, its knack for anonymity – or the existence of dummy places.
To situate his film against a(ny) city and to be faithful to the experienced city, I presume, roots on the artist with a radical inventiveness. He peruses the surface calm of the city – the plan and the concept of it – for thin ice, tap there, crack it open and let the craze out. The so-called ‘underbellies’, a la mode undergrounds and slums – the failures of the state, as identified in political discourses – indulge in a project of cleaving the hermetically sealed dummy subjectivities: the theoretical intervention of Undergrounds in a city-logic is much more profound than the easy explanations viz. ‘necessary evil’ or ‘natural by-product of urbanization’. Their presence validates a memetic Other for the Plan and predictability. In which case, the possibilities of an imaginative city-film rests on the dabs it gathers from the clash of the Perfect and the sneaky Insurgent present in this system of living. These possibilities extend both backward and forward – as in, the fantasy beyond the city engenders say, science fictions, and the fantasy behind it is stranded in the moral determinism that village is virtue and city vice. What are the possibilities of fantasy at the city?
Art and market revel in a synergic nexus in the clash of city’s polarities (Plan and Chance) - Graffiti, music of revolt, porn industry, drug peddling or prostitution. These tendencies, generally identified as deviant/ underground or dark, rescind the order, neatness and probity that external surveillance structures obsess the population with. Art of the Lived City is established in these disruptions, their unpredictability and the surprise generated thereof, however disgraceful they may seem against the original - ‘perfect’ - schematics.
It was these two city-cinemas - Slumdog Millionaire and Dev D – that I watched last month that bore out the thought I tried to map above. Also, Jayesh was searching for some fundamental explanations in that line.
Possibilities of Fantasy-in-City rest on the metaphoric values of the City. City evokes more than it is. It turns a figure of speech: it means to conceal and at once, express – a fine chance to poise the unpredictable-but-always-predicted turns. Dev D and Slumdog both explore this chance, in their own ways. Danny Boyle has sort of specialized in this craft since his Trainspotting days. In fact, starting from jump-cuts, western film stylistics can boast of a whole repertoire of cinematic devices that capture the craze that the systematicity of an urban site eventually vents out in undergrounds. And Slumdog, all said, is not an Indian film, and therefore neither cuts away from nor agrees with the Hindi film’s way of looking at cities: it is exclusively outside the ways of making a popular film in India. (In fact, on a personal take, I believe Slumdog, technically, is more of a Latin American film, with its racy soundtrack and intense montage seasoned with high drama). It is the second film, Dev D, that really had me hooked – it is rarely that such graphic audacity is displayed in onscreen Indian cities. It felt like living a graphic novel, with its potential fury and unease and the ability to burn right through the pith of usual Hindi film’s city-platitudes, to watch Anurag Kashyap’s version of the story of the perennial loser, Devdas. That it is a re-work is constantly referred in the movie: like a slight, the movie stitches images and videos of Shahrukh Khan, Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai in its frills. SL Bhansali’s pompous and luxuriously sentimental Devdas fades, but nonetheless works as an efficient foil against this searing drama of love, its loss, desire and betrayal in the loins of a ‘real’ city.
The film is about an escape, or at least the attempt for one. Abjectly humiliated by Dev, Paro decides to agree to the marriage her father cuts with a rich Jhat. Dejected, and more importantly, clueless, Dev ‘escapes’ to Delhi. The city promises him a life that is unmarked, a place where he may forget and start over. However, as money flows limitlessly to establish a religious alcoholism, through the crevices of the Plan, Dev hits the Chances of the city – its underground. The film treats Delhi not as a physical space, it is a mental state, an attitude, it is a theme. The city hosts dejections, humiliations and embarrassment jubilantly, whether it be Dev’s, Chanda’s, or even Paro’s. Consequently, Dev D is never interested in what-is-there-in-Delhi; instead, it is always asking: “what else is there in Delhi?” Awash in attitude, and brimming with terrific energy, this audacious seeking behind the safer clichés of city-life, directs itself away from other onscreen Indian cities, and successfully startles. City is just not where the plots happen, it is also what they mean – a sophisticated corruption, a machinery that gives out junk which in turn, turns into an autonomous, if not reciprocal, machinery. The film does not borrow from the psychopathologies of western cities (as seen in Western movies). It looks to aggressively portray the underground at hand, in all its complexity, as a meaning for the plot. Well, one may say, the film is not great art but just style, and possibly be true. But they would miss the point: Dev D is a ready and fiery youth movie, at the tack of whatever little pop-culture specimens we have. And that is what makes it important.

WRITING AND ITS LOOPS

writing is seriously a way to get some clots removed from the sense-making channels: some clots, that could possibly drown the burst of any striking new nodes to reflect on. and it is difficult to write naturally when you discover that you have been laying the plucked clots out onto your pages and that your pages have now become worn nets that keeps all your dirt and have let the thoughts lap out. in fact, i shouldn't then be writing. as raphael says, i need to hold it back, keep it hidden, and remind my self that i could be read, and that being read entrusts a rather onerous responsibility along with its pleasures - the responsibility to be in order, a need to defend myself from chaos and whim. it's to will and bring into being a schedule of logic - a mock-up of reason. strictly, writing therefore is a strenuous mode of communicating; not that reason is strenuous, but, more the demand of processing herein, more the strain. i know i haven't said anything new; neither was that my intention - i just needed to lay out what i've probably been thinking.
a divinatory accomplice of the will to transcend (the mundane and the dying phenomena), the act of writing in its execution cannot aspire to shed its baggage of spirit-uality that easily. and that perhaps, is the reason why the urge to write, the pleasure of having written something as it was meant to be written, or the later chagrin when the words no more seem to be what they stood for when they were written - all seem so filled with life although they do not claim any immediate connection to living. in fact, writing and life cannot ever relate themselves in uncomplicated loops: we cannot aspire to 'write life', because it is always the 'lived' (and not the living present moment) past that is recorded in writing. added to this, writing is much technique. it is not 'natural' that life be written; life is, 'naturally', only lived. writing at its best documents a remembrance of the series of now-blurred patterns. a serious written script is an effort to bring an Existence to its most honest nakedness; shorn off of its protective fabrics, in this burning nakedness, it could be called 'a spirit'. it is here that the will to transcend pullulates; the key to the matrix is imagination, the afterworld of reason and logic. unlike Survival, 'transcendence' is not in the purview of Reason, and so Reason cannot supply us with any incentive or consolation or explanations with regard to the end-purposes of Living.
in one of our conversations, i remember how raphael so wanted to explain what Eternity means; how every thing animate and inanimate, lived, living and to-be-lived is merely a stock of shadows that file by, passing from nothingness to nothingness and is uncared for. to proceed with Life is to move closer towards the most tangible proof of its transience: Death. and death, ironically, is confronted not with imagination, but with all possible armory that reason and logic render.
in anthropomorphing the nature and spiritualising writing, the human race is perhaps trying to come to terms with death and the will to transcend. and the most wonderful part in the whole process is the earnestness that we put into this: the earnestness of one that looks deep into the mirror right before he has ended.

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to hari: you might find it rather too audacious to have written such a piece on writing. waiting for the toll... honestly. this was a rushed article, and it is too late to go back and re-do it.

to raphael: may our one-off campaigns pay up sometime!!

THE SEXUAL CONTRACT

Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989.

this by now classic book by Pateman was a conscious pick. having heard, off and on, in various discussions, especially in connection with some of my recent papers, Sexual Contract, i expected, could provide a few corrective arguments. the discussion on the qualified triumph of feminism revolved, in the papers mentioned, around the fulcrum of the contemporary civil society. pateman's perspective, i presume, drives the colloquia out of this circumscription, for she founds her theses on the originary logics of civil society, the contract-theories. her attempt to undo the "most famous and influential political story" of modern times, nevertheless, is essentially a bleak one, almost cancelling all the 'civil' feminist claims and achievements as flawed and merely producing pale reflections of rightful men at their best. the blight begins with the myth of the original social contract of the seventeenth century europe: the myth that asks an exchange of the 'natural' freedom for the assurance of civil protection. pateman spots, and rightfully too, that the contract presupposes domination and subordination in this exchange. she works on the given, 'contract': "social life is nothing more than contracts between individuals." (59) on the vicarious foundation of the original 'civil' contract, actual contracts are made - those of employment, of prostitution, and of marriage. the historical heresy is that a reiteration of these contracts have resurrected the social contract and repressed vehemently the sexual dimensions of the original. the original contract is both social and sexual. in the course of the history of the european civil order, pateman traces a previleging of the narrative of the civil/the public/the masculine as against the corresponding antinomies, natural/the private/feminine resulting in the dissolution of one half of the story. the accepted interpretations of civil order as challenging patriarchal norms withstand analysis only insofar as patraiarchy is centred on its etymological essesntiality: 'rule of the fathers'. the father's authority over the sons is finished; sons move out to serve the state rather than the father; in place of Status, there now is a Contract. and the contract treats everyone as equals, thus resolving the strifes of the older order.

the book is a detailing therefore and thereon of how the contract "far from being opposed to patriarchy, is the means through which patriarchy is constituted." (12) Pateman identifies the newer order of patriarchy as a revised version concurrent with the myth of the social-sexual contract: the father is dissipated - teleogically, patriarchy is nomore a private 'father-driven' archy. patriarchy in its paternal denotation is dead - what is alive, well, and is accounting for the ill of the contemporary civil society is the newer order of fraternity or as she also calls 'fraternal patriarchy'. the sons who fly out of the shades of the father, to the wings of the apparatus of the state, constitute this fraternity.

the omission of woman in the discourses of the original contract, underlies these later actual contracts, and the individual in any contract is not a woman as woman. Pateman problematizes the field further in that even when woman is kept out of the contracts, fraternal patriarchy finds it incumbent on them to incorporate her into the contract as a subordinated subject, as say in the marriage contract. in deeming the marriage and the marriage contract, and in consequence the whole private sphere as 'politically irrelevant', half the original contract is ignored, as said earlier. but the inseperablity of this contract from the social/public/political counterpart opens the cork of newer potions into an already nebulous field of debates. pateman shows from this vantage point why and how the legal recognition in various judiciaries of the rapes by husbands been excruciatingly slow; she argues vehemently how even as prostitution is a "major capitalist industry"(17) it does not realise the consent of woman, to her client, as that of a 'free individual.' in order to consent to the contracts the individual has to be free, and having omitted woman from the category of the 'individual' in the original contract there is no more a chance that it shall happen so. that she is not an individual should reduce her to the level of not being good enough to make contracts, for a contract is made between two equals, and woman is 'naturally' unequal and therefore is outside the contracts. and most paradoxically, women is asked to, and must, enter into one contract, namely the mariage contract. "contract theorists [thus] simultaneously deny and presuppose that women can make contracts." (31) she surveys europe's classic scholarship in contracts, mainly rousseau, locke and hobbes, and holds them culpable for the alarming silence over why marriage contract was validated, even endorsed, when there was an evident fallacy involved. women in the time and space of the classic contract, that is the seventeenth century europe, were deemed naturally lower in nature than men; weak, less wise, and unqualified for politics or public. so, even when there are other ways in which a union between man and his natural subordinate could be established, why should classic contractarins hold that it shall be brought into being through a contract?

this insistence in one sense, spcialises the marriage contract. other contracts, say that of employment for instance, once made, transfer natural relationships to civil societal ones. the relaton of an employer with the worker is seen as a civil, not natural, relation; purely contractual. the curious thing about marriages is that it is not a contract of two 'individuals' but an individual and his 'natural subordinate'. social contracts involving women corrupt thus in the very inception because of this paradox that tags 'natural' into 'civil' orders, and sub/con -sequent relegative measures. in other words, declamations of freedom of woman in the newer civil order is framed by the meanings of patriarchalism, and therefore she is simultaneously free and not free. pateman pronounces that the balmy hogwash has already run neck-high and there isn't a way to wish it away, but the grand rejections within the liberal contractual politics that has eventuated in 'civil' - isation. pateman's eye for the sops of patriarchal myths for the feminist ends, and her consistency in perspective of the contractual nature of social relations bring her thesis loud and clear through the obscure chapters on european and american histories of contracts.