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 Reader & the Voyeur

The Reader (Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel, Der Volser, in original German as translated by CB Janeway), as they claimed in the blurb, does deal with morality in a very complicated way. it is after a considrable interval that i am reading a novel again. and this, being a 'page-turner' after all, was finished in a day. the novel, one has to admit, is overtly graphic. if the reader himself/herself has not been visual-ising the scenes as the events unfold in minute detail, the author insists him/her in doing so by installing Hanna's 'poses' all the way through the narration. those moments where Berg prints down Hanna in his mind: when she puts on the silk-stocking in the other room and fixes it to her garter belts meticulously (he watches it through the door indeliberately left ajar), or when she stands with a towel for him after his shower(he could only imagine what she looked like then, for she was behind him), or when she hazily perambulates in his father's study (his presence unacknowledged), in those moments at least, the pictures freeze within the sequence of words. even when Berg himself does not see Hanna, the reader of their story must see her. and consequently, the reader must feel her as beyond the written. in fact the novel does underplay the power of words as they are written, all the way. it is either the Voices or the Pictures that command the truth, here. voices are emotions served hot, perpetually. and pictures, resolving the semiotic intricacies of words all too dextrously, tower above both voice and writing. but this is not what i want to think through after reading Schlink's work.
it is the ease with which the characters disappeared from the mind's screen and of the something-else that lingered. talking of the disappeared people, i didnt want Hanna at least to fade away that soon. i wanted her to stay on. to puzzle on, as she used to, through out my reading of the work. but may be because she grew old and "smelt" of old age; may be because she grew fat and lumbered across her cell; because she, midway through her term, lost the fire of self-righteousness, because she no more cared about the why-she-should-care, she faded off from the montage all too soon like the ineffectual "reader" (Berg) himself. and i was left with nothing to write home about, but a vague feeling of disturbance. the kind of disturbance that a voyeur feels when the looked-upon looks back at him, kind of knowingly. to discuss killings as if it is a process necessitated by policies, and to dismiss policies as belonging to a period's specific needs and calls, the reader confuses "understanding" and "condemnation", by fondly juxtaposing the body of justice with the body that defines the protagonist's sexuality. Hanna is that open invitation for Berg to "forget the world in the recesses of the body" (p.16). world (as a condition of being answerable), body and guilt move in disturbing loops as eroticism is deftly instilled at unexpected leeks in time (Berg's hepatitis and the vomit, and their ending up in bed in the first chapter, for instance).
there must be a way in which the holocaust, as a word, unassumingly covers all the real - palpable - pain and reduces the choking-to-death, burning-to-death, and hacking-to-death, all to an Event. given the opening to it, through the court scenes in the text, the readers - including Berg, the second generation German - are invited to 'look' and be a (meta-)part of the trial: the 'view' to the time's ruptures - to the "past that brands us and with which we must live". stranded morally in between condemning the self and condemning the past, the novel is a crevice that puts the reader/voyeur behind it. necessitated by the past into attending the trial (necessitated by erotic drives towards the event); all too curious, but simultaneously totally aware of the culmination ( as how a voyeur doesn't really see 'different' events/things every time, but still see them as different), trying to repress the condemnation of the self and immerse in the degradation of the accused (like how the pleasure of looking is suddenly more real than the guilt of the agent of the look) the justice mechanism, as described in the book, turns holocaust into an 'event' circumscribed by the word, not withstanding the descriptions of the church in fire. it invites the non-German reader into watching. the obvious metaphor of Hanna Schmidtz's illiteracy for the un-speak/writ-ability of the horror of holocaust, augments the conversion of real feelings to the vicarious see-and-feel equation. she speaks with her body, in total. she, being the guard who has not written the order which the court considers, dissociates herself from the written code, while ironically becomes the crucible of a written message. she claims to know what "idiocy" is, and her shower-read-have sex routine with the 'kid' is pictured as a leap to transcend it. life and its truth and idiocy is coded in Hanna's body. it is in watching it, freezing it, adoring it, and constantly (without much reason to) apologising to it, that the mind of 'the reader' shapes itself. the figure of the guilty voyeur is implicit. the "recesses" of (Hanna's) body holds not only the world(of Berg) but also a tempting invitation to watch the world as it is held. it dilutes the guilt of being inside any other world (the post Third Reich Germany or the post WW II world, say). to feel a share of guilt for the ruthlessness perpetrated by the human world is subterfuged by the reader's merging with the voyeur. breeding voyeurs of history in schools, colleges, in libraries, in intellectual discussions, in judiciary and in the media, perhaps, this is how we have been successfully disowning our share in what went past.