Spaniard, A Sulky Teen Going Through Stuff, is 14: AMA

When I last blogged, it was Valentine's Day. Corona was everywhere else, soon there would be riots in Delhi and the Trump-Modi tamasha during which, very probably, a ton of corona virus cases gathered and spread along with other rot.

This blog has not recorded witnessing anything of note for months now. This blog is a sulky teen, navel gazing for all its worth, and wondering why nobody loves or understands it. If there was a convenient, not very heavy stone lying on the road, no doubt it would kick it moodily and - provided the clothes were not made for females - stick its hands in its pockets, while all around leaves agitated grey, empty streets.

The streets were empty for six weeks. Now they're not. I miss the empty streets, not so much the empty shelves, and am neurotically content to stay at home like this....right until the moment I remember this poem: 

II

Let's say we're seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get up
   from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
   about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see if it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
  for the latest newscast. . . 
Let's say we're at the front—
 for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
 we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
        but we'll still worry ourselves to death
        about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
                        before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
                                I  mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
        we must live as if we will never die.

*

Anyway. I'm all out of ideas, or rather I (sometimes) have them but can't be bothered to roll them out evenly with words and bake or season them. They're just lumps in my head and there they will remain.

(Aside: why blogger is giving me different fonts with each paragraph I don't understand. Behave!)

So I outsourced the search for a subject for this anniversary post to twitter. 

AMA, I said, and I had two questions in response:

Amba asked: 

If you had to pick one only, which would you consider a better representation of your bare soul before God and the devil - your Twitter archive or your blog archive?

I had a lucid answer to this forming the minute she asked me, but now it's all gone. However:

The short answer is, I can't pick just one; I won't pick just one! They're two different aspects of my (what is now known as) public facing life, and I think both are valuable. 

Also, if I have to have two entities judging me, I reserve the right to present two different (immortal) records of my self.

As I said to Amba in another context, greed is the true mark of this time of pandemic, and what's the use is arriving for judgement with a curated list of achievements? Bring everything, all the things, I say, and let god and the devil so some work for a change, sorting and sifting.

Ranjani asked: 

So...if civilization were ending and you had to pick ONE film to save what would it be?

You guys...so thoroughly living with a scarcity mindset! Why only one film? Why a film? What kind of a world are we looking at that can accommodate the paraphernalia of film viewing but can only allow a single film to survive? 

I'm so literal sometimes, I want to slap myself.

To be honest, I doubt I'd save a single film. Visual memory is persistent, like vision, and what you've already seen, you'll remember some of. For those who remember what films were, their memories will supply a dream-like memory of cinema. For those future generations that will no longer know what films were, why terrify them afresh when there will be horrors enough? 

Nah. They'll have Tik Tok, ya. Bite-sized cinema, perfect for when you have ten seconds to spare before fighting the next disaster.

*

That's all I have for you. 

Spaniard is 14. You can still AMA in the comments.

Nine: Man at Work

A couple of weeks ago, when my mother was looking through an ancient box of unsorted photographs, she put aside some she especially wanted me to see. Of these, I picked a few to scan. Rather rashly, I put them ALL up on twitter and then swiftly changed my mind and deleted them all.

This one, though, I want to put up. It's my dad at his desk at Geoffrey Manners. This was probably shortly before he got married; we're uncertain of timelines, and because there's no one left who can answer the questions we now have, we just have to speculate. I am not certain this is 1968, but my mother thinks it probably is.

If I cared enough about history, personal or general, this would matter. I care more for memory, though, and for that purpose, this works just fine as it is. There are clues, tantalising enough, in the posters at the back, his clothes, hair.

What I really want to know is, who took this photograph and why was my dad pretending the photographer was absent? Also, why was this photograph put away in a small envelope along with other photos we've never seen, among my dad's things?

Once again, there'll never be answers to these questions.

JH Prynne: 'Moon Poem'

Moon Poem
JH Prynne

The night is already quiet and I am
bound in the rise and fall: learning
to wish always for more. This is the
means, the extension to keep very steady

so that the culmination
will be silent too and flow
with no trace of devoutness.

Since I must hold to the gradual in
this, as no revolution but a slow change
like the image of snow. The challenge is
not a moral excitement, but the expanse,

the continuing patience
dilating into forms so
much more than compact.

I would probably not even choose to inhabit the
wish as delay: it really is dark and the knowledge
of the unseen is a warmth which spreads into
the level ceremony of diffusion. The quiet

suggests that the act taken
extends so much further, there
is this insurgence of form:
we are more pliant than the mercantile notion
of choice will determine-we go in this way
on and on and the unceasing image of hope
is our place in the world. We live there and now

at night I recognise the signs
of this, the calm is a
modesty about conduct in

the most ethical sense. We disperse into the ether
as waves, we slant down into a precluded notion
of choice which becomes the unlearned habit of
wish: where we live, as we more often are than

we know. If we expand
into this wide personal vacancy
we could become the extent

of all the wishes that are now too far beyond
us. A community of wish, as the steppe
on which the extension would sprinkle out
the ethic density, the compact modern home.

The consequence of this
pastoral desire is prolonged
as our condition, but

I know there is more than the mere wish to
wander at large, since the wish itself diffuses
beyond this and will never end: these are songs
to the night under no affliction, knowing that

the wish is gift to the
spirit, is where we may
dwell as we would

go over and over within the life of the heart
and the grace which is open to both east and west.
These are psalms for the harp and the shining

stone: the negligence and still passion of night.

                       ~ from White Stones  (1969)

*

It isn't night; there's no moon to speak of, either now or when the sun's done for the day. This is in lieu of a post I ought to have made on the 21st to [celebrate] another year of this blog.

I thought I was good at remembering dates. Apparently age diffuses ability in addition to all else. Let's call it a kind of wandering at large.

There are times, not regular, when certain poems seem to be a sort of augury or a point of reference - something you'd stick with blu-tac on a wall or the side of a cupboard, so you can remind yourself of something as you come and go. 

 

Some years ago, that poem was (still is) Pessoa's poem '6 September 1934'. That poem made my mother cry for me, I don't know why. Swar took a photo of it immediately she read it.

 

Now, I believe I will need to find a place for this one somewhere unhumid, visible and unassailable. Will I take the Pessoa down? You have got to be kidding me. I need those cold, empty hands available at a moment's notice.

 

*

 

At first I wrote two lines of my own, after I copied the poem. Then I felt miserly and ungrateful, and therefore all of this.

 

It only remains for me to say to those of you who still visit, read, return, browse and comment despite my loud silence, 

 

Thank you!

Belated

For the first time ever, I have missed this blog's anniversary. I began this thing nine years ago on the 21st and I'm rather surprised at myself. 

Maybe I should even change my description and all.

Then I remember that after all I forgot to announce the blog's ninth so.

Let's have another kind of ninth, huh?

And just for fun, the flash mob version.

[Belated] happy anni, Spaniard.

This is not a marriage (or: metaphors, like similes, prove inadequate)

This blog is X number of years old. I don't remember how old it is. I care that it exi(s)ts, that I still post here, that one or two of you read it when you could just as well mail me, because that's how long it has been, that we have exchanged mails and talked and even met offline, and I don't know how to end this sentence.

Which, if you want a metaphor for this blog, has to be better than the tired blog-as-marriage one. Been there, done that.

Anyway.

Just to, kind of, put a cake in front of it and say, "Well done. You made it through another year."

And also to put, I don't know, bhel puri in front of you lot and say, "Thanks for coming back."

The Spaniard at Seven

You know that Calvin & Hobbes strip where he's trying his pathetic hand at doing push-ups and after three he starts to count what it feels like and not what it is? That's what seven years on this blog feels like - it feels like a round dozen or perhaps a baker's dozen.

My poor blog. If it had feelings, it would feel like an unwanted child [Richie Havens, 'Freedom’]. I can't even conjure up some fantastical number to describe the number of years it feels like since I began this blog? It has to be a paltry dozen?

Yes, but a Baker’s Dozen! Thirteen! That’s respectable? Life-altering even?

When I was 12, I wanted desperately to turn 13 as if that birthday was a Rubicon I would cross triumphantly into near-adulthood. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened. I am remembering those years because El Cid will be thirteen soon, and unlike me he doesn’t care one way or another. He’s a more evolved human being than I ever was.

Me, I was the kind of kid people write teen books for: poseur wannabe, confused as heck and both snobbish & desperately wanting to be as effortlessly settled in my own skin as my peer group appeared to be. It seemed to me then that when I turned thirteen, I would mysteriously understand everything in my world that seemed so mixed-up and incomprehensible.

Where I am today feels a little like how I felt then – a state of mind in which I think a year or a certain date will somehow transform my life and make clear my muddied molasses mind. Amber and waiting.

I should be reading poetry, philosophy; I should be watching my own mind. Instead I look for something I cannot find, in teen books. If I was really thirteen I know for certain I wouldn’t touch that shit with the hooked end of a twenty-foot crane. But now I read teen books compulsively, so many of them that I can’t remember who wrote them or what they were about. Details remain but mostly they’re poorly written attempts by adults who try to talk like the teens they no longer are and perhaps never were. When they get turned into movies based on the book, they’re, shockingly, even worse. Who would have thought a bad teen book would be better than the movie?

Why am I doing this to myself? It’s a sinkhole out of which I should be clawing myself out inch by inch. I think perhaps I am looking for a way in to my son’s mind which, truth be told, is nothing like the vocabulary-challenged blank slates that some writers think teenagers are.

 – Harsh. That was harsh, Space Bar.

– You think? Wait. Let me produce evidence.

*

You know what? I was going to produce evidence. I swear. I even took out the book and re-read passages of it but if a quick re-read wasn’t bad enough, the thought of typing up all the rubbish gave me the heebie-jeebies. So you’ll have to take my word for it that the last teen book I read was awful.

[Basically, a girl is made to kiss a boy she kind of likes but she kisses him against her will. Later, when they talk about it, he pretty much says to her that when girls say ‘no’ they mean ‘yes’. And though she tells him she doesn’t know what kind of girls he knows (a pretty lame response, but perhaps she was in shock? I would have been.) by the end of their – what was it? a date? It might have been – she’s swooning all over him again. And that’s just one small incident in a book filled with....gah! I can’t even talk about it.]

This is not to say that all of teen books are bad; they may not be Catcher in the Rye, but they fleetingly catch something real, the good ones. It’s just, I really ought to be doing other things with my time.

Like writing.

*

Which brings me to this blog.

I don’t know what to do with it any more. I keep it like a name I can’t imagine changing but when I say it out loud, it doesn’t feel like my name.

I guess it’ll be here, I will be here, providing poems and excerpts from books which people will come looking for at a later date. One day – perhaps by next year – it’ll have something to say for itself.

Perhaps this is a pre-adolescent and necessary moodiness.

But as always, however rubbish the contents of this blog and however capricious my responses, thank you for reading.

Confessions of a Light Sleeper

In early May the temperatures were 40C. For the last week it's been 43C every single day. What this means is that the house, the roads, even the plants, give off heat like they were efficient and well-maintained solar heaters. I could fry and egg on any step.

We try not to keep the AC on for too long. We slop water on to mats and leave them on the floor. We wet towels and drape ourselves with them as if we were delicate greens at the grocer's. We think of watermelons ans cucumbers and instead get more mangoes than we know what to do with.

So we succumb and turn the AC on at night.

But here's the thing: I can't actually fall asleep when the AC is on. It's nice enough when I'm reading or writing or just messing around lurking on Tumblrs and looking at pretty pictures, but once the light's off, I get anxious.

I look at my watch every 15 minutes and if my anxiety levels are elevated, then every three. Finally, at 10, 11, maybe midnight, I turn the AC off. But then:

If I turn off the main swtich, I am closing off the possibility of turning it back on if the room gets hot again (which it will, in half an hour or less). If I open the windows, I will let what little cool air there is out. On the other hand, in time - in four hours or more - there might be a breeze.

But the stabiliser lights bother me. The mattress radiates heat. I get up and open a window. Fall back into uneasy sleep. Wake up again to, maybe, turn the AC on again and change my mind. Back and forth. Toss and turn.

There's too little sleep in summer. Too much time in that elastic space when sleep approaches and retreats. Too little during the waking hours.

(Also too many mangoes. If you're in the city, please take some off me. Their smell overpowers the house. Did I say: that's another bar to sleep.)

*

It's been six years since I started this blog. In a lot of ways it's like a marriage*: I'm mildly surprised it's lasted this long but can't bring myself to care one way or another to renew the excitement of it. Not when the siren songs of Twitter and Tumblr sound. Not when other new, shiny things keep me off the net altogether.

On the other hand, it's a space. It's where I am and can be usually found. And I'm astonished and grateful that people still turn up, even when there's not a whole lot to see.

In the last month, I've looked at what brings new people here. It's mostly chunks of text - poetry, stuff I've stored here in order not to forget - things like that. The top two, consistently are:Edwin Morgan's 'Opening the Cage' and Anouilh's 2nd Chorus from Antigone. Other searches depend on what schools or colleges set their students to read. Some will search for Arseniy Tarkovsky or 'Penelope's Descendents' and find themselves here.

They're not going to land up on the main blog and see this, but just in case: Hi!


And to everyone else, who still land up despite the erratic, self-indulgent, unresponsive to comments behaviour I display, thanks for reading!
__

*I ought to mention, when I say a marriage, I really mean mine. I know many people who have lovely marriages six years on.

Late to the Manto love...

...but only slightly.

Here's Mohammed Hanif in Dawn:

How are you getting on with your creator?

Have you settled that old argument with your creator: Who is a better short-story writer? You do realise that that this kind of claim hurts people’s sentiments. Especially sentiments of people who don’t read stories, who can’t read stories or who think reading and writing stories was a perversion. I hope you understand why your family didn’t inscribe that God vs Manto argument on your tombstone as you had wished. Censorship even in my death, you protest. No Sir, just common sense. I hope that you are up there with your creator, being argumentative, still carrying on that debate about who is better at the storytelling game. (That kind of thing, by the way, is called a creative-writing workshop these days). If your old friend Ismat Chughtai drops by while you are having that debate, you and your creator should take a break from arguing and say to her: we’ll both go in the kitchen and make tea, why don’t you write us a story.

(I was tempted to quote the very last bit, but that would be unfair to both Hanif and Manto.)

And Supriya Nair's 'Here Lies Manto':

In search of Manto in Byculla, Baghdadi points out that the neighbourhood in which he once lived has changed little. The marble plaques in Christ Church, across the road from Manto’s old house on Clare Road, recall the histories of members of its congregation who lived here over a century ago. Scratch the Urdu and Marathi flyers from the walls of the municipal garden, and the Star of David underneath, confirming its identity as an old Jewish cemetery, is intact. Any evidence of the writer of Mirza Ghalib and Mozail, Thanda Gosht and Letters to Uncle Sam having once lived here, though, must now be imagined.

Also see MS Gopal's images

3 Down. Cryptic

You should know that the stone I was attempting to roll Sisyphus-like is now behind me. I chose to walk around it. It's a kind of freedom, both yours and mine.

The Fifth Face/ Letters

Given that I have never held a job down for more than a year; that I've never even done the same kind of job for too long; that I never know what the next week holds for me, let alone what my plans are for the next year, five years is a commitment I never thought I could make.

Maybe the lack of thought or planning is what kept this blog running for so long. Yes: it's been five years and it's not just a face I'm going through. Let's call it several faces. The blog has crossed the enthusiasm of infancy and is probably settling down into a late middle-age of scattered thoughts and conversations that are held more with oneself than with anything recognisably person-like. This, despite the comments I still get that I sometimes forget or just don't respond to.

But I want to talk about is letters. Letters have always been something everyone in my family has looked forward to with pleasure. My grandfather stayed in touch with a friend in Canada until one of them died. My mother used to write letters to people she'd never met, c/o the names of their own or city, or some absurd approximation of an address. And she'd get replies from them. It was astonishing and joy-giving. The letters were always kind and warm; sometime long and delighted. And these letters were from strangers.

I know what it's like to receive these letters because I didn't have to infer the contents from the expression on the face of my mother; I was allowed to read the letters for myself.

Letters were public property.

Family letters - some of them artfully and well-written - were also public property. They spoke about other people, they asked after everyone, they gave news about happenings. They were not private.

I am wondering where and when I got the notion that letters were intensely private things meant only for the mutual knowledge of sender and receiver. Given that I had never in my life experienced a 'private' letter, one that the receiver would rather not share with everyone, I have no idea when it became clear to me that letters were also a kind of very private and confidential conversation, and to share these kinds of letters wouldbe to betray a confidence or inadvertently give even close family members a glimpse into aspects of your own character that you wanted to protect from their gaze or scrutiny.

School? Possibly, but I can't imagine how. School was where I wrote letters home and of course they were both public and private, in that I knew that the only people who would read them would be my parents, and so I could say things to them without worrying about who else might read my confidences (there weren't many of those, I admit).

Of course, the reverse didn't apply. One didn't allow even one's closest friends to read letters from home, though one might occasionally read out particularly funny bits to them. The letters were put away, under the mattress or in a locker and forgotten about until end of term.

Back home, of course, during vacations, letters came that were no longer public. When the postman rang, I would run to get my letters before anyone else got hold of them. My parents never did open my letters but I was convinced they might. (Though I did have to train famiy in general to not read my letters once I'd finished with them, because, really, even thoughI'd read it first it didn't mean they could read it now.)

I have no idea if this seemed strange to my parents. It must have. As far asI know, they didn't correspond with friends, who are probably the only kind of people who commit confidences to paper. Family was business, sociologically speaking, and letters from any member of family was common property - even the most hysterical, harsh, intemperate or savage letters. And there were a few of those over the years.

Passing lightly over the kind of letters I wrote and received from people who I met every day, and with whom I exchanged letter-notes (sometimes in particularly exigent situations, one posted letters locally), I found myself in a place of letter drought. The only letters I got were unpleasant official communications or impersonal requests for something-or-the-other. Once a year or more infrequently, there might be a letter or poastcard from someone I wanted to hear from.

All private conversation had shifted online. These were necessarily truly private, because my parents were useless with the computer and I got online long after I need have worried about shared or discovered passwords.

There was no room for the inadvertently read letter. Until a few days ago, I had no way of knowing what my feeling on the matter would likely be. Recently, though, a friend wrote to me back home and my mother - perhaps inadvertently - opened it. I found out about it and, because there was no immediate sense of outrage, I sat down to examine what it meant.

Perhaps I no longer have my earlier sense of inviolate privacy with regard to my letters. Perhaps I knew that whatever the letter contained, I wouldn't mind my mother reading it. Perhaps, that it would contain nothing private? Or that - of everyone I know who misses the pleasure of receiving and reading letters - my mother's joy in opening a letter, the ritual of it, would be the most acute and I wouldn't/couldn't deny her that, especially since she abhors emails?

Or maybe I've grown used to airing the most private thoughts in public  knowing they're both always available and quickly forgotten. Like everything else, this also is practice.

Moldy Moldy 70

Did you know there was a poem to ole Winston Ono who might have turned 70 today? I didn't. (It's a terrible one, actually).

        [Image from here.]

Instead, in celebration, in his own write:

The Moldy Moldy Man

I'm a moldy moldy man
I'm moldy thru and thru
I'm a moldy moldy man
You would not think it true.
I'm moldy till my eyeballs
I'm moldy till my toe
I will not dance I shyballs
I'm such a humble Joe.
                        -- John Lennon, In His Own Write.

Also check Google today.

Hanging On

Or, Spaniard Turns IV

After almost closing this blog down, and once even saying goodbye, I've managed to stick it for four years!

Four is the adolescence of blogging. This is when one gets moody and misunderstood, where one wants all the attention of the first couple of years but, unaccountably, spurns it when it is given. There are long, sulky silences followed by acute resentment when no one turns up to ask what the matter is.

On the other hand, there's - not to put too fine a point on it - boredom.

This blog is, if you haven't already noticed, going through an identity crisis.

I've considered closing comments, because I'm usually too busy or too unmotivated to respond, but I can't bring myself to do it. I love comments! I wish there were more! Nobody loves me unless they comment and continue to comment even if I don't respond!

(It's not that I don't, it's that I don't feel like it most of the time).

There's a lot of intention. There's a whole potential of it. Every day I think of something that needs essay length posts.

But the thing is, I'm inclining toward the elliptical.

This is a good time to point you to Aditi's lovely post about mood boards. Why just for poets? I think it's a wonderful thing for everyone to have. A visual/verbal shorthand* for what's going on in one's head at any given time.

So that's what this blog might turn into from time to time. For one thing, I'm too lazy to start another dedicated blog. For another, I might one day want to do long explicatory posts just to break up the cryptic. I mean, there's room for all kinds of rubbish here, right, and even the occasional gem or two?

__

* I like how she also calls it a morgue. I like places like that. There's an apt quote but I'm saving it for elsewhere.

all Bhopalis

If Bhopal had happened five years after it did, I could have been one of those on the AP Express on the night of 2nd/3rd December. It's not likely, because it was not vacation time and chances are that I would have been in Delhi.

In fact, I was in school. One way of dealing with one horror following another (the massacre of Sikhs just a little over a month earlier) was to talk about it with charts and drawings, the way Time magazine and India Today learnt to do. It keeps events at a distance: you can talk about Methyl Isocyanate with drawings of cells and arrows and forget for the moment what it does when it enters the body.

I was not in Bhopal, but I could have been in that town whose station I passed six times every year for ten years. One of the uses of this kind of thinking is to make the thought it could have been me real, if only for a short time.

I'm not linking because everything can be googled: among them, Vidya Subramaniam's article in today's Hindu about Anderson and how he's escaped extradition.

As Copenhagen is a word that's going to be heard more often in the next few days, it would be good to remember that amongst all the talk of carbon and footprints and offsets and emissions, there are other things - relevant to Copenhagen - that no one will bring up. Dow and Union Carbide before them were polluters who never paid: the people of Bhopal did. Not just with their health, but with the years they might have had to live a different life.

I was going to say something about migration caused by environmental disasters and human rights issues but I can just let off a unsupported screed. It is germane to the issue of Bhopal: maybe I will just point you to an old post instead where I talk about it a little bit toward the end.

I'm not sure what the point of this post is - I hope to just remember that there has been no justice even after 25 years; that for all the talk about emission cuts and environmental responsibility, we're nowhere close to drawing a line under that chapter; that it could happen again; that we need to think about what we intend to do, individually and collectively.

Update: Indra Sinha in the Guardian; Hari Batti for the entire week (do check out the Yes Men links)..

the wounded buffalo and other objects

With which image I will be leaving for a while.

II

Blog Birthday. Yay.

**

The evening before last, my father was discharged from the hospital, with instructions to continue the intravenous antibiotics he was being given, for two more days. To this end, my mother, who was with him nights at the hospital, was taught how to give these injections.

It appeared simple in the hospital: she watched as the nurse took out the syringe, poked it into the container containing distilled water; transferred the water from the syringe into another bottle containing the powdered antibiotic; shake it up well; transfer it once again into the syringe. The nurse then handed the prepared syringe to my mother, who, with great trepidation, gave my father the injection.

So far so good? Right.

Discharge all done, we came home and it was time to give him a last shot at night. Just as my mother had done struggling with the distilled-water-to-syringe operation, the electricity went off. They waited in the dark, clutching antibiotic and syringe. The light came back on and mother did the syringe-antibiotic-and-back-to-syringe routine. Time to give my father the injection. My father, suddenly recalling that the nurse had twirled some knob on the side of the needle apparatus, told my mother to hang on while he opened it up.

In the meanwhile, the electricity went off again, and some insect that was buzzing around found its way into my mother's ear. She shrieked, dropped the syringe on the bed and ran out to put warm salt water in her ear.

The electricity back, she began to give the injection finally. But it appeared that my father, far from opening the knob, had closed it. Every drop of the antibiotic spilled out. In panic, my father started turning the knob the other way around. My mother poked her finger with the needle and shrieked again. One injection was wasted.

Harsh words having been traded, another injection was prepared. This time, my father said, bitterly, that he would do it himself, thank you very much. He began operations. The electricity went off.

Shining the torch, my mother bethought herself of one more disaster.

I hope there are no air bubbles in that syringe, she said. It could be fatal.

So with that thought in his head and with the knob having been opened too far and stuff leaking out again anyway, my father began to feel giddy. They threw away the second injection, and each lay awake far into the night to make certain they were alive, if not entirely well.

The next morning, we all sensibly decided to go to a nearby hospital and have a nurse give him his injections, never mind what the doctor said about family being more compassionate and all.

That's the story, morning glory. How have all of you been?

Spaniard Turns One

Or, in which Statutory Navel Gazing and Blogispection happens.

Interior. Early morning. A study.

Space Bar sits at a computer typing away. The room is dark, lit only by the monitor. At the edge of what is visible, are several bookshelves punctuated by the occasional light-coloured spines of books. There is a fan that often whirrs and hums but it is off at this time. Space Bar is careful to type softly, lest those who sleep in the adjoining bedroom should wake.

Take 1.

Spaniard turns one! Gosh!

I’m actually surprised that I’ve kept this blog going for one whole year, posting something – anything – nearly every week. I can’t remember which came first: the thought that it might be fun to have a blog, or the name of the blog, which then demanded that I post to get it started and keep it going.

Cut. Too exclamatory and Dear Diary-ish. And incoherent.

Take 2.

It seems almost mandatory for every blogger to introspect on the reasons why s/he blogs and anniversaries seem to amplify this urge. I find such introspection especially hard to do, because it would mean I know the kind of writing I want to do in that space; it only remains then, to sort out the ‘why’. But I'm not even sure of that.

Some people write very personal, journal-like blogs – almost a form of thinking aloud. As Take 1 will indicate, I can’t do that (and this is the place to emphasise that this goes only for me. I have no problem with people who do have personal blogs.) And though I’ve had several posts on cinema and poetry, some on books, some posts that are links, most are what could be categorised as Misc. At the end of one year, I’m still not sure why I have a blog or what I really intend to do with it. After all, I deleted the first one I had; this should augur ill for this one. But given that I spend the time immediately after I put up a post in a state of mild euphoria, followed by two days of complacency and then a rapidly escalating sense of tension (I have to post! I have to post!), that doesn’t seem very likely.

(Aside: notice also, that this post, like the life of my blog, is still going strong in its second avatar. Hmm.)

I can understand why journalists blog, and why they are so widely read when they do. It’s a place where they can give themselves the space to explore all the thoughts they can’t in the media they engage in. They can be more informal, and have conversations about their work. At the very least, it is a place for them to store their published work. But I am not a journalist.

I think of a blog as a lit space surrounded by a pool of darkness. Why I find writing about my life or more personal matters difficult (apart from my inability to understand how anyone could be possibly be interested) is that it feels uncomfortably close to being a Lady Godiva figure at a lit window at night. Do I pretend the curtains are drawn and this space is indeed a private journal? Or do I assume that there will be people looking in? And having assumed that, would I ignore that fact and do what I would otherwise do? (Is that even possible?)

I prefer to think of this space as a stage instead, and necessarily an artificial one. If I must be in the lit space, I may as well offer something else than a slice of my boring life. And if the light leaches out into the dark places and draws in some figures every once in a while who will participate, so much the better.

Like several such spaces that hold a few people in for a period of time, blogs can become a real world sufficient in itself. We know each other by our real or assumed names and our opinions. If we do not know the personal details of each others’ lives, we know, through the writing, what any given person is likely to think, or how s/he will react. Even what we react to are often the same things. We live in an echo chamber and we find our choruses rather pleasant – even the occasional dissonance (who was it said you can have no harmony if everyone sings the same note?).

I enjoy that. I enjoy the eventual sense of community, the opinions that people hold, the way they express themselves and the conversations. I read several blogs for these reasons; I can only assume that someone somewhere likes to read mine for similar reasons.

So…Spaniard turns one.

Thank you all for reading!