A writer who begins young is like a meteor. (S)he is originally overwhelmed by the sheer inertia of his talents, the sheer power of his skills, and often charges recklessly at that which he doesn’t know. After passing his first planet, he suddenly finds himself in its orbit. He wants to reach the core of this planet, and no matter how much he desires to escape, he can tell that he is falling down. The young writer begins to shed, very quickly, but powerfully, pieces of himself, shards of his skin that, no matter how small or big they may be, impact that globe. Finally, he hits the planet, and he is incinerated into ashes. At the bottom of that impact lies a hole that only he could have made, a hole grander and more compelling than any hole thus made in that planet. Until the next young meteor comes around, and finds herself tumbling towards a world she knows she never chose, but has to dent.
A writer who begins at an older age has written probably for decades before he writes a work of value. He is clearly talented, but he has no armor around his body, no gait to which his work may center upon. Yet, somehow, someday, an event occurs, a moment of such seismic gravity that the older writer finds himself inspired in ways that never were before. Suddenly, the act of writing, which was at once hefty and bothersome, yet necessary, becomes fluid, and the worlds create themselves. In the text may be no words that haven’t been said before, yet in them lie a gloss, a steel, a luminance that shines over the text and makes it seem as if all the words have become new in front of our eyes. The old writer then begins to orbit and collide like a new writer. The initial impact tends to be smaller, yet the rips that the impact made into the earth almost seem in some ways more profound.
With youth comes innovation and freshness. With age comes sagacity and wisdom. These tropes of age have remained fairly constant, and writers are no different in this regard.
December 22nd, 2011: “masks…”
What is it with artists my generation and their preference to wearing masks? They go by pseudonyms, they never connect with the public unless scripted, they associate themselves with their meat outfits or their sunglasses. In other words, they hate being seen as themselves.
But, I have to ask why? I too understand the need to globalize the self, to take every little thing that makes me rooted in this world and toss it into the wastebasket so that only the way I imagine the world can remain. I, like them, want to say that I can be any and every person in the world, that I can create a mode of looking at the world that comforts the uncomforted and challenges the fixed. At the same time, I recognize that I can’t get away from the fact that I like men, that I’m of South Indian descent, that I’m crazy young, and that I have enough scars on my heart to sink the Titanic. That doesn’t make me any less relatable; on the contrary, it’s how I can not only make people relate to my specifics, but treat them as so distant, so distorted, that they can become universal.
Your art has to, at the end of the day, be your art, and you can try to chase the incredibly intricate and complex visions of the world that tether you to the world as much as you like, but you have to realize that it’s your doubt that becomes another person’s doubt, your longing that makes another person see a part of his ex-lover in your art. It is the moment that I exhaust that which makes me a human, transcend each and every particular to the point that they become the dust on my apartment floor, that I can become universal, that I can enter into every mind that was one never mine but is now only mine, that I can become what a Westerner would call God.
December 23rd, 2011: “on labels…”
What I find incredibly misguided about the early 21st century marketplace is the confusion between that which is literature and that which is marketed as literature. Great works have art have always been impossible to define by labels as vague as “science fiction” or “mystery,” but instead in their ability to uniquely channel the sensibility of the human experience in ways that challenge or complicate human existence. Works of the last ten years or so, however, have not even strived to create such intricate worlds. Works that are considered “literary fiction” are recognized as such for their decision to favor character development over plot, whereas “genre fiction” tends to favor plot over character development. Neither are effective tools in gauging literature, but they are effective in creating passive labels that can then be used to efficiently market works by writers to certain audiences. Some people think that it may be the case that, within the early 21st century, we are seeing a market more open-minded in promoting work that is of multiple genres, that might distort and bend the space of what genre means for the sake of telling a story. That’s all fine and clear, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re in very weak times when it comes to literature.
December 24th, 2011: “the collective…”
I just realized that we’re moving out of an individual world. Not a subjective world, where the individual is recognized as, well, unique and individuated, but a world in which that interior psychology is recognized and nested among a consciousness that every person is subjective, and that every person has right to their subjectivity; in other words, a world where a multitude sounds greater than an individual, but a multitude that doesn’t summate every individual in that multitude, but instead goes back and forth between every individual in that multitude to touch on every person’s truth rather than a grand truth. This is something that I’ve already discussed, both in relation to my own work (We Are the Poorest (Country) in the world, where there are hundreds of individual narrators, but none that tie together, with the exception of the collective “We’s,” but I don’t think of them as real characters, but allegories for the voice of a collective), and the political exterior (Occupy Wall Street), but what I’ve not realized is how that changes the West’s relationship to subjectivity. Even in modernist/postmodernist works, there is a Sethe, or a Leopold Bloom to grapple onto. It’s only in the extremely postmodern work of people like Barth where the idea of a character or language centered on character is subverted, but not in a way that then leads to a light at the end of the tunnel, but an infinite jest of, well jest. I want to keep both worlds, in that I’m very much a fan of the critiques of language of postmodernism, while at the same time seeing the special snowflake of everyone.
The problem is that the collective drowns me. I see such a beauty in a world where every person has an individuated opinion that can be accessed and then made active thanks to the Internet, and I think that’s going to be one of the touchstones of the global era. I just think of, as we continue to be compressed, as we continue to become closer together to the point that we merge, to the point that the networks that currently relate us begin to unite us, physically, mentally, emotionally, that it will be hard for people who are frustratedly individuals, even in the most collective of societies, to create worlds that are accessible only to themselves, that later become accessible to the rest of the world as they crack the eggs of their interior and reveal their splendidly yellow brim. I’m lucky. The 21st century still rewards individualism. I just worry for people who have the “Kiran” gene in the 24th century.
December 25th, 2011: “random thoughts that both have everything and nothing to do with Christmas…”
I was working on my novel before my parents called me towards the Christmas tree-> I don’t know what to make of my first novel. It’s a work I’m very proud of, but I fear that no one else will like it. I really like that the stories are so mellow and human, but what if no one else gets it? What if they tell me that I’m not writing the true narratives of poor regions, even though I’ve made it clear that these are regions I made up in my head, regions that don’t actually exist in this world, but reflect truth onto ours? And, then, there’s the fact that something feels missing from it. I don’t think the thread that connects my being to language is in it. I think that some of the stories are weaker than others. I think the transitions could be even smoother. Yet, I also feel done, that this novel is over, and I’m ready to begin my next one (in fact, I wish I had begun it even earlier; that voice feels dying to me as well). I feel like I want to wait until someone else at least sees it (no one else has read the novel except myself) before I make changes that might not even be needed. I might be being a tough critic