Monthly Archives: Aug 2018

A Design for Life

There is no surer way of knowing your emotional state and temperamental tendencies than the sort of music that’s grasped you. The liking one takes to the type of music is somewhat biologically determined. People who have an eclectic music taste, in most cases, don’t know how they exactly feel.

One definitive sign that I’ve just about got my mojo back is, I find I’m able to listen to some fun tunes again. For nearly a year or so, I could only have classical or jazz in the background, while couldn’t even bear the thought of putting on anything else. But now, I’m starting to play the likes of Of Monsters and Men, Spoon, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Manic Street Preachers. I’m on good terms with the Waterboys and the Jam as well (after a long while). And I’ve long been on good terms with Nick Cave. Although not quite ready yet to bring myself to listen to something like Glasvegas…

Propositions

A. Things are always much more muddled than they appear.

B. The repertoire of possibilities is always more extensive than we believe.

C. We often dont know the grounds of our inclinations. We are making choices that we are inclined, by something, to make.

“You Don’t Work the Lake Out”

If dreams still are the royal road to the unconscious …

Was dreaming the other night that I was working out how the centipede works. Had such a lucid, aha moment waking up which shed light for a few seconds on a life-long pattern — I took a mathematical approach to living where everything was rendered in terms of equation. AS IF neat, linear, progressive processes can be identified and ingredients discovered, all major problems can be solved. So dogmatic — almost following-rules-sort-of dogmatic! So lack of trust of organismic forces life itself contains.

When asked by his muse about how to work out a poem, Keats says, “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”

The centipede never knows how exactly it could manage to coordinate its more than a hundred legs harmoniously to move forward. It’s an inherent, built-in function. Requesting an exact walking formula of a centipede, were it human, would render the creature crazy. Sometimes — maybe most of the times — you don’t need to have prior knowledge in order to proceed. Maybe the keenness in knowing the formula (the so-called thirst for knowledge) is symptomatic, prompted by fear.

Feeling Free

Powerful interview with Michelle Williams in Vanity Fair…I never thought I’d like her (although she’s a fine actor), but now am changing my mind:

“I never gave up on love,” she later tells me, saying that she has spent the 10 years since Ledger’s death looking for the kind of “radical acceptance” she felt from him. “I always say to Matilda, ‘Your dad loved me before anybody thought I was talented, or pretty, or had nice clothes.’ ” I can hear her voice crack. She sometimes can’t believe that she’s found this kind of love, at last. “Obviously I’ve never once in my life talked about a relationship,” she says, “but Phil isn’t anyone else. And that’s worth something. Ultimately the way he loves me is the way I want to live my life on the whole. I work to be free inside of the moment. I parent to let Matilda feel free to be herself, and I am finally loved by someone who makes me feel free.”

It’s not that at all am partial to the “never-give-up-on-love” cliche. Am not. Am now inclined to proceed my life without using this massively ballooned word ever. It’d be curious to see what people would be saying to each others and doing to each others if the word “love” is culturally banned.

But am very much taken by her phrasing on struggle to be free.

It Takes Time

Naipaul on being a writer:

“The late Philip Larkin—original and very grand, especially in his later work—thought that form and content were indivisible. He worked slowly, he said. “You’re finding out what to say as well as how to say it, and that takes time.” It sounds simple; but it states a difficult thing. Literature is not like music; it isn’t for the young; there are no prodigies in writing. The knowledge or experience a writer seeks to transmit is social or sentimental; it takes time, it can take much of a man’s life, to process that experience, to understand what he has been through; and it takes great care and tact, then, for the nature of the experience not to be lost, not to be diluted by the wrong forms. The other man’s forms served the other man’s thoughts.”

“How, then, could I write honestly or fairly if the very words I used, with private meanings for me, were yet for the reader outside shot through with the associations of the older literature? I felt that truly to render what I saw, I had to define myself as writer or narrator; I had to reinterpret things. I have tried to do this in different ways throughout my career. And after two years’ work, I have just finished a book in which at last, as I think, I have managed to integrate this business of reinterpreting with my narrative.

My aim was truth, truth to a particular experience, containing a definition of the writing self. Yet I was aware at the end of that book that the creative process remained as mysterious as ever.”

Then, wonderful summary (if by Proust) on the gap between the person as an author and a private being:

“This method,” Proust writes (in the translation by Sylvia Townsend Warner)—and he is talking about the method of Sainte-Beuve—“ignores what a very slight degree of self-acquaintance teaches us, that a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.” And a little later on, Proust elucidates: “The implication [is] that there is something more superficial and empty in a writer’s authorship, something deeper and more contemplative in his private life…. In fact, it is the secretion of one’s innermost life, written in solitude and for oneself alone, that one gives to the public. What one bestows on private life—in conversation, however refined it may be…—is the product of a quite superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world.”