Fragments you didn’t ask for
Tags: Writing, Prose, Personal Essay, Literary, Stream Of Consciousness

Fragments you didn’t ask for

This picture has no purpose.

This piece has no purpose. It is not only unreliable, it is in fact unnecessary. Literary critics have rattled on for years about the inanity of superfluous prose that refused to inspire action or please people like art ought to do. I’m sure you see the irony here. If you do not, I’d like to sprinkle a needless superfluous quote by Moira Rose,

“You are blind to reality, and for that, I am most proud.”

I do realise I have rubbed in the point a bit too hard.

As I said, this piece is unnecessary. It shall not follow rules. Period. There are thoughts and they shall be not-so-gently purged. If I had to bury them in layers of aesthetic ornaments, I’d laugh it off, like I do every single day.

Why wouldn’t I follow rules? You *didn’t* ask. I am cowed into explaining myself, because of sheer habit. Rules are rules are rules are rules, and I am tired. (The grammar check on my screen has asked me to “remove the redundancy.” “You shut up, G”) Whatever I spew out here, may as well be grossly mediocre. Editing is a full-time job now, and I have logged out for the day. Now that I have been emphatic about my incapacity, here’s a confession: Faulkner, Woolf and a wee bit of Joyce lured me to take the road not taken all the time. Thoughts are to be coaxed into a direction and guided by an idea that is perhaps partly epiphanic. I do not care where they go, for the time being. I don’t have a map yet. I am not proud, but we’ll deal with what we have. What do we have?

A few weeks ago, my only pal in town visited me, and while I was ecstatic, speech turned into a phenomenon I did not recognize. I was aware of the fragments carefully and slowly forming on my tongue — thoughts not weaving themselves together, and context dwindling away. I went on purging. He patiently watched me struggle and held his breath each time an ellipsis appeared, and a whirring “errr”, “oh oh”, “haha”, “um” tried fixing the broken semantics. He gave up and yelled “Bitch finish your sentences, what are you saying?”

I laughed and cried for days thinking about how easily my mind is tempted by distractions. It hops from one impression to another and wants YOU to fill in the gaps. (I really want to talk about Barthes here, and I hate that I am distracted once again.) The confession is, “I can’t collect my thoughts…” (I am now giggling at a memory of a friend who only on sipping alcohol blurted out the same.) “…and shan’t edit unless I am paid to do so”

I also know of the godforsaken clutter. Sometime last year, a friend said: “There’s so much to read, and yet there’s plenty to write about.” I did not pay much attention to her unwitting wisdom, and I am sure neither did she. The thought visits me each time I learn something new. This piece deserves to be ignored in the mountain of TBR/bookmarked pages.

However, writing this is terrifying. It is an attempt to write again. (Dramatic music plays and I am rolling my eyes too)

I remember reading somewhere, “Writing is like exercising a muscle…”and exercising is clumsy.

Now that I have written a Sisyphean loop about why this piece is not for public consumption or derision, I am on the verge of sounding like the bunch of writers seeking space to “explore” and not be accused of folly and foolishness, in that popular essay A Letter on Justice and Open Debate. Here’s another clue, I do not have the spine to talk about my hot takes.

Let’s get clumsy, and squirm at every error here — while I sublimate my petty and fleeting feelings, you could do the same. Or scoff, or pretend this link did not reach you.

I have now have donned my critical spectacles, and see this entire note as an apology of naivety, or worse, a guard from the rational and responsible writing. (Like the millennials call it ‘cringemax bro’)

While I do fear writing, I also do it for a living. My impersonality with my written work must have been T.S. Eliot’s wet dream. (why would you click on this link?)

Besides, it isn’t the fear of writing poorly or of being a charlatan in a crowd teeming with creative minds. Writers at different stages have altered, stretched and made their style malleable to meet the audience and some “dough” halfway. (I have refrained from dropping a Salinger pun, and that’s sad). The fear that gnaws at my cranial nerves, and sends shivers down my hunched back right now is “Oh no, I have digressed again and I can’t stop it!”

The classics have specified unities, and the creative writers have emphasized development and gradual progression; the modernists have abandoned it all, and the postmodernists have ripped every word apart — the summation is appalling but fits, and we’ll make do.

Last summer, I vowed to write more for myself and less for an ideal reader. (Wolfgang) Iser said the Implied Reader gets the writer’s intricate (or bland) thought process. Iser also added that readers actively build the text. The rather long defence of writer-ly supremacy, ends with ‘Writers cannot please all kinds of readers…and if you don’t enjoy it, you suck’

Writing my thoughts down grew challenging over the years, and I realised the ellipsis exceeded the word count. I’d join the dots, build a story, and despise my mind for weeks. While I discovered words, labels and memes, that I identified with; I also censored, bleeped, DoubleSpoke, and used evasive phrases often. I can’t write for myself, I hate myself.

I like Seinfeld, and now you know it too!

The implied reader participates in writing, and with every fragmented thought, I felt like Saleem Sinai or Leto II, with voices chiding and binding my instincts. The cacophony silenced me.

Silence, that I have loved, embraced and found solace in also reminded me that when speech arrives, it refuses to meet the mind. It secretly adores fragmentation. I know why it slips onto the paper as well, and how my finger is always prepared to land on the “backspace” button.

I could erase this entire piece now, I ought to because this bit was entirely a digression from my original title on the draft “An un-sapphic tribute to the evergreen Vita Sackville-West” and here I am, forewarning and foreshadowing the arrival of awfully useless short prose with pictures that kept me alive this year.

I am sharing this pretentious and long prologue because…

“It was just the insouciance of youth,” David Mitchell had said of his decision to begin writing Cloud Atlas. “Sometimes your lack of experience can save you. Sometimes an underinformed decision is retrospectively the right decision and had you had more wisdom, you wouldn’t have done it.”

…the ellipsis is back and I bid you adieu!