Accepting My Place: The Early Journals
(2007 to 2015)
By K.B.
Copyright 2017 K. B.,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2928-1
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Preface
And, so, I decide to self-publish again a collection of early writings, knowing that next to no one will read it, that the handful of people who would pick it up would probably label it as self-absorbed, and what for? Well, I enjoy reading the journals of writers, and I think that, here or there, I said something of value in my little scribbles that didn’t make it into any of my other writings. Of course, since most of my early writing falls into the realm of the precocious, you might have to look around for it.
I started blogging because one of my good friends also wanted to start a blog, and so we decided to do it together. This was towards the end of my time at New York University, after I had finished off a year abroad studying at La Universidad Autonoma in Madrid. This year was absolutely fundamental to my understanding of the type of writer I wanted to be and my theories that would come later. However, I started blogging fresh off the time when I had finished my year abroad, a time which convinced me I wanted to spend the rest of my life traveling and working on my novels; nothing more, and nothing less. I was figuring out how to assort my fledgling thoughts into the Narrative of Literature, which meant I was trying to actively place myself into the writing of Critical Theory. Of course, with age, I realized that theory means little, and it is the art that matters. However, most of my writing for 2011 falls into my theories of literature and novels.
I decided it was thematically interesting to insert some of my earlier writings into this journal, and so I have inserted a section called, A Walk Down Memory Lane, in between the years 2011 and 2012. This collection includes personal essays, experimental fiction that didn’t end up developing, and theories of philosophy and art that coincide with my thinking from my college days, but also did not progress.
2012, particularly around March, marks the point where I started to reach my own voice as a diarist. Having finished college, and having started traveling around the world once more, I found myself interested in the emotionality of my thoughts, and the greater depth of what they meant. This style more or less marks the rest of the blog. I added another intermission to the novel between the years 2014 and 2015, a set of failed personal essays on some of the lands I have lived called Home (I still aspire to develop a set of essays or stories inspired by the cities all around the globe that give me that feeling of home, but at the moment, that project has yet to actualize). After 2013, I lost a lot of interest in blogging, and only wrote sporadically I did start to experiment with writing in my other languages here or there in 2014 and 2015, and I wrote prolifically at the end of 2015. Ironically, since that time, I completely lost interest in blogging. I ended that year with another failed story that I got inspired to write during a visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico, which I named Notes to the Creator.
After two years of not blogging, I decided to close my blog, but keep my writings alive, in this book form. I chose do so under the hope that, in the same way Flaubert or Woolf’s random thoughts have inspired me, the thoughts in my journals, whether they be densely emotional or intellectually abstract, are of use to any one who happens to glance at them. As always, I thank my parents, Subrahmanya and Annapurna Bhat, for being the only two constant people to shower me with love and attention. Despite the problems we have encountered, assuredly which you will read about here or there in this collection, they are the only two humans who assure me that I have someone to live for.
2011
November 20th, 2011: “Intro: I don’t believe in blurbs…”
I don’t believe in blurbs. Nor do I believe in telling people that they should read me. I believe in the power of art, the power of worlds that are so intricate, so complex, so reflective of the world that actually exists, that it’s hard to believe that they were created. Art moves us from X to Y. Art makes our world look just a smidge more pretty. There’s not enough art these days. There’s a lot of stupid Ben Stiller movies, there’s a lot of songs that don’t make sense, and there’s a lot of writing that’s trying to either send us back to the 19th century or make us truly believe that the answer lies in cutesy texts that make fun of text message culture.
None of that is art. None of that aspires us to be greater than what we are. None of that persuades our world towards a greater direction.
We clearly need art more than ever, and our need for art becomes even clearer when we realize that the 21st century doesn’t have to be an endless stream of youtube videos of puppies licking each other or contrived confessionals. There needs to be an alternative.
Let me say that I don’t believe that artists have to be part of movements. Sometimes, it’s only one artist for a ten year block, then another artist for a ten year block, and then maybe two for the next ten year block, which we then lump into a movement. If that was the world we were in, then I’d think it’d be very stupid to try to name a movement that might not even exist.
Art is at its best, however, when an entire group of artists are aligned with one turn of the world, and decide to represent that turn in a very similar way. I would be lying to myself if I didn’t feel like something on those lines was happening to us, right now. Look at Occupy Wall Street. Look at the protests in front of Washington against fracking. Now go over to Tokyo or Madrid or Sao Paolo and see those exact same protests. Then, check out those protests that were once in Cairo, but still in Damascus. After you’ve seen all those social movements, check out the work of JR, a French 28 year old who paints human eyes on the poorest parts of the world. Check out the music of M.I.A., the Sri Lankan Brit whose work zigs back and forth across continents and genres until you don’t even know what you’re listening to anymore.
The modernists saw the end of something great. The postmodernists saw a new cultural logic that was replacing that great. We see something great replacing what was once great. We no longer see the West, but the globe. But, that world can’t exist yet. We may want to party with that Brazilian you met at the bar last night and drink honey wine with her Ethiopian friend, but true globalization doesn’t exist yet. We think it exists, but it doesn’t.
So, let’s change that. Let’s get out of representative democracies (and for some people dictatorships) that don’t even care of our votes and move towards a system that does. Let’s re-imagine art as global so that new arts can be developed, ones that don’t just fuse West plus West, but West plus world. In fact, let’s toss away all those definitions of pseudo-progress and Englishtment, hat we’ve come to accept for the last four-hundred years in the West, the last four hundred years of oppression that defined the Global South, the four hundred years of isolation of the Far East. Let us throw it all away, and re-define our histories in the shape of the world.
That’s what my blog is all about.
November
