the worlds needs to hear, so that I may rest in peace, but the world will turn in the same frustration I hold for it now.
The good news is that my writing is not solely timely. I don’t think that my work will be dated if published in ten years; the worlds and their depth, their insight, their dissatisfaction, stretch not towards only the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd century, but towards infinity. Fifty years from now, no one will know the difference between what happened in 2011 or 2013 or 2016; they are both years of the early 21st century; what seems so distilled, so urgent, will be just part of the past, like every other moment of urgency that came before it.
Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still urgent for me. I’m glad to have learned that the act of feeling that my writing is no longer in my private space has calmed me down, but I can’t avoid the fact that my world as we know it, right now, in this very decade. This is the decade in which the world will continue to descend into its never ending stupidity, a culture of video games that make us feel like we’re in video games as we become taken over by the very rich, destroy ourselves for the sake of profit, and the earth is eaten up until what remains are skyscrapers. Or, the earth may re-bloom, use technology to enter the world into a state of global collectivity, where old definitions can die out for more inclusive ones, where we continue to take walks in the park even as we take those same walks in a network. I want the world to turn once again, to begin a new moment of itself, much like the Mayans strangely predicted (global, much?). I feel like I’m an unfortunately big part of this. I refuse to be silenced. I refuse to pretend that I’m like anyone else. I refuse to dim down my voice when my voice is exactly what the world needs right now. And, that makes me impatient, anxious, driven to succeed, and times, a monstropolis of my own.
Where’s a good back massage when you need one?
December 21st, 2011: “young versus old writers…”
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
