“nothing can prevent the MEANINGS, which have been LOCKED into the humblest OBJECT or PERSON, from always striking the hour, the serial hour (of Hell or Paradise).” – Francis Ponge
“I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.” – John Cheever
“It’s only with mild surprise I find I don’t so much read anymore, but rather teeter, wonder, take flight, like Pascal, like Madeline, like Bemelmans, like Lamorisse, like my daughters. Like Robert. Like anyone who has ever started or finished a book, or a love affair, or confused the two, in sweet anticipation of the fall.” – Liam Callanan
The one thought that haunts and at times excites the writer in the middle of the night is: “What will they make of these words that I wrote?” And though it is unnatural, the author must not concern herself/ himself with this. As I said, it is unnatural. Show me a writer without an ego and I will show you a spineless twit. Writers have terrible egos, only that some have learnt to hide it well. But believe me, I am not trying to discredit them. It is only natural. The urge to communicate our ‘selves’ dwells in all of us. And in writers, this urge turns into an obsession. What they write is their progeny, that they can only claim relations to through, not necessarily the words that they wrote, but their import. Their deepest desire is to take you to the place they have been to, which could be a heaven or a hell. Yet, this is not what I mean to write of today. I wish to write of the writing that is meant to be burnt away like a secret code in a thriller. And this is exactly in accordance with the wishes of the writer who tries to play coy.
Once the writers have created a world, they can either choose to leave the door open for the reader who wants to get to the bottom of their emotional, psychological, and imaginative frequencies and hence, through the Floo Network, is able to follow writers into their world, the Diagon Alley of writing. Or they can choose to leave the reader behind to travel by themselves, who often might end up in the Knockturn Alley instead. But hey, it’s all good! As long as the reader happens to love the dark arts and doesn’t mind a healthy dose of chimney soot. Eventually, readers end up where their own minds take them. Some enter a strange parallel universe, and others a different planet altogether. Yet, some reach close to where the author wanted them to be, if not next to them, but maybe in the next room, eavesdropping on their solitude. And what else does the author await, but the rarest resounding step of a reader that has found them in their loneliness. It is often a beautiful pact, shared by both, an affirmation of the existence of likeminded spirits.
And now, what of the writer who writes obscurely? They are damned to hell. But let me put it differently. The urge to be read and yet not be completely understood might sound paradoxical. Yet this is the very tension, which resides at the heart of every love affair. As Derrida wrote, “And as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire.” Not being understood opens the gates further into mazes where the writer can lead the reader, often deliberately, so that the readers enter but do not arrive so quickly. The writers test the readers like a potential lover, teasing them and yet, trying their best to make them stay and not spurn them away. The readers must possess the ‘desire’ to understand, get to the bottom of it all. It is the duty of the writer, the beloved, to evoke this desire. The Reader Response Theory gives the reader a license to freely roam and romp about the literary gardens at their own leisure. Now, how must the writers feel, divorced so from their written words, their loving intentions shoved away in such a manner without much weight? They can only look on helplessly from their windows as the dangerously homogeneous masses romp about their carefully tended gardens, toying with their carefully crafted world, reversing floral colors and contours on a whim. Some writers might rejoice at this playful sight, excited like children at the possibilities of interpretation. But what of the writers who wait in their worded fortresses, waiting to be rescued from being eternally misunderstood, guarded and threatened by the self-commissioned dragons of obscurity? Will some wandering knightly reader eventually ride through the forest of words to save the obscure writer who is otherwise ‘sentenced’ to doom? Or will the writer like Rapunzel let down some footnotes that could help the reader in climbing up the text?
But what of the writer who does not write to be understood? Such a writer may write simply and yet leave you with a nagging sensation that ‘this is not it’. Maybe they have moved the lens a bit too close to the skin so that unless you have been there, touched the hand and heart that wrote these words, you are destined to roam in your own furnished gardens, never really entering where the writer stands, smelling the pale flowers of strange exotic scents under the music of the orbs. Yet, is the misunderstood writer content? Often, I feel, in this case, the writer might have managed to repress the feeling of being understood and be almost afraid of being found out or seen. It is the same feeling that overtakes us when we find ourselves in love. All those needs that lay buried are summoned again. And we are ashamed of needing love. Hence, what lies within the heart of the writer is not the desire to be left alone, but the desire to be understood in all honesty of being. They want the reader to arrive at a place they are not always proud to show to them, for often doing this is equivalent to baring their vulnerabilities and absurdities, that they have locked away safely in the seclusion of language itself. Yet often it is the outer aura of this very seclusion that is felt and becomes art itself. I do not necessarily know for sure if such writers exist and if all this time we have not simply been talking about the limits and limitlessness of language. I cannot even vouch for the importance of entering this intentional world of the writer. Yet, I can say, as a reader, that I desire to know of it.
I feel I can speak for and of the urge the reader feels, of knowing the creator of the creation that has awed them. And it is then that I know why writers are afraid to be pinned down to their writings like that. They do not know who you came looking for when you came to meet their corporeal selves, while all along they have been waiting for you in the garden of words.
In this matter, poetry, particularly, interests me. Poets are notorious for writing in a cryptic language. They are known for something else as well. Poets are not paid enough. Hence, this art form can be entered into with relative abandon. The mind is given space. The poets, more often than not, do not write to please the masses or in answer to the trends in the book market. They do not write to be understood. But it is not the same as saying that they do not desire to be understood. Theirs is the language of love, of paralipsis. They seem to be calling- Come after us. Look deeper if you love, if you desire. Look closer. Give time. Get familiar. Come then, to the heart. Look for us. We wait.
“I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, … so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately.” – Jacques Derrida.
Uhi K; 
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