I am writing this blog when humanity is sleepwalking through a pandemic. Historians are urging people to document their lives. And we are doing just that- in our own myriad ways. But there is another side to this pandemic that makes me wonder, if it is as my mum said, “nature’s way of restoring balance”. If so, nature observes us very intelligently, sentiently. This is by no means a direct cataclysmic phenomenon like the melting of the icecaps caused by climate change. This seems to be very psychological, very much politically assertive. It has changed or at least brought to a relative hold the maddening capitalistic race. And though I am feeling an enormous sense of absence, and empathy for those who have to risk their lives every single day to save others and those who grieve, I am awestruck by this force that is bigger than us. It is quite humbling really.
One morning, I had been dreaming about the aesthetics of light and shadow and I dreamt that my parents wanted the entire house to be rearranged with respect to the classical aesthetic rules. Like the crevices and the protrusions had to be alternative, everywhere. I thought of the senseless impossibility of it all, the practical impossibility. But deep inside I was amused. Maybe it’s just that. What artists do at the end of the day. They try to keep the world amused as it goes through catastrophes, together at times, at times alone in their lone rooms.
But there is more. And it is one of the reasons why I am writing today.
I think a part of me wants to resist self-reflection or a more reflexive monitoring of my own thought processes. In a way, I want to be unaware and observe other lives, so I can come to understand mine, slantingly. Maybe that’s why I like looking at the world through the window of a book. I don’t want to face the world head on. I want to learn from life without paying its heavy prices.
What triggered this? Maybe reading Alice Munro? I was reading the introduction to Alice Munro’s Runaway. It said, “What Makes You So Sure You’re Not the Evil One Yourself?” Now you see, I have always felt that I was the evil one, but for different reasons. Let’s take morality, for instance. I cannot take a morally high ground because of my past thoughts, if not actions. I have no right to judge anyone else. But that’s not the evil I have in mind, the one that dwells within. It is the very fact that I can think of judging at all, irrespective of my thoughts/actions. Rather my thoughts that fell outside the realm of a morally high ground, where I admitted to being the evil one, made me human and humble. The upholding of a higher ground left me stone cold. But I don’t really know about that. For instance, I do not really know at what point our understanding gives way to conditioning. Our insecurities. The part played by a cruel economic reality. Our upbringing, education, differences, patriarchy. All I do know is that even though I understand these things and comprehend their import, but what is already inside me, has been inside me for years, how do I uproot it after decoding it? How do you stop feeling a certain way? I am talking not of being politically correct, but of our most private thoughts and feelings whose continual presence we may never admit to. How do feelings change? How do you start feeling differently about something? The mind itself is a maze. What is it that can profess to reaching its core, its depths and creating a seismic ripple? I firmly believe that this is where a reading book comes in.
It is beautiful how you begin to trust an author’s world. I trust fiction with my life. I can allow a book to look into me and slowly make me see things that I do not otherwise wish to see. And when I read the story “Dolly” in Dear Life, I just knew it, I lived that story, every word of it. And I thanked Munro with all my heart for having written it so stunningly truthfully, so stark, so honest, so cruel and yet so healing. It was what I needed. Not a reductive sympathizing of a half distracted and equally confused friend. I needed Munro’s insight. I need intelligence which does not stop being human, does not stop being cruel, does not fall short on truth to sound sweet, does not turn into a godly dictum, does not try to lift me up but sits with me in the ditch and lets me see what is happening in an entire universe inside me. And every sore that Munro masterfully touches, begins to heal in the delicate light of comprehension.
And so today, I extend my thanks to the authors. I owe it to them for having written across time and space, for reaching out without fail to those that needed to hear their guiding voice, and for creating these insightful portals to life. Now I am truly beginning to understand why it is so important to make art. Not only for what is happening inside of you but how by being true to yourself, you can make other people’s journeys less lonesome. It doesn’t matter how many people read it, see it, reward it. Even if one person does, it matters to the universal balance of things. Butterfly effect.
I think I am going to come back to this quote all my life. It is from one of Munro’s interviews:
Because there is this kind of exhaustion and bewilderment when you look at your work… All you really have left is the thing you’re working on now. And so you’re much more thinly clothed. You’re like somebody out in a little shirt or something, which is just the work you’re doing now and the strange identification with everything you’ve done before. And this probably is why I don’t take any public role as a writer. Because I can’t see myself doing that except as a gigantic fraud.
Alice Munro
This does two things distinctly for me, out of many. One, that the feeling of revulsion and distaste I get when I look at my past work, is normal. I never have to look at it. I have to look at what is happening right now. What I am making right now. What I am doing right now. That is all that is me. And that gives me immense relief. And secondly, it’s okay not to be the accumulation of all you have done. We are all moments. To say otherwise is to be fraudulent. A very dangerous territory.
And so we must, thinly clad as we are, continue to read, write and create art, while the storm rages outside. May we enjoy the tranquility offered by this shelter of words. May the catastrophe outside reveal newer undulations of the future on the horizon, forever holding its breath, waiting, yet to be explored. And yet, very often, the best of adventures happen indoors, deep within yourself. Down the rabbit hole, and into the recesses of the mind!
Uhi K; 
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