I want to know whether the woman is real. I know she is real, but I want to experience her voice.
Why do I want this?
Because, after all these years, a decade later in fact, I was once more sitting down on that bare earth, a dark brown patch of earth with small dry limpid grass and patchworks of red laterite rock jutting out of the earth, like the whole earth was a stew, the soil was the sauce, and the rocks were pieces of vegetables floating around. And a few moments later, the scent of drying carcasses of once-rotten cashew apples along with the smell that the heated earth gives away here on the hilltop hit me as if it were preserved for me and me only.
I understand the meaning of saameepyam today. Saameepyam is related to samam. Equivalence. Not of politics and of grade and merit but of existence. To exist as concretely as I am, beside me, sharing the same space and time, Your shoulders against mine. the stitched hem of Your sleeve grazing my arm here and then. Your thighs against mine. Our feet dangling down from the seat.
And then, xxx—if I may call you so—you will be the rain. The rain that made all of our stomachs empty and left us desiring for more. You are not simply just a ‘yearning’ I am affixed to. You are what makes yearning possible.
It is so easy to slip from one place to another. All it demands is a momentary easing of our rigid senses. We simply have to re-experience what our senses had once experienced. It is about arranging our senses to those positions in which it had once experienced sameepyam, the hot earth, and the dried cashew leaves that would vanish in a smoke if one throws a half-extinguished cigarette butt into it.
Then again, let us think about how this slippage happened. The slippage happened. It just happened. But it is only later, when I was sitting in that place so much around me but foreign to my situation, that I understood that xxx’s presence, her sameepyam, is a felt experience. But look at the very word which tells me she is samam to me; we both exist as concretely as we exist. To me, she exists here. She is next to me. I can feel her stray hairs falling down and grazing my ears. Your existence, xxx, is all around me. It is language, the word sameepyam, that leads me to this closeness. It is not the limit of language in a negative sense, but the limit that points us towards the physical sensation.
What happened is that as words lead us to things, things lead us to words.
And what is an erotics? Erotics is just about desire and whatever is associated with it.
Kumaran Asan is basically a guy who understood that we humans are always pulled in two directions. One is towards the earth and the other is away from the earth. There is a non-being longing and then there is a being longing. To exist or to die.
Kumaran Asan is basically trying to pull us out into the spiritual realm of non-being. That is why all his characters die.
Literature is basically a stage where being and non-being fight each other. In some, non-being overpowers, in some, being overpowers. But both of them in their extremes are things that we cannot live with easily. If we push ourselves to being, such as by say, Nicholson Baker, we see more of the being bits, and if we go too much towards non-being, we see people like Kumaran Asan where everybody dies. But the ultimate pleasure comes from this standing between being and non-being.
All celebrations are celebrations of being. Non-Being is a sad state to be in (society thinks so).
A meditation on being and non-being. About being and non-being. Something done always alone. A lone. Al one. Always driving us towards being alone. a one.
But he also says that nobody ceases to be. But he says that with another kind of word: aarum thozhi ulakil marayunilla (nobody my friend in-the-world going-behind-a-hiding-place-Not).
Nobody, my friend, no body in the world is not going behind a hiding place.
Nobody, my friend, nobody in the world is hiding.
Nobody, my friend, in the world is hiding.
This is what you get if you take everything literally.
This is what literature does. It tells us that there is nothing that can be not known if you look close enough.
So look, and you shall see.
The sensuality of words.
The real traffic between words and things is a two way flow. How words can create things and how things can trigger words. That is the only difference. In the first one, words are very much smoother and takes us quickly and efficiently to things, whereas in the latter things are not really that easy to catch hold of. They hide their words inside and lets it open and out to us only when it just happens.
Things reveal words only in sudden happenings. And this is why things are more difficult to read. It is a very much indulgent process which requires us to allow ourselves to trip into the word. The best thing in the world happens when you see the word emerge from the object. Like, I look at me and my ex (mukil is her name) sit together from a third person pov, the word ‘being’ comes to mind. I mean that is where I end up after going through a long stream of words.
xxx, I have never felt this degree of longing for someone. Because your eyes, your small eyes framed by a beautiful pine-leaf shaped brow. By virtue of your eyes, I fell in love with you. Such love that it pains me to know that you will not be there anymore. That you had left me, us, who were destined to be together.
Maybe, xxx, one day you might come back to me. It is only such maybe-s that keep me alive.
bare shoulders are the parts in our body which has the most capacity to be naked. they stay in that part from which goes three important roads to our body: the head, the arm, and the rest of the body.
so be careful about baring shoulders. they end up in the pin-up boards of people.
to stay out of all businesses that is built on existence. is-ness is is. is is. so, let us just stay there and be.
this takes superhuman effort.
and the crushing will be hard.
questioning ‘is’ is the beginning of imagination
is
nothing