This post is not intended at bragging. I am posting it here
as a mere diary entry to describe the state of my mind - more of my heart at
this time. This is an investment that might serve as a reference to me at some
time in the future, and, hopefully, also be something for people to relate to.
Channelised emotion is poetry*
Poetry.
It's a membrane to rupture..
A hymen, jealously guarded, if you will.. It is a question
of it breaking once..
And once that happens, the flow continues, for as long as it
does. It would be audacious of me to say that after that you can write at
will..
Writers, why, any artist will agree with me when I say that
there is little choice in art.. It happens when it does..
An artist has no right to be proud of his work.. It flows from somewhere through
him out into the open.. I have found myself marvelling at my own work
occasionally - amazed, surprised that I was able to do it.. The truth is that I
never did anything.. It flowed through these hands that I deem mine..
So, yeah, poetry.. I always thought one had to be extremely emotional to be a
poet, and for a very long time, I considered myself a cold, heartless man..
After the rupture, I realised that those meagre tinges of emotion that
occasionally possessed me were sufficient to churn poems out of my heart.. All
that was required was a tiny squeeze - not unlike that given to a wet sponge to
release water.. Of course, one needs to be very comfortable with the language,
so that there is no hindrance to the flow of thought as words - the translation
should be so smooth and so swift that the writer is unable to notice it
happening. And for that, he has to pay a price. Thoughts in the mind arise in
sentences - or at least in phrases - as words, not as fragments of mindstuff.
This can be a serious illness - perhaps others have ways to work around it, but
it is something I suffer from. I think in words - perhaps that deters my
thinking - inhibits, or at least slows it down. Perhaps I can be faster. I
spend fractions of seconds in framing grammatically acceptable sentences even
when thinking to myself - a cross I have to bear, I'm afraid. Aah, this is
getting deeper than I imagined. Very well,..
In another plane, however, writing amounts to siphoning milk from a cow's
udders - but it is to be remembered that whether to secrete or not is the
organ's choice. Milking the heart for words doesn't sound very ethical -
perhaps a case of taking undue advantage of something sensitive - self
manipulative, in fact, but sometimes it helps one deal with the emotion. Sometimes
you record it for future reference: as harmless (or harmful) a a diary.
Sometimes the flow is unstoppable: you just have to write it, that's how I
started.. The beauty is, this actually happens - but on its own, it cannot be
forced. I, for one, never saw myself writing poems (I wouldn't call myself a
poet even now) in this birth, but it came to me at a time when I least expected
to write. In fact, some of the articles/poems that I consider my best ones came
to me at times when I had tried to give up writing, at least temporarily, not
unlike the shy lover who looks at the woman he loves when she is looking away.
Writing something down creates a potential difference that triggers the flow of
writing that surprises the writer.. Yeah, and that's why my articles are long.
Once the writing reaches the outer world from the inmost recesses of the
universal Soul, it is labelled with the name of the medium it took to travel
through - not the pen, not the sheet on which it is written, but the name of
the man who held the pen. Yeah, another one of those ways in which the world
works. And we do what were best at - we get used to things and
"teach" our offspring that this is how things are.
No writeup on writeups can be complete without a word on the pride that fills a
writer upon listening to genuine appreciation. Art for the sake of art is one
thing, but a work of art is incomplete without its admirer. And the artist
wants it too. If Sherlock Holmes can "flush(ed) up in pleasure" at
"earnest words uttered" by Watson, I'm sure it cannot all be wrong.
And now I read this write up again, with my lips curling
into a smile.
*Yes, I wrote that. A more generic definition would be, "Emotion
channelised into words is poetry". (Quote appended on 21.4.2016 at 1:51am)
Commendable one.
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