A Writer's Little Stumble?

A recent discovery of mine is that when my mind doesn't have a grip, its creativity is at its best: it has nothing to do with me, the guy who takes any initiative: it is my mind, yes - a bundle of thoughts of which I am sure, I am the only witness, but my mind - it has a,well, a mind of its own. Perhaps its movement is controlled by some law of inner nature that is yet to be discovered by science. Creativity when under pressure seems to be a corollary of this fact. In recent times, half sleep states have churned out some pieces of writing that have surprised me. to the extent that I end up wondering if it was indeed I who wrote it. But thankfully I have been conscious at those times and possess the memory of writing every word - albeit on another plane, and that puts any doubt of whether I am possessed, at rest. The most noteworthy example would be "Come, visit me by my grave" - a piece I woke up thinking I had written in a dream. Specific details were new to me when I re-read the article - I supposed that this is what writing hangovers felt like.

At such times, I gladly hand over custody of my pen to my mind, letting it do as it pleases, giving it the authority to google synonyms for words as well (yes, I do that a lot). There are times when I go through what is written and then correct it, and those when I consider the words far too holy (forgive my impertinence) to be tampered with. I believe the state of my mind can be fathomed by those who read the work - at least the ones who know me well.

During one such unguarded moment yesterday, my unsteered heart took a turn that I had been consciously avoiding - one that had never forced itself upon me - a dare that I had sort of given myself but had chosen to not take up - I expended some ink on writing in Tamil. It wasn't a great piece, just a couple of cliched lines that are usually passed as dismissive statements in my mother tongue laden with philosophy but often never meant. I wasn't particularly proud after I wrote it - it had sounded better in my mind, but not great on pape- well, on the screen. I still thought I'd let it be.

I often disconnect with my writing once I publish it on my blog (that'd explain the spelling mistakes in my old articles) but this one stayed on in my mind - not its content but the fact that I had written something in another language. Well, you can laugh, but you've got to understand this: it takes quite a bit of tuning to get into the mode of writing, especially when it is poetry. Language isn't natural but feelings are - it takes a lot of canals to force formless, shapeless emotions to form phrases that truly represent them, in a way that every reader, irrespective of the era, should be able to connect to exactly the same feeling. Such channeling takes a while to adapt to, be it in any language. Command over the language is secondary. You need to think in words. Yes, it's a sacrifice to be a writer. We don't do it only because we like it - I like to call it mental pregnancy - the experience needs to be delivered. And I've tuned my mind so well that it's one big slut - it gets impregnated by every silly sight these days (I'm probably the only happy guy to say that).

Tuning the mind is similar to tuning a radio - each language is a frequency and once you're tuned into - each commercial frequency value is a language, and once you want to tune out of a frequency, it takes a lot of effort to tune back into it. Tuning into a different language takes a lot of time too. People unable to express themselves are the ones who aren't able to hear anything other than noise on the radio - ultimately, it's all a question of right training and so anyone can become a writer. Anyway, so, this Tamil thinking that generated Tamil writing got me - um, thinking. I worried that English had deserted me. At least I wasn't guilty since I hadn't initiated this transformation.

Yeah, Tamil is my mother tongue - and for the record, I like it, but so what? Does that mean I should only do "Tamil" stuff (whatever that means)?

Did I disturb the membrane? Burst a bubble? Start a sequence of ripples? Ok, I think I'm blowing up a simple matter. I guess I'd rather not speculate, and instead, sit back and watch.

Written at my room on 20:57 on 25.7.2016