A Farewell Tribute

You have  done well. That you sag now stands testimony for the way you have served me, for you sag, having borne the weight of my words, having served as the bowl to carry what I poured out.

Your every tiny feature rests in my heart, be it a tiny misalignment of the frame that holds you in place or a creak on the wood at your back that faces the wall behind you, and I love you whole - I may boldly say so, for I have truly known you.

You might not possess a mouth to speak from, but they way you lay in my arms when I held you alongside my marker pen speaks more words than I could ever write upon you.. And what better way to show your love for me than retaining stains of marker ink that are ghosts of poetry that I wrote, photographed and forgot countless times.

I prepare to leave this haven now, in search of another, but will I ever find a companion such as you? And yet I turn away, fighting to hold the tears that brim in my eyes, with an image of your cleaned face that refuses to let go of the faded ink that adores it - a critter which is no longer untouched, for it has known the touch of my love. And I smile to myself, for I know now, that I have paid you my return in full, for your image shall shine clearer in my head and heart than my words have ever shone upon you. Perhaps love of the most intimate kind is a contest where each hopes to love the other more. And the greatest joy comes from losing. I digress, but don't you know it is an attempt to ease the pain that fills me? To gulp down the lump that fills my throat and hold my shaking self, in a vain attempt to contain my grief?

I may have had many a muse, but without you, would it have had any use?

You were my mother, my brother, a true friend who made me speak endlessly at times when I've felt to choked to be able to utter any word. You saw through me in a way I never could see through you, and proved a true support to my ailing shoulder on my darkest nights.

And you did even more. You let me see my own thoughts in ways I could never have, but for you. You lay out my life in a way that only you could have, ridding me of the most complex difficulties of my life, suggesting solutions with such clarity that I could have never come up with, in solitude. You filled my day and reminded me of those tiny details that even I didn't care for, pointing out to me, time and again, that my life was more important than I'd ever considered it to be.

My poetry began in this campus, and might end here, and you have perhaps seen the last of it, cradling its heavy head upon your large lap, supporting it with your even larger heart as it breathed its last words, coughing them up on your heavenly self, while I lay like a fool, oblivious to the misfortune that fell upon my pen.

I now look away, my spirit as blank as I see you to be from this distance, for where can words come, when you cease to exist in my life?

11:01pm, 28.6.2017.

A goodbye to the whiteboard in my hostel room.

Sandwich Writings

At times I wonder if, over time, a writer truly evolves - writing is an eternal spiral, whose centre is the life of the writer and arms form his imagination - and successful writing boils down to maintaining it as a circle. It is all about keeping it as far from the centre as possible while keeping the radius low enough for it to touch readers' hearts.

I initially prided myself with being able to put myself in imaginary situations and write the woes of someone in that position pretty accurately, and thereby considered myself a vicarious writer. Now I find that when unaware, the distance between my heart and that of my imaginary self diminishes to naught, turning every stroke of my pen into a diary entry that I'd sometimes cringe to read.

My mind, it seems, tricks my pen into writing my own story, my own feelings instead of an imaginary one. If I let my pen wander, and the flow set in, the heart bleeds itself, into the ink that flows from my pen*.

And with writing taking more and more room in my mental space, I find myself suffocating in my attempt to run away from the emotions that my soul secretes, and feel imprisoned within the non existent claustrophobic walls of my mind, formed by my imagined limitations.

Funnily, more often​ than not, my pages are wetted and hence permanently coloured by at least a few drops of the feelings that my soul spits and soaks itself in.

With each writeup is attached an emotion, if not many, a memory, a feeling that I can relate to.

I do not remember words that I spill when in one state, yes, but I remember the feelings that I bury with them - they come back to me when I re-read my work, like a long forgotten dream, turning into spades that dig deeper into the soul of my web pages, finding tiny, peculiar yet familiar rocks of emotions that've hitherto touched the roots of the vegetation which has sprouted over the months I'd left them buried.

Has my blog turned into some encrypted diary? One that makes sense in one plane to my readers, why, even to myself - and on another to a select few, and perhaps on a third one to just me?

Those who claim to know me or who wish to try to decipher this bundle that they call Raam might perhaps add a few more layers to these already multilayered 'sandwich' writeups.

Two dimensional writing on a screen does seem to have gone beyond the paper, perhaps finding more nameless dark levels within the souls of my readers to whom I am ever grateful. Without you my work wouldn't even be ink on paper, it would merely be a little magnetic data stored alongside zillions of bytes, forgotten long before it was written, receiving attention from Google's dead computers but heeded not by a single, living, breathing soul. Whether there is life to my writing or not, the fact that you read it honours the words that my spirit generated. And if it does have life, know that a portion of your soul rests in each word I have written, alongside the portion of mine that I sealed with it, when putting it down in writing.

*At times there is the lack of a muse which stimulates a muse hunt, but to be honest, there is no dearth of muses in my life, considering the number of films I watch or the number of times I step outside my room.

Retrospection

I realise that a note, quote or poem scribbled in some notebook and put away is a lot better than one staying on an active blog page - it might've been written in a state of mind that might have changed now, but it stands as a pointing finger directed at me.

I feel responsible for every word I write on my blog - and I shudder to think of its implications.

The advent of poetry - a genre that started nearly a year back has drilled holes upon the walls of my literary world, and built doors that I'd never dreamt of - I have come a long way from considering poems as utter melodrama to appreciating the emotions that words embody - writing poems has fueled me with boldness to touch upon such sensitive topics with ease - topics that one would cringe to think of - I have done so, with an arrogance that gloats when I am praised, and there are times when I wonder if I deserve it. Perhaps this isn't boldness, perhaps it is foolishness.

I have been told by an experienced writer that even my innocent, seemingly harmless writing can touch a life, perhaps more, and that I should be careful with the solutions I provide for problems, but I fret not for the impact it might have on another's life, but on my own..

The writing on my blog seems to stare at me like a bag of karma with fearsome eyes.. My more recent writings have been backed by a greed for recognition, hiding behind the emotions that stimulate them, and I am constantly haunted by the fear of its repercussion - the repercussions of boldly writing about emotions that I pretend to have understood. Words once spilt are indeed unpickable, and I dread the result of my blind (deaf?) talk.

I will try to think twice before I put something in writing but that isn't easy either - when words come gushing out your fingers, they itch to capture it upon a film of paper, to be read, admired and enjoyed, not only by a set of readers, but by yourself, particularly on a day when you cannot remember writing it down - the surprise that you were the one who wrote something beautiful is one of the most pleasant feelings in the world.

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

A page from my diary

The past few months have been, well, different - starkly so, in terms of a lot of things, and, in particular, writing. The discovery that I could write poetry has certainly been emotionally rewarding, and has raised my literary confidence to levels that I never knew, existed. I feel truly free in the apparently two-dimensional but truly multidimensional world of words. Poems come to me at ease, flowing forth as a fluid would flow when there is a significant pressure difference.

However, poetic as this experience with poetry may be, it has taken a toll on my writing. There is now an urge to dramatize every little thing, and I spend my time involuntarily looking for metaphors to describe them, even worse, desperately trying to rhyme words. I find that while this poetry phase has brought out a couple of good (sorry) poems, what I've incurred substantial losses. Strong opinions have now almost completely been replaced by strong emotions that overwhelm me. I tear up more easily than ever, and even otherwise, have become quite sensitive. My vocabulary in speech has received a blow, and I find it difficult to frame full sentences, at least on paper. This post itself stands testimony.

I realize now, that I have tuned myself to write poetry, and why I stay in this frequency, it is extremely difficult to come up with prose. 60+ poems seems like a good number, and I am considering tuning myself back to the prose frequency - but I do not know what the repercussions will be. I'm slightly tired of putting commas after phrases and starting new lines with capital letters. My more recent poems have become soulless and stale, and this can definitely be counted as a sign. I miss writing long articles where I digress to point out something totally different and then connect it back with the big picture. I miss framing sentences that have poetic metaphors.

But then again, what if my natural current state is to compose poems and not articles? I did not choose poetry - in fact, I believed that I wasn't capable of it, and it came to me of its own accord. Am I disturbing that equilibrium by attempting to go against the flow? Will this result in me getting stuck in a no man's land where I'd be incapable of writing anything? I'm not sure if I can handle that - oh, I'm not talking about missing the appreciation - with all due respect to you folks, I have only a handful of readers, but you people appreciate me even without my writing. I'm worried about there coming a time when my heart is filled with content and my fingers refuse to budge.

This might sound silly, but it feels like a big step to me - perhaps I should write a few more poems? Perhaps touch a hundred? No, the quality is bad already. There are quite a few poems that I've written and kept to myself on a personal medium, for I find them far too sensitive to share - and  then there are half baked ones that I am incapable of completing. I feel inadequate to compose now - perhaps I should take a break. At least from poetry. And I must be ready to digest the fact that I might never be able to compose another poem - that doesn't hit me badly, I feel pretty satisfied with the poems I've written. I couldn't bring myself to write one as good as, say "The Admirer", or "On the Partition". My poems have become dull and repetitive. I'm not dejected or something - I don't need a pep talk now, I'm just weighing the options before making a choice - an obscure one at that. To you, it, I might seem melodramatic - why would there be the question of a choice between one form of writing and another? Well, there is. And I'm not looking for suggestions, I'm just thinking out loudly. And choosing to publish my thoughts. You may choose to ignore this post - in fact, I might tak it down some day, but as of now, I'm just letting it be.

And I don't have to tell you when I make my choice. You'll know.