red ground

Watched the One World Media awards and was particularly taken with a project organized by B’Tselem, The Israeli Center for Human Rights in Occupied Territories. This was the Camera Distribution Project, which put a hundred video cameras in the hands of various Palestinians living in highly contested and violent zones in Gaza and the West Bank. B’Tselem then gave them training and let them film the daily trials, humiliations and violence that their lives have become. The raw footage from all these ordinary Palestinians reveals a personal side of the conflict that is rarely seen in the media, and places the tools that allow them to document these injustices right in their own hands. It’s harrowing stuff:

“On 8 June ‘08, two settlers tried unsuccessfully to drive shepherds off Palestinian land near Khirbet Susiya. After they left, the shepherds called relatives for reinforcement, fearing an attack. Among those who came was Muna a-Nawaj’ah, with a video camera she received from B’Tselem. Ten minutes later, she filmed four masked men armed with clubs approaching the family and attacking one of the shepherds. They then severely beat other members of the family.”

“The Abu ‘Ayesha family lives across the street from the extremist Tel Rumeida settlement in Hebron, West Bank. They suffer severe and frequent harassment at the hands of the settlers. 14-year-old Fida’ Abu ‘Ayesha has taken to using the camera as a form of protection, and as a way of documenting her reality. This is some of her footage, filmed between July 2006 and August 2007.”

You can view more here.

Seeing footage like this makes me realize that I am extremely privileged to live in a place where walking out of the house doesn’t mean being subjected to stones, spit, baseball bats to the head and invective, and also that being a child does not make you automatically innocent – in fact sometimes being a kid lets you get away with things that would otherwise get you shot or land you in jail (if the police actually cared about what was happening.)

In any case the Camera Distribution Project is one of the many new faces of the media. The line between journalist and subject is slowly erased. The means of production is handed directly to the producers and the line of distribution is open (more or less) to the non-privileged. The so called ‘virtue of objectivity’ that is so highly prized in journalism is shown to have a bias of its own – the bias of the spectator, which is a bias of values. What is valuable to a journalist is not what is necessarily valuable to the subject. Here the subject is the journalist, and that subjectivity shows itself with none of the shame attached to bias – it is merely what it is. Authority is derived from the truth of the detail, and not from the truth of the ‘whole’, which is a misnomer anyways because any idea of a ‘whole’ can never be a complete reality, but simply an imposition of a reality. So yeah, the award was well deserved and I would love to see the project exported to as many of the world’s conflict zones as possible.

I love how in one of the videos, the woman operating the camera uses it as she would a gun, aiming it at the injustices and their perpetrators with the eye of a sniper. The violence of the camera has replaced the violence of the gun, and while the effect is much less immediate it is just as final, and if there is a death, it is only the death of immorality’s blindness to itself.

nibblets

The Worldwide Short Film Festival ended yesterday, and while I only went to see a couple of the screenings I was thoroughly satisfied. The opening gala brought together seven films from seven different countries, and I was pleasantly immersed in the bite-sized narrative worlds they successfully created and (sometimes) resolved in under 15 minutes. Only one of them sucked – a kitschy, derivative, unoriginal story about an older man in mourning talking to a boy about fishing, both of whom later turn out to be dead (seems like somebody was a little too enamored with the Sixth Sense). But apart from that sentimental treacle-trap from the UK, all of the films were smart, inventive and the perfect foil to the 120 minute narrative arcs that we’re so used to. Which got me thinking, why is it that short films as an art-form are generally considered to be ‘non-mainstream’? By ‘non-mainstream’ I mean (1) They do not occupy your regular multiplexes and most of the movie-going public has probably never seen more than two or three in their lives (2) The demographic that do go to see them tend to skew towards being more involved, marginally at least, in more serious artistic traditions (3) the films themselves often operate on more intelligent and self-conscious levels than the average movie does.

Regardless of the content of the short film, they are generally considered to be closer to gallery pieces than the type of thing you can munch a bag of popcorn in front of. Maybe this has something to do with actual form. A short film does not indulge the escapist tendencies of the audience; you cannot lose yourself in an elaborately conceived world or life-changing moments in the lives of minutely drawn characters. A short film is of necessity always going to be situated within an already operating thought-process in your mind, a sort of narrative that plays within parentheses, if you will. You approach it as you would approach a painting or a sculpture, with some sense of critical distance. This is because the traditional set-up/rising-action/climax structure is rarely employed in the successful short film – in the best of them it is always subverted. The old structure, which was once deemed universal and elaborated on in Aristotle’s Poetics, has now more or less been dismantled by the post-structuralist critiques of people like Derrida, and in many ways the short film is a unique product of our very fractured times. (I am not a neo-Romantic – I do not attach a moral repugnance to ‘fracturing’). The traditional narrative structure tends to create the discourses it wants you to understand it through within itself – it gives you the buildings blocks it wants you to use, places careful limitations of tone and scope. The short film too has limitations, of course, but there is less of a tendency for the audience to operate within it. A short film cannot make you forget yourself like a two hour movie can. Instead what it does is lodge itself in a gap between your thought, sandwiched between experiences outside of itself, and you view as you would a cut gem, turning it about and watching as the light glints off its various facets. It is not ‘limited’ in the sense that Adorno says movies are limited. A short film never pretends to be anything more than it is. Because of this it is more honest, more straightforward and less manipulative.

Yesterday’s program was a series of 22 shorts commissioned by the UN to celebrate the 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed. One of the most affecting films for me was a four minute piece called “Mobile Men” set in the back of a speeding pickup truck in Thailand’s rural countryside. As the wind roars about the camera’s mic, three young men pose and grin with increasing abandon at the viewer, showing off their street-cred: they point to their t-shirts, their DIY sneaker designs, take off their shirts to proudly display their muscles, their elaborate tattoos which one of the young men screams, “I got these to impress the girls!” Then he roars out a deafening, echoing cry to mimic the pain he felt when he got the tattoo. And that’s it. The camera is passed from hand to hand in the back of the pick-up, and these joyful, grinning young men show us a snippet of their lives. Then the film is over and I find myself grinning in the same idiotic way, and for a moment I can feel the wind roaring in my ears and my skin cooling in the late evening air. I would have screamed too, but I don’t think my friends would have appreciated getting kicked out of the cinema.

ice lodged in the brain stem

I’ve uploaded most of my old poems to the “poems and other peelings” page, although there are still a fair number floating around my harddrive. I’ll get around to uploading the new stuff as soon as I have a decent archive going.

Just finished the first part of my novella, which is set in Sri Lanka between 1980 and 1989, when a failed communist uprising killed more than 40,000 people, mostly young students. My father was in the thick of it then, and he has told me stories about how the army, to quell and frighten the JVP (the communist party) into submission, would cut off the heads of suspected leaders and local union members and dump them into the sea. The headless bodies would then wash up on the shore of some of the private hotel beaches in the south. This is not to say the JVP was innocent – oh no. They too had their mass killings: students were killed and dropped into ditches, voters were shot through the eyes in the polling booths. It is unfortunate that most of the left here align themselves so strongly and with so little reservation to communism/socialism. For those of us who have come from countries where practical communism devolved into sadistic violence, mass murder and propoganda, things don’t seem all that clear cut. Of course I understand the difference between communism as practiced and Marxism in theory, and there is such a thing as democratic socialism, but nevertheless I approach the subject with a weary eye.

Here’s a long poem I wrote some months ago about playing cricket in Sri Lanka (and other things). There is much I want to say about the recent and ongoing crises there, but that will have to wait. I want to be very careful with my words, because more than anything I have learned that the best intentioned ideas often unravel and deflate themselves with poorly chosen language. To articulate feeling as accurately as possible – this is my intent. And right now my feeling is so much at odds with my fellow diaspora Tamils almost as much as it is at odds with the government. Anyways, that’ll all come to a head soon…

Cricket and Mrs. Manikam

I.

No umpire, so the next batsman must replant
the splayed wicket, use the heavy flat of a sweat
worn bat to hammer the three stumps back
into the dry, scuffed ground.

There is blood on one of the bails, a rusty
splotch bedded in the oak pores –
that time Ajmal was blindsided by a left leg
spinner, the solid clutch of violent leather
glancing off the edge of the old blade at
ninety-six kilometers per hour, that mad
devil Chatura black and beaming behind his
throw – the glance and swift nick upwards
to the brow, gashing to lily bone.

But blood and slash are seasoned myths, and
we are not playing with a leather ball today.

I step up confident to the crease, heft the
careful weight of willow in my spindly grip,
feel in the palmed rubber handle all the small
local glories, the fielder cry of
HOWZAT! HOWZAT! HOWZAT! –
rarely ever a question, more a deafened rage
to cull all possible critics in a shower of
rank spittle.
I step up and lift the treated linseed edge
newly polished to the sky – for effect –
watch sluggish noon gleam its cruel grin
over the pitch: our small private road barely
eighty meters, closed in on three sides by
neighbors long weary of our antics.

‘The fucker’s grandstanding,’ Ajmal says at
center-right, a proud white scar
he’s shown off to all the girls
scrawled like a hasty comma
above his left eye – ‘Throw the bloody ball!’
And then the measured trot of bowl, Chatura
tense and coiled in his meticulous gallop,
a professional that one, two fingers on the seam,
the spin the throw the arc of arm, bright green
tennis ball with a life of its own after the first
bounce, as if his professional sweat had bewitched
it’s warm hollow, made it twitch and writhe like
air possessed,
waiting for the exorcism of impact.

I do not calculate, swing the weighted history of our
small tribe with pudding muscle, close my eyes at the
vital point, a crack a shudder that runs up my arm like
a stream of fiery ants, nibbling elbow and neck with
tiny jaws,
wait for the call.

None comes. Eyes open to the dirty light, the fallen faces
and angry scowl – Ajmal shaking his head like a dry
disappointed leaf:

The ball has landed in Mrs. Manikam’s yard.

II.

After they have smacked their brows and thrown a few
small stones my way – for effect –
we deliberate:

for we know the measure of Manikam, her forked
tongue and wattiyamma speech that like a burst dam
would somehow always flood the shores of parents’
ears,
and then surely the belt-buckle loosening, the
oiled cane retrieved from its place of pride, the
slap!slap!slap! administered without passion, as
perfunctory as snipping weeds, clearing deadwood –

for all this
I scurry to make amends, return the ball my blind eye
has scattered.

Skinny frame straddling the edge
of wall she has not yet studded
with broken glass,
I sit above two worlds,
sweat and dust and silt of light
enclosed in one;
and this other I am about to enter,
this small square of tile and house
which seems far older, far vaster
than the world I leave behind.

A careful swing of leg and I am sprawled a lazy cat on
the polished flagstones, the red clay split and scaled by
the sun. Our ball, nowhere, but I remember well the
slow turn back, Mrs. Manikam huge and looming
before the black gate, a musty almirah draped with
flimsy curtain, faded petunia and crinkled vine crawling
over her bloated bulb like cartographer’s markings,
the sinuous shift of rivers curling around her twin
mountains, a large dry basin yellowed by old sweat,
her quench of rain; and the face, wind-hardened dough
thrown in a lump against a wall and left for time to sag.
And then she opens, brings the tennis ball out from
behind her back,
a silent offering from within the darkened cave, and
the ball, I see, is neatly sliced in two, an empty bowl
each in one hand, that bewitched air long gone,
two vestibules now for the sly stretched sky.
‘Take this and run you pariah,’ she rasps, before
dropping the halved green spheres to the frying
ground and unlocking the gate. I perspire I stoop
I grab and I run, her voice a sting in my back,
leaking its ancient poison into my silly young veins.

Later, my sister swinging  in grandmother’s sari,
I am initiated to the past – how on a hot day in
July, 1983, the year I was still content inside the
womb,
the smell of burning flesh tendril-snaked
across the city, warping faces like a bath of sudden
acid.

How the ear curls at the sound of the mob, that
preaching frenzy of metal limb and wooden tongue,
that grain that seeks to crack the plank in one way only,
a critical mass of mad bite that roiled and scourged
a people
who refused to split at the seam.
This is not history, this is time folding time,
this, they say, is the harrowed ground that
nourished my disease.

Even the bus-conductors have fallen silent,
their incessant
Kollupitiya Bambalapitiya Wellawatte Dehiwala
Wellawatte
Dehiwala Dehiwala Dehiwala
killed
along with the engine, boarded along
the smoking roads by the
Sinhala kathakaranda puluwang-de? questions,
where the difference between word and word
syllable and syllable
is stretched between life
and the final closing of the lung.

Poor Mrs. Manikam, still cauled in a widow’s grief,
huddled alone on her terracotta floor:
the hungry limbs have entered her house.
They scaled the walls like I did, broke the latch of the gate
I had bounded archly from.
She shields her face with a crucifix, as if the bloody
maw could distinguish kin from kin,
the people of the temple from the people of the church.

But even here, at the base of this culling drive,
there is the farce of protocol, there is the mocking
semblance of law: a list is read and re-read, heads
are counted and tallied, half the names crossed out,
the other half still drawing inky breath, still
waiting for the raze.

Mrs. Manikam is not on the list.
So left to huddle in her pooling fear they flay
the house instead, find out she is a musician of
some known merit, break the case of her Sitar, that
swan-necked clutch of teak and string, gourd and horn,
drag it out by its beak to the hot clay yard, a growing
pile of rug and chair and board,
a splash of pungent flame and all consumed before
the manic eye, the warp of chorded stem before
the sweet strings snap each one in tuneless heat,
carry that black music crashing to the brain.

Ah Mrs. Manikam, now I fear I wrote you wrong.

III.

It is possible to go even deeper,
to mole my way through the brined past
and say
here,
look,
this is the jaw they dislocated in Jaffna,
this is the limb they hacked off in Killinochi,
this is hole in Vavuniya they plunged a nailed board
through,
these are the fingers they broke each day
with a hammer
in the closed dark of a prison in Colombo.

How much time can weigh in the swing of a bat?
How many people can crowd the twin hollows
of a split tennis ball?

I am afraid now to even get out of bed,
shift and turn like an invalid in sweated sheets.
I am afraid to lift my arm, to speak, to breathe
lest all that past blood gorge and sink
and siege my life,
if in brushing my teeth or cutting my nails I am
suddenly bloated by a scream so long and so deep
I am left without air and suffocate,
Or if in conversation with friends
my words in a single instant
are flooded with memories that were never mine,
dribble raw and useless from my mouth.

I am afraid of becoming this vessel,
of finding myself empty and suddenly filled
by other lives that seek escape from my pores,
that pinwheel my arms and jerk my wooden legs
to the end of the stage.

I am afraid of the justice that walks in my body,
I am afraid of what it will do and what I cannot
do for it.

I have woken up and found myself a skin over
a stranger’s bones,
pulled tight and fastened on all ends
like the skein of a drum,
humming softly in the morning air,
waiting patiently for the right hand to
release its coiled voice.

I am terrified of this.
Of walking to work one day
and arrested finally in mid-step,
feel the surge of a million souls
drop like a coin in my heart
and fix me forever to a foreign ground.

under the carpet

Watched this remarkable film called “White Dog” recently. Directed by Samuel Fuller, it is an incendiary assault on the two faces of racism: the benevolent side presented to society, and the seething violence presented to itself. But what makes this film so much more effective than other head-on treatments of racism is that its themes and criticisms revolve around a purely metaphoric site: a white German Shepard. At the beginning of the film the dog is hit by a car driven by an aspiring young actress, who then takes him to a vet and adopts him after no one comes to claim the dog. Everything seems to be going well – the dog repels an attack by a would-be rapist, protects the actress and seems about as cuddly and jovial as a well-trained German Shepard usually is, until we are slowly and horrifically presented to the truth. The dog is a “White Dog”, trained by its previous owner to attack and kill African Americans. The actress is at a loss as to what to do. She is emotionally invested in the animal and at first refuses to turn it in to be euthanized. She seeks more radical methods. Eventually she finds a black animal trainer who takes on the dog as a personal project. He believes, in opposition to his boss, that the dog can actually be deprogrammed, that its racist training based on extreme cruelty in puppy-hood can be erased and the dog saved.

It is astonishing what Fuller accomplishes with this scenario. Shots of the dog attacking, a low, zoomed in close-up of the dog with its teeth bared and seething at the mouth, tongue flapping in the wind, then the inevitable pounce at the jugular, are terrifying. This could easily be classified as a horror movie, some kind of mutant variant of Cujo. But it is so much more than that. The dog becomes a vortex for all the racial loathing that boils just beneath the beautiful furred surface of society. We see how loving and protective the dog is in the company of white people, but then how, at the drop of a coin, it turns into a remorseless killing machine at the sight of a black man. The film’s targets are numerous. One of the dog’s victims is killed in a church, and as the man writhes bleeding on the floor, the camera pans over the statues of all the white saints, the white Jesus staring down with his eternal benevolence from the cross. The black man dying on the floor is watched over by a white man dying on a cross. These images, ordinarily simply kitschy, are transformed by the movie into sites of powerful irony. What it accomplishes is quite extraordinary. It defamiliarizes ordinary symbols and re-contextualizes them according to the power-relations of race politics, so that the viewer becomes primed to seeing things as a dog would see them: in black and white and shades of gray.

In the ideological opposition in how to deal with the dog (the trainer refuses to give up on him and believes he can be reconditioned, and the increasing pressure from his boss and eventually the actress to simply kill it), we are also reminded of the blunt and utterly ineffective manner in which society tends to deal with race issues. The trainer represents all those people working on the front lines of race politics, tirelessly moving towards a method of untying the ugly knots of fear that always lie beneath the surface of hate. We learn later that the probable method of turning a color-blind dog into a white dog was that the owner paid a few black homeless people to abuse and hurt the dog as a puppy, so it instinctively equated black skin to a violent threat.

What makes the film even more powerful is that the phenomenon of white dogs is a real one, based on colonial slave traders who trained dogs to attack and capture escaped slaves. The story Fuller uses was based on a real incident originally written by Romain Gary – the dog was found by his wife, Jean Seburg, an actress and activist in the 60s who at one point supported the Black Panthers. An added level of irony is in the fact the film was quite controversial when it was made (1982), and was actually shelved by Paramount Pictures for nine years until a brief theatrical release overseas in 1991. It was only last year the Criterion decided to release a DVD of the film so that people can actually go out and see one of the most wrenching depictions of racism on screen. It was shelved by Paramount because they were afraid that the film itself was racist, which goes to show you how afraid we can be to even touch something that deals so bluntly with race issues. As soon as people feel like they’re being preached to in a movie, they shy away, even when the movie isn’t necessarily didactic. Fuller simply presents us with a racist dog; all of the universal implications are supplied by us. It’s like a litmus test – the more a person is familar with the severity of racial prejudice, the more affecting the movie becomes.

malaria and wine do not mix well

Sometimes the body betrays us. Sometimes the body acts out with a consciousness that seems far removed from the fevered convolutions that supposedly animate it. ‘Supposedly’ because sometimes the body seems to know a far deal more than we give it credit for, and its occasional tremors, its sudden tinge and pallor in the wine-stained evening, with the tight skein of drums vibrating the night’s venom in the body’s veins, with the maracas circulating their seeds infinitely within themselves, with your black dress torn right up the thigh and a heel hanging off your shoe like a hangnail, like a martyred limb: the body knows all these things and many more that weave and fret like the silver trails of fish beneath the cool drugged surface of a late spring day.

I am too intense, she says. I cannot look at you for too long, I feel like you will burn me, like you will try to consume me with your eyes. Eyes are nothing, I say, just semi-transparent sacs of vitreous jelly and a few discs of blind color spinning in the void. Nothing. There is the glint, she says, there is the gaze. I say, the gaze is not in the eye, it is in the muscles around it, the dozens of tiny fibrillations that set the brow and cheek to such minute poses of meaning, that shade or slice or haze or slit the eye: that is what the gaze is, nothing more. No, she says, you are wrong. You are wrong wrong wrong. There is something in the eye, there is something that floats at the very center, something the light must refract around like an inverse prism, repulsing the rays and transforming them to coherence. That is the thing, that is the gaze, that is the hypnosis that begins the gravitational movement between two foreign bodies: this vortex, here, in this scrawl of milky light. But you are too intense. It is as if that vortex in you has grown till it has become all of your eye, till there is no difference between the center and the surface. How can I look at you when you look at me from inside such unbounded chaos? It is like looking into space. I have no orientation.

I listen to what she says and know that it is true. I cannot keep living like this, skinless and raw, exposing all the red sinew to the people who try to want to love me, whom I want to try to love. I must not keep pushing against the electric fences at the limits of control. I know no caution. I am like a wounded leopard who charges at the hunters who seek its death, who leaps out from beneath the safety of immovable things and extinguishes itself in a haze of gunsmoke and blood. If there is glory in this, the dead cannot know it. I am here, perpetually wounded, seeping life from my cut stomach, my grazed haunches, my slit lip, here behind a rock or in the wet darkness of a cave, waiting for the footsteps of approach, waiting for the moment that will consume everything.

I must learn caution. I must learn to hide the danger of my spots, the final desperation of a wounded animal. Perhaps in hiding there is hope. To hide is not to deceive. To hide is to retract the claws that would break the skin that wants to reveal you. To hide is to believe you can live for at least one more day.

living with fever

My first Anaïs Nin experience. Here is a beautiful passage from A Spy in the House of Love:

“Whenever she felt lost in the endless deserts of insomnia she would take up the labyrinthian thread of her life again from the beginning to see if she could find at what moment the paths had become confused.

Tonight she remembered the moon-baths, as if this had marked the beginning of her life instead of the parents, school, birthplace. As if they had determined the course of her life rather than inheritance or imitation of the parents. In the moon-baths perhaps, lay the secret motivation of her acts.

At sixteen Sabina took moon-baths, first of all because everyone else took sun-baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous. The effect of moon-baths was unknown, but it was intimated that it might be the opposite of the sun’s effect.

The first time she exposed herself she was frightened. What would the consequences be? There were many taboos against gazing at the moon, many old legends about the evil effects of falling asleep in moonlight. She knew that the insane found the full moon acutely disturbing, that some of them regressed to animal habits of howling at the moon. She knew that in astrology the moon ruled the night life of the unconscious, invisible to consciousness.

But then she had always preferred the night to the day.

Moonlight fell directly over her bed in the summer. She lay naked in it for hours before falling asleep, wondering what its rays would do to her skin, her hair, her eyes, and then deeper to her feelings.

By this ritual it seemed to her that her skin acquired a different glow, a night glow, an artificial luminousness which showed its fullest effulgence only at night, in artificial light. People noticed it and asked her what was happening. Some suggested she was using drugs.

It accentuated her love of mystery. She meditated on this planet which kept a half of itself in darkness. She felt related to it because it was the planet of lovers. Her attraction for it, her desire to bathe in its rays, explained her repulsion for home, husband and children. She began to imagine she knew the life which took place on the moon. Homeless, childless, free lovers, not even tied to each other.

The moon-baths crystallized many of Sabina’s desires and orientations. Up to that moment she had only experienced a simple rebellion against the lives which surrounded her, but now she began to see the forms and colors of other lives, realms much deeper and stranger and remote to be discovered, and that her denial of ordinary life had a purpose: to send her off like a rocket into other forms of existence. Rebellion was merely the electric friction accumulating a charge of power that would launch her into space.

She understood why it angered her when people spoke of life as One life. She became certain of myriad lives within herself. Her sense of time altered. She felt acutely and with grief, the shortness of life’s physical span. Death was terrifyingly near, and the journey towards it, vertiginous; but only when she considered the lives around her, accepting their time tables, clocks, measurements. Everything they did constricted time. They spoke of one birth, one childhood, one adolescence, one romance, one marriage, one maturity, one aging, one death, and then transmitted the monotonous cycle to their children. But Sabina, activated by the moon-rays, felt germinating in her the power to extend time in the ramifications of a myriad lives and loves, to expand the journey to infinity, taking immense and luxurious detours as the courtesan depositor of multiple desires. The seeds of many lives, places, of many women in herself were fecundated by the moon-rays because they came from that limitless night life which we usually perceive only in our dreams, containing roots reaching for all the magnificences of the past, transmitting the rich sediments into the present, projecting them into the future.

In watching the moon she acquired the certainty of the expansion of time by depth of emotion, range and infinite multiplicity of experience.

It was this flame which began to burn in her, in her eyes and skin, like a secret fever, and her mother looked at her in anger and said: ‘You look like a consumptive.’ The flame of accelerated living by fever glowed in her and drew people to her as the lights of night life drew passers-by out of the darkness of empty streets.

When she did finally fall asleep it was the resless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.”

Published in 1954 she still manages to break through to the heart of our conveniences, the placidity of the structures of living we build around us.

I too was trapped in the division of time, the One path laid before me or which I felt I needed to lay before me. It is difficult, removing the numbers on the clock face, more difficult now because as soon as you do there are a hundred other modes of being that immediately swallow you up and prune away the unfashionable edges of your identity. Now it is not enough to live at counter-point, because living at counter-point is also a living that has been given to you. I am so innundated by these different flavours of life that it is now only in an active and constant form of rejection through which I can come to that undiluted, unpruned core of being. Come, but not reach. Each day is a battle. Each day we slog through the thousand things that would delimit us, draw our boundaries and check our speech. It is true, there is no rest for the wicked.

in our time

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is past. People in a novel, not skilfully constructed characters must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all that there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire, they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time.

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things, and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.

Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from.

A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this, too, remember: a serious writer is not to be confused with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”

- Hemingway

I’m trying, man, I’m trying.