Sridala Swami Caught Me, Psychosomatic Cold, Rants

When Sridala Swami caught my bluff, rants about things that irritated me when I was not well, a poem about idleness, a story about joint business families and astrology, a book suggestion, a word.

When Sridala Swami Caught My Bluff

I don’t exactly remember from where—perhaps in one of the college hostel newspapers, I saw Sridala Swami’s then upcoming book Escape Artist. I bought it but didn’t quite read it fully. I started following the poet on the internet. She wrote an interesting column called The Sideways Door on dailyo.in, where she would give a poetry prompt to the readers and in the next article she picked some of the submissions and responded to and discussed them. I decided to participate. When I woke up to an excerpt from my submission, exposed, I panicked. Today, it’s utterly funny, as time has a way of translating. The prompt was (you can read the whole thing here):

This month, I am asking you to disorientate yourself before you write.

…I ask you to wake in the night, at least three hours into your sleep - but while it's still dark outside - and write in the dark.

Yes, I want you to actually write in the dark. That means no writing on phones, tablets, laptops or anything with a glowing screen. No torches, candles, lighting devices on pens or paper.

Go to bed with a notebook and sharpened pencil beside you. When you wake, sit in the dark and become aware of yourself and your surroundings. Think about what it feels like to wake up, and that from a state of deep sleep.

If what you have are sensations, record them in your notebook. It is likely that your words will be indecipherable later in the light, and that your lines will have overwritten themselves. That doesn't matter.

Activate your memory in this state of in-between-ness. Memorise the phrases and words that occur to you. Remember their sequence. Remember your dreams and their nonlinear images and conversations.

This is not merely an exercise in note-taking. Now, some time after you've been awake, bring these thoughts and notes and words together into a poem. Remember: you are still writing in the dark. You can't turn on any lights in order to read your notes; you must know them well because you wrote them not so very long ago.

If you don't remember, sit still in the dark and allow your thoughts to gather into your person and your consciousness. This is the one time of the day when you are not fragmented into the many things that are required of you, or into the twenty open tabs on your browser.

Write your poem. Go back to sleep.

When you wake up, look at your poem afresh. If it is very different from what you would otherwise write - and I hope it will be! - don't erase those differences when you revise.

Revise minimally and mainly for length. Don't impose outside structures on the poem you wrote in the dark. For instance, if you wrote it without rhymes, don't try and shape it into a poem with a rhyme scheme and a metre; or, if you don't understand what you meant by a phrase or sequence of words that occurred to you in the dark, don't change it to make it more comprehensible. Allow the mystery of that hour to remain in your poem.

Of course, this will be most effective as an exercise if you do this without cheating. So please submit the poem you actually wrote in the dark. And please actually write the poem in the dark, after a half-finished sleep.

I cheated. I submitted a poem I had already written.

I woke up to this

In Arihant Verma's 'Visual Cacophany', he begins:

In the middle of the night, I panicked
That horrid dream shook my senses.

Maybe, I was floating over my pale, lifeless body
A raw figure molded in flesh, bones and horror

Or maybe I was just being rebuked by a teacher
for having written a poem instead of an answer.

---

This is clearly not the words that occurred to him in a state of waking from deep sleep. What Verma has done is to impose a narrative on what should have been a poem made up of the raw material of his dreams. In one line, he says: "Highly eager to falsify what I saw", thus accurately describing what he has done with the exercise. The one interesting phrase in his poem is "self embracing life-tree", which seems like something thrown up by a dream.

A Poem

Since I talked about this exposé by Sridala Swami, let’s read one of hers this week. My favorite poem of her is Dear stranger deciphering this ancient script, but that’s not what I’m going to share in this issue. While writing about my relationship with idleness and how inevitable and necessary it is for me and my writing, I found Idle Bliss

Idle Bliss
After Auden

I am transcribing the sunshine.
The river flows backwards and the sky
borrows the light from it.

I fall upwards, a returning spacewalker
in free fall.
There is no land.

This is idle bliss: to plunge
and never land, to jump
and meet only cloudy ocean.

To forget the moment before
lose the effort
and become cloud

carrying its own sun within
lit, idle, eliding effort for fun.

Psychosomatic Cold?

Jass detected a pattern. Every time I feel emotionally overwhelmed I get a cold—a particular kind of cold—that lasts anywhere between a week to 10 days, and may or may not involve fever. It starts with two to three days of continuous fluid drain, it extends to three days if I don’t get enough sleep. Then the nose blocks and no amount of steams in the day seem to unblock anything. The only thing that mildly opens the passage is physical exertion, which I have no energy for. Then it stays solidly blocked for two to three days—days for breathing exclusively through the mouth. All across these 4 to 6 days body energy is a myth, no matter how much mind’s will I slap across it. Headache or heavy head is a constant companion. My therapist confirmed that it might be psychosomatic. It is fascinating and also terrifying and that terror feeds the symptoms further.

Rants

I’ve been unwell, so I got irritated more than regular by some things and I wrote some of them down.

1. Smart TV remotes should give a way to human-proof Netfix, Hotstar, Prime hot buttons. Maybe a hard switch lock on the side which disables these hot buttons, so that your butt, side of the body, feet don’t accidentally keep pressing them in the middle of the most important time of the movie or the episode.

2. Why do category managers, catalogers or inventory takers who write meta data and descriptions on e-commerce websites, don't add thickness and type of the nib of fountain pens? Or the paper. And how do people not care?!

3. I think

   Substack
   ’s choice to have a serif font as the default font is an abomination to accessibility(personal opinion). I feel icky and yuck when I read Substack in a serif font. At every extra unwanted curve of the alphabet, I ask ‘why, what’s the need?’ and I’m deviated from reading. Reading Substack in a serif font also makes me want to ask their designers and developers, if they have experimented with A/B testing the font with reading time metrics. I think they’d find that sans-serif fonts will lead to better readability, and hence better reading. They wouldn’t throw the reader to frequent and unexplained distractions by the ugliness of a bad serif font, on the web.

Short Story

• Prophecy by Kanak Kapur

• Conversation about the inspiration and questions about particular parts of the story, in an interview with the author.

Apart from the beautifully written story, I was amazed at the inflection point where the narrator’s identity is revealed, to deliver the coda.

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Book Suggestion

I am still ruminating and swimming, gurgling and simmering feelings in silence, in this book’s wake. It’s very visual. It has a lot of letters, and lot of digressions on the part of the narrator’s mother being bipolar. Most innocent corners of passing feelings bared without slightest of navel gazing or judgement, difficult times—the only kind that the family has known, trudged in knowledge until a time when its absence become eerie. Above all the book is hilarious amidst the dark and the pain. When I finished the book I realised I had filled a small notebook from the paragraphs and sentences that resonated with me, or which I loved. It has never happened to me that I’ve wanted to read another book by the same author of the book I’ve just finished. I’ve picked another by Jerry Pinto.

Em and The Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto

A Word

Levity: The treatment of a serious matter with humour or lack of due respect.

A similar word is facetious: Treating serious issues with deliberately inappropriate humour