Yet Untitled 131 - "Big Thing" Approaching
Preparing to 'publish' bigger than I ever have
Dearest Yet Untitler
Something big lies ahead and somehow I’ve been reluctant to look this fact in the eyes. This instalment is as much about sharing this news you as it is about engaging with my reluctance and seeing what comes of it. It feels important.
Something I spent four years making will release before…essentially anyone who has access to the internet and a subscription to one of the big OTT platforms. It took a year to develop, two years to write and another year to film and a good eight months to post produce. And now, it has all but been revealed in front of its potential audience. In other words, I’m about to hit publish, but at a scale that makes the sort of publishing I’m used to feel like some roadside operation under a tin shed.
If I consider this with you for a moment, this should not feel like any momentous thing for someone who pushes one Yet Untitled instalment after another into the big blue yonder week after week. Whatever comes, I hit the red button on Sunday evening and launch. Sometimes, my instalments float into your orbit and you make contact. Sometimes they drift into the silent void of newsletter deep space, continuing to transmit the one or two sparks of inspiration they carry, waiting patiently for any static on the radio.
It’s wonderful. I thrive off it. It has become sustenance. But it’s tiny!
The size of the upcoming publish being what it is, every possibility feels daunting. A potential response feels daunting as does the potential lack of it. With every aspect feeling supersized, I’m suddenly adrift as if none of my lived experience is equipped to grant me comfort here.
There’s also the thing about me knowing you.
I have come to know you over time, dear yet Untitler. You read me. Even if you don’t read the works fully and scroll over the pictures, you read me. At whatever level you engage, there’s a response that somehow gets relayed to me. Perhaps when we cross paths in person - you possess a foreknowledge of things I may tell you, and to my delight, you let me know this. It feels amazing to be known in this way.
It’s isn’t fame. It’s something else. It’s about you acknowledging something about me that is not immediately apparent. Each week you respond to a truth about me that’s been excavated, sometimes painfully. Each week - you receive this part of me, respectfully. Even when you acknowledge that my newsletter lies unopened in your inbox with the regret of not having had the time to read it, I glean a heap-ton of validation from it.
But what of this behemoth, then? Is it really so different? Like Yet Untitled, it carries a genuine and excavated truth gleaned from my life. Like YU it comprises of words and pictures. Like YU, it lands before an audience among whom there are those I have never met. But the size! And how long it took to tear it away from its placenta and finally birth! Already, it demands to be treated as different. It feels like something I do not know, and scares the shit out of me in ways I cannot describe.
This fear takes various forms. It evokes a defensive indifference from me, as if by not looking, the things I fear will somehow wash over me. But I know that this indifference is grossly unfair because I must serve my work in a way that it deserves.
What’s my fear? Perhaps I think that I’ll end up being paraded naked before a crowd of strangers? I take solace, dear Yet Untitler, in the fact that I’ve been here before. How much more naked could I have been than I was before you in this instalment:
How did you respond after I put my vulnerabilities before you with honesty? Only with deep resonance, empathy, and many life affirming conversations followed.
This big thing that’s coming: it also carries a truthful part of me within it that I’ve relayed with as much honesty as I could muster, along with the sincere truths of my precious collaborators. So why should I be so frightened, having already tested my truth by placing it before you, returning every week to do the same for three years?
You know me. So, I’m safe. But do they know me? Will I be safe?
What is safe? Who are they?
Someone I revere deeply said something about writers the other day - about how writers are able to weather uncertainty and chaos because they are used to the shock of a blank page - the uncertainty of it.
According to this mentor-figure, writers counter uncertainty with creativity. What else am I doing here but channelling my uncertainty onto the blank page of my YU instalment and hence challenging it. But that alone doesn’t cut it. Putting the instalment before you is essential, as putting the big thing before the big audience will be as well.
In my experience, putting my art before someone other than myself is where the magic happens. I think this has clearly been the most bountiful harvest from YU - the thing that comes from the interface between you, moi and this newsletter.
But I know this from before as well:
Years ago, when I directed Kiran Nagarkar’s play ‘Bedtime Story’ at Cambridge, I remember coming back to my college bar after the first performance to find two strangers discussing the play. It wasn’t a conversation I had initiated, it happened on its own. Suddenly, the play had a life outside of me.
It had life. It was alive.
Creativity isn’t called ‘Creativity’ for no reason. I think it allows a glimpse of the something higher than our plane of existence because it allows us to create things that live - books, plays, pictures. As a proud parent of Ananya and Aahana, I’m just as possessive of them as I am of my art when they demonstrate more and more signs of wanting to step away from my orbit of influence. I want to prevent it. I want to keep them close, not let them drift an inch from me.
But they will find their own orbits. They will meet the outside world - their ‘audience’? The control I currently have as a parent will dwindle.
But I don’t just have control over my children. I also have influence.
I’m really hoping that all the years of influence that Vani and I have exercised on the kids will eventually hold them in good stead. Isn’t that the most a parent can ask for?
On what approaches: I have given that big thing four years of influence. I can tell you this - I really went for it, as did my collaborators. Of course, I wonder if I, we, could have done better, as much as I sometimes wonder how I can do better for Ananya and Aahana as a parent. There were good days and bad days. Sometimes, I was at the top of my game. Sometimes I really struggled.
That’s how it is. But, I’ll say this - the thing is alive. And I, we, must cheer it on.
When our children took their first steps, Vani and I cheered them on. We didn't think about how quickly or how well they would walk. We just stood nearby to give them the confidence, watched a fall or two and then receded behind them when they started running.
Watch this space. I’ll tell you more about this big thing in an instalment or two.
Thanks for listening!
Love
V
PS. Do you feel that the things you create (especially those that aren’t flesh and blood) live? If so, please share in what ways. Tell me. I want to know!
Aww YES! I cannot WAIT to see it! Anyway, I like the idea of art being alive. But for me, it's a strange kind of aliveness that lives only when its audience is interacting with it. It's the magic moment when the creativity of the artist and the attention of the audience are made to meet and commingle. It really blows my head off when I am in the presence of a wonderful work of art, I give it my attention, and suddenly it becomes alive. It really is one of the deep miracles of consciousness. But that's not my original thought by any means, Peter Porter captured it perfectly in his poem Instant Fish:
Instant Fish
by Phidias!
Add water
and they swim.
;)
Jon
All the best! So excited for and with you! I too am getting vicarious butterflies! For me the way I finally understood detachment in my 30ies really helps me in moments of doubt (besides of course the way Elizabeth Gilbert breaks down and describes the creative process and the expectations and responsibilities around it, in her many great TED talks and Big Magic which I see is already mentioned here in the comments). Detachment is not, not giving it your all. It's to surrender and trust that when it leaves you, you will still exist, you will still have value and there will be more left from where that came from. That the creations you give birth to, will make the world richer because you gave it your best and it is okay to not know in what ways those effects will take shape and create a ripple in the world, beyond your wildest imaginations. Magic lies in the surprise of it all! Honest Intention and action, together, is everything. Karm ki icccha and all that you know! Teehee.