Yet Untitled 158 - Cross Connections
On the little notes we leave and receive on the fabric of time/space
Dearest Yet Untitler,
I write a lot. Not just because it’s my profession, but also because it’s me answering to a deep calling. If I think about it, my writing’s scattered about the planet in many forms - submitted tutorials, comments in suggestion books, letters to friends, notes on the in-sleeves of presented books…
Many of the writings I mention above were intended to be read by someone, but I do write a lot that I don’t intend to share. It’s precisely with this sort of writing that I start imagining - who’s going to eventually read it in the future and how will they react to it?
Most often I’m thinking about future versions of my daughter reading my forbidden, hidden stuff (mostly fragments of text in notebooks). There’s a bouquet of assumptions here: that my writing will survive the flood and that my daughters would be even vaguely interested.
The second isn’t an assumption, it’s a fear. A fear that none of this will matter. I wonder if this is one of those things that confronts everyone when they confront death - looking not just annihilation, but irrelevance in the face.
Almost exactly five years ago, my father left us. While writing this, I’m thinking about whether he thought about similar things as he went through life. Was there something more in that mural he painted - the one with the twisted woman with an unbelievably flexible spine bent backwards over the door frame?? I mean, surely there was🙄! I’ve never been able to decipher it. But I wonder whether dad wished for someone (me?) to see the true meaning he coded into it.
Maybe it’s just my projected assumption. Maybe just it’s me who’s obsessed with these messages-in-bottles sent out into the sea of time, so much so that I’ve known myself to orchestrate it for family members now and again. For example, when my nephew Jaisal was born in 2002, I was in Cambridge and I went to a college party and filmed a bunch of of very drunk people as they recorded messages form him to view on his eighteenth birthday. More recently, after finding a bunch of unused Indiapost Aerograms in my mom’s drawer, I had various family members write and seal messages for Ananya and Aahana to read on their 18th birthdays.
I wonder where this impulse comes from - this impulse to time travel / send out a signal / reach out beyond the present?
I trace it down to the thrill I’ve felt in intercepting signals from other times. I’ll try to explain what I mean. When I was in school, my housemaster showed me a trunk full of journals he had brought from an antique shop in Dehradun. There must have been around 30 or 40 small leather-bound journals, all written with a fountain pen, some of them holding newspaper clippings and other artefacts from another time - when words like ‘connection’ were spelled with an ‘x’. I drank in these journals and learned about the life of a lonely British government official living between Dehradun and Calcutta in the 1930s, about his dog whose name was Trixie, about his duck hunts, his domestic staff and his immediate cares and concerns.
Now, did that colonial human ever entertain the possibility of his journals falling into the hands of an inquisitive 15-year-old schoolboy from Panipat? I don’t think so. It feels like a mistake, something that the continuum of linear time would brush off as a blip, or disown as a cross-connection that was never meant to happen.
But there it is. It did happen.
I’ve only had one archeologist friend, but we’ve lost touch and she’s now somewhere in the innards of Canada. Perhaps she would have shed light on the thrill I felt - to have excavated - cheated time somewhat: my own Tutankhamen moment, where such discovery changes the present forever.
Perhaps, because I’ve been sniffing around in the vicinity of some powerful truth - the power that resides in transcending this prison of the present - I’m always excited by not just receiving these signals from beyond but also sending them out.
And, somehow, I’m not the only only one toying with this idea. In Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, there’s an extremely moving scene in which an astronaut lost in a black hole finds his way - through time and space - to poignant moments in his life, like when he left his teenage daughter behind to go exploring in space. He realises a poignant truth about the universe - that time and space: the past, present and future - all co-exist in the same instance. Realising this, he reaches across and makes contact with his daughter in the past. At first, she thinks it’s a ghost. But eventually she knows that it’s not just an apparition but her father. She listens, and the communion then bears a huge and deep meaning.
‘Interstellar’ always makes me tear up - such a powerful film, bridging the perceived gap between science and our inner lives which are always, somehow, presented as two separate worlds.
Whether my father consciously left writings on the wall for me to decipher or not, I’m constantly listening. Perhaps he’s talking now, after he’s gone; and if he is, the way I see it - we all undeniably have access to engage in such communication. We just have to get used to the idea.
I’ve been doing this back and forth all my life, enacting inter-temporal dialogue as a drama, conducting little experiments. And my life is coloured in radiant hues by the experience.
So - to you, who are reading this, whether in my present, or in my future. Who you are matters as little as who I am. What matters most is that you and I are talking, unfettered by the bounds of our present. In this, you and I have transcended.
Believe me, it’s of huge significance. I cannot thank you enough for receiving my signal.
Via this communion, in this moment, I give you my everything.
Thanks for listening.
V
PS - this video above. I don’t know exactly why I’ve shared it, but it feels right. I don’t remember this moment in actual memory, when my father was showing off his new wheels to me, and I was showing off my eclectic music taste to him. But it’s come back because I chose to record it, before ever-present recording devices were a thing. It’s come to me for a reason.
I’m listening.
PPS - I’d love to hear from you. Really. If you’re affected in any way by this writing, tell me.
"Whether my father consciously left writings on the wall for me to decipher or not, I’m constantly listening. Perhaps he’s talking now, after he’s gone; and if he is, the way I see it - we all undeniably have access to engage in such communication."
💜 This is so poignant, thank you for sharing! (Wish I had recorded more videos as well - how cool that you have this!)