Yet Untitled: Experimenta 001
Towards roadmaps of impulses
Dearest Yet Untitler,
Each week as I write these first sentences towards the current instalment, I feel very grateful for your willing ears and commitment to this surprising, small creative enterprise that has gone on for close to two years (!) now.
This is a precious and hard-won relationship we have here, and I while I marvel at its longevity, I also feel that I need to work hard not to let it degenerate into some form one-sided spam exchange, something we all can do without. I’ve been thinking a lot about where YU needs to go next, so that it can stay as fresh it was from the time of its earliest instalments while building on the assuredness it earned in its later instalments.
So…I’m trying an experiment here. There are two ways to do it. The first way is to explain what I’m going to do first. The second is to start by doing it and then see if an explanation is still necessary.
The first way feels safer. The second feels like an adventure.
Up Anchor! Raise that flag! We all signed up for nothing less than an adventure here, Yet Untitlers! I’ll be doing you a disservice if I don’t offer you up even the slightest bit of adventurous thrill in your generous weekly communion with my life.
I hope you enjoy YU: Experimenta 001! Be sure to tell me what you think in a comment below!
V
I was grating against the old steel of the cage that had closed tight around my body, and they had twisted my torso at an impossible angle before locking me down. I couldn’t move my arms. Only my fingers and toes could move freely, and moving them just amplified how excruciating my discomfort was. I did not know how long I’d be left like this. Thinking about time in any manner threatened to throw me into a panic. Bigger and more suffocating than the panic was the knowledge that I was alone. Every time I looked in the direction of that feeling, I was struck by sensations whose memories were very dangerous. The soft soap-smelling skin of my daughters against my beard, the sweet sounds of their complaints, the house full of riling against one type of food and their bringing down the roof over things so inconsequential that memory has no hold on them at all. Not to have all that was an internal contortion that felt beyond the limits of my organs, my mind.
This physical discomfort could become the counter to this danger. It had a shape, coiling around my body in red rings. These rings jailed me out of my memories. They were keeping me safe.
This dungeon: too dark to decipher. The darkness has blurred my orientation within the past, present and the future. This too is, absurdly, a protection. I cannot describe it with clarity; except when I see others like myself pass before me and I meet their eyes. Their eyes see what has become of me. Even from afar, I feel the sharp intake of their breath. Theyre thinking of the future, a future where I am present already. They are wondering whether I am their future. They anticipate how they will balk when the red rings coil them. They wonder what my eyes tell them. They do not believe me when they see my eyes telling them that all will be well.
This piece of writing emerged from me this week, and - to say the least - it puzzled me with its morbid tone and darkness. Stuff like this has come out of me in the past, and I’ve usually thought it best to kept it to myself; mostly because anyone else would not be sure what to make of it, even more so than me.
But when I get past my trepidation and vulnerability (to begin with, my vulnerability before myself), this fragment of writing - like some photographs that have been triggers of previous instalments - presents to me a fascinating map of impulses and their translations that come together to form a…story? A scene? An image? An atmosphere?
Thinking about it, Yet Untitled has been a map of impulses. The mapmaking starts with setting a bunch of impulses lose on a page with my deciphering eye chasing them down, with my curiosity making incisions and looping sutures to form a being that lives. Thereafter, I use the tool of craft upon it, transforming the Frankenstein thing into a human shapes and textures. The tool works magic like a wand. The wand moves until the creation can speak for itself.
This time the trigger isn’t a photograph, but a fragment of writing. We circle back, dear Yet Unititler, you and I, back to where we once arrived, but having walked a new path.
Q: Where have we arrived here specifically?
A: The house where a fear of mine lives
I’m very sure that in the realm underlying the dungeon of my writing fragment is my deep-rooted fear of small, cramped spaces. I obsess over scenarios where I’m faced with what is likely one of my worst nightmares. The coffin scene from Kill Bill Vol. 2 makes my breath stop even when I think of it.
Years ago while on a visit to Vietnam, while I crawled through the famous Cu Chi Tunnels, I realised that I definitely harbored a phobia of cramped spaces. Without consciously willing to do so, I obsess about how I would do if I came face to face with it.
As I isolate this impulse - obsessing over the phobia that quite obviously lies behind the writing fragment - I realize how this the engagement has changed over the yeas. Initially I had thought that it is nothing more than a snapshot of my mind in the grip of abject fear. Upon reading the fragment again and again, I realize that it’s not just that. It’s also a portrait of my ongoing battle against one of my biggest fears. I start to realise that over time, my obsession has stopped halting at the point of abject fear and has gone beyond it - concerning itself with the things I would do to not only survive my phobia, but possibly even conquer it.
I find it interesting that in deciphering that morbid piece of writing, I find hope. It’s nothing less than buried treasure.
Is the Map the Treasure?
I have a feeling it is.
Knowing what’s going on inside your life feels good - a lot better than leaving it as some sort of nebulous enigma too complex to decipher. What goes on inside my head is complex. Often it is an enigma. But - to have these tools to make sense of it! Ah!
Let’s travel along the other contours of this map.
A response to the past two weeks
Two weeks ago, I was sick.
Then our house help fell sick. Then Aahana. Then Vani.
In our overlapping convalescence, we were all in each others’ faces, slathering Zandu Balm on each others’ foreheads, sometimes getting on each others’ nerves, most often offering each other comfort. It felt like swimming in human soup.
From the midst of this human organism that is my life, I think my mind began to experiment with what feelings would come if this extreme proximity wasn’t there.
These thoughts did take me to some darker places. I’m quite sure I tapped into a particular fear I harbour about my times, when artists are snatched up and persecuted for the things they say. This fear often calls the shots inside my head, and I don’t like that fact that it still stops at the point of abject fear - where it ends up controlling what I write.
I wonder whether obsessing over a fear is a way to prepare yourself to face it. I think it could be but it hasn’t always been so for me. In the past, my obsessing over my fear used to stop at the point of impasse - as if coming up against something unfathomable, an exercise that is best avoided or deferred to later.
Something has steadily changed in this context after I started practicing Buddhism six years ago. In the course of my Buddhist journey, apart from gaining deeper understanding of Buddhist theory that doesn’t see our life tendencies as fixed but changeable, I met many individuals who had changed fundamental aspects of themselves via their Buddhist practice. I see the same happening in my life. After six years of practice, the same fears still exist, but the nature of the engagement has changed. It’s a more dynamic engagement. It’s become a quest, it’s become a fairer fight, where I feel I’m grappling with something that I can actually wrestle with, as opposed to grappling with something formless, like the wind.
I think the writing fragment reflects one of these battles in progress - Vasant vs. His Fears. It’s a worthy battle. The map lets me check in on the fight and see where it’s at.
It’s useful, this map. It’s a real tool!
Being Courageous and Gandhi
I never thought of myself as courageous. I’m the youngest of my siblings and always thought of myself as ‘the kid’. But life has demanded more of me and I found that it was difficult to rise up to those demands playing such a role.
Whenever I get overwhelmed by any sort of fear, I always think of scenes from Richard Attenborough’s ‘Gandhi’. It always inspires me, the fact that watching one person show true courage has the potential to transform everyone who witnesses it and inflect them towards courage. Here’s a great scene with a young Gandhi demonstrating great courage in South Africa, some years before he came to India and joined the freedom struggle there.
Underlying the last sentences of the fragment is my obsession with this principle - that bravery is contagious. I have received bravery from others, and have been fortunate enough to pass some along as well to others. I’m fascinated by what happens when this transference takes place. Hence I’m not surprised that it keeps popping up as a theme in things I write.
Generosity vs. Nebulosity
In my experience, artists sometimes find it productive, (useful?) to keep their art mysterious, but I have never thought of it this way. I have benefited immensely from those artists who sincerely presented pictures of their mind and their processes. In appreciation of how such transparency allowed my mind and my craft to develop, ‘Yet Untitled - Experimenta’ feels like me doing a bit of the same.
A big shoutout to my fellow Substackers who continuously inspire me with the truth of their processes - Austin Kleon, Cali Bird, Karen Davis; thank you for everything you do!
A last word on my words
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
―Frank Herbert, Dune
When I heard these lines in ‘Dune', I was very moved. I agree totally.
I use writing to bring me to where my fear resides, so I may knock on its door. I find it better to call on my fears rather than let them call on me, especially unexpectedly. Perhaps my fears resonate with yours. Perhaps they don’t. If they do, then perhaps my writing allows me to transport you to their doorstep vicariously, perhaps laying the ground for your own engagement with them, helping you make the fight fairer for yourselves.
Perhaps none of this is helpful to anyone other than me beyond its aesthetics.
But still, I think it’s worth even to hope that it is!
Welcome to Experimenta, my laboratory of creative impulse. Do let me know in the comments below if any of this resonated. Or not.
Either way, I’d love to hear from you.
Lots of love
V