Paris | 4th May 2011 | 1:21 am
Dear reader,
Wow, it feels amazing to break the fourth wall. I should probably do this more often. But I have only ninety nine more minutes to finish typing this, so I'll stop dawdling and get a move on. (You do not know this - well, at least most of you don't - but the only way I could ever rein in my epistolary verbosity was to impose a time limit. It was either that or a word-limit and given my love of laziness, I was never going to go for the tediousness that is keeping a word-count.)
Anyway.
I just want it said here, categorically, without it being nestled in soaring metaphors or cunning wordplay or obscure imagery, that this blog is very much alive, and will be for a while to come. This is by no means a reassurance (I surely am not presumptuous enough to attach a sense of importance to myself in any of your mindspaces) but just a disclosure. A confession even, if you may.
Why.
Because I might be on the cusp of a disappearance here and thought I would be a little vocal about it for a change, instead of leaving it up to time to do a poor imitation of my voice. Or, well, the disappearance might just never happen. I'm not sure really. Ummmm, I prefer that all of my letters be purposeless, and would dearly like this one to stay so. Just humor me, will you please? As it is, I already have the time-limit weighing on my mind.
Enough small talk.
I work mostly through my notebooks, vessels of jotted down elements and imagery that I usually scour for focal ideas to weave my words around. But like most things, they have outlived their purpose and I very recently decided to let them go, in a singular moment of calcified determination. Two and a half years worth of unfinished material, zipped up and stashed away for reference later in middle-age, if ever that were to arrive. So, this essentially puts me on, artistically speaking, a blank page, the definition of pastlessness that I only too readily understand. Thankfully, I'm not new to this, I have a long-standing habit of resetting my literary pursuits and voluntarily going blind once every few years. (For those interested in history, the last time that happened during this blog's short lifetime was here.) It usually makes the world a tad more beautiful when your vision returns in the months to come. It also helps make life easier and art more complicated, a delicious recipe for their co-existence. Yes, they're quite the bedfellows, but you know art is the only thing that lasts, nothing else does, not your methods, not its inspirations, not life itself. (I'm tempted to break out into a passionate-yet-perfunctory exaltation of the tenacity of art, but then the clock moves.)
It means new reading habits, new playlists, longer evening walks, new paper-faced mates (Pinter, Rilke, Carey and Virgil wearily lift hands in attendance from the cluttered desk in the background), more late-night experiments with ink and eventually, a slightly evolved destiny, bent, bruised and battered. Whether the new-found freedom will liberate me or just tie me down until I find new inspirations or construct a large enough corpus of notes again, only time will tell. (I have a sneaking feeling I'll be back here before the turn of the week, but you know, betting on yourself in whimsical matters like these is just never the right thing to do.) As for "Confabulations", it is an offshoot, an arena born of my desire to adopt a different tone from my habitual one. It's got nothing to do with anything here, and as such I don't really expect it to influence matters much. So that's that.
I do not know when the next time will be that I'll be able to address you directly without being shrouded in half-painted ideologies or veiled metaphors, so I would like to take this opportunity to extend my most heartfelt gratitude for deeming my words good enough to waste your time on. After all, you've just seen how seriously I take my own. All ninety seven minutes of it, to be precise.
Verbosely yours,
Dheeraj.
Dear reader,
Wow, it feels amazing to break the fourth wall. I should probably do this more often. But I have only ninety nine more minutes to finish typing this, so I'll stop dawdling and get a move on. (You do not know this - well, at least most of you don't - but the only way I could ever rein in my epistolary verbosity was to impose a time limit. It was either that or a word-limit and given my love of laziness, I was never going to go for the tediousness that is keeping a word-count.)
Anyway.
I just want it said here, categorically, without it being nestled in soaring metaphors or cunning wordplay or obscure imagery, that this blog is very much alive, and will be for a while to come. This is by no means a reassurance (I surely am not presumptuous enough to attach a sense of importance to myself in any of your mindspaces) but just a disclosure. A confession even, if you may.
Why.
Because I might be on the cusp of a disappearance here and thought I would be a little vocal about it for a change, instead of leaving it up to time to do a poor imitation of my voice. Or, well, the disappearance might just never happen. I'm not sure really. Ummmm, I prefer that all of my letters be purposeless, and would dearly like this one to stay so. Just humor me, will you please? As it is, I already have the time-limit weighing on my mind.
Enough small talk.
I work mostly through my notebooks, vessels of jotted down elements and imagery that I usually scour for focal ideas to weave my words around. But like most things, they have outlived their purpose and I very recently decided to let them go, in a singular moment of calcified determination. Two and a half years worth of unfinished material, zipped up and stashed away for reference later in middle-age, if ever that were to arrive. So, this essentially puts me on, artistically speaking, a blank page, the definition of pastlessness that I only too readily understand. Thankfully, I'm not new to this, I have a long-standing habit of resetting my literary pursuits and voluntarily going blind once every few years. (For those interested in history, the last time that happened during this blog's short lifetime was here.) It usually makes the world a tad more beautiful when your vision returns in the months to come. It also helps make life easier and art more complicated, a delicious recipe for their co-existence. Yes, they're quite the bedfellows, but you know art is the only thing that lasts, nothing else does, not your methods, not its inspirations, not life itself. (I'm tempted to break out into a passionate-yet-perfunctory exaltation of the tenacity of art, but then the clock moves.)
It means new reading habits, new playlists, longer evening walks, new paper-faced mates (Pinter, Rilke, Carey and Virgil wearily lift hands in attendance from the cluttered desk in the background), more late-night experiments with ink and eventually, a slightly evolved destiny, bent, bruised and battered. Whether the new-found freedom will liberate me or just tie me down until I find new inspirations or construct a large enough corpus of notes again, only time will tell. (I have a sneaking feeling I'll be back here before the turn of the week, but you know, betting on yourself in whimsical matters like these is just never the right thing to do.) As for "Confabulations", it is an offshoot, an arena born of my desire to adopt a different tone from my habitual one. It's got nothing to do with anything here, and as such I don't really expect it to influence matters much. So that's that.
I do not know when the next time will be that I'll be able to address you directly without being shrouded in half-painted ideologies or veiled metaphors, so I would like to take this opportunity to extend my most heartfelt gratitude for deeming my words good enough to waste your time on. After all, you've just seen how seriously I take my own. All ninety seven minutes of it, to be precise.
Verbosely yours,
Dheeraj.
