Akashleena struggles with words of the world and world of words. She invites you to sit, read, play, think, sense, feel, sing and twirl around with words. Writing is not just about words, is it? Neither is writing about signification. It is about those pauses, those silences, those commas, semi colons, those unsaid waste paper baskets, those unshed tears, those exclamations of joy. This post refuses to make sense, refuses to be relevant, meaningful, comprehensive or coherent. Just an invitation, as Yoko Ono says, to Get Lost!
I struggled with the title of this piece. ‘Socially distant: the writing project’ brings a juxtaposition of phrases like tangling wires and hula hoops in your head. You jump and play through these hoops with the constant risk of falling down. As I sat down, on the table with the blank page of the word document staring right at me, cursor blinking, waiting for my intervention, my mind reflected Tabula Rasa[1]. I wrote random musings, ramblings of an amateur writer. Delete. Writer? Can I call myself a writer?
Words and I share a contentious relationship. I lie at the margins in the world of words. Neither do words flow out of my body nor do I swim with the words. You, the reader, might try to make meaning, sense, intent or purpose out of it. But let me invite you to stop making sense and dive deep into what the world of the word and word of the world offers. I am not writing gibberish or following Lear’s nonsense verse. Mind you, I am an amateur, beginner without expertise, often told that my writing is clumsy, distracted, stumbling words spilling on to other boxes.
How do you write about going slow in this fast paced world? Social distance created anomalies basking in the pain of solitude. When someone asks for a productivity-progress report[2] of 2020-2021, all I give is a blank stare. Pandemic produced certain words such as burn-out, exhaustion, Covid fatigue countered by corrective, temporary measures without reflecting on the brutal exposure of the structural inequalities exacerbated during this pandemic. I am off-sync, out of tune, unable to turn on or on-line of this world.
My tryst with the world of words in this pandemic has been painfully cathartic. Writing in isolation, latched in the room of one’s own, listening through the walls, doors to feel the mere presence of bodies. You express the ‘feeling at home’ to connote safety, security, comfort, the humble dwelling became the source for anxiety and anguish. How do you write about grief? How do you write about the unshed tears, crippling anxiety, fear of proximity and intimacy?
How do you write about/in/on the pandemic? When the mere utterance of the word, induces devastating ‘affect’. This piece takes a detour to reflecting on writing as a project, rather than a significatory, instrumental, symbolic, technical expertise, an ‘acquired skill’ and a ritualistic exercise. Mastering the skill of writing[3] adheres to the logic of grammar, restrictive use of language, anthropocentric touch, numbing the sensory haptic experiences. This ritualistic writing often focuses on the visuality, optic and myopic vision. It has a purpose, a grand narrative where even broken fragments are tied along with a string to label as Magnum Opus[4] or a coherent piece. This writing is reformist in nature, it can write revolution[5] but restrict within the text, talk the walk, succumbing to the pressure of articulation and functional usage.
Words like things, objects, symbols, matter have a life and trajectory of their own. It is interesting to witness when a word and its connotation, the mere presence and absence of certain terminologies expose the fragility, limits to tolerance, sedition or apparently incite hatred in society. In lieu of Judith Butler’s speech acts[6], the mere act of utterance becomes precarious. Jashn becomes communal and Jihad is blasphemous, alerting bodies signalling danger. Aren’t words mere utterances of syllables, strung together by a thread so powerful to ‘incite’ hatred, cultivate fear, produce disgust and disturb the homeostasis we pretend to live in.
But, words do wonders, words facilitate wandering aimlessly, the act of writing is often an act of defiance, these words matter. Word is a smooth space, emotion and action[7]. I was supposed to write about/in/on the pandemic, social distancing, home and the world, exhaustion, burn-out. But the Tabula Rasa is meant to explore, to wear out the rail-road tracks and fall over. That is the beauty of word and writing, the act of being a homofaber is in creative production, maybe even playing over with words and imagination. Maybe, we need to re-think, re-write, re-read, re-visit, re-clean the slates, re-invent new vocabularies, grammars, arts and skills of writing, of encountering words in the world and world through the words.
Wiggling is unsettling, discomforting, neither outside nor inside, just like the margins and peripheries in democracies, trying to grasp, get a hold yet trying to get out of that hold searching for music in chaos and noise amidst this pandemic.
One of the instructions in Yoko Ono’s phenomenal work, Grapefruit is to Get Lost. Did you, dear reader, get lost in the labyrinth of words?
References
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. Bloomsbury Publishing. 2013
Ono, Yoko. Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions + drawings. New York: SIMON & SCHUSTER 2000
[1] Numb unlike the active Tabula Rasa formulated by John Locke’s ‘An Essay concerning Human Understanding’(1689).
[2] Often subtly by asking- what did you do, now that you were at home?
[3] The emergence of help books on writing as ‘How we write’ (2015), ‘Bird By Bird’ (1994), ‘Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks’ (2008) ‘The Elements of Style’ (1920) signals this trained expertise necessary for calculative, cautious and coherent writing.
[4] Deleuze and Guattari present this argument in the Introduction:Rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus (2013).
[5] Talks of revolution are more profound in academic texts within the departments than celebratory enunciation outside the sanctum spaces of ‘University’, though nowadays, revolution in university could amount to sedition.
[6] Discussed in Butler’s Excitable Speech (1997) and elaborated upon in Precarious Life (2004)
[7] Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion on books and writing in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, specially where they dismiss the work of book as signification, symbolic or instrumental work.