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#4 Wiggling with Words
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.
#3 Pandemic Pulse
Tanvi Akhauri is a writer and journalist currently associated with for SheThePeople. In this article, she envisions the pandemic as a terrible paradox, one that has coaxed future fortitude from irreparable grief. She asks some interesting questions about the potential of the global pandemic /pause in providing impetus to the human community needs to start afresh, revived with humanity.
We’re living in a pandemic that feels like it came and went a lifetime ago. Disjointed, detached, dissociated – no Oxfords or Merriam Websters could have decoded these experiences better than the past year-and-a-half has done. I stepped back in March 2020 and another woman took my place to fill time till I could resume life as I knew it when the dystopia overturned. Now I realise it never might. And the dummy I thought was absorbing this horror so I could return in peace has actually been me all along. I am a substitute in my own life.
What are the rules of a game into which the majority of players are pulled unwittingly? Priorities shifted and new perspectives were created to grapple with this new world. They say you only fully understand the value of something when it leaves you. But in the age of the coronavirus, the impending scare of losing a grandparent or a celebrity sitting halfway across the globe to a random design was enough to remind you what matters.
‘Any day now, any day.’ The scare was there with a pitchfork, prying your eyes open every morning. The hand grabbed the phone first thing, memories flashing and flooding to the beats of a silent prayer in the heart – and I don’t even believe in god – while hope scanned the screen to reassure you of emergency calls that didn’t go missed and lives your sleep didn’t steal. Only then could the rut of a day begin.
‘What if they were dead tomorrow?’ It’s a sinister way of evoking kindness from each other. But this is where SARS-CoV-2 has left us. Hey, half a loaf is better than none though, right?
There were emotions more visceral than kindness, however, that were on unabashed display between April and May this year, the months of peak second wave hell. The human instinct for survival tested just what this animal is capable of when the only vision ahead is the ultimate checkpoint: death. From the anguished desperation of breaking the law on a few extra bucks to the priceless million medical sacrifices, the spectrum unfolded in all its glory with a common goal in sight – a life needed saving.
That kind of mayhem shakes up your sanitised pedestal of morality, of righteousness, of wrongdoing. When love and life are at stake, to what end do the forces of law, order, equity, justice hold weight? Was the son who switched his mother’s empty oxygen cylinder for a full one through the backdoor while a file of other heartbroken people waited their turn (as is fair) wrong? Among the many lives lost that night, one wasn’t. Will every breath she takes hence be branded as sin? Should he have compromised with the incompetence of our political overlords?
Spending a lot of time alone can chafe you down raw. The thoughts and dreams are brutally real, too honest to confront. It makes you question everything you know about everything. And for someone like me, someone who relishes a good solo deep dive contemplation session when the need arises, having this escape become a habit is dangerous.
In the thankful absence of personal tragedies during the pandemic, I kept watch on the chaos outside – headlines upon headlines of fires and burning pyres set against corruption and indifference. My self-flagellation was driven in equal parts by disbelief and the requisite of my new, first job as a journalist. And boy, did the world come out in all its naked depravity for the welcome party.
The mind refuses to acknowledge it, but the body carries stress. I have woken up more than once with a cold sweat and an abnormal pulse, lost weight and hair, felt as terribly tired as I never thought I ever could. Of course, on odd days, the mental breakdowns are worse.
Maybe it’s resilience that encourages how life can still go on or maybe it’s ennui that discourages how life has to go on, but the Homo sapiens has emerged from pandemics and wars. Scathed but evolved. We have built ourselves back up to get on with a new day and we shall again. That’s cue for the substitute blue woman in her place to cheer up a little. We’ll be alright.
Socially Distant: The Pandemic Writing Project
Thank you for your enthusiastic contributions towards Login Gender’s ‘Socially Distant: The Pandemic Writing Project.’ We received some very poignant and thought provoking entries and have shortlisted five of them to be featured on our website. We will be featuring one shortlisted entry, every week.
Now, we invite you to please read and share these entries with your peers and post your comments in the comments section of each post!
Oh Captain, My Captain: An Ode to Teaching!
Written by Akashleena
Beyond the confines of the syllabus and curricular structures, Education to begin with, teaches us to question the prescribed or given, learn together and move ahead. Classrooms are the spaces where art of teaching-learning becomes a creative pursuit and the mere act of reading, thinking, feeling and reflecting becomes a political act as best illustrated in the works of educators such as Paulo Freire’s dialogic participation, Bell Hooks ‘Teaching as Transgression’, Samuel Pickering’s ‘Carpe Diem’, Gandhi’s ‘Nai Talim’, Tagore’s ‘Shantiniketan’, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Prof. Avijit Pathak’s ‘Transformative Pedagogy’, Prof. Randhir Singh’s ‘Radical Teacher’ amongst significant others.
Teaching-learning is a collective ordeal, labour of love, ethics, care, journey, an exploration and an adventure which demands humility, empathy and respect. It teaches us to humanise, embrace and apply theories, invent, discover, question and remain critical, creative and curious in the process. Imagining a classroom includes experimenting with science, learning about his-tory or her-stories, doing civics or politics, reading texts, forming Dead poets societies, embracing Socratic Dialectics, and smelling the flowers as you move ahead. Not as an air conditioned room with high quality desks and chairs, Power point presentations, points, rote learning and robotic education. Tagore envisioned it as being in the lap of nature, exploring the skies and reading Rumi or Kabir, vibrating with the energy of discussions and debates, deliberations buzzing around with young minds on work.
More recently, the classroom is captured into the virtual space of laptops and computer screens. It inhibits the joy and theatrics of learning. Digital Divide perpetuates this gap in learning. Quality education gets reduced to social capital rather than equitable access. The ‘Tyranny of Merit’ despite affirmative action policies ensures exclusion in higher education spaces. There is a serious need to address inequities in access to affordable and quality education specially amidst the privatisation conundrum in India and digitisation of education.
Policy measures and legal mechanisms on education treat pedagogy as service delivery mechanisms. Where the teachers/professors are seen as an instrumental reservoir of information delivered to students, consumers who rote and purge it out in an examination format. Reclaiming pedagogy involves questioning the supposed hierarchies in the teacher-student relationship. These hierarchies cultivate a culture of fear rather than mutual respect. Discussion, deliberations, creative engagement, reflexive pedagogy and dialogic participation is lacking in most of the public universities or schools in this country.
Classroom spaces in the school promote the epidemic of marks. They produce children trained in the art of scoring sky rocketing marks. Equipped in the modern culture of surveillance/examinations/testing with inadequate superficial comprehension of the text and the context. Writing and rewriting textbooks and curriculums, where appreciating poetry, aesthetics and imagination, reading with Kamala Das or contemplating with Premchand is a waste of time. Experimenting with acids or bases, experiencing velocity and motion or reversing differentiation to integration gets reversed to rote learning the formulas. Politics/Civics becomes dirty rather than art of possibilities and history re-presenting the past undergoes transformations every 5 years.
While in colleges, a culture of silence and surveillance kills the purpose/meaning/scope of the classroom spaces. The atmosphere of intolerance throttling dissent demands obedience to the status quo. Education fosters dissent in agreeing to disagree, deliberate, debate, sing and walk together on paths. The tragedy lies in these spaces for emancipation reduced to degree production machines with adequate examination surveillance schemes with cut-throat competition and pressure to perform create a post-mortem on the barely alive young mind. The University becomes a site of contestation through the vibrant active, creative and constructive action of protests.
Professionalising learning introduces mediocrity, technocratic and skill based attitude to this act. Instrumentalising the homo sapien as mere human resource/capital promising demographic potential commoditizes humans and deprives them the ability to thrive as a homofaber often translated as creative producer. Skilling involves drilling rote learning and technocratic material into the young minds limiting space for expression or fulfilment of creativity. Creative and constructive pedagogy entails learning to transcend the accepted frameworks while questioning the established assumptions across the sciences or even humanities.
One can only imagine the purpose of cut-throat and dead-lines in this fast paced rat race world where every student gets forced into. Well, if Whatsapp universities rule over the mainstream political discourse, one can hardly bring in questions of relevance, quality and critical rigour.
Even if pessimism of the intellect blinds our vision, optimism of the will should pave way for light amidst darkness. Discomfort is necessary, there are no easy answers, one must choose the burdens, one must carry one’s own crosses and navigate difficult dilemmas, questions and situations in life.
Indeed, whether words and ideas can change the world for the worse or for the better depends on us. Living in quiet desperation, accepting the systemic maladjustments and submission is the worst form of defeat to the challenges ahead. This calls for radical pedagogy, pedagogy on resilience, care, fraternity transforming the classrooms, humanise the word and world, haptic than the optic spaces, opening the doors and windows to light and action. The magnanimity of this noble act teaches us to continue reflecting, questioning, asking, thinking, feeling, dissenting and walking together. As John Keating would say
Carpe Diem! Seize the day and make it extraordinary!
That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What shall your verse be?