Curiouser and Curiouser
Weekends are apparently meant to be used for more writing, and NaPoWriMo is taking advantage of that to suggest some form-based prompts. Today’s is the nonet! A nonet has nine lines. The first line has nine syllables, the second has eight, and so on until you get to the last line, which has just one syllable.
Raven
From my bedroom window, a raven
sits steady on a spring-time tree,
his velvet tones romancing
a long distance lover.
This secret language
melancholy,
is desire,
is love,
hope.
Today’s prompt comes to us from this list of “all-time favorite writing prompts.” It asks you to name your alter-ego, and then describe him/her in detail. Then write in your alter-ego’s voice. Maybe your alter-ego is a streetwise detective, or a superhero, or a very small goldfinch.
These are rough prompts. I’ve never been one for imagining myself as anything other than the human I am, so I’m struggling with this. Instead, therefore, I am writing a haiku. Although it’s spring, this one feels a lot like autumn.
Autumn
birch tree stamps kindly
bleakly, fervently, acorn
quibbles, darkening
Today, the prompt asks me to write a poem that argues against, or somehow questions, a proverb or saying. They say that “all cats are black at midnight,” but really? Surely some of them remain striped. And maybe there is an ill wind that blows some good. Perhaps that wind just has some mild dyspepsia.
I struggled with this immensely and could only come up with the one stanza, that I am hopeful will lead to a more cohesive poem some time in the future.
Absence Makes The Heart Grow
Absence makes the heart grow flabbier,
Losing musculature, it fattens in its forgetting,
Straining, feigning remembrance of
Blocked off, walled memories.
Today’s prompt is a challenge to write a variation of an acrostic poem. But rather than spelling out a word with the first letters of each line, we are encouraged to write a poem that reproduces a phrase with the first words of each line. I knew GloPoWriMo had encouraged me to write an acrostic a few years ago, but really had to dig the archives for this one, from 2017, where I wrote one on Warfare.
Break a Leg
Before important events and milestones people
risk everything and move mountains for,
everyone feels trepidation, nausea,
and the unpleasantness that everything is going to go wrong; but you, you should
know that the Universe functions in the most miraculous ways,
and I believe in you, for
labour always translates, fortune always favours the brave. Have faith that
every little thing is going to be all right; you’re going to be amazing,
good luck!
Today, the challenge is to write a poem about a mythical person or creature doing something unusual – or at least something that seems unusual in relation to that person/creature. For example, what does Hercules do when he loses a sock in the dryer? If a mermaid wants to pick up rock-climbing as a hobby, how does she do that? What happens when a mountain troll makes pancakes?
I am far and away the least fiction-wise creative person I know. I struggle with fictional thoughts and fabricating things from my imagination. Despite being a tactful liar, my creative energies are concentrated on the real world, so this is quite the ask. I’ve interpreted this loosely, where the mythical creature for me is someone who works without a break (and enjoys it) – and the surprising/unusual act is taking time off. The title sounds awfully close to a children’s essay or an Enid Blyton book, which contributes to the rhyme scheme and pattern I set myself on.
Sajet Sleeps
As the sun rose in his part of the world,
Sajet awoke to the sound an Outlook notification,
Deep into his comforter he curled,
Decided today would be a one-day vacation.
He slept all day, and slept all night,
Sajet gave his family and boss a good fright,
They kept calling but he snored and snored,
Sajet decided people made him bored.
The next morning, Sajet arose from his slumber,
Found fifteen missed calls on his cellphone number,
When he read his mails, he saw things were on track,
But replied to his parents that he was awake, online, and back.
Then he was notified they docked his pay,
Adding penalties for deliverables that he delayed,
The whole thing seemed like an elaborate insult,
Until he remembered he was an adult.
Today, I am challenged to write a poem in the form of a poetry prompt. The poet Mathias Svalina has been writing surrealist prompt-poems for quite a while, posting them to Instagram. You can find examples here, and here, and here.
For my prompt-poem, I wrote a set that I would be keen to read, and what I usually start conversations with when I am texting people.
You
This one is a bit complex . It’s a Spanish form called a “glosa” – literally a poem that glosses, or explains, or in some way responds to another poem. The idea is to take a quatrain from a poem that you like, and then write a four-stanza poem that explains or responds to each line of the quatrain, with each of the quatrain’s four lines in turn forming the last line of each stanza. Traditionally, each stanza has ten lines. Here’s a nice summary of the glosa form.
I tried.
[more thicker than forget]
love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail
– [love is more thicker than forget], E.E. Cummings
when she arrives,
no space in my heart is left hollow,
every word, weighty, not shallow,
her time a gift,
her company my safety net,
love is more thicker than forget.
when she departs,
she carries our meeting,
time past feels fleeting,
my memory palace locked,
its drawbridge will not fall,
love is more thinner than recall.
when she re-emerges,
she is different,
this is no deterrent,
the evening passes,
we pretend it is the first time we have met,
love is more seldom than a wave is wet.
it is unfortunate then when she settles,
that my overthinking commences,
this calm storm, rocked by hail,
remains steady, unfazed,
love is more frequent than to fail.
Today, I am challenged to write a poem based on a word featured in a tweet from Haggard Hawks, an account devoted to obscure and interesting English words. I picked this one.
Nemesist
Doomed from when I hit snooze,
My sleep consumes memories I could be making,
Moments I could be sharing, work I could be doing.
In that process,
Kafka-esque forces make me a chronophage,
I tell my parents I am a creature of habit, a night-owl,
Alas, the moon sees no transformation,
I remain human, not a werebeast, and as it were,
I have procrastinated everything,
For the monkey in my brain refuses to concentrate on the important things,
Choosing instead to eat time to fulfil its hunger.
April 2021 passed me by in preparing for examinations and surviving the dissonance I faced between where I was living and what was happening back at home. Amma and I spoke about GloPoWriMo, but I could not be bothered to write at all. This year, I realised the month had begun only on April 2nd, and my cousin messaged me to ask whether we were writing this year. That little nudge was enough encouragement to start up. So here I sit, on April 5th, five poems in hand, posting them one-by-one. The rest of the month should see this play out with more consistency, ideally taking me back to the daily posting this blog offers the promise of.
The prompt today is based on Robert Hass’ remarkable prose poem, “A Story About the Body.” The idea is to write your own prose poem that, whatever title you choose to give it, is a story about the body. The poem should contain an encounter between two people, some spoken language, and at least one crisp visual image.
Rotund
His childhood friends say it first, “Man, you look so good – you’ve lost weight, haven’t you?”. It’s the question that catches him off guard. Why do they ask when he feels like a dried raisin rather than a grape? Six months of portioning meals and no sugar, before the chorus of aunties and uncles offer their views. No pleasantries exchanged but an immediate recognition of shape, “Your cheeks are less round” and marks, “We can see your dimples”. Colours too, “Aww, he’s blushing”, as they turn to his mother and only half-jokingly mutter, “You should get him married when he’s like this”. For those minutes, he holds his tongue, thinking about the dimpled skin hiding stretch marks and how inner-shirts hide the inverted hourglass his body presents in the mirror. He has fasted for this, and so, eats orange gravy, naans, and gulab jamoons to his hearts’ content. All of this till he goes home, feels his fingers along his bulging belly and notices the jamoon he has become.
If you are here expecting a post that outlines genuine concerns that explain why there is nothing new on this blog, you may skip to the end and come back tomorrow. Here is a concise summary to help you on your way: I have convinced myself of multiple reasons to procrastinate writing over the past days, weeks, months, years, and this post chronicles my brain’s observations/attempts to procrastinate once more. I have merely prevented myself from doing this by writing an entire post about the thoughts in my head in real-time as I actively combated the procrastination monkey.
As you are undoubtedly aware, I have not been able to write on this blog continuously or consistently for the past two years. As you are also probably aware, I have grown to accept this and come to terms with it. This has meant understanding that on some days there are no words to write, and no stories to tell, or nothing I wish to share publicly into the void. It has meant giving myself the flexibility of being comfortable with not writing, which is vastly different from the two-three years I spent pushing myself to write. On some days, I query whether I did the right thing in relentlessly pursuing a blogpost everyday, especially if it has robbed me of things to say to the void, or to people in real life. On most other days, I give myself a free pass. I tell myself that writing has become like second nature to me, that because of the two years I wrote, the words will forever flow from my brain. Except, on reflection tonight, I know that is not the case. Words have gotten stuck, and I have become an editor more than I have been writing. I have critiqued drafts and not posted them, going fundamentally against the rules I set out when I started this blog. There have been so many reasons I’ve given myself for a holiday. I’ve written so many posts exactly like this one: for recent examples, see here, here, here, and here. All of them have the same theme with such little pay-off. I explain what’s going on, how I struggle with writing, and make a public commitment to write. Invariably I console myself by saying that I’ve been writing in private. I then go back to my ways and this blog sees no activity for a number of days. Then I come back. This cycle repeats. No constructive writing is done, nor am I wiser for this experience.
Therefore, today, I’ve decided to do something different. I’ve decided not to make a public commitment, but a more private commitment to writing everyday again. You may wonder at this point: Tejas, you’re writing on the blog, surely this is another public commitment? That is absolutely fair. Except, my intentions with this post are not to some audience (that is completely a figment of my imagination, only two people actually read this blog, and I currently live with both of them). This post is intended solely for me. I want to use this space to list every excuse and thought process my brain turned to before churning out what you are reading. My purpose with this is simple. Hopefully, by showing myself what I have thought, future me will rationalise that these thoughts are not constructive for writing, and begin to dismiss them whenever they emerge. This will mean hitting the reset button on a lot of habits that have developed in the two years I have been inactive, but I am certain it can happen.
So let’s get into it. Here’s everything I thought while writing this:
And then I started typing, and the words have come out, and for today, this is all I have been able to produce. I know that this is probably a very disorganised post, that makes very little chronological sense (or any sense, to be honest), but this is what my brain has been thinking as it has been typing the words you see. To simplify, I have not written simply for one of three reasons:
Today, as you can see above, it appears that the excuse I wanted to lean on was #2.
The problem with these, in turn, is plain to see:
So, it is, therefore, that I am writing this. There is now time blocked off in the calendar to be writing, and a reminder to read this before I do that writing. Tomorrow, I should be writing. Will I be writing? Yes.
Hello to one & all who follow the blog, or come across it on occasion!
It has been some time since I posted, and today, I just wanted to say I’m still here. Over the course of 2021, several things were done and an equal amount left undone. This blog, and my desire to continuously improve as a writer, by writing for public display, falls into both categories. This year, although very few pieces were published up on the blog, several drafts were written and stored away for future rumination and public consumption. They didn’t feel appropriate or up-to-par, nor did they have the arc I usually aim for with my writing. And so, I left words unsaid, choosing instead to express those sentiments in my diary, for my own records. Naturally, I pondered the distinction between posting something here and writing something in my diary. I’ve spent time this year thinking about whether the blog (and it’s “no edit, no filter” policy) is a true reflection of my thoughts, and how it compares to diary entries from the same day. I’ve concluded that my writing tries to be as honest and open as is practicable, with the diary containing reflections I am unable to share publicly because of circumstances external to my own thoughts. However, another critical distinction I’ve identified, is that while they’re both honest accounts of the way my brain spends its day, they are accounts of two different moments in time on the same day. If I was playing detective or researcher, for any reason, and investigating myself, aside from the various trails I leave on the internet, I imagine that two distinct datasets (the blog and my diaries) could be truth-checked against each other. A whole narrative might also be created by piecing the two together.
So many different stories, so many different portraits can emerge.
These musings aside, as I type this out, I am sitting on my bed at home, after two long years away from my parents. It feels appropriate to return to writing now for two reasons.
First, most habits I carry through today have been built at home in an environment that facilitates new habits being formed. While I don’t earmark a time to create new habits (and I am fully aware this will be contradicted very soon), being at home in a place that is easy and familiar allows me to experiment and figure out how best to reduce the friction between myself and the things I want to be doing. My parents allow that process to play out, and I usually leave home with a sense of routine and realizations about new habits I wish to have. Writing has been one of them, given my diaries, the website, the blog & the newsletter were each born at home – and what joys they’ve all been.
Second, it’s nearly 2022, which is usually when I do annual resets. While cognizant that there’s never a bad time to start anything new – and waiting for a specific moment to begin a new adventure is perhaps a procrastinators’ best friend, the start of a new passage of time have been when I evaluate and envision the things I want to be doing. Annual years, academic years, new weeks, new months – they’re helpful as ‘markers’, if nothing else. This fits well into that mould. I’m hopeful of writing consistently into the new year and allowing my writing to play out in 2022 as it does. Today marks a start.
There we have it then. I’m still here, some new things have been learned and experiences have been had. I’m looking forward to writing about them, and writing about other things I wish to find my words and voice for. Thanks for sticking around – and I hope the wait hasn’t been too bad. There were enough archives to keep you busy. I hope the health of yours & your loved ones has been good, and as ever, you know where to get in touch with me if you’d like.
Ever so often, I catch myself say something that feels like it’s taken out of a young-adult novel with teenage dramatis personae. You know exactly the type: where one of the central characters is a boy who wears hoodies and jeans, with headphones on at most, if not all times, where this clothing is emphasized, repeated as foreshadowing the character who becomes his love-interest and makes him take off his headphones and indulge in conversation – their meeting trapped in time, space, and the novel becoming about everything aside from the routine that interrupts the meeting of their minds. I catch myself having a sequence of thoughts when I’m dressed in similar attire (perhaps a consequence of associative memory), and think to myself, right after, that belongs in a book. A book filled with tropes, but my masterpiece, my Michelangelo.
I associate my foray into this genre with John Green, an author whose work amazes me for how riveting and unputdownable the novels end up being, but equally, after a friend pointed this out, for the sheer profoundness crafted into people who are wise beyond their years. My friend told me, teenagers don’t talk like that, referencing Green’s use of a cigarette as a metaphor in The Fault in Our Stars. I chuckled along in agreement and queried other nuggets of wisdom I had gleaned from these younger characters. For all my quips about seniority being immaterial to respect or knowledge, I dismissed them, till my reading journey got me along to a point where I realized the generalization, that all these characters be pooled into one single space within a Venn diagram marked with a circle teens was flawed. Their wisdoms, their quips stem out of their lived experience – and disassociating, taking a step back, those pieces seem to fit. Granted, this create a hero arc in their lives, but, it fits. Chapeau, my friend, what else can I say?
It’s in those moments, when I speak or text these sentences – sometimes compliments I’m passing on to people, or explanations of something I’ve said, oftentimes apologies, and even mundane observations, that I think, I need to write that book. I have that one sentence, maybe a handful, and here I am, dreaming of these long young adult novels that are as page-turning as I found Green’s work. You see the problem here, don’t you? I’ve identified myself as that character making these quips, and placing the onus on myself to write. It takes a couple of hours, but eventually, I come to the realization that at best, this belongs on a twitter thread, and dismiss them completely. No record, no memory. Like the first step of editing a poorly crafted tweet before the internet sees it, my lack of record means I have no recollection of the sentences I’ve waved off into the abyss.
I caught myself having one of these moments yesterday while exchanging texts back and forth with a friend. In the casual conversation about how much time felt like it had slowed down and days had morphed into each other (a sign of this pandemic for most), my friend said every day feels like Sunday. I seized my literary moment. With no hesitation, in real-time, I said, I’m caught in a sea of Wednesdays. I can recall, vividly, my pride at typing this masterpiece. In dissecting the novel in a Grade 7 Book Club or English Literature class, perhaps a teacher would say, Why did Mr Rao choose to use the word “sea”? To which the bright spark that lingered in greys, hood down, at the back of the class, would shoot back, because he felt like he was drowning. And so the English teacher would have found her star, and a new student-teacher relationship would foster the creation of a Dead Poet’s Society, bonded together by the one moment someone really understood what an author meant. Except, in this case, the author, me, didn’t use sea because he was drowning. I used the word sea deliberately, because I’m floating, one day to the next. More than that, I picked Wednesdays deliberately. An odd choice, as my friend suggested, but one I easily explained, below:
I don’t know. I think it’s the fact that it feels like the middle of the week, despite there being no fixed middle because it’s the closest you can get to a middle on the work week calendar. Or maybe it’s the memory of having good lunch in high school with friends. Or the long forgotten but never really gone memory of being yelled at for saying régle wrong in french class.
And for the Dead Poet’s Society that emerged, there would be the one kid that researched the author’s background, found this post, and got the actual meaning behind the tour de force that is a sea of Wednesdays. For an outsider, a sea of Wednesdays would make no sense. What does he even mean?, they’d ask, and when someone explained it, they’d say, then why on Earth couldn’t he just have said, “every day felt the same”, to which, literary flair, would be the only appropriate response.
So I had this moment, right, on the train yesterday, coming back from London, and I said to myself, that belongs in a book, and for the first time, having a record of that moment and the realization that followed, I can see now that at the very least, it’s given me enough content to fill a space on a blog that serves as a daily reminder of my place as a writer.
As I’ve decided to start recording each of these phrases I concoct, these literary-isms that occupy space in my heart as novels that are never written. The plan is to blog about them and what they meant when I said them originally, for anyone to adopt if they’d like, but more crucially, for me to remember what on Earth I actually meant, lest I think someday that a sea of Wednesdays was a number of shops called Wednesday’s, like Sainsbury’s.
Tejas Rao 