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| safe/unsafe |
girl child.
freedom.
chocolate.
After much rumination, I fail to identify any continuity of thought. Still, I attempt to weave the stream.
The One Billion and Rising campaign, vindicating the right of safety of women, had just reached its media pinnacle on February 14th. And yet, I can not stop thinking of the violence and the oppression that the female foetus, the female child, the woman face in regions where this urbanised campaign is not even a dream. There is actually a multitude of worlds within this earth and this time; we do not need to go far out into the universe to look for multiverse. They are already here.
Freedom has been the tale of Schrödinger's cat experiment with a difference. Though you and I believe we can either have freedom, or not. In reality, freedom is the 'AND' syndrome. We have freedom to do many things, and, simultaneously, we do not have the freedom to those exact same things. We have the freedom to speak our mind, and, simultaneously, we do not have the freedom to speak our mind because too much is at stake already.
For the chocolate, I think: irony.
The free writing helps me to get to the point where I can look back at my beautiful flower-capered blog Lustrous Lives and realise how unsafe my writing dream would be if I were to cling on to the safe haven.
When I started Lustrous Lives, I had arrived in Budapest with the baggage of having failed in life. I had left my M.Phil dissertation halfway and had killed the dream of being an English professor, possibly forever. Academics was my holy grail. It was the driving force in my life. And then, it was all gone. Lustrous Lives began as an escape from the ordeal and ended up being the salvation.
I wrote free-willingly about anything and everything that came to my mind. It was a time-killing exercise. And I willed to remember and record only the happy memories and the beautiful thoughts. It was a sane choice at that point in time. I survived the pangs of being an utter failure. That blog gave me all the safety principles that helped me to combat the new life in a new continent. It gave me family, love and support. It also gave me something that I wasn't looking for. I found a new dream.
The dream appeared to be an illusion for some time and I believed that it was only a mirage. It gradually started to make me leap out of my sleep at regular intervals causing an itching that will only be satisfied by writing. I was still seeped in self-doubt. Questions loomed over my dream: What kind of a writer will I be? How can I write anything that will make any contribution to all the great works that have already been written?
I always looked at the macrocosmic view and as a result, was left more and more inconfident. How infinitesimally small I am! - is all that I could think of. What had been my safe haven started becoming an unsafe zone to tread on.The more I wrote, the more I believed it is of no use to follow this new dream.
Then there are leaps that we make for no logical reason at all. I have finally decided to follow the dream that has been haunting me.
It is unsafe to dream because you have the probability of waking up from the dream into the real world. Maybe this blog will end up nowhere. Maybe I will end up being right where I am. Yet, I got to live this possibly 'unsafe' choice of attempting to be an author of some worth.
Image: Safe/Unsafe by Susmita Paul (c) 2013
Your article(or some ejaculation of your inner self - whichever way you like it better) is very touching and I can, to some extent identify myself with your scribbling. Though I was not as good as you in creativity and grasp over language and literature, I also had a latent wish of leaving some footprints of mine by dint of my fingers. I completely correspond to your thought in your other article where you have spoken of the urge of creative writing as a microbe, infesting the mind. Often do I feel the urge to write but pathetically I end up in some needful but meaningless complications of life which I am inextricably intertwined in. And it is when I strive to but cannot write, several means of decorating the language come to my mind. Otherwise it come as spontaneously as new leaves to the branches. Keats rightly said that our sweetest tales are those that tell of our saddest thoughts. Many other mentioned frenzied agitation to be an important prerequisite of poetry. But they failed to mention the mind stuck in ostentatious go of mundane life. It is obviously the burial ground of creativity. However, I also own a blog (pradyumnakhan.blogspot.com). Though I am not a frequent writer there, some articles are there. Please do read 'em and comment. Take care. Pradyumna
ReplyDeletethank you Zephyr/Pradyumna for sharing your thoughts and your blog.
ReplyDeleteI have been a believer of Keats' words for a long time. gradually however, I am starting to believe that :
a. we needn't write only sweet tales (remember Coleridge and Blake in the Romantics bandwagon?)
b. to be a tale worth telling, it needn't be a tragedy.
About the complications of daily life, I share your despair but am also learning that despair takes you nowhere and makes nothing happen. the busyness with the business of daily life is something that concerns me - maybe food for an upcoming blog post as well.