In every room there is a tyranny hanging, often unseen, like a small spider in the corner of the room. It breathes in and out, waiting with ever increasing patience, till you shrug your shoulders and slip off the guard. It leaps from it lair and strangles you in its powerful arms and slowly sedates you into an inarticulate and incapacitating sleep.
You are now trapped. Incoherence lolls on your tongue as you stretch for the perfect words but fall terribly short. Grammar befuddles you, and spellings have taken the space ship out of this cosmos. Anything you write, talk or even think becomes irrelevant, prosaic and terribly boring. You are flustered and you are at your wits end to make everything sound nicer and bring back the lost relevance.
There are the usual strategies. Lock yourself in a room filled with books and other enormously important works and start reading. After finishing a couple of them, you cautiously step out and switch on the laptop. The first lines are tricky, but soon, you are working brilliantly. Line by line the entire story flows out of your mind onto the page. But after paragraph three, you encounter the kink. The disparaging bastard refuses to be erased, or even moved. In frustration, you start reading your work again, hoping that the luminosity of your first few lines would show you an alternate, more exciting route. But you have been conned! What you have spent the last half hour on is merely a poor imitation of the genius of some other author. What you though was innovative is now cliché. Every line you’ve written is woefully insignificant and worse, demonstrates an utter and total lack of creativity. Your dirge has begun.
You retaliate. Armed with the tactics of the Greeks, you fight back with the classics. Tragedies and comedies are re-examined. Divine deities from Olympus, Amaravathi and Kailash descend down to bless you as you generously make them hospitable in your pieces. Every line uttered, however whimsical, can be retold, in the vicinity of modern wars, corruption, sexuality and show business. You croon in the vernacular, edging common English words out. More flavors you say, more flavors you add. You stir your piece tenderly over the flame and spend many nights till it boils. Then you cautiously taste it. What is that flavor? Is it the buzz of tangerine, or the mild kick of liquor? Is it too bitter as it clings to the back of your mouth? Does it fire up your nostrils and burn your throat till you gasp and cool it down with lots and lots of water? You can not decide. You need to sleep on it. In the morning, the first thing you notice is the foul odor that hangs in the room. It seeps into the curtains and threatens to asphyxiate you. Upon further investigation, you realize that your curry is slowly rotting. Your massive mixture has failed you, and you are on the verge of giving up.
You recuperate, however. You decide to go back to the basics and watch the world around you. You don’t need to write about the fancy Greeks when the stifling heat of your sleepy town can sprout any story. You watch for days and days. You spurn every book, trusting instead your inherent creative process. For days in and out, you wait on your third floor balcony sipping chai and watching the sun rise and sun set. You watch the middle aged lady next door hanging her laundry. You watch the raucous crows tease each other in the evenings. More importantly, you watch yourself as you silently try and gaze into the abyss of your soul. You try to kindle the most primal emotions and the most pertinent issues worrying you and tie them up together on a string. You suspect your emotions aren’t strong enough to either flatter itself in the flamboyance of your writing or subtly peep like a shy bride and open the gates to incredible depth in your art. You suspect that none of the issues that you have thought of are relevant, new or in any way pertinent. But you can not stop here. You bring out from within the cupboard the spools of thread that you have carefully stored just for this occasion. You begin knitting. But soon enough, you realize that neither the emotions nor the issues are enough in number to make your extra large sweater. You begin to stretch. Sunsets go on for pages. Your neighbors hang their laundry for hours together. There are so many crows in the sky that they blot out the sun. But you know that the pattern isn’t working. There are too many loose ends and in your frustration, you prick yourself.
Maintenant, que dois-je faire? I have no clue. I am plagued by the inability to write. Oh, I can write alright, but just not well enough to please myself. This may seem utterly narcissistic but that is what I see every time I peer into the mirror. With the Japanese earthquake, Tsunami and nuclear crisis, it may seem impertinent of me to not write on anything else. But what writing of significance can I produce out of that now? Whatever poem I write will reek of self-plagiarism. Any prose will sound farcical, distant and unaffected. It’s not that I don’t know what to write on. There are hundreds of ideas teEming in my mind, but after just a few paragraphs, I need to discard that piece. Even this writing thrives on cliché, drama, redundant metaphors and a large dose of unnecessary flavor. I need to exorcise the tyranny haunting me. But any writing before the exorcism, I fear, will be like a cloudy wine that gives you the worst hangover.
