Archives for May, 2008

After his appointment, my father goes grocery shopping. He buys every conceivable fruit in the store and when he gets home I take them out of their bags and put them all away. Oranges and tangerines and grapefruits jostle for space in the fridge drawer with apples, empires and granny smiths and red delicious. There are pears and guavas. A papaya, its slick green skin shrouded in clinging plastic, somehow finds space too. And bananas, of course. They’re a staple in my father’s shopping. I place them in the wire holder on top of the microwave. He used to bring home plantains, but only he and my mother would eat them, so he fell out of the habit. There’s even a whole pineapple, which my sister carefully slices, her dark head bent intently over the spikes. The scent stings and for a moment I am transported to a damp kitchen in Colombo, to those crowded mornings, the way those days slid under my skin, seem lodged here beyond familiarity.
Strange that this many years later the memories still resurface like this, in all the wrong ways, for all the wrong reasons.

And then it’s all done, there are no more fruits to be put away. The plums and the peaches and the apricots, the orange juice and the ginger ale, the hefty green watermelon, everything neatly stored in their correct placeholders. This excess of colour, these strange ways of speaking.

I had an essay due last week. You’ve heard this story before. I began it the day it was due.
I was sorely tempted to begin it like so:

In light of international food crises and soaring death tolls worldwide, writing academic essays seems like an unforgivable exercise in triviality, a wilful ducking of reality.

Shameless smugness at the ready for immediate and terrible deployment? Check.

I would have blithely continued in that vein of holier-than-thou irritation, except that that would have required I write fifteen pages of original content. My inveterate laziness, not to mention the laws of both physics and physiology, prevented me from accomplishing that in a single evening, which is as much time as I told myself I had (having already received a month’s extension). So, though it caused me tangible pain in the regions of my head and my heart, I revisited a paper I’d submitted the week prior for another class and revised it for length considerations.
And by revise I mean I recycled it so heavily that I prayed this didn’t constitute plagiarism, prayed harder that I didn’t get caught.
Given that I began said revision half an hour after midnight, the paper is still late.
Sorry, was that a spoiler?

It fucks with your head, staying in school for too long. Or maybe it wouldn’t, if the stuff you’re studying didn’t seem to always be about you. It’s incredibly stupid to go about school the way I have, like every single thing matters, like your entire ethical existence hinges on every word you encounter.
Of course, having said that, there is a part of me that if given the chance to redo the last few years of readwriting, wouldn’t do it any other way. Philosophy and critical theory are hugely destabilising things to immerse yourself in. But I don’t know which came first, my fear of stagnation or my having read these texts, and the question of chronology is trivial anyway. In the end, all that matters is that I am a bit crazy and school hasn’t helped.

Masochism: a way of life, wherein you wilfully decide to waste years and years of your youth in poorly ventilated rooms with fellow social misfits. Continue reading this entry »

“Are you mad?”
Always a trickier question than it looks. “I doubt it.”

- Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. Hodder and Stoughton: London, 2004. 50.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

- ee cummings

I’m nearing the end of the second year I’ve spent in this bedroom, beginning my third summer here. As a room, it doesn’t have much going for it. I don’t have a bed, or curtains, or a closet. The one poster I had up last summer has long since been removed, leaving the walls naked where they’re not obscured by bookshelves and the solitary calendar. One wall boasts a shoddy paint job, the last marks of an unnecessarily complicated and ultimately useless adventure in pulling apart concrete.
It’s not a pretty room by any means. It’s a room that works, an empty space to be. A table, a bookshelf spilling papers, and an open window that keeps me outside. It doesn’t boast whatever it is people call character, or maybe it does.
 

When I got home today, the whites of my eyes the colour of my skin, the first thing I saw was the cross, a dark rust-coloured etching in a corner directly opposite the door to my room. Continue reading this entry »

What sickens me is how dependent she is on him, how her need for his approval is the circumference and the centre of her self-knowledge. The hold that he has on her, even though he is magnanimous, is so absolute that watching her, because he is magnanimous, I feel a thick weight settle in the base of my stomach. Her dependence is so total, his image so firmly entrenched within her being, that I know how impenetrably alien it would sound to tell her that she does in fact exist outside him. He needs her too, yes, would find himself unanchored without her, but she is not the locus from which his every conception of himself departs and returns.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe her absence would ruin him more than any of us suspect, but he doesn’t he live with that fear now. She, on the other hand, lives not only with him but also with the constant dread of his absence.

What terrifies me is that their love is no less real for that. Continue reading this entry »

It’s a strange experience, reading a book and feeling like I’m reading someone else’s life. Usually I find myself in many of the books I read – not in all of them and not even in all of the ones that strike me hardest, but generally I read myself into books and read myself out of them, find my own experiences in their words and find also that the words articulate my own experiences in unfamiliar ways. So it’s basically all about me, this act of reading, as I look for ways to rethink my life. The range of the books I feel this way about – from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa – indicate just how vague, however visceral, those connections are.

But this is the first time – that I can remember, so I may be wrong – that I’m reading a book and feeling like I’m reading a friend’s life and not my own. Continue reading this entry »

The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.

- Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live