A short-lived journey

Journeys undertaken on a train are particularly special. The rattle of wheels a standard-issue melancholy-breaker, the gentle yet suspiciously precarious swaying, and most of all, the sourceless wind that is the locomotive cutting with sure speed through the still airs of tunnels and valleys, plains and shores.

Sights of life are reduced mercilessly to pictures whipping by; they cannot be anything more in the eyes of the hurrying traveller. That character of inevitability is inescapable about industrialism: everything has been compacted, shrunk into an image of its essence, packaged, sealed, stamped and sold. Even summer rain, which would in a past era have coursed willfully along the stern bark of a banyan or a Saraca, is now identified as an argent streak slapped against the Perspex.

I'm not complaining, however: I don't yearn for the slower journey or the prolonged farewell. I yearn for the loneliness that the fervour of a modern lifestyle should ultimately deliver. The quick opening and shutting of doors, the picturisation of a smile, the slapdash demise of the raindrop, the diminished journey, the extended destination. The short-lived beauty that I behold through the window befits the needs of a new world. Even the brewing cyclone and the storms descending from the distant mountains do little to wither the black smoke out of a factory before I lock my gaze with the next miracle.

Even the journey is not a journey anymore: it is a jarring and tumultuous transition from the serenity of home to the invariance of a four-hour train ride to the visceral duties due the workplace. The traveler simple vanishes at one location and appears at another, only to vanish again and reappear, an existence that is direly contiguous. Perhaps it is for the best, perhaps it is for the worst, but it is, and that's the truth.

Would that I had to trace by foot what I was instead doing by train, and would have despaired. The persistence of visions would have broken my spirit, the conviction of changelessness discouraged me from my enterprise. Accuse me of what you will—fickle-mindedness, for sure—but why must the I be culpable? If you would rather be yourself and don many masks than keep changing your person while wearing an eternal guise, then what more would you ask for?

The futurity of art

I suffer from a terrible lack of insight. Unless I find that something is structured in a way that I can recognize the structure itself, I cannot "read" it (and I don't know how better to put it).

For example, consider web design. Ignoring the programming aspect of it, anything on the web is designed keeping in mind the content that will be contained on the page. If it is purely written content, the primary objective is to provide the reader with an "environment" that contains no distractions irrespective of how many and what kind of widgets feature on the sidebar(s). The font has to be legible and stylistic at the same time, each post should be clearly demarcated from the next, keywords of the post should be visible to the reader as well as to any search engines that might crawl the page.

Keeping all this in mind, any insights I can and will provide will pertain to striking a fine balance between principle and technique, or requirement and style. However, the same cannot be said of art or creative writing because products in such arenas are products despite any disregard they may have expressed toward principle/technique because they are expressions of individual beliefs and tastes. In such cases, what is insight? I cannot say without a perfect knowledge of the subjective perspectives involved, and even then, things like the indeterminacy of translation limit the "quantity" of insight I am in a position to provide.

However, the necessity of insight persists because, in the absence of such information, development on the copy is impossible. In retrospect, this points to a consequential sort of lack-of-originality amongst those who employ another author's mythos to base their own works upon; at least, it is so that there is only any scalar development and no directional development: the plot will move forward in time or in space, but it will not move in any direction in terms of the ideological elements that it espouses.

For example, if I were a fan of Ludlum's Bourne series and if I were to speak about my liking of van Lustbader's continuation of the same series, then I will be not be professing any opinion on the subject of the series' essentially abstract constituents but only on van Lustbader's writing skills. In furtherance of the same line of thought, the creations of Ludlum will go from being fictitious to being meta-fictitious; van Lustbader's books will become individuations of Ludlum's mythos but can never aspire to become one of the mythos itself.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="510" caption="Magritte's 'The Treachery of Images', 1928-1929, questioned the viewer's perception of reality. The picture of the pipe in this painting is only a metaphysical representation of the pipe; the pipe itself is alluded to by the comment at the bottom."][/caption]

However, the more important deduction is that van Lustbader's works now form the basis of other subjective interpretations, thereby ensuring the propagation of the "art of authorship" as such but not of the articulated entity itself. Someday, the memory of Ludlum's works will fade; at the same time, the mortality of such memories will concern only the processes involved in the creation of the mythos (and therefore only the structured) and not the mythos itself. In other words, the mythos will lose its history but retain its form and function, or its futurity, which will persist in the works of van Lustbader.

That is the problem with structure: its cause is pure principle while its effect is pure technique. Such a particular state of being stresses on inductive memory as opposed to requiring deductive memory: insofar as deduction is concerned, the advantage of inheritable logic is present. Although the inductive nature of logic itself can be disputed, the relationships it derives its strength from are fairly ingrained into our minds because they are the foremost tools employed to deconstruct reality. Furthermore, inductive memory is essentially biological. Propagation, therefore, is limited by natural constraints. (This recourse to human memory also implies that the changing face of art is necessary for a healthy futurity.)

The Death Of A Blogger

More so than using WP's Plinky to find something to write these days, I go through the archives of my oldest blog, more often than not finding not just badly written posts but also lots of good ideas that I find hidden between the lines but, back then, was digressing too much to focus on them. While I can safely say that I have matured as a writer, I know the difference between the earlier "me" and the present "me": I used to write because I felt like writing something. Now, I write because I have something to write about.

That's not a desirable part of the maturation process, nor is it undesirable.

That feeling of "wanting" to do something because you like doing it and not because it has become a medium to express something is what I miss, though not too much because I could only have written so much meaningful or contributory pieces before starting all over again. Writing for writing's sake has an expiry limit. We're all humans and our mastery over something is automatically succeeded with our employment of that same thing.

What prompted me to write this post was that, when I was sifting through some old notes on the blog, I found a particular WP user who had left comments on almost every post for a period of about four months. Whensoever I used to put up an article on anything, he had the habit of finding something wrong with it, and we would get into a lengthy discussion. I would comment on his blog, he would respond on mine, it was such a good experience, of finding a friend out of nowhere.

I found a link lying around to his blog and decided to pay him a visit, but this is what I saw.

[caption id="attachment_509" align="aligncenter" width="520" caption="Interrupted."][/caption]

One blogger has disappeared. In his place is an emptiness that cannot be filled because it is still so full of memories. Another blogger has died. In his place is a man who wants to write something only because he has something to write about and not for writing's sake. 'Ars gratia artis' is not impractical nor is it unreasonable as an expectation, but it has its purpose, a time and purpose to practice it. Being an artiste non gratis is not condemnable. What is is the idea that art is what it is and cannot be anything more.

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The City Of Pity: A random poem

There once was a man
Who lit a fire
Under a balloon
And made it fly

He sailed the world
And the seven seas
He went places
He’d never known before

The balloon popped
Over the Big Apple
He gently sailed
To the ground

The fire was out
The weave was ripped
Cars and bikes and buses and trains
Still he was so terribly lost

He walked to a woman
Smoking in the corner
Asked her for a light
She didn’t hear him

He spoke a little louder
She stared at him
Her eyes were read
She saw beyond him

He asked her again
Politely this time
She handed him a smoke
And went back to sleep

He pocketed it
And went his way
Until he found a man
Reading the paper

He asked for a light
And he got a matchbox
He pocketed it
And went his way

Until he found a girl
Playing on the sidewalk
Crying so loudly
Because she was hurt

He bent down to help her
He heard someone run
He looked up to see
His wallet was stolen

He gave swift chase
But the man was fast
He lost his wallet
And now he was lost

The little girl cried
He gave her candy
And asked her this time
For a balloon shop

She pointed up a bright lane
He thanked her and walked
Until he came to a balloon shop
And a big one he bought

In return for the smoke
And back on the streets he was
As evening slowly came
He set up camp

He lit a small fire
Under the big balloon
It ballooned up big
Until it was all pink

He mounted it and waved
Goodbye to the city
The city of smoke
The city of pity