Saturday, June 17, 2006

Nausea

It's all the same. All of it. I keep browsing through all these blogs that are kept by my friends and acquaintances and random people, and they're all beginning to look the same. Postcolonialist debris in the form of deconstruction. A lot of "good" writers in Pakistan, (and I hate to sound like a pompous asshole), but a lot of "good" writers, including perhaps myself, in Pakistan, in the Subcontinent, are simply good at breaking down English, putting words, fragments of cultural lingo, Urdu, bits of reagional catch-phrases, and a ton of cliches in a blender, churning them all together and rearranging them in aesthetically fascinating patterns in their own "creations". This techinque may have started out great. It attracted with its novelty. It was, to put it simply, fun. It may even have had meaning and some threads of "substance". But the problem with "newness", is that it gets old real quick. I've been browsing through a bunch of blogs and I'm just about ready to throw up. It isn't that these writers aren't good. It isn't even the lack of meaning in what they write. Some of the stuff is exceptional when compared with others in the same genre, and the same breadth. But that's the problem. It's all in the same breath. They are all deconstructing language like each other, imbuing the same meanings into their works, all of them pretend to be covering up something deeply emotional behind a facade of elaborate metaphors and the "controlled" burst of vivid images(very much stinking of the bad breath of rigid empiricism). I'm nauseated by the string of personal experiences that are described in some of these works, very vividly, in much detail, with the pretence of one of two things: Either, that these experiences are somehow imbued with a deeper meaning on a higher level, or that they lack all deeper meaning and are simply there for the purpose of affiliation(More precisely, so that the individual who recounts them wants at the same time, to be able to capture the emotional/psychological dilemma of everybody else on earth, but still be able to stand out as an individual.) Some of them pride themselves on being absolutely meaningless: "I just write for myself and when I want to. I don't care what others make of it." Beware. Those are the ones who write precisely for others. And no matter how many times somebody tells you that what they've written isn't supposed to have some "greater" purpose or meaning, that isn't true. For they are aware,(I'm assuming they have something of the likes of a brain), that the simple act of putting up something they've written for the world to read, GIVES their work meaning of some sort. The simple act of their putting their thoughts, random, meaningless, or otherwise, on paper, is giving meaning or purpose to something.

If I am accused by the same accusations that I have made, I willingly step forward and take responsibility. We are a little too entrenched in what we are "supposed" to say and how we are "supposed" to say it. Not by superficial restrictions that others make for us, but by the restrictions we make for ourselves. By our conscious decisions to stick to the tried and tested: the comfortable.

If I have to kill a part of me in order to create a new part of me, then so be it. I'm not saying one more word, until the word justifies itself on paper. Until it has real reason to be there.

Yes, not everything has to have a reason. Or meaning. And it must not. But I NEED something different. I need to read, write and think something new. I need to. I'm sick of the sameness. It's beginning to clot inside me. I need fresh blood.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Melted Chocolate meaning on a spoonful of words

Words. What funny little things words are. They never quite say what they are meant to say.
Flying about on the tip of a tongue, playing with it like a bead of warm, melted chocolate on a silver spoon, coiling and unfurling and rolling around. When they are finally pushed out, they refuse to pay their loyalties to their womb. They spread out thin. On air. On water. On other people's thoughts, and ideas and memories.
Words inspire meaning that never was. Meaning, that was never meant to be. Suffocating, crippling meaning. I'm sick of imbuing meaning into everything. Sometimes, you just need to indulge. Chocolate is God.