Daily Times

The mind laboured by physical toil, and not emotional refuse (as goes the majoritarian occupation of the species), is not a good channel for creativity. Because the former is symptomatic of a degeneration; of a clouding monotony that risks obsoletion. The latter is the wellspring of creation — an ideation space that desperately awaits an uninterrupted transcription. At least until the suffocating load has been vented.

I, for one, and in the interests of relating a singular experience which can be contested, stumbled upon these truths at my own cost recently.

Being originally a writer (which, in many ways, is code for an artist steeped in textual neuroses), I have been occupied with the daily adjudication of sentencing mechanics for almost a year now. The effort, as anyone engaged in the dry and repetitive juggle of monthly funds acquisition and restraining the urge to strangle your politicizing co-workers (kidding – I love them; Ok, maybe that is a bit excessive; the part where one should ideally insert a choice emoticon in the narration) can empathize with, is depleting to state the least.

It is deteriorative of the mind; a time-tested recourse for wasting its hard-earned and creatively geared muscle. An opiate, in other words — one responsible for paving the way towards a forced acceptance of things; of reality, and a slowly beckoning, ignominious death.

Whereas the artistic life is characterized by frequent bouts of unstable inspiration which lead to the attainment of many ‘an original masterpiece’ and a risky state of being (one popularly coloured by the ravages of drink, smoke, and all manner of other sensual stiflings that eventually corrupt the soul); the life forcefully kept at an arm’s length of this demon can sometimes prove to be even more alarming to contemplate and live through.

What happens to a restrained garden hose connected to an open, gushing tap – especially if it has been clamped for some time? You get the picture.

In my case, I have found my faith and religion — not the variants generally adhered to by the unthinking masses (and yes, these are two different permutations of the spiritual path; at times tangential and in alignment at others; personified best through the ‘intangible soul and visible body’ association) — to act as the resolving bridge between what had always, previously, been an infuriating impasse.

A sucking binary that had left all attempts at surmounting its clutches an exercise always destined in vain. And who can argue that a theologically-mediated psychological tranquillizer (what religion, in a certain sense, is – essentially) is more dangerous than a chemical substitute, and thereon make a recommendation to urge the pursuit of the latter? Surely a deviant bent on the recipient’s destruction! Many people like this abound nowadays, unfortunately.

But when my currently ensuing sustained occupation came into the picture, I chanced upon the second panacea referenced; or at least that is how the hordes would choose to class it. Only this distraction succeeded in severing the umbilical cord that had always directed the fuel leading towards artistic production; a temporary handicap (thank God!) which, thereafter, takes some time to remedy.

So it is only now, after much time has been wasted in unoriginal pursuits (motivated for the ‘outside’ – for the satisfaction of everyone and everything external), that I seem to have mustered the resolve to pen/vent away again — uncaring of convention or critic; geared only for a selfish outpour. For a blasphemous revelation that leaves a bad taste and is tailor-made to achieve a targeted conversion: pained de-familiarization, even, from a comfortable plane of being and thinking to one of shaky footing. Reading intended to yield appreciation and a displaced view — a reset.

But like all inspired/uninspired endeavours (you be the judge of this one), each kind of unraveling takes its toll. Its pound of flesh as fair compensation for the neurons dispensed and the built-up heat relinquished.

Like the displacement principle of quantum physics, this text — intentionally — now starts to unravel; reading all over the place. Starting with structure and seeming symmetry, it perverts into a riveting madness void of all shapes. Produce that defies conformity at every turn; absolving itself of the risk of the formation of a new, confining ‘normal’.

Sometimes it is important to allow oneself to get de-tracked from the beaten, accepted path – if only to appreciate what is at stake (that which has been left behind – for ‘forward’ is not always synonymous with ‘progress’); and what can be lost by forsaking it for good. Being a nonconformist, after all, has never been a path for the timid or the hopelessly self-conscious. It requires wanton abandon.

Think of this exercise (the one elaborated in heady, poisonous lettering before you) as being the textual equivalent of an inverted funnel — where the words and the ideas signified by them start off strong and narrowly defined; eventually succumbing to a rupture that is (as always) coming, puncturing their comfortable casings and opening the path that reaches into oblivion. The infinite resource which is the domain of all madness waiting to take sensible shape: conformity with the rules of success of the living.

But let us terminate this free-fall line of inquiry at this juncture – don’t want to risk putting the reader off too much, or proceed without any grounding anchor.

For my design here was only to show what happens when the laboured mind should chance to lament (yes – the disposition is bent on registering complaints, making howl of the pains of childbirth; and seldom one inclined towards an elaboration of pleasure).

The mind, when entranced in such rapture, loses itself into productive obscurity; a creation that is all aesthetic and impulsive when judged from the outside, deceptively deep and evocative when taken the time to be struggled with.

It is the raw representation – and direct translation – of reality.

The writer is a blogger, poet, culture critic and a nonconformist