Losing Face

I am in the boss’s cabin listening to him, and suddenly I feel my face flee. It is as if it is drifting sideways, toward the wall, or toward the translucent board that is riveted to the wall for scribbling thoughts. What do I do? I pucker and grimace, if these things are even possible now, to hold my face in its right place. My boss looks at me as if his own face has tightened in response to the spectacle of someone losing a face. Unfortunately I can’t verify the feeling, because there are no mirrors in my boss’s cabin, which is only proper—the absence of mirrors is a necessity to delete erotic possibilities from the workspace. So I ignore my fleeing face and try to concentrate on the words that my boss is uttering. There is something about lead and lag measures. If you do the lead measures right, then the lag measures, which is to say the results, will follow automatically. He wants me to make a model to track the correlation between the lead and the lag measures. The whole thing is senseless, I think. But I don’t mention that, simply because my face is fleeing, or perhaps also because I’ve the notion that I’m wrong to think whatever I’m thinking, or perhaps I’m sure I’m thinking wrongly. Too many perhaps, perhaps. I say nothing when the boss ends, not even Absolutely, or Sure, or Will be done, or Understood, nothing in the vein of a parting remark whose sole purpose would have been to provide an artificial confidence to the boss. I know that both the remark that is expected of me and the confidence that is expected of the boss are empty gestures. But they are not unimportant. They serve nothing less than the most important functions in today’s organizations—decorum. And I’ve nothing against empty gestures. It’s just that I feel I’ve lost my face, which is quite a thing if you think of it.

So I just walk out of the cabin, longing to put both my palms to investigate my lost face. I reach my cubicle. I enter two sets of usernames and passwords into my laptop to reach the main screen. This entering of usernames and passwords is a reflex; I do it even when I’ve nothing to do on the computer. I stare at my screen—no files open, no files to open. Then suddenly I remember the story of my face. I poke with my fingers, and then use my palms. The thing is there. It has returned!

There is No Home

Sometimes my writing is just a documentation of all the pieces of insanity in me. I’m in my home now, naked below my waist, carrying a book in one hand and a glass of orange juice in another. It is morning. I woke up half an hour back, and I’m waiting for the geyser to heat my water enough. Some minutes ago, I masturbated thinking of her on top of me and whispering into my ear, “I like it when you hold my butt…hold my butt.” Then I texted her—a blank message.

Last night I went to a seedy place called Shanghai Bar and had two big bottles of Kingfisher beer. That was dinner and lunch combined. On the little TV in the AC section, they had put on a channel that played old Hindi songs. I gaped at the TV and let myself feel lonely and schmaltzy. I thought of texting a girl who I’ve come to know and with whom I believe it would be easy to sleep with, but scared somewhat of the contrast between the solid sadness in me and the flimsy joviality in her, I decided against it. Just as I paid my bill I felt a fear suck at my chest and I thought There is no home. Then I went home.

I’m 27 years old and I feel I’m at an edge.

In two hours I’ll be back in the office again, as if returning to waking life after a litany of lethargic dreams. Last night I slept in two phases. In the first phase my mind kept flitting between memories and dreams, and all of them, in some way or the other, were fragments of the books I’ve read and the books I’m reading. Literature took my sleep away, I can say, and I claim that I even heard its gears shift in my head.  The light was on, and at times in my half-sleep, tormented by images whose genesis lay in words, I would think that all I needed to go to real sleep was to switch the light off. But I was too lazy, or sleepy, to do that. Then, a couple of hours later, suddenly, the scene-switching stopped, and the void of deep sleep, a void made plausible by the exhaustion of literature’s possibilities, presented itself with all its black beauty. I plunged into it and then emerged at 6:45 A.M., and the first thing I thought of was sex.

Social Life

I’m in my office again. I’ve just logged in. In half an hour, M, a girl from HR, will ask me to come to the canteen with her, for breakfast. I don’t want to go with her, but I never say no. M is only interested in building erotic tensions. She talks to me about sex, says things like Size matters, or There are some guys who can’t get it up without a bj, or You shouldn’t smoke so much, it will hamper your performance in bed. She irritates me with all these innuendos whose sole function is to test how I face them. But I never let anything show. I’ve even invited M to my house, twice, an act that to me denotes some catastrophe my life is generally moving toward. Though I’ve made sure that M doesn’t come to my house alone. She has come with one other woman on both occasions, either from the office or outside. We drink a bottle of horrible Sula wine then, and mostly talk about men and women and relationships, and the feminist stance these urban women adopt tires me. Clichés, although they are windows of truth, are undeniably tiring, because they are truths that are already brutalized. The problem sometimes, though, is that every fucking thing appears cliché.

These three—M and her two friends—are the only people who have visited my flat. They all call it a steal, considering the rent I pay. I don’t give them much heed.

Introduction to “The Bachelor”

In the office I’m currently reading a pirated PDF of Bartleby and Co. by the Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas. The details of how I got this book on my office laptop might be noteworthy. The organization I work in is very strict on IT security. It bans all external storage devices. No USB drives work. The network bans all websites that can aid a file transfer—no Gmail, nothing like that. But, it allows this one website—an illegal one—that I often use to download pirated ebooks. That is how I got my reading material.

The book is about the Bartleby Syndrome, which has to do with writers who don’t write for one reason or another, and so one could read the book as a love letter to literature in general. On certain levels, the book tries to eulogize the non-existing work of non-writers. A lot of writers and philosophers also find voice in the book. Apparently the philosopher Gilles Deleuze posited that Herman Melville’s Bartleby was similar to the Kafka of Kafka’s diaries—a type that he called The Bachelor. And from all that Vila-Matas does to expound on that concept, I find myself believing that I, too, am The Bachelor, the guy whose says stuff like I’m not from here any more, or I prefer not to, or I’m really from beyond the grave; the guy who can write but is either out of imagination, or stamina, or patience, or love, or libido, or money, or whatever it takes to be able to write; the guy who is alone and who walks the streets looking down or looking up but never looking sideways. I feel I’m out of all these things, but of course that is not true. Anyhow, I can’t write. I can’t write but I write. What a fucking paradox! I write on my office laptop, after reading some inspiring passage from a book, any book. I write hiding in my cubicle. I write, but still I’m The Bachelor, I’m convinced of that much. And my writing won’t come to much, and even if it does, it wouldn’t matter. We achieve nothing, we scribblers, we scriveners, we copyists, we horrendous constructors, dealing with the world with one face and excreting it as words through the assholes of our minds, ever sitting in the rectangles we never chose for ourselves but are stuck to, stuck to, stuck to. What a mess!

When I get tired of all this or of thinking of all this, I try to write a poem. I keep them short, very short. The one that I wrote 15 minutes back reads like this:

There is a wall in your head,
Either side arid,
But jump over, keep jumping over.
Someday there will be a better desert.

A Small Critique of Capitalism

I lost her, or she lost me, or we lost each other because of our professions. This is the way capitalism operates. It commands us to fully enjoy our lives, while insinuating all the time that this enjoyment is deserved only when we participate, only when we seek a critical part of our overall search for meaning and fulfillment in the work we do in corporations. Five days of work, two days of enjoyment, and love in the little wrinkles of time that may not have been smoothed. And then the near-dystopian clichés like Thank God it’s Friday, or It’s Saturday night, yay! or Damn, it’s Monday again, or There is a feeling that bisects happiness and sadness, and it’s called Wednesday, et cetera. Our professions led us to different cities, to different countries, and the injunction to enjoy led us, or rather her, to different people, which is to say, men. Though I’m not sure of the last part.

What does it make me feel? It makes me want to write. It makes me want to write a novel in which the protagonist is our unborn son, trying to locate that paradise where there is no injunction to make the most out of this one life, and people don’t find it impossible to love someone more than themselves, even if for a day or two. Perhaps, if I were to write this novel, it will end up being about the impossibility of love. In the book Bartleby and Co., the narrator is a non-writing writer who nevertheless once wrote—25 years back, as he says—a novel on the impossibility of love. Has some of him drifted into me? Or am I plagiarizing here? Isn’t my unborn son’s quest a pick from a David Foster Wallace essay? Isn’t the stuff about the injunction to enjoy a pick from Jacques Lacan? No, there are extra shades here. And as for the novel, I’ll definitely add more shades to the protagonist. I will make our unborn son a Marxist. Why not?

The Bachelor Incarnate

As I’m as yet not used to either, my love-handles get scratches from the doorknobs in my flat. In the cramped bathroom the two translucent buckets swallow my shower space, and get filled with dirty soapy water. In the bedroom there is a thin full-length mirror to which I sometimes present my body sideways, to examine the delta in the radius of my incipient belly. A Royal Stag quarter bottle serves as an ashtray, its narrow mouth demanding extreme concentration. Another Royal Stag bottle with liquor inside awaits, always. There are metal grills covering the three sliding windows in the flat, and sometimes pigeons camp in these overnight and make a ruckus that disturbs the narratives of my dreams. Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 lies on the armrest of the sofa closest to the main door; its terrorizing cover always raised at a forty-five angle, and from the first exposed page Bolaño’s emaciated face looking up to the ceiling, with nothing to say, nothing at all, except that literature is its own abyss, which is in fact more nothing than nothing. The flush in the tiny toilet is kaput and water keeps dripping into the commode at all times, and at night this dripping acquires the sound of liquid doom. In the kitchen the only piece of cutlery is a knife and the only thing the knife has ever cut is three out of four mangoes that were bought too early in the season, out of a whim that could not have been stopped from becoming an imprisoning want. The refrigerator hums all the time, like a hibernating demon waiting for a fool to break the spell of entrapment; inside it lie a rotten mango and a container of food that was ordered a week back and remained untouched, the rice inside the container as hard as it must have been before boiling. There is a little personal laptop on the bed, used for pornography and writing, porn that never gets me up and writing that never fails to take me down, though now the laptop has a virus that has corrupted all the word files, which is to say all the stories that are still unfinished, and I can’t help but have mixed feelings about this. I’m roaming in the flat, naked, this man is me, and he has no clue why he sometimes roams inside the flat, scratching and scribbling, pulling his pubes and spreading them all across the floor, getting scratches on his virgin love-handles, ever ever ever convinced that he can’t write, and still writing.

A Portrait of The Bachelor as a Symbolic Man

The Bachelor as a symbol of dysfunctional individuality. The Bachelor as a castrated revolutionary. The Bachelor as an empty gesture to literature’s status of being a sword in a nuclear war. The Bachelor as an indicator of the tenuous tenability of sexual love. The Bachelor as a fatherless figure, and a figure that will never be a father. The Bachelor as a paean to the project of scribbling without a cause and without a center. The Bachelor as a slave to enjoyment. The Bachelor as a problem for the generally impossible. The Bachelor as a signifier of the successive erosion of all that was virtuous in the abstraction of 20th century Youth. The 21st century Bartlebyan Bachelor, who does not prefer not to anymore, but who just can’t, and still does. The Bachelor as a miracle. The Bachelor as Hope. The Bachelor as the last generation that might still make it right—it being the world and its literature. The Bachelor who faces a wall so big that the only way he can see through it is by closing his eyes. The Bachelor for whom history is the correlation between infinite independent variables, very similar to the present, and as impossibly vitreous.

She

She is somewhere on an island in the Indian Ocean, vacationing. The only two things Indian about her right now are the ocean and the cellphone connection she is carrying. I guess I’m grateful for the latter, for I’ve just received a message from her:

Hi my love, I really don’t want to lose u. I love u. I need to talk with u tomorrow. Good night.

The problem is: she will forget to call the next day.

Delusions of Grandeur

  • There is a certain grace in doing what Maupassant did, slitting his throat to check if he had finally been granted the immortality that the creation of high literature seems to proffer.
  • Because it suits me, I agree with Robert Walser, the Swiss lunatic scribbler, when he says that writing that one can’t write is also writing.
  • There are certain similarities between Kafka and me, though even in delusions of grandeur I would not dare say that talent or greatness or whatever it is that Kafka has and will always have is one of them. I am unsociable, though not at the cost of civility, just as Kafka. I work in an insurance company, just as Kafka (which has a tinge of irony in it too, for insurance companies are masters at dealing coldly with loss). Like Kafka I believe that my workplace signifies both my life and my death, and we rue being excluded from it because of this organism of literature, one that somehow seeps into the places of our worldly work and acts like a virus. We rue being exiles from our workplace, though it might be true that we hate the workplace too. Like Kafka, I’ve a fine wound on my left lung, left there by the same tuberculosis that eventually consumed him, though TB will find it difficult to consume me in today’s age, and I confess I’ve mixed feelings about that. Like Kafka had Felice Baeur, I’ve her, though unlike the case of Kafka it is not any disease of mine or any ill disposition that keeps us away from each other; it is just the world as it is. Just as Kafka wrote letters to Felice from his workplace, I’ve written emails to her from my cubicle, and just as Kafka’s letters are essentially avowals of inferiority, so are mine, though I will confide that my inferiorities are different from Kafka’s.
  • I dig David Foster Wallace when he insinuates the power of clichés as windows to truths that are easily neglected but hold the simple pathways to our redemptions. I dig DFW when he, counter-argumentatively and paradoxically in a way that is trademark DFW, also insinuates that the problem with clichés is that they are especially tiring for the cynic and are at times too much to bear and might even evoke a violent reaction that risks being interpreted as a major event by all who still evaluate it from the zone of clichés. One can never disagree with DFW because he ends up saying everything.
  • I think I am friends with Roberto Bolaño because he understands that Good writers need bad writers if only to serve as readers and stewards.
  • What Enrique Vila-Matas said in Bartleby and Co. is so close to what I could’ve said that it almost feels that he stole my apothegm: Literature, as much as we delight in denying it, allows us to recall from oblivion all that which the contemporary eye, more immoral every day, endeavours to pass over with absolute indifference.

She

She wrote me an email saying she had lost her cellphone. She is flying to Europe tomorrow.

Just Another Day at Work

I’m in my cubicle and I’m building a model that tracks the correlations between lead and lag measures and I’m fantasizing a bit as I do that. Fantasy is being used as a cunctation by me simply because there is no deadline, which is simply because the task is considered so path-breaking that my boss’s idea is to allow me a non-stress working environment till I stir every soul with an amazing solution that he can share some credit for. If me rising up from my seat and going to my boss’ cabin and slapping him is a lead measure, how would it correlate with the lag measure of him losing his cliché-spewing face for the first time ever in his life? Not much. Because the lead measures are unrealistic. The idea of tracking lead measures is to track actionables and not fantasies. Although actionables is not even a real English word while fantasies is.

Suddenly an unrelated thought comes to me, which I write down as words:

Interred deep within the labyrinth of my inner life is a masterpiece, though I shall require a talent as good as an oil rig to make it gush forth, and even then my broken imagination may prove to be that faulty little part, that worn-out safety-valve, that allows everything to spill and burn, and then all we would have would be the silent ashes of my masterpiece, though that shouldn’t bother me much, for floating ashes are what all masterpieces end up as.

I sigh when I read my thought. I close my eyes and press my eyelids and tears come to my closed eyes because I realize that every anguish of mine is in words, I’m such a compulsive archivist of myself, and I feel a pang of shame and then I open my eyes and read what I’ve written again and I ask myself “What does it mean? What does it all mean?” and suddenly I realize that I suffer from an obsession, an obsession that every writer I’ve mentioned—whether a writing writer or a non-writing writer—has, an obsession that in Bolaño is manifested as absence and violence, that in Vila-Matas is a bumbling enquiry regarding the value of it all, an obsession that is independent of your ability or your talent to serve it, an obsession that simply believes there is a truth behind words and the only way to reach it is through them, an obsession that culminates in the following words of Kafka:

From a certain point on, there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

A loud explosion occurs at precisely this moment and the far half of the building breaks down as if a chunk of it has been bitten off by a monster of multi-storey proportions and all my colleagues on that side of the building start getting sucked into the gap that has opened in our 7th floor workplace, all of them are getting sucked away and there is a lot of howling and shouting and I see all the doors of all the cabins fling open and I see my boss cartwheeling toward the large hole in the building and out into the void of the world and all the time he shouts, “Correlation Correlation Correlation,” and then I see M somersaulting above the cubicles, sucked by the snafus of the outside world, and she shouts, “Sex” with many trailing Xs and I look around and everything from the floor I’m sitting on has disappeared into that void and it is only I and I alone who doesn’t feel any force from the outside world, and at once I open a notebook and begin to write, for I feel it is the best time to write, with everyone outside, but all that I can write is I love you, I love you, I love you, and it is so strange, so very strange, this thing that I’ve written, this thing that is the ultimate of all ultimate clichés as soon as it is repeated after the first time, and it is strange because in it I don’t know what is I, in it I don’t know what is you, but then I shrug my shoulders and keep at it.

______

Photo credit: miuenski / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA