Monsoonami 1

Dear Me,

I write because there is nothing else I can do. Someone said that before, but I am not quoting - I am speaking for myself.

I write not because I have something special to say. But I feel that I am inside an endless stream of words and ideas, and I live to explore them. Through me, then, they find expression.

Perhaps that is imprecise and I don't have the right language to say what really happens. What I want to say - the Word exists. With or without me, it exists. I write them not because I want to, but they find me to become.

So, I see writing not as a craft. Rather, I surrender to writing. I realised this when I started writing poetry. I wrote it once, when I was young and in love. I don't remember how I wrote it then. But much later in life, when another moment came, I wrote not to impress anyone, but because I couldn't do anything else. It was not to tell anything to anyone, but just to surrender myself to the feelings which took hold of me. 

Reading those poems now, I can see which ones I was writing effortfully, consciously, pretending to be a poet. Those are few and forgettable. Others, which I still feel good about after a few years, seem not to have been written by me. They came about as I allowed random words spring to my mind without any consideration of rhyme or meaning. They I still feel, because I felt then - they lived then as they live now! I feel that they would live on, as words in the world's ether, even when I can't write anymore.

Which is eminently possible. I wrote once and then didn't. That was not for the want of trying or I got busy. But I forgot to feel. It only needed a great rejection, deep pain, an end of the road - for me to alive again. Or, I had to be vulnerable enough to surrender to the words that swirled around me. They were always there but I wasn't listening.

My niece complains that I am no poet, and she is right. I have no skill. I would fail if I am challenged to write anything beautiful. If demanded, my poetry would be pedestrian. Only if I can stop trying and let them come, those words would come to me. They would arrange themselves - mysteriously rhyme, make metaphors and paint my pain - see, I was almost letting it go here!

I feel I have now lived my life and no more is needed. So I shall go into the new year with a sense of ending - of my conscious, arrogant self. I want to arrange at the other end as a non-being, who an intense love has claimed and turned into a vehicle of the beautiful words implicit in the universe.

These words, I shall write to you and write often. I won't understand - won't try to understand - either the ideas or the words, but I hope you would interpret them in your own way. Indeed, none of those interpretations would be final or definitive and you would keep searching too, but that bafflement is perhaps what you desire, the beginning of poetry.

It's midnight and I shall sign off, but let the words be.

Yours

S