Why do I write?
Prashant Bagad
(A piece presented in the North-Eastern
and Western Young Writers’ Meet, 30-31 May 2013, Sahitya Akademi, Mumbai)
I feel so delighted to be here on the platform of
Sahitya Akademi and express my thoughts about my writing. I am grateful to the
Akademi for offering me this opportunity to participate in the “Young Writers’
Meet”.
I can’t help but recall here
Philip Larkin’s remark that “a young writer” is a contradiction in terms. What
does Larkin mean? A young person can’t be a writer? Or, a writer can’t, by
definition, be young? Or, was Larkin pointing
to the agelessness of writing? I would like to lean towards the agelessness of
writing. A writer yearns for the independence of his text from the tyranny of
time. I consider myself writer in this sense: a composer of sentences desirous
of creating an ageless text.
I think I have a short and
tidy answer to the grand-sounding, age-old question, “Why do I write?” This very
moment is the key. This very moment is the answer. I’m on a literary platform
now, a microphone is at my sole disposal, and I am supposed to ponder on the
question, “Why do I write?” This is precisely the reason why I write. This is
precisely the moment, a supreme moment, a moment of glory that I look forward
to while polishing my prose. I write so that I am asked – rather ironically
urged – to tackle the question, “Why do I write?” This may be put in a neat
formula: A writer writes so that he gets a public opportunity to deal with the
rusty philosophical question, “Why do I write?”
But why does a writer wait with
poise for this moment and this interrogation? He waits so that as he faces the
question he could be submerged in the inwardness, the inwardness that again makes
him an insider, a captive of his own literary compositions. A writer writes
because he could claim at the moment of public self-interrogation that he is
nothing but his own story-organism, that he is a kind of Gregor Samsa.
Is this the moment that we encounter
in Plato’s Ion – the moment when Ion, a rhapsode, a reciter of poetry,
faces the Socratic question, “Why do you sing, perform, and thereby co-author,
Homer’s poetry?” And is it that Ion makes a similar reply, a reply similar to
mine, albeit a hesitant and unsure one, that he knows nothing but his own
recital, that he is merely his Homer’s song? Is it an artist’s fate to know
nothing outside their texts and compositions? Or maybe there is a Platonic
twist to the Socratic tale that obliquely indicates that herein dwell the
distinctiveness and sanctity of a poem that it is from within the poem that
the poet – and the readers, the overhearers of poetry – can glimpse the world?
So a writer looks forward to
dealing with the question, “Why do you write?” because it yields Platonic
moments. A Platonic moment offers him a chance to gaze at the conventional and
the unconventional, the known and the unknown, the familiarity and the
alterity, while being rooted in the multi-layered, story-like universe of inwardness.
A writer writes – and let us keep in mind that writing is intransitive – and
anticipates the Ionic interrogation, and roves, with a white melancholy, to discover
and renew Platonic moments.
Maybe that is why I dedicate
my book, Vivade Vishade Pramade Pravase, to “a Plato in my mind.”
I have yet another short
answer to the question, “Why do I write?” I have a figurative theory, rather a
story, about writer, writing, and text, and writer’s speaking about his own
text. My theory is that a text written by a writer, a work composed by an
author, is a kind of silence, is a kind of ‘mauna-vrata’. The writer commits
himself to this vow by choosing to write, by choosing not to speak. So
when a writer is invited to speak about “Why do I write?” he answers the
question by not speaking, by reading the written text as though reading is only
a representation of the already complete fictional universe, by continuing to
be loyal to his fundamental commitment of keeping (fictional) silence.
I
once met an artist well known for his book-designs. Well, he may be or may not
be an imaginary character. A mutual acquaintance soon disclosed that I am a
writer, and suggested that I might like to consult the artist when I decide to publish
my first short story collection. The artist was quite pleased, and said “yes”
with a fair amount of warmth and generosity. “What subjects do you write on?” I
had to overcome my puzzlement to summon a polite answer. “No, I write fiction,”
I said. “On any particular subjects?” The artist was persistent. But the
question seemed to me like an allegation. I felt alienated. Nevertheless, I
explained (if that could be called an explanation) “I write short stories and
my stories do not have any subjects. I write about nothing.” Needless to say I
disappeared from the scene at once and decided to do two things. First, I would
not consult this famous artist when I publish my first book. Second, I would
narrate this incident when I am asked to speak on “Why do I write?” I write, or
a writer writes, to demonstrate that writing does not have a subject. It’s
about nothing. It’s intransitive. Rather writing a text is an exercise
undertaken – or undergone – by the writer to exemplify the definition of
literature: a literary text is a piece of writing that is not about this or
that.
A
writer always lives in curious times. Rather he turns his times into something
curious. Today he finds that literature is becoming more and more ‘diasporic’. To
be diasporic is not to be physically displaced from one’s land but to choose to
define oneself from that extrinsic perspective, to identify oneself with one’s
facticity, to use Sartre’s somewhat old-fashioned language. Diasporic
literature celebrates, and flourishes on, facticity. Physically diasporic Indians
who write in English never forget to visit Kashmir or Agra in their fictional
worlds or fondle such recent constructs as ‘nation’. Mentally diasporic Indians
write about such classical sanctuaries as Meera or Buddha. It might seem that
diasporic tendencies are manifest only in the so-called Indian Writing in
English. But that’s far from true. Why does a Marathi writer who wants to
portray the plight of a contemporary farmer would spend a lot of time in the supposedly
green pastures of the past? He wants to claim a homeland within a homeland,
real or imaginary or reconstructed. And such diasporic literatures are lauded
world-wide for their espousal of basic human values defined predominantly in
capitalistic and materialistic terms. Diasporic literature seems rather a craft
with a practical end in view. It might prove to be a raid on the idea of
literature. A writer wants to distance himself from the diasporic. He may prefer
an ivory tower to a diaspora. He may prefer more curious times.
A
writer has his magical paraphernalia to transform his times. He has a ball pen,
a fountain pen and a gel pen. He has his pencils, sharpened, and unsharpened,
and many of them still lying in the pristine paper-box waiting to be opened. He
has notepads, green, white and yellow, and A4 Bond letter pads, still
untouched. The writer once had a typewriter, an Olympia one, quite old, bought
second-hand, and slightly heavy, with a carry-case, which made a clear,
unhesitant sound for every letter in the dark foreign nights, and whose ribbons
were rather hard to get. The echoes of this typewriter still accompany the writer
and urge him to follow sights, sounds, and stars, and a twinkle in the eye of
an emotion. A writer has an electronic typewriter which he has never used,
which he has never touched, which he has never owned. A writer writes for the
sake of that unseen electronic typewriter. The writer’s fingers tend to move
balletically on the lush black keyboard of his laptop. His fingertips can read
the white shapes of letters and symbols. The writer is in love with the
keyboard, the blank page, and the surrounding, enveloping afternoon, the
immense, sun-filled, sky-blue afternoon, the plenitude of afternoon. A writer
writes because he loves pens, pencils, a typewriter, and a laptop, and a
sublime afternoon. And, a writer loves writing because he knows even a piece on
writing, even an attempt to answer the question “Why do I write?” is a mere
text, a meager set of words, a melancholic universe of inwardness.
© Prashant
Bagad