Dear Chinki,
You are asking a hopeless romantic the concept of hope in a world that is doing its best to prove the un reason able ness of the virtue of hope. I am a non-believer with a strong sense of belief in the possible. The possible allows us to inhabit-translate our ‘wish’ in a way that hope fails to achieve. Or to explore this differently the possible allows us to arrive at an intuitive state of Doing. We do. And in our doing we arrive. Each arrival opens us to fresh possibility. Or our version of what you may wish to call Hope. I am not capable of looking too far into the future. My life and work and if I may add my sense of the ‘humane’ tends to evolve out of what I often term ‘retrospective method’. When I look back. A kind of almost poetic meandering into pastways I see the logic that this ‘present me’ begins to understand. The choices. The role of chance. Luck. Lack of religion. Belief in the individual. Joy in doing things in the arts and my world of words. None of this is easy. But it isn’t meant to be. But the equal measures of stress and passion create a potent balance that allows me to make possible that. Which. Otherwise. Looks difficult. If not downright impossible. Thing about desire and its companion ‘expectation’ is that it keeps striving towards a receding future. Am almost elusive time-game where the future never arrives till it is too late. I feel when I look back at my life my most effective even cherished moments were those that made me immerse myself into the vulnerability of doing. The process was enough. Or to use the cliché of the ‘journey’ being enough in itself not the actual goal of ‘arriving’. I find stimulation in reversals here! Preferring to look at the past in awe rather than try and analyse it to arrive at some form of ‘hopeful’ future. I find this business of setting goals a restraining exercise. Allowing yourself to be handcuffed. A constraint. A boundary. A fence. A limit. A confining. Achieve. Implement. Be result oriented. Within a given time frame. Swords hanging overhead. Self-imposed targets. The bane of a world governed by the marketplace. Perform. Or perish. Disappear. Vanish. Fade away. Be replaced. By others. Till they too meet the same fate. Line after line of tin soldiers. Stretching into the distance. Ideas need a free rein. To be able to roam freely. Sometimes this can be a very exhilarating thing. The thrill of not knowing what lies ahead. The nervous pleasure that stems from taking a risk. Trusting that which is intuitive. In you. Not being able to predict or foresee is not a sign of foolhardiness. Or a crime. After all it is the future. No amount of mathematics and spending sleepless nights over an abacus of uncertainty will accurately foretell the future. Let it arrive. This future. When it does. Embrace it. As your present. See what it unfolds. Observe the process. Learn. After all what we do as publishers of reasonable independence is creative. There is an art. And a logic. Even a method to our passion. Only it is different from the dictates of a world desperate to clone itself. Replicate. Bringing something that stems from the minds and hearts of people we call authors and poets. Into this world. Is unique. Something that did not exist. Before. It does now. You made it happen. Like a midwife awaiting the first cry. A sign of hope. A severing of the cord. Sure. But also. A beginning. Something with drive. And the will to survive. The opposite of stillborn. That which we hold in our hands. A book.
Some people have reserves of strength residing in them. Untapped reservoirs. Always plural. Always renewable. Therefore, a part of their internal ‘ecosystems’. I use the word deliberately to highlight its friendship with nature. Suggesting perhaps that there is a natural connection between these layers we tap into. And the environment. The environment that resides inside each one of us. And the world outside. Both interconnected and susceptible to the vagaries of degeneration caused by man on one hand; and a sort of ‘emotional pollution’ or daily battering from what we label our life and work and relationships and domesticities and circumstance and all those strings that bind and drag us down, on the other. Unless we can resist. Unless we can tap into these reservoirs. Either through years of intuitive harvesting. Or practiced skill. Or through immense and deliberate labour. Effort. Intent. These multiple and hidden layers within are like a rain forest. Breathing new life into our frailties. Refreshing all that is good. And natural. And full of hope in us. It also makes us become sources of strength for the people around us. And that is saying a lot.
Ownership. Every thought. Every memory. Every emotion has a landowner. Things that ‘happened’. Are meant to belong. To you. Or to me. Like a privilege acquired at birth. A litany made up of ‘this is mine, yours, ours’. Often it is nations that appropriate entire histories. Lives. Other nations. People. Writing and the re-writing of things that later become our truth. Yours and mine. Living under the heel of collective ownership can be crippling. To say the least.
How does one free the ‘event’ of one’s life from the clutches of a possessive, even dictatorial, memory, and turn it into a literature of resistance?
