I’ve been making an effort to sit down and meditate at some point during the day, to focus on my heartbeat and my breath as everything else blurs into the background. I like it. I never thought I would.
In a weird way, turning my attention solely to what’s happening within me physically has very a different effect to when I let myself loose to the irregular but incessant waves of thought that keep me afloat but barely alive at any point in time.
My mind spiraling into the abyss of whatever burdens me feels a lot like walking without ceasing towards a wall in a desert. After a while, as I keep attempting to walk with my nose crushed against the wall and my eyeballs millimeters away from it, the desert fades away and the wall is all there is. My eyes give up focus and my knees turn red as they meet the cement. All I want is to see the wall, to “know” the wall. And I’m sure that the closer I get, the more I’ll know.
But that isn’t the case. Distance facilitates sight.
Big lesson, and a hard one.
Taking a step back often feels like giving up control. It can also feel like you’re walking away. It takes years of bruised knees and red eyes to realize that there are places in between, places where the wall isn’t too small or too big.
Meditation, like prayer and a good conversation, helps me see that sometimes.
Yes, focusing on the air go in and out of my lungs breathes a sort of intentionality into things that happen inside me without me ever having to schedule them on my calendar or make a to-do list. But these things don’t need my permission. I’m merely joining along for the ride – a hitchhiker inside my own body.
For someone who finds it hard to see life as meaningful, that’s a good feeling to have. It tricks me into thinking that what I’m experiencing is not my life.
My heart does not beat because I want it to, my heart does not beat because you want it to, my heart beats because it wants to.
That’s why it feels so sacred. Like it’s not mine to stop. Or yours to stop. It is its own beat to stop.
I made the animation to describe what it feels like to forget that. I drew some inspiration from one of my favorite TV show intros. Here’s the YT video if you’d like to check that out:
It was nice to write again. Forgive the grammatical errors and the usual lack of coherence and flow.
There’s a problem with me. I don’t know how to fix it. To draw is to survive. When it serves any other purpose, I turn into an ear at the door, scared, my calves tense, ready to flee in case they open the door. And I know very well that’s no way to live.
But the thing is…today’s problems go away tomorrow. It burns through the night like firewood that turns to ash by daybreak. This means I should finish drawing before daybreak – before my reason to draw turns to ash and I’m drawing not to get through the day but for other reasons that fail to stand up against questions that don’t even matter. Questions such as: What will they think? Won’t they think I’m weird? Isn’t it a bit too disturbing?
It really doesn’t matter! You know why? Because you’re still reading. Ha! And that’s all that matters at the end of the day. That you recognize enough human in me to say whatever you say: “different”, “weird”, “nutcase”.
I’d have loved to wait another day before putting out the artwork. But I’m still a fucked up coward who needs to hide behind the alarm that jolts me to action when I feel like I’m going to die. It is only in the shadow of my doom that I can speak what I mean. How…pathetic….interesting.
So all you get is something I’m not proud of. But that doesn’t matter either. Because you’re still reading. And once again…that is enough. For today.
Oh, also, the artwork is about a woodcutter (father figure in children’s stories, rescuer of people in the forest, an amphibian like Mowgli the Frog who lives both in the forest and in houses). It is what I aspire to be – like the children of Narnia whose cupboard opens into a forest. What I intend to do is conquer and return home of my own accord – to be the prince of the forest and yet give it all up for what we call “society”. How do I live in the forest during the day and come back home at night? How do I learn to dig deep into myself, find hidden treasures, and return with resolve to a place like the world we all share? ( for it is a very greedy world where gold kills people)
What I need is an axe. But I feel like I’ve taken up the hammer instead. And that is getting me nowhere. I am stuck.
Lego bricks, assorted, in an indigo blue container with a knob-like handle on the lid that makes it look like a teat. When you ask me about the house my father grew up in, that’s the first thing that comes to mind. It’s an image that doesn’t compete with any other: the winding roads that took us there, grandmother’s kaachimoru that I always wanted with my rice, the rubber sheets and hemispheres drying out in the sun, or the soft jasmine flowers that ended up in deathly garlands but grew back every morning like someone stuck in an abusive relationship. Among all the vibrant images of my dad’s place, the faded indigo container with yellowing lego bricks is what sticks out to me. So, I had to ask myself why.
I have a very peculiar relationship with my father’s ancestral home. To me, everything about it is fragile, like my dad’s lego bricks in the indigo container that are around 40 years old. The assorted collection was unfit for any ambitious project when I was a kid. The connectors had worn out and used to fall apart very easily. What I built with them was often of the most experimental nature. I should have known then that life was like that, that I’d always feel like I was dealt the wrong set of bricks. My imagination would be limited to, or rather free to be, a house without a roof or walls, with doors that broke easier than they opened.
My father and I are extremely different people. He’s always admired order and shunned chaos whereas I have always found beauty in the uncertain and unpredictable. It is, to me, the blessed curse of being an artist- a love for the unknown. The reward for my effortless recklessness has always been of a timeless quality, for no art has been washed in the blood that hasn’t come from the silence beyond. My father does not quite understand this, even though he wants to. This has made us unable to understand each other at a level that is required for his eventual death and my promised resurrection, the context for existence that every boy trying on his father’s shoes or shaving a beard that doesn’t exist believes he will one day receive. It is in the friction of this relationship between two unfortunate souls bound to each other that the ancestral home remains veiled. The fact that I was a kid who grew up extremely isolated from peers and popular culture in a milieu that made the language of innocence seem foreign and insipid on my tongue led to this inability to feel the earth of my ancestors even more painful.
I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy spending two months in the summer every year with my grandparents. I feasted on Ammachi’s tasty food and played with my assorted collection of lego for hours. Time flew by in my bedroom on the second floor while I breathed life into all kinds of weird characters who lived in worlds that ended right outside the door, in houses that collapsed on top of them, and rooms that didn’t have walls. Downstairs, at the top of an old bookcase made from what looked like rosewood, my dad’s Lego projects were on display: vintage cars, airplanes, and helicopters, even an apollo 11 rocket model with a launchpad and all associated paraphernalia. It was so far from what I was capable of with my hand-me-down Lego bricks. My dad’s projects had an order and stability that was nothing like the chaos of the indigo container. They were a part of my dad I could not understand. I couldn’t even see them if I stood in front of the bookcase. I had to be a good distance away from them, at the top of a staircase on the opposite side of the room, at the very top where the first flight of stairs intersected the next. Only then could I peek over the handrails and observe that magnificent display of what “man” was capable of, a species that I would never feel like I was a part of. I was not allowed to take anything down because they were old and hard to put back together. Imagine what it would be like if archeologists were never allowed to get close to something they discovered, to use a delicate brush to remove the ossified remnants of time that eluded the mechanical arms of giant excavators and see the legacy of the species they belonged to; to caress the bronze and the iron and feel the warmth of warriors that had been trapped in pockets under their feet. If they are not denied the joy of feeling the liberated souls brush past them, the glory of the resurrection of the past, why was I? As far as I was concerned, I was stuck in a world with people I did not understand. My story lay buried in plain sight, waiting to be brought back to life. This was why I looked longingly at the bookcase, knowing even then that what has not been resurrected can never bring forth salvation.
There were many books in the bookcase. Glass panels separated the books, their true colour and smell, from the rest of the house. In a way, the transparent glass made the bookcase invisible. I’d never seen anyone open it or read any of the books inside. What I saw through the yellowing glass was nothing that could be part of the life of my father or my grandparents. It was nothing worth excavating. The entire house was filled with things that seemed invisible to my family and thus were enveloped in a sort of darkness. It was like the house was made up of the loose lego bricks in the indigo container. It remained so until I entered such fragile spaces by force, in febrile fashion without cicerone or candle, and threw myself into the abyss of my senses. Around the age of 12, I broke into the wooden bookcase. The glass panes were designed to move within grooves made by strips of iron that had been rusting away for years. I pushed, hesitated, then pushed again. There was a scream of glass on metal, a hollow scream that sounded like a drowning man gasping for air. And then it hit me, rushing into my nose and seeping into my skin. The smell was divine; aged papyrus mixed with the warmth of souls and rust. I felt it against my skin and in my nose and knew then, with great conviction, that what lay before me had always been a part of me and my family.
It is perhaps because the house was the site of such endless excavation, the resurrection of a past unlived, that the journey there was always synonymous with death. We lived in the city, in the heart of Kottayam. My father’s childhood home is a two-hour journey on winding roads, through forests and heavy rain, over hills and powerful rivers. Every time I step into the car to go there, I see my death on the road, ripped to shreds far away from the indigo container of assorted lego bricks. I’m guilty of having excused myself from visiting my grandparents a couple of times because the fear was too real for me to ignore. But as time passes by, like the edges of outer space recedes away from us every second and takes our past with it, the fire of the city will take the trees, the small shops and bumpy roads, the forest air and the winding roads, and leave nothing but barren land between me and my father’s house. It is for this reason that I decided to challenge death and visit my grandparents a few days ago. On the way there, I realised that so much had changed; tar and white paint had replaced the muddy roads, the forest was less dense, the river’s song had been drowned out by a dissonant chord of torpid trucks chugging to life, the houses had grown in size and show, and I had hair on my chin. The journey to my depths, the chaos in the indigo container and the unattainable order atop the bookcase, had always been one of mythical dimensions. Without the primordial cathedral of the forests with frescos of the naked sky on its canopy, and the raging waters of baptism that flow from the mountains of God, the overt prescience of nature that always preceded my rebirth was no longer on display. To uncover the part of me that remains hidden, the father who speaks in riddles, is no longer a response to nature. The geography has prepared itself for someone else; my son, perhaps. The thought released me from the ropes that tied me to my father and exposed the deep grooves on my bruised skin. It is finished. “I am a man now”, I said to myself on the way back home with the indigo container on my lap.
Yesterday, around 3 a.m. I was in my room, spread out like jam on bread walls, white like canvas and smooth like skin.
When you spend 2 years in the same room, you forget where your body ends. I know every inch of this room. I’ve cried in all corners, banged my head against the walls, and spent my nights under the bed. That’s why part of me exists as a heavy mist that fills every nook and cranny of this room. It came down heavy last night, moving like a river that flows from Armageddon. It starts from within the Mountain, comes down with great indifferent speed, and rapes the valley. And then it slithers onto the sea, its hubris hidden by the rubble flowing across the floor of my bedroom.
It was not a pleasant night.
It was into this bright abyss that the Song entered, a spear with a taper that turned my concrete box into a balloon drifting in the backyard on a summer afternoon. Inevitable release, uncomfortable absorption- the osmosis of the night. The explosion was silent, the suction pleasurable. My mist had escaped the room and seeped into a world beyond that was growing with every note. I felt my body becoming smaller every second. I was being consumed, to new life through death.
Then in the corner of my eye that was too heavy to keep open anymore, I saw a stack of my old comics. An epic sigh. Oh, what tragedy! There was a time when I enjoyed life, when I thought it was worth something. Where is the teat from which Lethe flows? Where is the comfort of chains?
My ailment, like music, has a way of taking away my past and my future. A couple of old comics had turned things around. The past had become accessible. The mist returned, the music stopped, and my body found its place in my room once again.
Inspiration was complete.
Loneliness, as I realized, was always in temporal isolation from all that I was and will be. May it remain so.
Cold morning showers after staying up all night depressed and anxious are quite an experience. I hop into the icy stream every morning. Shivering, my bloodshot eyes staring at the square patterns on the bathroom tiles, I go through a playlist of Argentine tango tunes. Everything is so angular; responsible and ready to take on life. I’m not. I’m a coward shivering in the darkness, showering with an open door because I like light without the source. My mind is racing at a speed I’ve probably tried to figure out five times just in the last ten seconds. I’m confused, divided, in a bathroom that’s got its shit together.
Every pain is a new day. It washes itself in Lethe and comes to me in twilight wearing the clothes of yesterday. Like a baby, it falls into my arms, wraps its hand around my finger and squeezes it until white starts to show. And I…ah…I squirm like a boy because I can’t father it. And yet, peace is with me; in the way it drools, twitches and turns, in how its eyes never look at the same things I do because it has no notion of betrayal or death. It will never question my arms. It looks at me and for a vicarious moment, the world becomes my oyster. I sigh, reassured.
This piece is about how pain feels new every time. It’s so easy for me to find security in this self-destructive low that I’m going through by devaluing life and finding peace in not caring about my existence here.
This is so because it brings me down to a place where all the lights go out and I’m allowed to be truly myself, or rather forced to be so. My pain gives me the luxury of not caring about anything else. I don’t have to worry about what people are going to think of me if I am who I really am because life’s not that great anyway. And in facilitating this perspective, the dark thoughts become my greatest ally as an artist.
This piece is basically about how I’m like the father before I allow myself to feel the pain and how I turn into the baby after I do. And I always choose to feel. Because just like a baby inspires a father through an effortless expression of near-perfect isolation from all that is so wrong about this world, my painful self like a babe in “yesterday’s clothes” reminds me that if I allow myself to feel pain, I can get to a place where I only need to be seen and not complimented, where I can be myself without worrying about what other people are going to think. It enhances the need to express and brings out the artist in me. It gives me purpose and peace. That’s why I never hold back. I feel it all.
Pain/ my painful self will torture me, make me create things that are honest to my experience, and then it bathes in Lethe and forgets all about what it did to me. The creation of art is where that baptism takes place. That’s what puts the face of a babe on pain. I’ve always said that the art I make does not necessarily heal me, that it solely arises out of a necessity to express. Maybe it does heal. Maybe it’s just that I go through the cycle way too fast. This could be because of many reasons. Like how little rational thought is involved in these escapades down rabbit holes that lead straight into hell or the abundance of new associations and pathways that I create every day, new ways to get to the same bottomless pit. Same liver, new eagles.
I live on the first floor of a giant apartment. But if I go stand outside the gate and look at it, I feel like I live at the very top. I like that. I like that my apartment does not end where I live. I like that the idea of where I live is full of rooms and spaces that I have never been in. I’ve never felt that way about the city I live in. I see it spread out like a soggy blanket from the terrace of my giant apartment and I know I hate it with a passion. Maybe it’s because I hate this city that I like my apartment so much. It looks like a hoe that a farmer stuck into a piece of stubborn land that he’s fucking done trying to till. It’s a giant block of concrete that’s trying to reach for the sky and get as far away as it can from this lukewarm city. Just like me. So, I sit in my room on the first floor of my giant apartment, press my face against the window grill, and look out. WE LOOK OUT, DAMMIT. We feel it, the fire burning our atriums to a crisp. We feel the wind swirling around in our basements, pushing against our doors and making our bodies shake. It’s like the lightning that hits before the thunder, the crack in our walls. We are together in this.
If you’re not a musician or familiar with music production, you probably won’t know what I mean when I say ‘reverb’ or ‘delay’. But if I ask you if you’ve walked into a church or a giant cathedral and felt like the sounds were bigger, lusher or “spacey”, you probably know what I’m talking about.
Reverb and delay are effects that are used in music production to simulate and manipulate the reflection of sound (links at the end of this post if you want a short history). You don’t sound the same in all the rooms of your house. Even if you might not notice it, you do. Certain instruments and vocals sound right or fit into a mix well when they are recorded in certain rooms. This is why the studios that bands like the Beatles used to record their music are often talked about as having the potential for the creation of a certain kind of sound.
But as technology has developed over the years, people have tried to make it possible for you to infuse the songs that you make in your bedroom with the magic of spaces far far away.
I can put a certain reverb/delay effect on my song and make it sound like it’s being played in a cathedral on a Sunday morning. But that’s not the only mind-blowing thing here. You can listen to my song as if it was being performed in a certain space without actually being in that space. This was not possible a little more than a century ago.
I can sit in my small bedroom and listen to the latest Contemporary Christian Music release, which is usually full of lush reverbs and delays, and I can hear what I’d only hear in a much bigger space naturally.
What does that mean for the experience of music?
Well, there’s a reason why Cathedrals are the way they are. You walk into one hosting a choir or a morning service and you feel like you’re walking right into God’s chest. You feel small and insignificant but you also feel like you’re part of something larger than life. Concrete branches arch and meet above you as if you were walking in a forest encrusted in cement. Like the sun breaks into a thousand lines at the tip of leaves covered in morning dew and seems to displace itself to your arm’s length, light breaks in through the coloured glass and brings God right to you. And as you stand within reach of what seems like the great intersection of life and light, the sound of angels wash over you like a wave. The air feels wet and the ground grabs hold of your feet.
Part of me feels like reverb and delay belong where I can not only hear them but also see them. But sitting here at home, isolated from the rest of the world with walls that seem to close in, I feel like my favorite shoegaze albums are the only way to push back against them.
I think the difference, for me at least, is that when I can see how the space I’m in is what makes the sound a certain way, it makes me aware of where my skin ends. But when I can’t see it, it feels like it comes from within. In the latter case, it is a force to be reckoned with; one that can push back the walls of my room.
On that note, here’s a song from one of my favorite bands that does some pretty cool stuff with reverb and delay:
Today was yet another miserable day. However, there was a bit of comfort in the evening. I had run out of things to distract myself with so I picked up my guitar for the second time today and tried to come up with a few ideas. I did come up with a few but they were nothing special, nothing that could captivate me and keep me distracted long enough. So, they broke through, all those horrible thoughts. Then, out of nowhere, I found myself playing an old hymn that I’d listened to so many times at church. It’s a hymn written in my mother tongue so you probably wouldn’t know it. I was playing the tune on the D string of my guitar, just the D string. My fingers moved very slow, adding a delicate vibrato as if they lay heavy on the string. A peace washed over me, something I had not felt in such a long time. I kept going for another 30 minutes or so, playing this effortless tune again and again on my guitar. Somewhere along the way, my fingers had taken a life of their own. I was no longer thinking about what I was playing. There was no commanding. The rest of the world opened before me; time split and dispersed into a million moments of rain-like seeds that hung in the air and grazed against me. I could hear the low incessant hum of my amplifier, the gloss of my guitar straining against the cotton of my shorts. The cars on the street were parked on the windows of my room and all the light that was left in twilight sneaked in just for me. I felt it all.
For the past few years, a significant portion of my depression and anxiety can be attributed to my crisis of faith. I’d grown up loving all that was spiritual. I did more than the average kid to find God. Having all of that taken right from under me left me falling into a bright abyss. I don’t know if what I felt today was God in my room or the glimpse of a simpler time. Whatever it was, I’m grateful.
I know this is a very depressing blog. Very few people even read it these days. But right now, in this moment, I am able to comfort you too, even though I know that this moment will not last long.
About the artwork:
I drew this listening to the hymn and thinking about what that moment was like. By the time I was drawing it, the feeling had sort of watered down to a memory of perspective. So the colours ended up being the usual ones which I use. Something cool about it is how if you look just the lines, you can make out an eye, a nose, and ear of a face. But if you look at the colours also, you start to see how they divide the lines into two faces.
I’m sure most people like to read poetry and derive their own meaning from it. However, since this blog is a way for me to record my journey, I will add the inspiration behind these lines.
Today was extremely hard. I felt such hate for myself that I hit myself pretty hard quite a few times. Somewhere in the middle of it all, there was a pause when my eyes and mouth were open in a similar fashion. I was crying and tears were welling up and making their way down. My mouth was also filled with saliva because when you’re crying with your mouth as well, you don’t really get time to swallow. The sudden realization that my eyes and mouth were associated in the way they were open and filled with bodily fluid amused me. I paused and for a moment it felt like my entire body and the world itself was open and filled with bodily fluid. In feeling this overwhelming sense of oneness, the pause became a photograph of sorts. Anyway, in that pause, I felt a beautiful calm. For a moment, I was not myself but some other person who was able to see all 21 years of my life on this planet. It was okay. Everything was going to be alright. I went back to beating myself up after the pause but it was powerful enough for me to sit down and draw what I felt out on paper between sobs.
I’ve noticed that for a few months now, the future doesn’t exist and the past keeps blurring into the background. They are unable to provide me with a reason to hope or to try. The present is all there is and it is filled with self-hate and gloom. These moments where the artist in me breaks out and draws over my body and soul are the only moments where this anomaly in the perception of the temporal isn’t pronounced.
In the poem, I’m asking myself if my work as an artist and a student of life (sweat) will ever flow along with the pain I’m going through. I’m asking this because I’m afraid that if I don’t learn to do that well enough, it will destroy me (wrinkles) physically and mentally.
The 4th Dimension 