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.
The entire house was open to me, laid bare and naked. Except for the kitchen. The kitchen was dangerous. It had gas cylinders, knives, and hot pans. Entering it during the day, when my parents were at work, was like entering a tomb. The dry sink, the shut cabinets and closed lids, the black iron of the stove like a fire-breathing dragon asleep after a hearty meal, it all seemed…dead. But it was a living death – more like sleep.
I would wander into the kitchen in the evenings and watch my mom run around the kitchen trying to make food for all of us. I had been there hours before and the tiles had stared back at me. The squares had heaved like the chest of a sleeping monster. And here she was, moving, unaware of it quiet and submissive under her swift feet.
I would look on, from the threshold. My entry into this world of fire and sweat was only possible if she acknowledged me – only if I had the right things to say, the right things to ask. The kitchen is off-limits. To distract her would be criminal, to interact disastrous. My father would come and leave. He did not need her to be a part of this space that breathed like a boxer after 10 rounds. He was an adult.
Walking in, proceeding with caution, my arms and legs telling her that I knew that I must enter this space with great care, I was like Lazarus coming out of the tomb wrapped in cloth – slow, scared, and bound at the mouth of a tomb. I was screaming to be reborn, to become what my parents were. I ask her something in my best voice, I put my choice warrior to task. I find the rhythm of the kitchen in the sound of the metal hitting the cast iron pan. My words fit right into the spaces. They cut through the mix the way incisors cut into cheese and cake.
But she ignores me
In that moment, I am in the void. Lost, in a space where I do not belong. The chimney is old, struggling to swallow the heat. The fires blaze and I bake next to the stove. I can’t scream. I become lifeless like vegetables before they are washed. I become meat prepped for the grill. I become food.
What if I can’t leave the kitchen? What if the door is shut?
What if I can’t run away like I always do?
Am I to bake in this heat?
I need to grow. Faster.
I need to be able to go in and out as I please.
Panicking, I grab an apron. I extend my limbs, stretch out the straps and cry out – “I am not a child. Please don’t cook me”
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.
Sucked into the narrow middle at the last hour, the horizon where we will meet, surrounded by death, with one foot in the door to infinity. The sand will fall through into dead space and if we join hands and hold them out into the void, the dirt of our grave will graze our pale skin. There, you will hand me the pen and I will write on the door, frantically scribble the only things that matter, poems for those who come after, who dare to see death within the face. Creak, creak goes the hinge, grace our shoes with crusted paint that falls but never fell. There is no time at the door to infinity, in the middle of the glass that contains the hour.
I made some music and created an animated video to go with it. It’s a vision, a dream, something I blurted out that I felt was important to turn into something I could realize and forget at the same time. That’s what this blog is supposed to be about anyway.
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.
When I was a child, I always wanted clothes twice my size. I wanted clothes that were big enough for my parents, my heroes, for that person I was going to become in ten years. I never felt at home with peers. Me tugging on the shoulder of my XL shirt trying to pull the sleeve back up my arm was an expression of how hard it was to fit in with people my size. It wasn’t about wearing a blanket but about wearing the future, being part of a group that I understood. Now that I’ve grown into those shirts and grown taller and stronger than my parents, I stop and ask myself if I still want clothes twice my size. Yes, I do. Time has taught me that parents are much bigger than their clothes make them out to be, that heroes live in the smallest spaces, and that the future is more accessible today than it ever will be.
The 4th Dimension 