Mimesis

by Mandira Pattnaik

Luis Vaz

Dear Readers of my column, among the many concerns this week, apart from my eyesight getting worse and having to wear power spectacles for the first time in my life, and a genetic variant on chromosome 6 pronouncing arthritis declaring itself master of my limbs, is the fall of everything here in India. And that’s not the level of journalism, or standards of living, or the value of rupee, or employment I’m talking about, it’s the general outlook of our people. Losing hope seems the order of the day, and with what’s happening in neighboring Sri Lanka, matters feel far worse.

I’ve been anxious, my immediacy fueled by the needs of a young family. In the intervals of calm, I’m contemplative, wondering about the future of our children. While I’m worrying about almost everything these days. I’m also writing more essays, though topics that are non-political, non-opinionated are hard to come by.

Last week, I also chanced upon several articles about the homeless in the U.S. A documentary on TV showed large swathes of slums, and the homeless having to pitch tents on public property in Los Angeles and San Francisco. That was something very much against the grain of the American Dream many of us Indians live by, and are willing to die for. There were reports of Asian discrimination as well, several popping up in my news feed, but I can’t be too sure, it’s the algorithm most of the time, pushing you towards exactly what they think you’d be interested in. In any case, realities of ourselves are getting harder and harder to grasp in 2022.

Luckily I had the comfort of a few publications. Getting work read by University MFA students and voted for and published in their prestigious journals, still feels surreal to me. If-I’d-be-in-one-of-those-places is a refrain that’ll not leave me anytime soon. I’ve loved reading all my life; loved my student life, always will.

On occasions, the editors from these places are very encouraging, and we develop a personal bond, and they write back, lovely elaborate emails I sometimes wish were on paper to be treasured!

Drawing from those touches of kindness, I understand creative honesty and reader association/recall is one relationship I have missed in the list I made for my last column. Actually there might’ve been several misses, and my concern is how attention on some entities inherently ‘manufacture’ blind spots. Only human. So impaired, that focusing on a few is normal, while overlooking some others. Follows across time and geographic parameters — about development, industrialization, education, and so on.

Like, I’ve been ignoring my reading. As it is, print copies are expensive to import, and e-reading is prohibited (I get migraines). What’s left — if libraries are poorly-stocked, ill-managed and inaccessible? I rely on reading online, in short bursts, almost like cheating my eyes, but I’m hardly complaining, it’s a universe of new knowledge out there.

Right now, I’m reading the latest issue of trampset and how the pieces are like blades of the same grass, as if grown together, having so much in common in theme as well as structure. I notice a vein of regret, devastation and hopelessness. In “god’s children,” Jeremy T. Karn writes “it has been two days of nonstop fighting & raining in Monrovia. the sounds of bullets could be heard in a distance.” I’m wondering if it’s a calm acceptance of violence/death, or, is it an acceptance of what life gives us? I am reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (which is sometimes mentioned as an example of post-modernist literature), and the phrase “So it goes,” used in the text almost every single time someone dies, and when death is evoked. It is interesting how we perceive these things, particularly about situations we’ve no control over, and when we write about them, we see events like an unaffected outsider even though we’re in it, and are truly involved. We’re perhaps hoping to record realities through art that is genuinely unbiased. People who have read Vonnegut think of “So it goes” as a kind of resigned commentary on life, but it could also be a pointer to describe things the way they are, perhaps a reminder of the impermanence of how events are planned, and how they finally take shape in the future.

I’d hope our generation of writers are standing up to the truths of our times, and documenting realities as they are, through whatever we get the privilege of creating. Essentially, we’re piecing together bits of ourselves on grid-points in a graph so enormous in time, we’ll never be able to see the whole.