Putting My Unknowing on a Pushcart

by Mandira Pattnaik

Warren Wong

The trouble with social order is its affinity towards hierarchy and its maintenance. As writers, we follow-up on our pursuance of journal publications with chasing elusive Pushcarts. Later, dream of novels, book deals and Bookers. Along the way, we debate with our inner self whether to write for the love of writing alone, or for money and fame. In circles of reputation, opinions both merge and clash about this. Just as whether to name a library (art, literature) after Jeff Bezos following his handsome donation (money). In India, excellent libraries are named after Nehru, but JL Nehru (politician, freedom fighter, Prime Minister) was a great writer himself so there’s no divergence on that. Naming places of art and culture for people outside the creative world? I’m not sure how we’d react to that.

Conflicts like this in the pursuance of unbridled creative arts are many. In his recent poem (trampset, Jan. 14), Joel Worford writes: “Every single day is an opportunity for more words that will not come. More imaginary lives that will never breathe the imaginary air that will never blow. Entire generations of imaginary families erased from a history never created.” Referring to a personal impulsive disorder (trichotillomania) while drawing parallels, the poem made me wonder how this resonates in the particular trapping in which we find ourselves now, under the shadow of hopelessness and confusion. As writers, we may have too much to say or too little, depending on how affected we are, and base our words on a lot of information or none. Who decides? I’m reminded of the phrase “Write what you know,” and I’ll confess in a blink: I know nothing, for, what do I know about others when I know so little of myself? Today, I may feel generous, tomorrow unforgiving and the day after, numb. How about the idea of “harmonious confusion” (“Where order in variety we see, And where, though all things differ, all agree.” — Alexander Pope) and the refuge in vivid imagination, hypothesis, and common sense, to write about things we know, and do not?

Now, what we think we know may also be what we do not know because they are fragments of unreliable memory, unadorned ghostly wisps. Still, an arresting conversation or image in the present may unwrap hitherto ignored details from our past or our learning, and splash them on the page. They prove to be stunning imports from days long forgotten. The energy and arc of a piece mined from those mysterious pockets of memory are truly appealing to the reader. Challenging information with imagination and juxtaposing the two to create something beautiful is one of the most fascinating aspects of art.

In her essay, “Memory, Creation and Writing,” Toni Morrison writes, “I depend heavily on the ruse of memory (and in a way it does function as a creative writer’s ruse) for two reasons. One, because it ignites some process of invention, and two, because I cannot trust the literature and the sociology of other people to help me know the truth of my own cultural sources….I want my fiction to urge the reader into active participation in the non-narrative, non-literary experience of the text, which makes it difficult for the reader to confine himself to a cool and distant acceptance of data.”

This is a perfect reason to write, to write in spite of everything. As a beginning, exploring what I know in a non-conforming, child-like fashion, and rearranging with pieces from my curiosity and fantasy (what I do not know, in the classical sense), often lead to wonderful results. There’s great peace in this subtle disharmony and apparent chaos.

Interestingly, following criticism, Jeff Bezos requested that, instead of him, the D.C. Public Library should name the auditorium in the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library after this same essayist and novelist, Toni Morrison.