You and the Jape of Art.

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”

~Charles Bukowski.

To Begin

The fire is crackling just warm enough in the fireplace to drub the cold of the blizzard raging outside. It's just books here, books and warmth. Shrivel your hands under your chin, and snuggle back far into the couch. Books were made to fall in love, I'm glad you have found yourself one. I am glad we have found ourselves each other.

Hi.

Here for a while let me sit the dusty seat of intellect because talking about the subject of art is somewhat different from its creation itself. Art is like working on buttressing the pace of a river, perhaps your imagination, talking about it is like trying to judge its exact speed without any instruments yet invented. Talking about art is like trying to describe what exactly changes in your heart that makes you fall in love – to do it without the fur of romance is a difficult hike steep uphill. The reason talking about it should not be made an effortless narrative, something only to skim or lick through, is because it is an affair of grave gravity. Talking about art should not be effortless because art is not an effortless dome.

It is something big residing in some old part of your mind like a forgotten dream. I will talk about that old part. I will help you hunt it down and undust it with my cloth. Then perhaps you will like ruffling through its crisp brown pages. Then perhaps you will fall in love with their irreal materiality. But hunting is never an effortless task, is it?

The Dreamslaughter

Wild memoiric stories about drastic transformations that turns one’s character from a dead autumn twig to the thick lush of spring lies too far in the philosophical cortexes of the headset to be of any practical cue to any practical person of the practical everyday life – Ashoka realising the true religion of peace after butchering a thousand men to grime; Mike Tyson contemplating on the psych of his younger, animal self and regretting so much and so forth; the petty sorrows of Jordan Belfort after bankrupting numerous innocents; Nobita Nobi using an unnatural cassette device of the thoughtful man to realise his stupidities; Mia Khalifa…well; Sunny Leone…well. A part of you still believes in the hope of such reconstructing adventures perhaps because of the fairies and the fairy tales and the fact that you believed in Santa Clauses and tooth fairies for a jolly while in childhood. But in the mundane monotonous monstrosity of the blaring alarm clock, and the urgency of taking an acidic shit before you jump onto your joyful school bus ride, the plausibility of any such drastic dreams coming true dims down from its brilliant shine (the times of wilding childhood imaginaries that can make you fly rockets to Mars, fight the goblins, then let you make it back to sleep in the crib in time) to a still hopeful bulb of decent lambency (I am more than this textbook…I am…I really am). And it dims a little more every day that you live to see the sun rise: a little more, a little, a little, a little. Until one day, perhaps in the late of your teens, you realise that when you try to grope for the hope of something changing, something coming up, something happening, something extraordinary striking into your way, there isn't anything in sight to grasp at all. There is no twig for the you that is now drowning with boulders tied to your legs, there is no change, only dead waters of the deepest blue deepening and deepening. All there is, is this robotic schedule of losing your mind day by day, with the periodics of the arms of a clock, in an army systematic sort of way. This schedule is the devil's imp, a fiend, the monster from under your bed, dressed like a sexy, erudite and scholarly gentleman, blocking all your ways off to the realms of fantastic realities. Through these years of vigorous practice it begins to seem much easier to just pull down your pants, oil your sexes, masturbate, then clean up the mess and off to bed, till the alarm clock shatters all dreams the next day, and then it is time again to bathe, dress, walk out to the schedule of school or office to let it devour some more on what is left of your sanity. Hollow Men, as TS Eliot called them, Hollow Men.

And so it goes on, and so it goes on. You might, some time, look around your house and see the jolly infant now with the dead pallor of a ghost still residing somewhere in the hearts of your parents, killing them, like ghosts usually do, with old sorrows and old regrets a little everyday, a little every day. The worst part about the battle of dreamslaughter is that the killing begins from the day you begin the journey and never really ends until all that is left of you is a corpse ready to be put into the confines of a grave, or be turned to ashes before pouring it to contaminate the aqua.

A life was lived, they tell you, and you try to be sad about the death. A life was lived, they tell you, and you wonder what for. A life was lived, they tell you, and you realise no…no, not really. It was a jape, you realise, a rather unfunny one. “What?” you wonder and, “Why?” But japes seldom answer.

The Art

It is somewhere during the course of this surfing joyous misery that the magic of art bows its green hat. It is like that tiny white lilly growing from a corner of cracked soil that you never made an effort to spot in your garden of dead, wilted and odourless roses. To ask what exactly art is, is like asking what it is to live a life (live, that is, not just breathe and die): art is experience and expression. Art is Holy – Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! – not to any of those stone structured divinities of the defective theological department, but Holy to what lies in the depths of the chest of man: the heart. If there is one thing holy to the heart more than science (name any branch), religion, system, morals, or era, it is the experience and expression encrusted to unity inside the sphere of a medium. It is the medium that brings it alive, it is the medium that lets the singing nightingales fly into pretty the moonlit night. And it is the symphonies of these songs that saves you from dying the deplorable death of living for nothing and dying for nothing.

The sphere of the medium, I believe, has the shape of water. Imagination doesn't cost you money; it costs you a little effort to sustain the world of fairies and quaints in your mind. (If it is effortless, it is either not art at all or art of the utmost prestige – chances are you would end up writing Ulysses or War and Peace just as you are beginning out). As long as imagination (water running shapelessly loose, to continue that analogy) and find some material shape in the world, the medium is as ingenuine as the sunrays of a spring morning. Anything, anything at all, that can find its place even in the dustiest corner of a dustier world, or the dankest corner of a cornered bog is a medium of expression. The canvas and the paint brushes, the video camera and the computer, the wall and the spray cans, the voice and the singer, the stage and the frenzy of the dancer's legs. Silence and facial expressions. And silence and

books.

The pen.

The paper.

The passion and the indefinite scribbles of ink. The Infinities of the narrative jests.

The medium doesn't matter much at all. It is the hunch that drives you to yours, the experience and expression that initiates and continues it and the effort that completes it. It is your sweat that makes the creation yours. Yours, as though it were your own child.

The Book

This is where, I believe, it is right for me to begin to advertise my merchandise. This is where I converge my stream of ideas over one, or perhaps two, of these artistic spheres and talk for a bit about them. This is where I get down to fiction, and its writing.

Most of the readers you'd know and those devoted to writing – the two are not very different on many spectrums – are supposed to have been born with a bug that excruciates their heads if they are not devouring books at every moment since they slipped out of the womb, and till they lay down with finality.

Well, for what it is worth saying, I did not know what reading meant until I was as far in the plasma of insanity as the eighth grade. Nobody taught me to find joy in the task, except for finding the worthless poetic devices on academic pieces as nameless as the worms on monsoon bushes. My parents did not read, except for news-empty newspapers and considered imagination to be a restless evil. If there is one thing the genesis of my own imaginative consciousness tells me after its journey began crippled by long solitude and delayed by useless spry activities, it is that it is never too late to give the seed of your imagination the nourishment it needs to become an endless entity of its own; until the limiting boundaries blur and you begin to create something to call your own. All one really has to do is open a page, set their mind, and just contemplate for a while on the words. With consistency.

I am not going to go into the scientific aspects, the psychological broadening or the positive reconstructions that reading gives to your brain: for one, I did not begin reading for the sciency benefits and two, it is rather easy to fall back to the cushion of masturbating at the schedule when you are doing it for anything except joy. I began reading, and actually understood for the most part its unsung ecstacies, because the first book I read absolutely blew my mind away: Goosebumps, Series 2000, Jakyll and Heidi. It is the boon of education houses that sow into us the seeds of the detest that we develop for the incredible task. It is this apparent unavoidable certainty they help us develop in our heads, to have to scrutinise every word the writer uses in the place until you have squeezed it all out to the final joyless death of the sponge; to scrounge every line and find out the ocean blue meanings and functionless figures for fucking feech, blegh, speech. It is most important to realise that reading does not have to be a sleuth game of finding funny meanings behind funny sentences. It does not have to be tedious. It just has to be done, when you begin, just for the experimentation, then just to maintain the consistency, then to continue the juicy joy. When you learn to enjoy it, it is like sniffing a rose in its full bloom. It needs to be for the joy of it. For the need to savour the taste of those words in your mind as though it were the bite of the juiciest mango in the world.

Begin with step one, that is also the first step – the way it should always begin. A concrete resolution of today to read 20 minutes a day will spread the wings of your mind like the wings of a swan. Begin with easy books. Do not go for 1200 page mammoths or literary boggling puzzles (The Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and Ulysses by James Joyce respectively). Begin with the easiest thing you can lay your hands on, and that can catch your wandering attention. Begin with cheap sex novels, but just make sure to give your mind – and the vast world of literature – the deserved promotion after you get the hang of the task. But if there is one thing most important of all, it is the do it every day for 20 minutes factor. Any time of the day you find free, any at all, just let your mind alone with the versed fantasies and dreams they never hesitated to teach you to smother; let yourself have the only weapon you've been given against the raging battle with reality: let yourself back the imagination.

Art.

Read. Begin somewhere but don't pause. Begin somewhere today, slow and easy as you would, but make sure that you take the next step tomorrow. It might not always be the most motivated or elevated task, but you have to make your bird learn to fly. Learning is never effortless, but what matters is that the sweet labour of reading, having been accomplished one page at a time, always feels worth it at the end. Mark my words: Always.

As for how I got into it, it is the tale for some other day.

—Akash Kumar (21/11/2020)