Still Sundays

March 10, 2013.

 

There is some really awful writing on blogs. Sunday wants me to show otherwise. Stillness whispers, After all, that’s why you began writing on Sundays, no? You were bored of re-reading. Yes, I remember. I remember when the word “blog” was a misspelling of the word blob.

 

My fingers seem to have developed an allergic reaction to the keyboard of my laptop. Or so it appears. When I sit to type I notice how my nails need a manicure instead of how the words need to be filed. The word “manicure” creates a manure of memories in my head. Thereafter I find myself on a paper boat created in my mind’s imagination department where I can use the oars made of flashing imagery and end up on Broadway in New York City. 108th and Broadway is my favorite spot in the whole world, I think. If stillness was an architect it would have begun there. I don’t know why manicures and pedicures are so affordable in New York City as compared to the rest of the world. And so it goes. I have typed no new words. So, I have been writing with a pen and paper again. Sometimes I pause to notice my hurried writing: an animated roadrunner flashing after thoughts and places. My one dimensional self wants to ask the four dimensional being: what is it that you are so desperately trying to accomplish with words? Worlds! is the humble yet defiant reply.

Everyone tells me one carries peace in his or her heart. What if that piece is New York, NY? My father reminds me that I can have New York City anytime; it’s not going anywhere. That’s when I am reminded that which I love the most about certain places no longer exists no matter how many times I return and start over. Most days I feel I am in some Babylonian Captivity.

Memories contra mundum.

My father tells me this is a consequence of being an inhabitant of earth which exists in the realm of time. Then why don’t I?

That exchange inspired a thread for weaving a story unlike any other. I don’t know when I will be so full of that story so it has to burst out of the seams of my fingers. Is it the same story that I have been writing? Until then I will remain a sponge for fragments. Writing in the meanwhile serves as defibrillation.

 

Although it is getting harder and harder to find writing that satisfies, on the Internet or otherwise, a friend sent me the following essay by Michael Chabon (disclosure: I am not familiar with his writings).  It was exquisitely written and an excerpt from the article is most fitting for this Sunday.

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken.

Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again.

The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half—remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.”

(“Wes Anderson’s Worlds” by Michael Chabon, The New York Review of Books).

 

There are places that are only inside our head: the bend on Claire Road in Durban; the route overlooking all the residential streets on Bus No. 24 in Prague; Broadway exhaling the funky breathing of the red subway lines; dew on grass in Defense Society in Lahore; some giant fan turning from one side to another to cool 1000 summers that were made to read books which shaped our desires, questions, and answers despite the shackles placed by society at large.

 

The more I “googled” about Michael Chabon the more information I found about his wife who, a former attorney, also happens to be a writer. And the more I learned the more disappointed I became. I am not sure if “successful” writers are aware how much they are hurting themselves by sharing too much on social media.

Pat Mora wrote, “A sad truth about art is that it is unlinked to virtue. Wretches can write well while saints produce pedestrian passages.”

The foremost task for any writer or artist is to preserve that sacred space between himself and his audience while simultaneously giving all of him or herself. This is no easy task in this digital age, especially for those of us who remain on the outskirts of mainstream. But it can be done; it must be done; it has been done; it is being done.

 

I still believe in the power of virtue. Izzat. Menschlichkeit.

I still believe people want something real no matter how much it hurts. And the best thing about real is, it doesn’t.

Most of the time, real looks like something you made up. And very often you just had to.

 

 

 

3 responses to “Still Sundays”

  1. Nayla says:

    Virtue is something that has a permanent place. One cannot twist its meaning according to ones need and wants. Places has special meanings to each one of us. It is so strange that a lot of times when we go back to visit them. It appears that nothing is like that what we thought of. That is why god has given us imagination and it never expires,we can always keep our thoughts and feelings alive to any city or street. You have very well said that famous people should keep part of their personal lives to them selves. Being big or famous does not mean that virtues and morales don’t matter. Poison is a poison whether a big person takes or a unknown person takes.

  2. Miles says:

    Yes, it has been, is, and shall forever be; it happens in the space of a wink or the twinkle of an eye and reverberates throughout the ages for all eternity. Breathtaking! 😀

  3. Keep being “a sponge for fragments”–a very worthwhile task of gathering in. To mix in another metaphor, there are seed times and there is the harvest later. You’ll be in there threshing, I know! 🙂

    ~lucy