Still Sundays

January 22nd 2012.

Biko. Coltrane. My father. Coleridge. Marquez.

Writing when you are under the weather is like talking in your sleep. Nothing makes sense; it all makes sense.

It is a Steve Biko kind of Sunday: “I write what I like.”

New York City is under the weather too. It snowed yesterday.

I read a post by a talented photographer in Finland, Annika Ruohonen, this morning titled “January in Finland.”  So this is Finland in January I said aloud without realizing. Maybe my heavy head thought I was using “inside” voices when I was not. I tried leaving a short comment but due to computer glitches, password itches, the comment was lost as was the moment that knows just the right words. Her winter photography somehow always makes winter appear warm. Maybe winter was made for certain lands but geography too changes overtime. Why are people so fixated on who they think they are?

So it is going to be a Sunday without words.

Last night John Coltrane kept me company. I recalled a Coltrane thought: “Change is inevitable in music—things change.”  Why is it so hard for people to change their minds? All these attachments to who we are…where do they go when we become dusty? I keep Coltrane close for changes. David Wild wrote about Coltrane, “He pushed continually at the boundaries of his music, sought constantly to hear differently, to renew what had scarcely had time to grow familiar. What remains for us now are the sounds of his spirit.” So if one feels his or her spirit through the music that is the essence of another’s….

I don’t think one can talk about music—specially jazz and blues—without talking about soul.

I don’t want to talk about soul. Maybe on a Sunday when I am 60.

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I called my father at 2:00 a.m. last night. Mama says Zain, my father, and I are some crystal balls at that hour so it doesn’t surprise her when we eagerly connect like astronauts on certain nights. She giggles when she says that. One of those giggles that makes its way upon observing a kitten do something amusing.

What is and isn’t a natural desire? I am stuck with this character’s motives in one of the stories on which I am working.

My father replies with stories of being a young twenty year old man where he felt misunderstood by adults and only understood by young kids. The families in his then small town dubbed him the Pied Piper.

Can you please focus on what I am asking?

What are you asking?

About desire. What is and isn’t natural?

There are things you think you don’t want and things you do want and the unconscious mind has more reasons than you can ever come up with consciously to trick you into thinking you do or don’t want something.

So much of life seems a coping mechanism for living, I tell him, disappointed.

Only when you get older, much older, do you see so much of life really as “meant to be”. I was very unlucky and also very lucky in life. It doesn’t change what I was always meant to do.

Then he continues on about his childhood, his father, his mother, his skewed perception about himself and who he was…and clarity that came more with luck than trying to consciously understand everything.

I tell my parents goodnight…grateful that I can call them like friends to talk about the meaning of life in an obscure way that doesn’t really feel like talking about “the meaning of life” but recounts so many lives walking on stick figures of memories…

I don’t tell them I feel a cold coming…

I think about just how my mother loves—her love is profound—an enigma like my father.

He looked at his own Soul
with a Telescope. What seemed
all irregular, he saw and
shewed to be beautiful
Constellations: and he added to the Consciousness hidden
world within worlds.

~ Samuel Coleridge

What if the poets were all really crying and not rejoicing when they all in one way or another wrote “I was born to love you”?

I fell asleep to dreams that keep changing to show changes. I hope the world is ready for what’s always been real.

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Vusi Sindane created this new web space for me. He knows the foreign language of PHP, CSS, Javascript and MYSQL. I don’t even know what the acronyms mean other than java but I am pretty sure in this case it doesn’t mean coffee. He is patient, diligent, and he defines exceptional beyond professionally. My mother says if he can remain persistent with his passion pretty soon he will be choosing clients with whom he wants to work. Vusi says people who quit what they are doing probably didn’t want to be doing that in the first place. We outgrow things for a reason. In his South African accent over Skype I can hear all my friends and even the warm Durban days where rain really feels like some blessing from sky gods. There are places in this world where we slip in to another universe that is within and continue wanting to return. South Africa is one such place. It is hard to defy the gravitational pull that is Africa.

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I was re-reading The Autumn of the Patriarch by a favorite author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, where the dictator says it doesn’t matter if it’s not true now, because sometime in the future it will be true. Sooner or later people believe writers rather than the government.

Great. Thanks to social media, blogging, Internet, we have as many “writers” as thoughts that are just white noise in our heads. Internet was supposed to be a good thing. We have taken the war on ignorance with the artillery made of ego and desperation on another plane.

This led me to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s interview in the Paris Review this Sunday morning.

I considered it best to tape the leaking faucet of words with his words this Sunday morning. I share some excerpts on friends, dreams, stimulants, reality, that resonate deeply with my process.

• If I had to give a young writer some advice I would say to write about something that has happened to him; it’s always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to him or something he has read or been told. Pablo Neruda has a line in a poem that says “God help me from inventing when I sing.” It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

• Bad readers have asked me if I was drugged when I wrote some of my works. But that illustrates that they don’t know anything about literature or drugs. To be a good writer you have to be absolutely lucid at every moment of writing, and in good health. I’m very much against the romantic concept of writing which maintains that the act of writing is a sacrifice, and that the worse the economic conditions or the emotional state, the better the writing. I think you have to be in a very good emotional and physical state. Literary creation for me requires good health.

• Leaf Storm was written for my friends who were helping me and lending me their books and were very enthusiastic about my work. In general I think you usually do write for someone. When I’m writing I’m always aware that this friend is going to like this, or that another friend is going to like that paragraph or chapter, always thinking of specific people. In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions of readers I am writing for; this upsets and inhibits me. It’s like a million eyes are looking at you and you don’t really know what they think.

• The writer’s very attempt to portray reality often leads him to a distorted view of it. In trying to transpose reality he can end up losing contact with it, in an ivory tower, as they say. Journalism is a very good guard against that. That’s why I have always tried to keep on doing journalism, because it keeps me in contact with the real world, particularly political journalism and politics. The solitude that threatened me after One Hundred Years of Solitude wasn’t the solitude of the writer; it was the solitude of fame, which resembles the solitude of power much more. My friends defended me from that one, my friends who are always there.

• In the very beginning I paid a good deal of attention to them [re: dreams as a source of inspiration]. But then I realized that life itself is the greatest source of inspiration and that dreams are only a very small part of that torrent that is life. What is very true about my writing is that I’m quite interested in different concepts of dreams and interpretations of them. I see dreams as part of life in general, but reality is much richer.

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