Feb 20, 2020

Reading update

Reading Naipaul, Watching Gandhi

I haven’t read a lot of Naipaul’s fiction. I read Guerillas a few years ago. I have often tried to read one of his more popular novels, A House for Mr Biswas but without much progress. When fiction is set in or around India, I find it difficult to access. Usually, fiction carves this new space where you step in and think through characters based in other times and other places, mostly distant, which, fiction set in current times or about India does not provide. 



I read Naipaul’s essay collection, Literary Occasions sometime late last year. This is the writer talking about his making, about the years that formed him, about his early days, about the perceptions he has collected of growing up as a person of Indian origin in a foreign place which was still called Indies by another name. The collection also includes a couple of forewords to his books. It is an enjoyable collection, worth a re-read. There is the struggle and joy of him becoming a writer, and there's his joy as a reader as he takes us through his reading influences.

There are certain writers where their worldview seems to run like an identifiable thread running through their work, easy to be picked, a theme or a memory, and sometimes making it difficult to draw the lines between their memoirs and fiction. I have felt that while reading books by Marquez and in his autobiography. Similarly in Naipaul's writing, there's a recurring theme of  him being a perpetual outsider. Most of his essays seemed to return to the theme of his struggle with reconciling the world  that is and the world that he sees given his contexts.

Around the same time as I was reading Naipaul, we watched Gandhi (or re-watched it to introduce the movie to the kid as he wrote his essays on modern and historical heroes). And for me, the dawning epiphany was in finding a similar theme in Gandhi - that Gandhi’s views, thoughts and approaches to the world were shaped elsewhere (and not in India) and he arrived in India fairly fully formed, which might seem obvious, but not so to me so far given the way history is taught or written in India. He brought his outsider views to India and saw things differently. 

  
Zadie Smith

One of the last books I read in 2019 was Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. I have come across her essays and have loved reading them.  I read it like a page-turner for most parts, but in terms of overall thoughts,  I think I favour her essays over fiction. Similar to my discomfort with reading books set in India, books set too close in time do not let the longer, historical arcs to settle down that tend to form the background to a good reading experience.

Another thought that it brought up - although White Teeth charts people from different immigrant cultures, I felt somehow it didn't fully bridge the gap of seeing through two points. Unlike, say the authors who’ve grown up and lived in two different cultures and who write from inside those cultures. Perhaps it is just the way I feel, but the first-generation immigrants seem to work with a richer palette than some of the second-generation writers. Thoughts not fully formed, but something which appears to me as I read from say Rushdie, to Naipaul to Zadie Smith. Looking forward to reading Quchiotte in the near future once K finishes reading it.

Meanwhile, I continue to read Zadie Smith's essays. Hoping to read through her collection of occasional essays soon.


Feb 9, 2020

Poems and “The Order of Time”

Last few days have seen me return to poems – call it my poetry phase. A lot of TS Eliot and some EE Cummings. Between breakfastfood and coffeespoons, myriad meanings inherent in words occupy me.  I love being in that space, but words, at times operate in the realm of uncertainty. There being no one reading of the poems, sometimes one can be so lost in such triggered thought chains that it messes up one’s sense of perspective and objectivity.

Deep in a poem, it dawns on me that poems don’t deal with centre. They tend to deal with the extremes, the edges of emotions (of what I get of poems). Edges are where life finds meaning and its bounds, yet edges imply quite high highs and low lows. And yet again, if not for the edges, how does one even define centre? And most daily life happens in the solid centre. To be able to traverse and occupy both the edges as well have a solid grasp of the centre stays a perpetual aspiration, but not there yet.

By opening up to a poet’s influence and hosting a poet’s words in your mind, one begins to think in their metaphors and turns of phrase not knowing when the influence becomes one’s own belief. And I wonder at what point does the quote stop being a quote and becomes one’s own thought. Most of the time if it is a poet, it doesn't & perhaps shouldn't matter - the influence works for the better. But unless one perpetually questions, one risks rational, free and independent thought.

So how is one to restore objectivity?

There are many ways (I hope). At times, solving bounded, finite, complex problems works for me  – problems grounded in certainty. Where there are infinite interpretations to poems, there is only one possible picture waiting to be revealed by a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle, or one clean solution to  a difficult Math problem, or workings of an excel model. A consuming issue requiring every shred of attention and thought with just one possible answer helps at times.

Sometimes the displacement provided by a good novel or sci-fi works. At other times, science helps. It brings back the scale perspective.


**

With that, I started reading Carlo Rovelli’s  “The Order of Time”. This one is a small book, similar to his “Seven brief lessons on physics”.  It is focused on the nature of time.

The first section crumbles time for us, stripping it of all the conceptual layers that we think it of – of it being unified, of it flowing in one direction, of it being present, of it being independent. The second part describes and explores time thus delayered to its essence, and the final section rebuilds time for us. I am still in the first bit.
"Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us"
The puzzle of time is one of the fundamental puzzles linking the unanswered questions of gravity, consciousness, and perception, our existence itself. Like the people few centuries ago beginning to grapple with the idea of Earth being round and a moving body and not a fixed centre with the heavens moving around it, we find it challenging to accept time as not a uniform, constant, forever kind of thing the way we perceive it.
"We inhabit time as fish live in water" 
(and perhaps DFW would then ask, ‘how’s the water?’)

The subject fascinates me immensely. Previously, while reading another of Rovelli’s book, I had to resort to this freewriting post to find a home for my fascination. Even now, I have very limited understanding to have any coherence of my own thoughts on the subject. I’ll resort to quoting from the book.

Here's Carlo Rovelli talking about Einstein in that chain of exceptional people, Copernicus and Anaximander, and taking away the unity of time (that time passes slowly in some places and rapidly in others).
“The ability to understand something before it’s observed is at the heart of scientific thinking. 
In the course of making such strides, we learn that the things that seemed self-evident to us were really no more than prejudices.”
The relativity of time:
“Times are legion: a different one for every point in space. There is not one single time; there is a vast multitude of them. “
Moving to the direction of time, the difference between past and future:
“The difference between past and future does not lie in the elementary laws of motion; it does not reside in the deep grammar of nature. It is the natural disordering that leads to gradually less particular, less special situations.”
Talking about a pack of cards, sorted and then shuffled, and how our perception of entropy defines the shuffled pack being disordered, he draws the point that each ordering is as unique but we limit ourselves to noticing only certain aspects of the cards (say, color or suit or numbers – everything else seems to be non-unique). But the understanding that everything is particular makes the difference in past and future vanish.

The disconcerting conclusion -
“the difference between the past and the future refers only to our own blurred vision of the world. …is it really possible that a perception so vivid, basic, existential—my perception of the passage of time—depends on the fact that I cannot apprehend the world  in all of its minute detail? Even allowing for the fact that our perceptions of the world are frequently wrong, can the world really be so profoundly different from our  perception of it as this?”
Next he dismantles the idea of ‘now’:
“The idea that a well-defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience."
And temporal structure without the present:
“In short, a common present does not exist: the temporal structure of spacetime is not a stratification of times … it is, rather, a structure made up entirely of light cones: More than a hundred years have passed since we learned that the “present of the universe” does not exist. And yet this continues to confound us and still seems difficult to conceptualize. 
If the present has no meaning, then what “exists” in the universe? Is not what “exists” precisely what is here “in the present”? The whole idea that the universe exists now in a certain configuration and changes together with the passage of time simply doesn’t stack up anymore.”
And this is where I pause. A lot more still to go and gradually the time spent on each new page has increased. He also quotes a lot of poetry, and notes “Perhaps poetry is another of science’s deepest roots: the capacity to see beyond the visible.”


**

Although most other times, science tends to work, today, I think I should have picked up a jigsaw puzzle instead or fiction. Even after those hours deep in Carlo Rovelli’s book, for the closing word  to capture some of Rovelli's essence of time, I still think of Eliot's words:

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”


I feel like quoting the whole poem. He further says:

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."



Come to think of it, Four Quartets and Carlo Rovelli are a good pairing.

But the thing is, the problem I set out to solve still remains.  

Perhaps, time itself is the solution.


Feb 4, 2020

Difficult Loves

I have been reading Italo Calvino’s short story collection, Difficult Loves. These stories were written in the 1940s and 1950s when Calvino was still in his 20s and 30s.

These stories follow the private thoughts,  the stream of consciousness (though much structured than usual streams) of people, the protagonists. A day in their life. An adventure. Or a phase in their life. The adventure of a soldier, a reader, of a poet or a traveller. Mostly men. A few females too, like the adventure of the bather who realizes she has lost her swim suit in the water. And then the adventure of the reader. Private sensations, private thoughts so articulately laid out that you slip them on like a glove.

Which then draws you to the writer. How well can he create the sensations that you get in the story and the characters and are one with them without thinking that you are reading the written word.  In that sense different from Balzac, my last read. Balzac’s was the writing which recreated the world he writes about. Calvino’s is about the person – you can almost feel the same things the characters feel, you get to be one with his characters.

One of the stories, the adventure of the photographer is apt for the modern times of Instagram. What he says here is worth remarking on since he says this in the 1950s.
“You only have to start saying of something: ‘Ah how beautiful! We must photograph it!'  and you are already close to the view of the person who things that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore in order really to live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second, to madness.”
This is before the same character takes on to photography himself. And over the course of the story, enamored by photography, his efforts are directed towards wanting to create a portrait out of space and time. Like any artist, trying to create something that can breach the boundaries of the finite, and dissolve into and exist in that other dimension of thought, the dimension outside of time and space.

**

Each story is a world in itself. Requires me to pause once I close the page on the story and just ruminate. Dwelling on the space it creates, not letting go. These stories deal in emotions, sensations. Beautiful stories, and although translated, the magic works. There are a couple of long short stories too. One of them, Smog – the story is alright, not as hitting as the shorter stories – but I get it, given the lingering smoke that has pervaded everything in Sydney for the last few weeks, now months.  And in parts, little parts, Smog also reminds me of the opening setup of Pessoa’s Book of disquiet.

One more long short story to go before I mark this one as read.

Makes me wish – if I could make a cave in time, or a kind of loop in time, where I can just read and read, and then once done, come out and still be at the same time where I left off, or if not the same time, may be five mins later. I wish, I wish!  But it doesn’t work that way.


**

Later (Feb 19): Finished reading Calvino's book, and I finally get my books-read in the year count to two. The last story in the book was about real estate and changing nature of cities, and people - a long short story. I think I liked the shorter stories in the book better. Hoping to read more from Calvino soon.