My Trilemma~: Writing, Speed-reading and Brimming Minds

[~Note: Trilemma. As in Dilemma. And by extension, tri-. Each ‘unilemma’ enumerated below. Get it?]

Let me come right out and admit. I’ve been lax in updating my blog. I’ve even tried to fudge some reality in my last, lame post. The one about the newbie writer’s life and my good wife. Truth is, I’ve been laid low by a trilemma, an especially enervating version of writer’s block.

Do I know when it all began? No. All I know is that it’s right now surging to a terrific climax. Soon. As of now, I’m currently swimming in the robust body of it. Beware as you venture forth.

Cicero once said something to this effect: say what you want to say, but just so; beware that your extra words will spill over an already brimming mind.

He may have been too right, as my current trauma will prove. I’m become an oriental orientated to occidental ordeals, riddled with strange visions. Cicero style. Oh, read on.

Apparition (1)

I first discovered it a fortnight back, when one of my friends asked me what I thought of the latest English movie in town. Never being one to succumb to brevity when I can manage it, I was ten energetic and hardly elaborate minutes into the review. Then I casually glanced at him mid review. What do I see? He has an odd expression – dazed, or rapt, perhaps – and for a split, mad second, he looks like an undomesticated Rastafarian, swaying to some mind numbing music only he could hear. Hair on my arms stood on end.

Then I shook my head and my eyes watered immediately. I broke off and we went to a café for tea. My friend looked normal, of course and relieved for some odd reason. Topic during tea was weather and other routine matters. We parted soon after with no mention of the movie or the review or my maddening, frightening hallucination. I desperately hoped it was the pre-monsoon heat gone to my head.

Then I drive away to the net parlour, log on to the net and some pointless browsing… lo! I find Mr. Cicero’s quote. Ringing in the gory synchronicity in all its sinister splendour. Surreal, no less.

Those dreadlocks… what if they were my own words falling off the side of my friend’s brimming head? [shudder] Poor guy. Poor ME!

Affliction (2)

If I’ve been caught between a rock and a hard place, my tremens – as I discovered above – is exceedingly delirious. And here’s the hard place – a three headed hydra I’ve been throwing biscuits at, unwittingly cajoling it - ‘puss, puss, here kitty, kitty’. In my case, the beast has reared each ugly head in slow demonic grace. Savour each champing and malicious head as I paint the petrifying picture for you.

I wonder if other newbie writers are caught in the same, tight bind – finding it easy to be frivolous and excruciating to be frugal.

I wonder if it’s healthy, or even right, that for a newbie like me I sense many ideas out there and much to write about. But I refrain because I need more close knowledge. And then I can’t figure out the exact limits of it to either avoid pedantry or deliver the appropriate authenticity and control over subject.

I wonder about the impasse over style, length and the integrity of the idea. So I just end up in froth over it all, because to even sort this sorry mess out I’ll have to fight my own laziness. And then to squeeze my professional time further, which is low paying anyway.

Juice in the rind, anyone? Yup, I didn’t think so.

Avoidance

Oh, what opened this hideous can of worms in all its debilitating details was this one particular story draft of mine that I laid out a month or so back. After six rewrites and endless frustration, I realized that for the story to come right out and out right, so many things have to go, well, right. Truth be told, it will have to be done in complete spite of all. Some mid-wifery, this. Just got my goat, you know, goatee and all! So I took the spite’s way out.* but I have realized that I’m not to have rest or redemption.

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Let me present the third trauma of mine this way – the rock: check, the hard place: check and here: the cracking cliff shelf I’m now scrabbling desperately on. A mixed metaphor, I know. But then I have no luxury to ease in the choicest, I just have to grab at all straws blowing in the wind.

Angst

I realize, looking for ideas is like a languid, pleasurable walk in your private garden – in cool shade one summer noon – musing at the low hung, blushing mangoes. After I finish licking my fingers of the sweet stickiness, I look up to see unusual and rich gossamer around me, fragile, shimmering, colours delicately blending in the gentle breeze. All I have to do is to just choose, pluck from thin air and begin weaving. Colour, strength, design and meaning are just waiting to emerge in arresting confluence, it seems.

But I find that actually launching into writing an essay or story is like navigating stormy night seas on a frail boat. The wind’s rent my sail, my oars are almost soggy, my toe’s plugging a hole in the bottom and well, in this situation it’s a non sequitur: the fact that I can’t swim.

Aggravation (3)

It’s like the issue over sub-vocalizing (9) in speed-reading courses, the last but not the least of my present troubles. While reading and comprehending quickly does appeal to a writer-learning-to-be, it has precipitated a peculiar existential trauma in my case. This last resort, so to speak, has denied me recourse to relief and release. Be warned, o novice speed readers.

You don’t know you have this self-defeating tendency, and have been happily coasting – stumbling, more like – along when suddenly you find out you are actually suffering because of it. And you realize that your entire reading life has been below potential. Take that.

Then comes the knock-out blow: you’ve got to re-train yourself with reading faster. But this cure is worse than the disease, God. Trust me, I’ve tried. It’s terrible; all at once, you’ve become this millstone around your own neck, watching, assessing, inquiring yourself if you’re vocalizing - and you’ve just overnight become a relentless self interrogator. All this, while you read. Takes the fun out of it, you know.

Oh, Aristotle did say a man’s full of contradictions and selves or some such thing, but… Blast! He never let on that I would end up waking an eternal nagging voice in my head, for sanity’s sake! I'm now beyond psychiatric succour.

Agony

Now I can’t enjoy my favourites anymore! Brian Greene, Amartya Sen, Belinder Dhanoa, John Le Carre, G.G. Marquez or even my own consulting and research documents and reports. I’ve become a nervous wreck from trying to SHUSH this voice in my head now.

It’s a veritable Frankenstein’s monster, refusing to go away now that it’s hatched. These new age learning methods are nothing but primitive, thinly disguised, vile black magic. Add to it the brimming heads I’ve begun to spot. Cicero’s advice, speed-reading and the writer’s block. Imagine solar system my way – a cowering little sun [me] in the centre and three slavering monster planets circling him into a terrible trap, inexorably moving in vicious, centripetal anticipation. Brrrr!

My social life has gone to bits. I can’t visit libraries for fear of endangering librarians’ livelihood. I can’t read or write in peace. I’ve been ushered unceremoniously out of film theatres already. Worst of all, my clients are counter-counseling me! I play pathetic hide and seek with my suspicious wife. It won’t last long. I’m faced with either self-imposed exile, without any attendant fame to boot, or socially sanctioned asylum. What have I perpetrated on myself!

Ignorance does really tend to bliss. Ah woe.

Where was I? Oh yes. Writing’s a double edged dagger. Serrated. Dipped in poison. Oiled hilt. Riveted with tiny, sharp spikes. And a sizzling grip… ok! You get the point. Right.

Alleviation

Ah, I also realize that writing is as much saying as withholding. It is in equal parts revealing and concealing. Good writing is supposed to illuminate space, till then in complete darkness, and to bring into sharp relief that which is worth seeing, or deemed by the writer so.

It is also to provide crisp, clean edges to the subject in focus – who or what ever that may be – so to suggest shadowed other sides from which it withdraws with tact, by design, through deliberate omission. To nuance is to layer, texture and acknowledge dimension.

To fling typefied lingo at you – show and tell, just as well.

Good writing naturally accords respect, empathy and freedom to the reader to paint her own mental landscape, lighted by her imagination and guided by her emotional compass. It is a beautiful contract that is fulfilled automatically to all round satisfaction, if the writer is committed his writing.

Abandonment

To lay bare is to bore, loudly crowding out the reader, to refuse room for her intelligence. On the other hand, one cannot constrict expression in the name of precision. Then there would be no meat, nothing to masticate, leave alone to relish, regurgitate and remember.

The challenge and goal is balance.

I also realize this. Every so often, I seem to strike sublime poise on the slippery edge of ability, just about, there… but I begin to totter in a minute. I flail wildly, grasp haplessly, and keel over awkwardly. Ooooo-er!

I plunge headlong and helpless into excess.

Overdone adverbs mock me on the way down. Wheeeee.

Archetypal Authorial Anguish

There. Quite a beast, eh?
My very own trilemma, in its elaborate explication. You see… uh!
Ah, well. My eyes are watering again…

Guess you are all topped up now. [sigh]