Let Us Compare Mythologies

“It was called ‘The Traitor’ because it was about some feeling that we have of betraying some mission that we were mandated to fulfill. Being unable to fulfill it and then, coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it. That the deeper courage was to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you now found yourself.” – Leonard Cohen 

I am beginning to fear that I orchestrate my mistakes in search of the desperate emptiness that follows the crescendo. Almost, as if I am seeking out extreme tangents that will allow me the respite of a recovery period. Something that I can finally relish without guilt. I fear that I’m one of those people who attract drama just so I can thrive in the silent, hateful aftermath and succumb to the hard shell of solitary confinement engrossed in soft cushions of Cohen, Borges, Dylan and Kafka. I suppose one could make the hard choice and live the shell, but that seems far too courageous a move to weave into my life’s morbid aesthetic. 

That is why, I have always grasped desperately at the humour in all things. As if the making of ugly things into sadistically sarcastic ones somehow saves them from still being cruel. It doesn’t really, Funny doesn’t trump Fate…it only clouds it over for a while. It is somewhat different this time around though, some wordless, weightless, want-less expectation has been lifted from my shoulders and my conscience. And no, it isn’t as basic as “marriage” or “coupling” or “companionship”, but more the faint glimmer of the dream of all those composite 'some day in the future' things that I no longer feel. On some level it has become easier to talk to people now, because I have lost my self-propelling greed to be liked, to be considered better than I could be. Some might say my pride has finally flitted through the cracks of my fidelity. I don’t really think that’s it. It’s more as if I no longer care about conclusions as much as I used to. Sadly, I still care about process. This means that my particular brand of Stockholm Syndrome has me equivocating my words enough not to offend anyone but not enough to lose all sense of opinion.  Like one of those exotic pet parrots who pretty much always says what you want them to but once in a blue moon manages an original thought only to blurt it out in front of your guests so it can shame you. It’s oddly liberating to finally be on the giving end of that spectrum. For those who know me, it’s a milestone I could never have anticipated and yet I still cannot escape the sense that I am a fraud. I suppose we are all frauds, each pontificating at their own podium to an imagined audience who couldn’t be bothered to give a shit. My fungibility rests in the fact that I cannot help but self-aggrandize and self-deprecate in equal measure. No podium could ever hold against the pressure of dogma awkwardly coupling with doubt.

As Kant put it, I am presently in a state of ‘arbitrary self-defilement’, I know my excesses aren’t really my natural setting and they most certainly don’t fit but I am determined to wallow in them anyway because on some level I’d rather be saturated than sorry. This is why I am determined to write this time around-without being conscious of the garbage that I shall regurgitate in the process. I am determined to bleed toxins of the mind and finally let my garbles fall wherever and however they may. Art without frame and words without will…but words nonetheless. I miss my typewriter.

I know that some of it has to do with being in this city again. This place makes me angry and seeing as I have never really learned how to be angry, I am seeking solace in the familiarity of being flippant about the important things. I am dedicating time and energy to listening to music, systematically: album by album and playlist by playlist. Currently, I am submerging myself in ‘Death of a Ladies Man’, reading The Aleph again and contemplating the merits of French toast. I spend ten minutes a day, examining the layers of cellulite on my thighs and belly with a glare so curious it could peel paint off walls but appears helpless in the face of fat. I then proceed to plan whether I shall cook my pasta in white sauce or red. 

Once upon a time, when I lived in a moribund bric-a-brac prison not far from here, I used to compile letters. I was ten when I started and I vaguely recall my first letter to the judge who decided my custody case and sent me to stay with my mother (on my request). I remember I posted the letter and since I didn’t know his address I invented a name (I’m quite certain it was a Mohammad Something or Other), conflated a house and street number and put it in the mail box without a stamp.

                                                                                            

May 19, 1994

Dear Mr. Judge,

Thank you for helping me the first time and sending me with Mama.

I’m back in Islamabad now.

I made a mistake.

I need your help again.

                           -Maria Amir

The point was to write it and send it. Not for it to be received or returned. It was a therapeutic enterprise and I suppose on some pathetic, panoramic level the internet and blogging now serves the same purpose. That is why, there seems to be no better time than the present to take up the practice all over again. 

Dear To Whom It May Compel,

It seems particularly easy to talk to you. Mostly because I can neither observe nor imagine your face. This is a good thing, since it prevents me from activating and deactivating my impressions and analogies to suit your particular pallet. You may find my wordiness to be an indicator of an amalgam of social superiority complexes.

 I can assure you it isn’t.

I like big words and if anything my taste for them is born out of an inherent inferiority complex. That said, you may now argue that both of these complexes are the same and if you do, you are much smarter than either of my complexes allow me to be. I shall enjoy this, now that I have already projected on to you a mind of my own making. Rest assured - you are under no compulsion to accept this attribution.

You are one of those odd foibles of nature that cannot rest until and unless they have proven a point over mine. My need to sound whimsical is exceeded only by your need to appear illustrious, guarded and contained. I hope here, that you shall excuse both my familiarity and my flippancy. I trust that I am making up for it by awarding you a pedestal without your even having had to have worked for it. This is indicative of a deficiency in my own character and I would terribly appreciate if you did not read too much into it.

I shall tell you about my present, which is a congealing mass of arbitrary observations: the fact that security guards in Islamabad appear more liable of scoring women on a decimal point-scale than men who actually have a chance of dating them; The fact that decimal-point scoring of women’s attributes somehow never translates to men – and why is that I ask? Why do women not score men on attractiveness with the same sense of purpose and brutally-banal honesty that they allow to be directed at themselves? Why is it so hard to stop wanting…everything and so infernally easy to need… nothing? Have you ever found yourself being comforted by the random racket of construction work in your building and if so why? Do you live in a country where men piss on the edge of a street and if so, can you help yourself looking at them while trying to simultaneously condition your mind to ignore them? Do you wish you could see the world without having to be a part of it? Do you believe backpacks are monikers for a personality type? What is your favourite cliché? Do you aspire to Be your favourite cliché?

Do you ever find yourself stopping in the midst of several eternities buried beneath the dancing masquerade of a lonely minute and really believe in God, just for a split-second?

Yours Sincerely

Who Cares

The Resurrection

“And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”- Milan Kundera

It has been a slow few months and for once I find it heartening to realise that life always does move on. I am no longer seeking romance in a cup of coffee and a bite of pizza or even in the weather. I am not even reading poetry the way I used to. Instead, I have switched to political satire because it is apparently a more easily marketable personality moniker. I am consciously shutting down that idiot in me who feels a desperate need to archive and poignantly demarcate every silly, tween-time minute of the day before dampening it in soul-sucking majesty. I am breathing for now… shallow, staccato in-takes that move me forward in a straight line so I am not confused or confounded by Beentherella knocking inside me telling me that none of this is really me. 

I am meeting people and my shrill laugh and awkward self-deprecation actually seems to be coming off as endearing, at least I like to think so. I am also grateful for this on some level. I have always been somewhat of a verbal fidget: talking too much around people I don’t know and would probably prefer to avoid and sulking in silence or silly satire with those that I do, who would probably prefer to be elsewhere. Still, this whole socialising thing…it seems to be working. If nothing else, it passes time and makes me feel like some of my former self still exists. Like if I try hard enough to get to know people, I might end up finding some validation and almost feel normal outside of my head. I could fit…not fit in per say, but settle…like a congealed mass of jelly that feels utterly vulnerable but is slippery and sluggish enough to persist in its environment.

There is also some solitary sort of comfort to be sought in the fact that one can return to a completely un-changed place and have become an entirely new amalgamation of self. I feel as if I am living my life in iambic meter, skipping over all the ugly and diving into the busy with little consideration for everything in between. I moved to Islamabad a few weeks ago for work, temporary work, but work nonetheless and it has been a decidedly odd experience. On the one hand, having my own place and my own schedule does afford me some peace and alone-ness which is much appreciated. On the other hand, I hate this city. I always have. It carries a cesspool of shitty memories, lousy blood ties and bad karma. It doesn’t help that I now find myself constantly looking over my shoulder for fear of seeing my father in some random restaurant or walking next to me towards the nearest khokha. This is an odd reversal of the love I have always sustained for Lahore, where I spent my teenage years looking over other peoples shoulders hoping to catch the slightest glimpse of my Mom at every street corner. It is an odd paradox, knowing that the one city awarding me single-freedom in this god-forsaken country happens to be the city I always associate with prison. After all, any place you don’t leave is a sort of prison and there will always be a small part of me that can never leave this place. Such is the brittleness that comes with self-sufficiency.

A caveat: Living alone in Pakistan is not for the faint hearted. And I always was faint-hearted, wasn’t I? Strong minded, iron willed, brutally silent and acerbically amusing but ever, ever faint-hearted. I somewhat miss that girl, who launched her personalised crusade against society and silently flitted through each day terrified and shy. Now as I cross hallways in my apartment building followed by strange gazes and haggle with people at counters, I feel nothing. I still search for it though, that odd piercing tingling at the back of my neck alerting me that I am being leered at and each time I brush through it I feel an odd imbalance. As if I have gained and lost something simultaneously. In social conversations, I race at warp speed through every random subject I can envision just to avoid a silent swamp I might potentially sink in.

I am striving for success this time. I am aiming at wealth … at eventual power even. Or at least pretending hard enough to want to. I still haven’t learned to switch off my brain though, and I am beginning to fear I never will. That is what will always get in the way, the consistent self-critique that psyches me out from doing something before I have even fully contemplated doing it. That is why I have never really been able to write, even though I pen down over a thousand words on a daily basis. I find that my words are safer on paper and this is by far the most degenerate incarnation of cowardice.

I wish I could unlearn now.

With all the undercurrents I am riding on, it’s still somewhat surprising to find that it was all so easy in the end. I always knew I could not keep myself and succeed in life. It was a most unrealistic and selfish aspiration, to not only relish the challenge of a life that resists perfection but to expect to profit from such an existence. Still, it has been depressingly easy to forgo Beentherella. I always assumed that when the time came and my illusions were finally shattered and reality confronted, there would be a break, a collapse, a maelstrom of misnomers and memories but it never came. All it took was a short-lived, short-loved, ill-conceived marriage. All it took was finally making a mistake and acknowledging it. It took me 28 years to find a fairytale and storm the Bastille of my phobias only to realise that I really am one of those girls. Girls who are impossible to forget but hard to remember.

So now, I rest among latent chidings begotten with affection and as I slither in my degradation hoping to reinvent myself as a ‘strong woman’, I can’t help but wonder what that means anymore. I still don’t want to be of the world or belong to it. I have far too much of myself invested in surviving on peripheries and playing in platitudes. But I need to. For the first time I need to sublimate and socialise, make friends even. No matter how much I resent the interaction, I find myself manipulating circumstances to maximise the plausibility of it. The soul should not have to compensate for what the body needs and for what the ego wants …but it does. So that is where I am now, compensating, compromising and decidedly congealing into a state of ordinariness desperately needed to thrive among the living.

I am trying as hard as I can to be as hard as I can.