Clarice Lispector – The literary genius nobody reads

What angers me this morning is that Clarice Lispector is an underrated writer. She was a genius like no other. Her books are testimony to a mind that has flown away from the subjects and methods of writing yet discovered. I have never come across such philosophical analysis from the greatest of the writers I have read. That she is underrated is no surprise given that very few understand her stories. Very few ever will. Because college education was designed for survival not enlightenment. For what the world can praise will be limited to its capacity to comprehend.

This note that Caeton Veloso leaves for possible readers of Clarice is apt and brave.

The book is like any other book. But I would be happy if it were only read by people whose souls are already formed.

To me, for example, the character G.H. gave bit by bit a difficult joy; but it is called joy.

A poem by Dushyant Kumar

We have no clear reason to Sushant Singh Rajput’s death. The lack of a suicide note leaves us all wondering whether it was one. In any case, he certainly commands good journalism and action from people. The public uproar on his being bullied and demoralized by his powerful colleagues, whose frivolous work is not good for us, reminds me of a poem by the late poet Dushyant Kumar. This is so relevant to any man’s fight against a threatening hegemony of the few.

I launched a new website

Hello!

I launched a new website here. It’s called theGangescript.com, where I have some of my works of fiction. These are very quick reads. I will be posting one every Sunday for the next two months. When I created this blog, I wished it to be a magazine so that I could collaborate with other writers and post their work, too. For some reasons, I found it too tasking, especially because I myself need time to write larger pieces of fiction. Then came the ghastly Corona, and here were are! Locked-down. Thankfully, we can all read.

I’m brave beginnings, easy endings

I’m improbable shots in the wind, unlikely gamble on the earth, lost tears in the sea.
I’m often found in the dust you pat off your back, the worries you ward yourself from, the sweat you wash off your face.
I’m the ineffable depression, the unexplained mood swing, the unthinkable cause.
I quietly sob during the day, wander groggily in the night, stay numb in the twilight.
I’m the fatigue of a hard day, the simplicity of a bad day, the inadequacies of a good day.
I’m hard stones on a good path, pain in a kid’s eyes, smile on wretched lips.
I’m brave beginnings, easy endings.

-Himani

These words, written in January, 2014, is still make my favourite poem describing how I felt torn between my creative quests and the world. How many times have some of us felt like we were a centre of radiant anomalies!

If you mostly feel you don’t fit, it is likely that you don’t.
So take a chance. And don’t fit.
And if you have that gush of wind in your gut, you will create your own space. As for others, they have rented their space in the world.

On interpretation

My habit is to blog regularly for a week or so and then not blog for months.

My next blog will be On Interpretation. This is severely against my current heroine Susan Sontag’s views, who stood against interpretation of art.

I am against interviews, though. Against the rush to interpret. This, however, is what I am practicing with full hypocrisy because whose loss is it after all to judge in some gross minutes what you cannot in months or years? Nobody’s. Those who believe that there is loss must remember that it is a shared loss, a fleeting loss, a temporary loss and a loss that is redeemed sometime later or never.

The best thing is that the one who loses never knows this loss happened.