will in the world1

There is a beautiful, beguiling and somewhat dissatisfying line in అలా మొదలైంది when, on being asked how he'd know that he's met his soulmate, the mother tells the son- "నువ్వు డిసైడ్ అయినప్పుడు". కానీ డిసైడ్ అయ్యెదే ఎలా?, not just about the topic at hand but about anything at all. Its a question that's haunted me for over two decades and I've only recently managed to tame it though I don't know if that's a sign of maturity or resignation. 

The surprise Blue Mountains trip gave me enough focused meandering² time to think about and reach a conclusion about this whole question of what to do with one's life - atleast for the time being. The crux of the problem has been the taekwondo between everyday/ hour for itself vs embarking on (and more importantly, finishing) long-term projects. My brain has gotten quite good at finding good rationale for the other when I'm in one mode forcing me to abandon, and abandon again ad infinitum³. I won't get into elaborating on that tussle because 1. its exhausting to think about and, 2. isn't that all I've done across the lifetime of this blog?

The trigger for this phase transition has been the conversation I had with Sravani a couple of weeks ago about wanting to abandon my marathon plans because it was getting tough/ I wasn't making much progress/ well, why should I stick to something I decided many months ago when my present, current, in-your-face immediate self tells me to do something else. Instead of confronting my emotions that have to do with the shame and guilt of abandoning another thing, she coolly and logically pointed at something I somehow never saw- Living everyday for itself, as if it were your last, probably sounds nice and adventurous but it is neither true nor rational. For all days of your life there has been a tomorrow where you've had to pick up from the day before. So to not embark on long-term projects with a Hey, Who Knows attitude is going to leave you worse off on way more days than you'd like. It was so brutal and refreshing in that jump-into-cold-water fashion that I couldn't refute it. I probably would've had a easy escape response to emotional or metaphysical objections but had none for that dose of rationality. Damn, I'd been stumped on my home ground.

The other important bit has been hovering around me for about a year now, something I'd articulated with a lot of pain and struggle in థియరీ & ప్రాక్టీస్ - Theory & Practice, and that I grokked into yesterday while our drive back. It was a beautiful day and I've always sneered at people who obsessively take photos/ videos of their trips but thanks to the day night/ day night project I was less reluctant to start shooting. Which is when a weird truth hit me: that I was more focused on the road and the surroundings when I was looking through a phone screen than when I was allowing it to enter unmediated. So the entire notion of purer (for which I don't have an unvague definition) being better went out the window. I see atleast 2 reasons for that:

1. Like Gillian Flynn puts it in Gone Girl regarding those of us who grew up on tv, that is in essence is our reality and the real-reality only exists to provide raw material to tv/ internet/ other media. I see quite a great deal of truth in this statement. We are shaped and tuned by technologies we use and the more we use something, the more natural that feels⁴.

2. On the other hand, an explanation I was reading on Reddit yesterday seems plausible too- That reality is both too vast and fairly uniform across large chunks of time so when its compressed it gets more intense and so in our heads, when viewed through other media and not just our sense organs, gives more bang for the buck- seems more memorable and deeper. This explanation presupposes that the mind⁵ indeed resembles a computer and so the better the algorithm, the more space and time-efficient the processing and so the better the end result.

That's somewhat of a digression. What I felt at the moment though was that not only does it seem incredibly hard (impossible?) to not curate but also seems illogical to avoid curation⁶, if not obsessively then atleast semi-regularly. I don't know if we are capable of (or even if its desirable) collecting all sights and sounds and ideas and emotions objectively that we can at some later point use to create/ curate our artwork. The only way to go about it is to constantly keep creating (in this sense, theorising) and keep testing those hypothesis. Art is what happens as an effect, both intended and serendipituous, of the imposition of the will on the world⁷.

¹From Stephen Greenblatt's book which I haven't read yet but who's brilliant Tanner Lecture I highly recommend

²From the tagline of Raghuveer Kovuru's short-lived Stream magazine

³It's nothing many people before me haven't grappled with but I doubt if many have communicated it as charmingly and exasperatingly as Geoff Dyer

⁴The Convivial Society, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Capitalist Realism et al

⁵Can I use it interchangably with brain?

⁶"అసలు నరేటివ్ అంటేనే ఇంపొసిషన్. ఏం ఇంపోస్ చేయాలి అని నిర్ణయించేది రచయిత విజ్ఞత. కానీ నా గొడవంతా ఆ నిర్ణయం తీసుకోకుండా ఎలా తప్పించుకోవాలని."

⁷Just to be clear to myself this post right here isn't art. It is an unspooling of thoughts with minor editorial changes. Art is something else, something that's more about the world than about me. I think its also a skill I should develop- looking out as much as I look in.