er, arty stuff

I made a short film in Apr and May 2023- day night day night. I owe the title to Julia Loktev's film.

Also, between Jan and Jun 2023, I embarked on a solo podcast which only Sravani knew about. I recorded a poem everyday, and while the quality slowly went from atrocious to just terrible, I'm glad I persisted in reading a poem a day- almost a remembrance. 

I owe this title to a John Keats' quote- “Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity—it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”

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Also, I mailed Meheranna a few thoughts after reading DFW's essay on Joseph's Frank's Dostoevsky in Consider the Lobster. His response was brilliant and succinct, and I'll check with him if he's okay with me publishing it on the blog. Until then, here's what I wrote.

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that old, inescapable question

DFW's writing is dense; And busy. That much is obvious as one starts reading any of his (more accessible) non-fiction let alone his fiction. But when a little closer attention is paid, it begins to appear that the density is just an affectation or style. He usually has just one or two major themes to explore just like most essayists but unlike most his signature move has (had) been to transcribe, if not entirely accurately then atleast consciously, the process of arriving at and departing from various touchpoints. I don't mean this as criticism, infact I enjoy it more often than not, only as observation. The reason he became a zeitgeist-defining writer is because he was able to convey what it felt like to live in a (late-capitalist/ proto-internet) society where the sensory overload was extreme and in which one had to work really hard to get to the crux of one's thoughts.

Let me illustrate my statements by analysing this particular essay. The two main themes of the essay are: how Frank's biography belongs to that old(-fashioned) species, earnest and straightforward, against the more fashionable types (ex: theory-driven, ideologically-motivated etc.)
why Dostoevsky (hereafter FMD) is still relevant and how his 150-year old preoccupations are still grander and deeper than contemporary fiction.

He contrasts Frank's approach from more ideological academic writers, for whom he seems to have special contempt, and uses that 'more genuine' style to comment on FMD's writing itself. DFW thinks that Frank gets FMD, that his reading is the most apt, because both of them put the individual and the conundrums of the heart front-and-centre of their work. FMD is grappling with his debts, addictions, the in-flux social context of Russia, overarching ideological narratives but equally, if not more, he is grappling with more personal (existential, ha!) feelings of faith and morality. And Frank's approach is to consider all of them to explain why he wrote what he did. 

For the same reasons, obviously, DFW exalts FMD because of the passion of his moral dilemmas and the earnestness with which he approaches them. There is no distance, ironic (DFW's pet peeve) or otherwise, between the writer and his characters. There is no post-Joycean obsession with form nor a pathological belief, of the mid-twentieth century, that aesthetics is the only ideology that matters#.

FMD is concerned with the question of How to Live in a rapidly chanding world where older notions of morality and metaphysics are fast losing ground. The essay argues that FMD is the precursor, probably even an important motivation, to Nietzche's thought to whom we can trace back our contemporary atheism (that's actually too strong a word, maybe it should be called the post-faith condition). I don't know enough to comment on that but it does indeed seem like the questions and dilemmas of his time are what we ought to have if only we weren't so fatalistic. 

It is probably too late to bring back that innocent striving by dialing back the cynicism. So what do we do? Not incidentally, considering his preoccupations, DFW tried to make Post-Post-Modernism the way out (what he also called New Sincerity).

In a world where Faith doesn't have much currency, Aesthetics is insufficient, Politics is too temperamental, where do we turn to for, I ask this with a straightface, Moral Instruction? What decides our behaviour cannot be instinct/ myopic selfishness or social conditioning (sanctioning?) alone; So what should fill that space? How do I design/ identify my Dharma as a thinking-and-acting being in the world?

#He has a beautiful line in there about aesthetics replacing metaphysics.