Vartika > Recent Status Updates

The Old Empire may not exist. But obviously our tradition of servility has become too profitable and enterprise to dismantle.

And so it remains...

"Walking with the Comrades" was fantastic. It would be a pipe dream to think this could be published in even the boldest Indian news magazine (or what remains of them) today!

Or maybe, I say to the crow or to myself, the beginning hasn't yet begun. Maybe that is where I am running to. Maybe there is a time between end and beginning that is like the time between beginning and end. A time that is to middle as beginning is to end. Maybe this is that time. Middle but without the hope of resolution.

Caleb Azumah Nelson is such a fluid, accomplished stylist. Incredible!

What the FUCK is going on

And isn't death just the apocalypse in the first person?

I think she just pulled a John Green on me.

'Had I been born,' said Bernard, 'not knowing that one word follows another I might have been, who knows, perhaps anything. As it is, finding sequences everywhere, I cannot bear the pressure of solitude. When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing...'

the fact that shyness interferes with compassion,...

"...the fact that I wanted ho help everybody when I was younger, and now all I do is study smoke and steam coming out of apples, sole purveyor, sole provider, sophomore, s'mores, Smores Bakery, sorority, initiation rights, the fact that I'm only doing it to help my family, and yet, to make any profit on these pies, I have to ignore my poor family half the time,..."

Whatever we mean by the word "love," we earn the right to use it only by doing the hard work of knowing and being known.

The newspapers, needless to say, complied with the instructions given them: optimism at all costs. If one was to believe what one read in them, our populace was giving “a fine example of courage and composure.” But in a town thrown back upon itself, in which nothing could be kept secret, no one had illusions about the “example” given by the public.

How, for instance, continue to ignore the funerals on the day when somebody you loved needed one?

You will find no tears in a country that is no more now but a crematorium.

"A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven’t taken their precautions."

"I forget myself in order to reinvent myself. I might say that my body as I experience it — in its weariness or exhilaration, its labour or lassitude — is composed of these little vanishing acts: moments of a being which is in fact non-being, only put together in retrospect."

"I felt if I didn't write nobody would accept me as a human being. Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also so much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience." — December 27, 1958

This section comprises the journals Plath kept between July 1950 and 1953, where she recorded her first three years as a student at Smith College and the events that later inspired her novel, The Bell Jar.

Plath here is strikingly mature for her years: her form is admirable; her ambitions and meditations on sexual freedom & marriage reflect a clear understanding of the precarity of women's lives in the 50s.

"Nature is a strange factory, relentless in its productivity. We like to think life and death are opposite states, but it’s all tangled up together, the cherry blossom and the cancer: a never-ending production of more, a monstrous fecundity – Dylan Thomas’s green fuse that drives the budding flower but also blasts the roots of trees."

"On Thursday 13 April 1989, [Derek Jarman] records a phone conversation with his beloved Howard Brookner, the brilliant young New York film-maker. Brookner had by then lost the power of speech and for twenty minutes communicated by way of a ‘low wounded moaning’, a devastation magnified by the technological wizardry that couldn’t cure him but sent his voice speeding halfway round the earth."

"On Thursday 13 April 1989, [Derek Jarman] records a phone conversation with his beloved Howard Brookner, the brilliant young New York film-maker. Brookner had by then lost the power of speech and for twenty minutes communicated by way of a ‘low wounded moaning’, a devastation magnified by the technological wizardry that couldn’t cure him but sent his voice speeding halfway round the earth."

From Reading Turgenev:

"A person's life isn't orderly...it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present's hardly there; the future doesn't exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life."

"...the dead become nothing when you weary of doing their living for them. You pick and choose among the dead; the living are thrust upon you."

"Sectarianism, fed by fanaticism, is always castrating. Radicalisation, nourished by a critical spirit, is always creative. Sectarianism mythicises and thereby alienates; radicalisation criticises and thereby liberates."

No matter how many times I read this book, it still crushes me. It is very rare to find the suffering meted out by caste, class, and corruption being discussed with such poignant, heartbreaking realism.
Time and again I have realised that this is truly a story that rests on empathy.

What an advantage to have a soul that's inside out!
At least some verses get written.

The leaf won't return to the branch it left
Nor from its dust a new leaf be formed.
The moment, which ends as this one begins,
Has died forever.
The vain and uncertain future promises
No more than this repeated experience
Of the mortal lot and the lost condition
Of things and of myself.
And so, in this universal river
Where I'm not a wave, but waves,
I languidly flow, with no requests
And no gods to hear them.

I don't always manage to feel what I know I should feel.
Only very slowly does my thought swim across the river,
Weighed down as it is by the suit men forced it to wear.

I don't always manage to feel what I know I should feel.
Only very slowly does my thought swim across the river,
Weight down as it is by the suit men forced it to wear.

"He didn't want the friends of the different stages of his life to meet. Their encounter would almost be between facets of himself, face to face. Whatever would they say to each other?"