Accepting My Place: The Early Journals

By K. B.

These are my first set of journals, written mostly from 2011 to 2014. Experimental and overtly pensative in nature, these collections of thought experiments, fledgling essays, and prose poems reveal the workings of a global thinker in development.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Oct 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781456629281

Book preview

review.

Preface

And, so, I decide to self-publish again a collection of early writings, knowing that next to no one will read it, that the handful of people who would pick it up would probably label it as self-absorbed, and what for? Well, I enjoy reading the journals of writers, and I think that, here or there, I said something of value in my little scribbles that didn’t make it into any of my other writings. Of course, since most of my early writing falls into the realm of the precocious, you might have to look around for it.

I started blogging because one of my good friends also wanted to start a blog, and so we decided to do it together. This was towards the end of my time at New York University, after I had finished off a year abroad studying at La Universidad Autonoma in Madrid. This year was absolutely fundamental to my understanding of the type of writer I wanted to be and my theories that would come later. However, I started blogging fresh off the time when I had finished my year abroad, a time which convinced me I wanted to spend the rest of my life traveling and working on my novels; nothing more, and nothing less. I was figuring out how to assort my fledgling thoughts into the Narrative of Literature, which meant I was trying to actively place myself into the writing of Critical Theory. Of course, with age, I realized that theory means little, and it is the art that matters. However, most of my writing for 2011 falls into my theories of literature and novels.

I decided it was thematically interesting to insert some of my earlier writings into this journal, and so I have inserted a section called, A Walk Down Memory Lane, in between the years 2011 and 2012. This collection includes personal essays, experimental fiction that didn’t end up developing, and theories of philosophy and art that coincide with my thinking from my college days, but also did not progress.

2012, particularly around March, marks the point where I started to reach my own voice as a diarist. Having finished college, and having started traveling around the world once more, I found myself interested in the emotionality of my thoughts, and the greater depth of what they meant. This style more or less marks the rest of the blog. I added another intermission to the novel between the years 2014 and 2015, a set of failed personal essays on some of the lands I have lived called Home (I still aspire to develop a set of essays or stories inspired by the cities all around the globe that give me that feeling of home, but at the moment, that project has yet to actualize). After 2013, I lost a lot of interest in blogging, and only wrote sporadically I did start to experiment with writing in my other languages here or there in 2014 and 2015, and I wrote prolifically at the end of 2015. Ironically, since that time, I completely lost interest in blogging. I ended that year with another failed story that I got inspired to write during a visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico, which I named Notes to the Creator.

After two years of not blogging, I decided to close my blog, but keep my writings alive, in this book form. I chose do so under the hope that, in the same way Flaubert or Woolf’s random thoughts have inspired me, the thoughts in my journals, whether they be densely emotional or intellectually abstract, are of use to any one who happens to glance at them. As always, I thank my parents, Subrahmanya and Annapurna Bhat, for being the only two constant people to shower me with love and attention. Despite the problems we have encountered, assuredly which you will read about here or there in this collection, they are the only two humans who assure me that I have someone to live for.

2011

November 20th, 2011: Intro: I don’t believe in blurbs…

I don’t believe in blurbs. Nor do I believe in telling people that they should read me. I believe in the power of art, the power of worlds that are so intricate, so complex, so reflective of the world that actually exists, that it’s hard to believe that they were created. Art moves us from X to Y. Art makes our world look just a smidge more pretty. There’s not enough art these days. There’s a lot of stupid Ben Stiller movies, there’s a lot of songs that don’t make sense, and there’s a lot of writing that’s trying to either send us back to the 19th century or make us truly believe that the answer lies in cutesy texts that make fun of text message culture.

None of that is art. None of that aspires us to be greater than what we are. None of that persuades our world towards a greater direction.

We clearly need art more than ever, and our need for art becomes even clearer when we realize that the 21st century doesn’t have to be an endless stream of youtube videos of puppies licking each other or contrived confessionals. There needs to be an alternative.

Let me say that I don’t believe that artists have to be part of movements. Sometimes, it’s only one artist for a ten year block, then another artist for a ten year block, and then maybe two for the next ten year block, which we then lump into a movement. If that was the world we were in, then I’d think it’d be very stupid to try to name a movement that might not even exist.

Art is at its best, however, when an entire group of artists are aligned with one turn of the world, and decide to represent that turn in a very similar way. I would be lying to myself if I didn’t feel like something on those lines was happening to us, right now. Look at Occupy Wall Street. Look at the protests in front of Washington against fracking. Now go over to Tokyo or Madrid or Sao Paolo and see those exact same protests. Then, check out those protests that were once in Cairo, but still in Damascus. After you’ve seen all those social movements, check out the work of JR, a French 28 year old who paints human eyes on the poorest parts of the world. Check out the music of M.I.A., the Sri Lankan Brit whose work zigs back and forth across continents and genres until you don’t even know what you’re listening to anymore.

The modernists saw the end of something great. The postmodernists saw a new cultural logic that was replacing that great. We see something great replacing what was once great. We no longer see the West, but the globe. But, that world can’t exist yet. We may want to party with that Brazilian you met at the bar last night and drink honey wine with her Ethiopian friend, but true globalization doesn’t exist yet. We think it exists, but it doesn’t.

So, let’s change that. Let’s get out of representative democracies (and for some people dictatorships) that don’t even care of our votes and move towards a system that does. Let’s re-imagine art as global so that new arts can be developed, ones that don’t just fuse West plus West, but West plus world. In fact, let’s toss away all those definitions of pseudo-progress and Englishtment, hat we’ve come to accept for the last four-hundred years in the West, the last four hundred years of oppression that defined the Global South, the four hundred years of isolation of the Far East. Let us throw it all away, and re-define our histories in the shape of the world.

That’s what my blog is all about.

November 26th, 2011: I’m afraid of the future...

I’m afraid of the future. I’m afraid of growing older and not feeling like I’ve done anything in my life worth remembering. I’m afraid of being average, and of being hated for what I believe in, or for what I want to do. I’m afraid of rejection, even though I’ve gotten better over the years at feeling like I’m afraid of nothing.

I’m afraid of the future as the past tense is being unwritten. I’m afraid that Shakespeare, Chekhov, and whomever we want to call the greater writers of modernity will fade like the poems of Anglebert. I’m even afraid of our collective nihilism, and I really want to change it, and I know others that want to change it, but I occasionally feel that it still pulls me in.

I’m afraid to look back and notice that the earliest we tend to remember literature is from 5th century BC, which is nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of years humans have existed. I’m afraid to think of all the works that don’t make it to the present, and all of the works that will make it to the future, because they adhere to some way of looking at the world that we don’t have yet. I’m afraid that, even if that art might be very good, art as we know might not exist.

I’m afraid of the future that is inevitable. I’m afraid that, someday, millions of years from now, everything that the human race has ever done will not mattered, because we’ll have been erased by a meteor or destroyed by atomic warfare, and unlike humanity, the earth shall dust itself off and begin anew, as it always has. I’m afraid because in a world like that, it doesn’t matter what Shakespeare or Kalidasa have done; if humans no longer exist, then no one will care about what was once done by humans. I’ I’m afraid because I’m slowly realizing how little it truly means to impact history, to impact a culture memory with your vision, because regardless of how deep or transcendent your vision is, the world strikes down those who have not humbled themselves to the world, and this especially will someday include humans.

Yet, I keep writing. Part of myself is inspired by fear. I want to tell everyone I’m a writer, and then for everyone to speak of me in the same tongue of the greats, because I want them to know I exist and am worth reading. I want them to see me as someone who’ll change the world, because otherwise, I might truly believe that I live a life that isn’t worth living.

But, I know there’s a part that isn’t driven by fear at all, the part of me that loves to live in my head and pull worlds from underneath me, the part of me that sees a beauty in the world that needs to exist and feels that only I can provide it, the part of me that knows it has to be me, and it can’t be anyone else, because I feel it, and therefore, it exists, and the part of me that knows that it doesn’t matter if no one will know my name, that no one might ever care about the worlds I create, because the world as we will someday know it will be nothing without the world that I can create.

December 6th, 2011: the portrait of a Kiran as an immature twat…

Like many who have come before me, I was someone who wanted people who had once thought of me as average to know that I was anything but. I was inspired to write poetry because I was depressed over my parents disowning me for my sexuality, at 17. After my parents realized that I was here to stay, as a queer, and I settled down, I began to write to heal my ego. I wrote and wrote and wrote (random stories that would fall apart, usually beginning with the conceit of I want to write about a homeless woman/coal miner/ strong independent Latina!), and showed it and showed it and showed it to anyone (literally anyone; I had no concept of a vision that actualized its words around itself). Even though I regret this part of my life, where I burnt bridges (but also made some great contacts that still love my work; hint: some very big magazines) and made an ass out of myself (well, not to everyone), this period was my apprenticeship to my art. I learned the act of creating structure/dialogue/characters, mostly by fucking up and learning from it. My apprenticeship culminated with my meeting Irini Spanidou, an incredibly brilliant and insightful writer who would come to be my mentor. Irini saw through my mask and, in it, a writer of promise, but of no use. I showed her one of my stories, she thought it was crap, and she was this close to writing me off, until I told her not to, because one of my stories, Aurora of Eden, got a nice note from Zoetrope All Story (it’s a story about an Inuit teenager who does drugs to hide the fact that she doesn’t see beauty in herself). She read the story, and thought it was beautiful. From there, we began working together, for a couple of months. She tore into my stories and saw nothing but talent (in a bad way; I was a talented writer that wrote about nothing). She told me I would have to stop chasing fame and ego, and instead try to write that which the world needed to be told. I left the independent study with several stories that, with her guidance, became worthy of existence, and a crushed soul. What would I write about? Am I a writer? Should I continue to write? I didn’t know. I felt like I had nothing to say.

All of those thoughts changed during the summer, when the flow between my body and the world became unblocked, and I began my journey to become one with the world. I saw a cover for TIME with a picture of a woman with her nose cut off, and a subtitle asking us to stay in Afghanistan. I was disgusted. Here was TIME magazine exploiting and appropriating this girl’s story, for the sake of a war. It made me want to barge into TIME’s office and tell them what-for, except I realized I was powerless, and therefore, voiceless.

Except, I realized that didn’t have to be the case. I realized I wanted to write about war, but not about war from the frontlines, but instead from the people who are fragmented by it. It was that realization that made me write Until We Meet Again, a novella about three voices, a mother who loses her child thanks to the war and then finds herself unable to emotionally connect with her husband, a son kicked out of the army because of DADT who then gets outed to his parents, and a refugee who must choose between staying in Georgia with his best friend, or moving to California to chase a girl that might not even remember him, that move in and out of each other, creating a story that reads both fragmented and united. I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back one and a half years later, I’m so proud of my story. On one side, I’m so happy that the stories of war remained on the surface, and that it’s really a story about having to move on and say goodbye to people in your life, in order to grow as a person. On the other, I could tell that Until We Meet Again grew from stories like Aurora of Eden or Jihad of the American Fool, but I hadn’t known at the time that the style I had created in that story would be one I would continue to develop in later projects.

Those projects came to me when I moved to Spain. I had decided to live in Spain mostly to write a collection of stories called Jesus Lives in Madrid, which became 8 stories about a black, Islamic Jesus who is born in Spain, but, because of how new immigration is, is treated as an immigrant, and therefore over the course of the stories loses his sense of identity and self (it went swimmingly, thank you), but something greater pulsed into me just a week after arriving. Me and my classmates were in Segovia, a small fort town near Madrid, when I started imagining hundreds of years of history unfolding in front of my eyes in the wide green hills that overlooked the castle. People fighting with bows, then guns, over religion, then race. I had seen in my eyes the history of Spain, and in that history, I saw hundreds of other histories. I realized that I wanted to compress the entire world into a novel.

That being said, a vision is a vision, and it takes time and years of practice to create something of worth. My trip to Segovia inspired The Hearkening, an incredibly ambitious book that I know I am going to write, but I am not ready yet. That being said, when I went traveling around Eastern Europe near the end of my year in Spain, I heard in my head on the bus to Zagreb the phrase We are the Poorest Country in the World, over and over again. I didn’t really understand why my imagination was haunting me with that sentence, but, after hearing the story of a beautiful Croatian girl with long brunette locks and a Cindy Crawford mole (no, she seriously should have been a model, and I’m not even into girls) who guided me to a train station, I felt the need to write down my phrase and develop its world. So, I constructed hundreds of voices, some told in first person plural, most told in first person singular. It was all a hot mess. I stepped back. I realized I wanted to construct five regions that don’t exist in this world, but are imagined from this one, and I wanted to tell their stories, and are associated with being the poorest regions of the world, through the first person narrators who live in these regions and relate to that space through a greater tale that is weaved through their voices, and then first person plural narrators that come to tell the brutal and tragic histories of these regions through dyads like Mother-Son, Master-Slave, God-Devil. I wrote the second draft, and recently finished what I hope to be the final draft. Like Until We Meet Again, I’m proud of We Are The Poorest (Country) in the World. Instead of telling stories of genocide or war or famine, I told stories of a mother meeting her daughter for the first time, a sister comforting her sister after she loses her job, or a person confessing to being an atheist, ie stories we just don’t associate with places like the Congo or Curacao (not that I wrote about those regions either; again, regions that don’t exist in our world but are based in ours). I used the power of language like I did in Until We Meet Again, to fuse the narratives by having the last sentence of one paragraph respond to the first sentence of a new one, creating almost a dialogue that weaves between the different I’s, we’s, and the stories they share. Finally, six months after I wrote this first draft, Occupy Wall Street happened, a movement that centered itself on a multitude having the exact same type of global dialogue that I had created in my novel. It made me feel like, within the passing of a month, the postmodern world has ended and a new one had begun, and I was channeling that moment.

But, over time, I found myself less proud of my first novel. I still think it’s an important work, and therefore worth publishing, but in Until We Meet Again, I felt I had created a language that burst through the restrictions that language creates, that any person could see a part of themselves in that novella, instead of empathizing with a narrator behind a wall. That wall still exists in my first novel; in fact, I would say it’s the greatest critique I would give to that work, as well as the fact that it shows that it was clearly a novel written by someone still maturing into himself. That being said, both critiques I find minor, and I’m relatively proud of my novel, because it’s channeling the moment we live in now, tells a story that had to have been said, and does something innovative. I’ve just realized that I can do better.

In fact, I’ve started that better already. When I returned to the States, I found myself depressed. I was very upset being in a culture so industrial and consumeristic instead of historical and artistic. Furthermore, the memories of who I once was, both in high school (the fat, not attractive, super in-your-face, inconfident, depressed, unloved Kiran) and college (the overcompensating, super in-your-face, hyper-extroverted Kiran) bombarding me with the shame of who I once was. The process began as I found myself dreaming in a new world, a Global City that became named Monstropolis, a city once of a golden age where every language, race, and culture in the world coalesced had gone to ruin because of a disease that had wiped out its collective memory. I began to imagine caricatures of the world, a Yugoslavia that had killed his brothers out of the seven sins, and, feeling bad, resurrecting them at the dinner table and pretending nothing has happened, or France, a beautiful girl that only looks at herself in the mirror and no one else. At the center of this story is the Nameless Man, a person who has chosen to come to the city for no reason that he knows of. Every time he enters a new village, town, or space, he changes personality, and any time someone attempts to get into some form of relationship with him, he ends that person’s life. He refuses to be named, even as man who bought my bread. While this world grew in me, I started having horrible nights where I couldn’t fall asleep, nights where I’d think of girls who made fun of me for a high pitched voice, or being called out for trying to sit with people at a table where I wasn’t invited. They were memories that I hadn’t thought of in years.

Then, after I got back to New York, I started to rationalize my world in theory again. I had noticed that we were entering into a new era, a new moment, and as a result a new aesthetic, social, literary space, and I wanted to define it, even though I had noticed this just at the beginning of said possible movement. My imagination started to chase the world of what I later began to call altermodernism instead of my work, the exact opposite type of progress that had happened in Spain. I felt so overwhelmed by what I was trying to do, coupled with my post-Spain depression, and a sense that everything I did was a failure. I began to see a counselor. She made me realize something. In high school, my life became progressively worse until I was disowned by pretty much everyone I knew. When I went to college, I told myself that the Kiran of that time had died, and a new one began. I purposefully tried to create a new personality over my old one, a veil that was much more accessible, approachable, charming, lovable. Meanwhile, I’d show photos of my old self to people, telling them I was once fat, once incredibly awkward. I acted as if I was a member of the crowd that once pointed at me and laughed. I didn’t want to recognize that Kiran existed, and when I would, it would be only to point out how much better I was than him. My counselor made me realize that what I was doing was very unhealthy, that my old self didn’t die at all; he was underneath me all along.

And, that is where he remains, underneath Monstropolis. I am the Nameless Man, who chooses to escape the place I grew up and the family that raised me to hide from who I once was. Monstropolis represents the globe, the place to which I escape, whether in the sense of my vision, or the physical spaces I plan to live in (Portugal, South Africa, Italy, France, Russia, etc). I’ve realized that What Remains of Monstropolis came to me under fits of self-anxiety because it is now time for me and my art to become one, to take my memories and meld them over the warm steel of a sword into myself. In the same way that the Nameless Man finds the memories that caused him to become nameless through his interactions with the people of Monstropolis, I must now search the empty corridors and darkened streets of who I once was, in order to find myself and tell him that someone does indeed care about him, to hug him in my arms and tell him that he is loved.

It is through this first act of accepting and loving myself that the process in which I transcend my body begins. In order for me to write my greatest work, I’ll have to become so fused with, yet distant from the memories that were once my own that they appear to me like the memories of someone else or fictions I’ve created for myself. I can begin to take those fictions and place them into the bodies of people who aren’t me. I want to give birth to myself. I literally want to collapse everything that once made me who I am into the threads of history that have made up our world, and from that birth the globe as I know it. It will be that moment then, when my anxieties will disappear, that the hundreds of thoughts that flood my mind will suddenly calm, and I will no longer be the human that I once was. I will have exited this world, and finally find peace.

A list of my projects:

Finished:

Jihad of the American Fool – (Last Chance on 75th Street, Aurora of Eden, Thankless Call, A Poetic Intermission: The One Night Stand of Flowers, Jihad of the American Fool, Song of Jack, Like Father, Like Son, A Facebook Message from the Person That Loves You, Until We Meet Again).

We Are the Poorest (Country) In the World – first novel

Jesus Lives in Madrid – a novel composed of 8 stories (Jesus Remembers, Jesus Buys Something, How Juan Betrayed Jesus, Jesus Lives in Madrid, Jesus Sees His Father, Jesus Fell in Love with a Gypsy Once, Jesus and the Bull, Jesus Dies)

Working on:

What Remains of Monstropolis – second novel

A Walk Through Western Streets – (A Walk Through Western Streets, Three Stops from Belfast, The Queen of Coimbra, and then the rest to be decided).

The Hearkening – to not be touched until after I turn 25.

December 8th, 2011: "a reaction to Cymbeline performed, or 21st century Shakespeare…"

I hate to begin with this, but Cymbeline confirmed to me that I am not a person who enjoys theatre. I can’t only blame only my attention span, for I find rewarding gazing into paintings that a typical American teenager would glaze over, or reading dense literary works that would cause any other person of my age to hurl said work at a wall. Yet, whenever I’m in a piece of theatre, whether it is shows as diverse as Spiderman the Musical, RENT, The Book of Mormon, and yes, unfortunately, Cymbeline, I find myself unable to concentrate on the plot, more interested in the inner works of my imagination rather than the ones being projected towards me.

And, what a shame that is, for Cymbeline was clearly an excellent show. I loved the movement between the six cast members as they changed characters without even once breaking character, unless intentional, I loved how they changed lines and outfits to fit the sounds of the 21st century (Imogen says I hate you to Iachimo, and Iachimo looks like he’s wearing a sweater designed for Grease), I loved that Noah Brody and Paul L. Coffey looked like twins (inbreeding on the set, much?) and, dare I say it, I loved the acting, which was good enough to suspend my inner turmoils for a moment and watch with complete belief a grown Posthumus cry on stage.

If history is when memory is annihilated for the sake of creating the collective identity of a peoples, myth is when memory is distorted, bended, and altered to allow a memory to speak for the collective present of a different time period. In that regard, Cymbeline is clearly a myth. It may feed us the lines of Shakespeare’s originals, but re-imagines them, not only creates the laugh for the audience but laughs along. The actors show none of the rigor I associate with the theatre, and I think that is good. Like all myth, Cymbeline re-adapts a memory and puts it in front of the audience in a way that can’t be ignored. For that, I will at the very least give it my utmost respect.

December 11th, 2011: "A reaction to Ulysses, the greatest book of the 20th Century…"

This is my fourth time reading Ulysses. The first time I don’t remember, other than I put it down. The second time was in Spanish; horrible life decision. The third time was when I was in Dublin, in which I thought it was well done, but not for me. So, the moral of the story is that, every time I come back to Ulysses, I find myself admiring it more and more, but never in love with the world presented, and this remains my reaction, now to an incredibly strong climax. I had to read Ulysses at this point of my life. I’m in a stage where I’m changing directions in a direction already chosen for me, and it’s been causing me to obsess a little bit with Joyce. What can I say? He finished Dubliners at 22 (it just took him forever to get it published), which makes me feel inferior in every imaginable way, and he wrote work that offered infinite new pathways for language. Joyce, whether he knew it or not, wanted Ulysses to be the last novel ever written, and it shows.

In that regard, I would say that Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written. It uses every technique, from stream-of-consciousness, journal clips, various third persons, even various characters, to construct a day in Dublin in 1904. It’s very easy to see how Ulysses led the world to postmodernism. It was probably the first novel that exhausted every possible way a story could be told, which then led to hundreds of novels that used Ulysses multitude of techniques, but without the search for a truth, a light at the end of the tunnel. It was also a novel that fused myth with the novel, compressing the entire history of the West into both the history of Leopold Bloom, a trend that later became perfected in postmodern literature (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnight’s Children, etc). What is most impressive is how Ulysses represents the ultimate mergence of the self with history. One has the sense that Joyce has taken every moment in his life, fused that with a moment with history, and as a result, made himself part of the very tapestry of Western existence, so that one can’t even read the phrase E. Pluribus Unum without it referencing something else. It is the fact that Joyce has made himself the ultimate memento, the focal point to which all the memories of Western history collide, makes me incredibly envious. I would agree with everyone who has claimed that Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written.

That being said, I don’t think it’s the best novel ever written. First, I honestly don’t believe in original or authentic art, nor in tiers, because then you get into what’s bad for one person is true for another argument. The only way, in my opinion, that one can really evaluate art, is as either important, art that has shifted thought in such a strong direction that one can never forget it, as great, art that moves, impassions, and inspires both the world and the individual, in such ways that one feels that one’s very thoughts, emotions, and, dare I say it, soul, has been ripped right in front of you and shown pulsing through the very work you are reading, and then everything else. Works that are that intricate that any person can see themselves in it, and works that change the very way we think, those are both rare, important, and unforgettable (coincidentally, things that are none of the above are commonplace, average, and pretty forgettable, even if they can also be very good). So, while I would say Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written, I wouldn’t put it above and over, say, War and Peace, Moby Dick, The Tale of Genji, or Shakuntala. They all did something that had to be done, weaved a story that had to exist, and for that, we should, to all of them, be eternally grateful.

Nonetheless, I am incredibly jealous of Ulysses. Joyce broke through the cacophony of traumas and memories that made him who he was to create music. He exhausted the entire history of both literature and the West. That being said, I don’t think that Ulysses did everything. Ulysses may have exhausted every trick in the book, but he did so in a way that created a world that ultimately saw the end of language as we had known it (yes, in some ways, I blame the beauty of modernism for the melancholy of postmodernism). Plus, Joyce clearly wanted to give voice to a nation, rather than distort what it means to be of a nation. He may have created a multitude of events, but a central event anchors them down, and at the bottom of that trove is the land of Ireland. Ulysses is an incredibly Irish work. In other words, Ulysses may have done a lot, but it didn’t place the globe in the context of a novel.

Thank you, Ulysses, for coming to me at a time when I had to learn that art has to be personal, that it’s not just enough to tell a story that needs to be told, but to merge oneself with the world in such a way that your very soul becomes the very history that the world looks back upon to know it existed.

December 13th, 2011: as new worlds replace old…

When I was in Spain, Segovia, I saw errant knights fighting each other in the hills while archers hidden in the castle flung arrows their way. Couple with the speech my professor/tour guide Eugenio was giving us, I suddenly felt a desire to compress the history of the world into a novel. I knew that this novel had to exist even before I knew what it was about. I had dreams of clouds ascending, people changing, all the way back in high school, highly abstract thoughts that I later pinned down to the ebbs of the world. On that day, my vision was born, and with it, The Hearkening, the book I am always orbiting, writing towards, but have yet to have pinned down and constructed. I am not ready for the sheer breadth and depth the world needs. It is coming to me slowly, day by day. Maybe once I am ready to write it, I will talk about it less abstractly. Until then, it is best that the work remains plunged into my subconscious, until the pressures of my psyche have compressed it into the pearl fit for the world to see.

In Spain, I also realized how much technology had compressed our world. I saw girls playing endlessly on their smart phones while walking, dressed no differently than the New Yorkers I was used to. As I traveled, I got into conversations about Gabriel Garcia Marquez with a random old Romanian man, or used the power of Futurama or Dr. Zoidberg to bridge the gap between myself and 2 Armenians who barely spoke English. The world is compressing. I always give the example of a future fifth grade classroom, one where people from all over the world (Mali, China, India, New Zealand, if we’d even go by national identities in such a world) are doing the same math homework, speaking some form of a global language, but do not interact in a physical class room, but through the network that is more and more displacing our world. It would be a world where a Malian, Indian, and New Zealander would all practically be in the same space, or in other words, a world where, a Malian with her strong oral traditions, an Indian who clings to his foundational epics, and a New Zealander who loves to read novels, would be on in the same space, the same footing.

Which made me realize, this would be a great opportunity to equalize the world. Which made me realize, the novel isn’t dying because literature is dying, but because literature is re-energizing, rejuvenating, re-flourishing. Why can’t there be a new form that would replace the novel, in the same way the novel replaced the romance? It would be a form that is global, a form that ties print literacy, orality, and other global forms of storytelling together, thanks to the handiness of the Internet and new technology.

Unfortunately, that world can’t exist, yet, because we live in a simulation of globality, where the West tells the rest what’s best. In order to begin to view our world as truly global, at least in literature, we would have to bridge the world of the novel we currently know with the future. It wouldn’t be possible unless there was a novel that truly rewrote history in the face of the world instead of the west, first. I want to create that bridge.

Today, I had a brunch with another grandiose thinker. He wants to construct an entire system of education that is individualized, negotiated entirely through the internet. A person will be introduced to different disciplines, then choose what he or she wants to be educated in, and then will educate himself in that world, at the pace she sees fit. The professor will function as a facilitator, rather than a source of information, but most of the work is individualized, and done through the network. He sees a future where robots will walk aside humans, where humans will have plunged into the depths of technology to the point that we’ll defeat nature; why worry about dying when we can colonize new planets and find new ways to extend life?

We both make fun of ourselves in some ways. Lofty ambitions can’t truly control the future. The world turns, and people impact it, but those impacts create smaller dents than we realize. To think only of the future lofts your goals away from the world inasmuch as it exists. To think only of the present is to shield yourself from the fact that the world is always in transition. Therefore, the only thing one can do is work in the moment, while at the same time reaching for infinity.

December 14th, 2011: I concede, Mr. McCarthy…

I’m currently finishing up Changing my Mind, a collection of essays by one of the few writers in the generation above mine that I respect, Zadie Smith. To sum up the essays: she’s a brilliant literary critic, albeit not nearly as interesting when she begins to delve into the personal essay form. Anywho, the reason why I feel like writing a blog post on her is because one of her essays, Two Paths for the Novel has spoken to me in a way it definitely didn’t the first time I read it. Back in 2009, when I was an intern at a literary agency, looking for articles to read with which I could waste time, I chanced upon an essay in the New York Times Book Review, in which Zadie argues that, right now, we have either traditional realism, or experimentalism, neither of which are healthy states of literature, but that the experimental road, or at least the one recently paved by Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, was the best bet for our literary future. At the time, I thought cool story brah. Then, a few years later, I flipped to this essay, and I almost didn’t want to read it. I had remembered what I had thought the essay was about, and thought, Oh, great, another self-indulgent essay arguing for more meaningless language for the sake of language, which to me is just as pointless as meanderingly boring realist writing that’s pretty much doing what people 200 years already perfected. My aesthetic is the writer who fuses language with story, constructs worlds of great intricacy with sentences that are unique, and if you can’t do both, you might as well back your literary bags and go home. I began Zadie’s essay with this thought in mind, that Zadie was pretty much arguing for the lesser of two evils, but one that was still pretty irrelevant to art. Then, I stumbled upon her conclusion one of her concluding thoughts.

"As you read it, Remainder makes you preternaturally aware of space, as Robbe-Grillet did in Jealousy, Remainder’s obvious progenitor. Like the sportsmen whose processes it describes and admires, Remainder, fills time up with space by breaking physical movements, for example, into their component parts, slowing them down; or by examining the layers of a wet, cambered road in Brixton as a series of physical events rather than emotional symbols. It forces us to recognize space as a nonneutral thing – unlike realism, which often ignores the specifities of space. Realism’s obsession is convincing us that time has passed. It fills space with time.

Something has happened here, someone has died. A trauma, a repetition, a death, a commentary. Remainder wants to create zinging, charged spaces, stark, pared down, in the manner of the ancient plays it clearly admires…. But the ancients always end in tragedy… Remainder ends instead in comic declension, deliberately refusing the self-mythologizing grandeur of the tragic. Fact and self persist, in comic misapprehension, circling each other in space (literally, in a hijacked plane). And it’s precisely within Remainder’s newly revealed spaces that the opportunity for multiple allegories arises." (Smith 95-96)

Ladies and gentleman, with this one page, I am convinced that me and Zadie Smith are indeed of the same world, for she too realizes that, regardless of whether a story has meaning or not, that story has to take place in a space, and whereas literature up until now has used space to annihilate time, it is now time for a literature that uses time to annihilate space (see, she’s even using my own wording!). In other words, I’m interested in a literature that shows representations of time, but without ever referencing a fixed space, because of the constant movement back and forced between space that fragments the notion that we can even exist in one space. Maybe, McCarthy is interested in a similar thing, but in a different way. For me, it’s a geopolitical, physical space. For him, it’s a space that has to be orbited instead of stated, bricks that are used to construct a wall rather than an abstraction, ie brick 1 + brick 2+ brick 3 = wall, rather than I live next to that wall. I’ll admit that I had to put down Remainder; it was a book that I couldn’t get into. That being said, I’m always looking for more allies, and I’m pleased that Smith may have inadvertently helped me find one.

December 16th, 2011: say you’ll go…

Today, in an hour, I leave New York, hopefully for good. When I first came here, a year ago, it was a great city. It was exactly what I needed for freshman and sophomore year, a place in which I could reinvent myself and hide from the traumas that made me so passive to myself in Georgia. There was so much to do, everyone and everywhere had a great energy. I clicked with people in a way I didn’t know I could. Then, I went to Madrid, evolved into a different person, and found the States not only boring, but strangely scathing. I realized that the States disturbed me so much (and not in the sense of pissed me off, but in the sense of "agitated my very sense of self) is because I kept framing my world as evolution rather than actualization. I am still the Kiran that I was at age 5, even if I’m changed; my traumas will always be mine, and I can’t pretend to kill them off; I have to accept them, using my art to make beauty out