IT IS. AND IT IS NOT

I have been dreaming through my life mostly. And writing. When I write, I wake up. And it is not much good, especially if it is prose. Because prose means order from the first word of the sentence.

I dread order. Order is regimentation. Disciplined display. I have a problem with authority. Order is fascist. A whole army of sentences marching as one man toward the end, the other country, all of it materializing just with the last word.

Dreaming is better. It is closer to the form of poetry.

By dreaming I do not mean dreaming-dreaming. It is like standing on the bank of a river and watching it flow, reading things in the movement of the water, finding patterns in it, the gaze slowly turning the river into a whole lot more. Into a poem, maybe.

That is probably why I find writing fiction harder than plucking a poem out of a feeling.

A river is a feeling.
A poem is the name of a feeling.
A sense of loss informs it.

You are not sure about what you lost. But what you have got is not the whole for sure. Maybe it is because of the way life is programmed. Something must be missing. In poetry, we look for what we lost in life.

I do not celebrate. I praise loss with a phrase.

And one other thing. Death. I am constantly aware of it. Perhaps that's why when I write, it seems always like coming to terms with what is not there. A farewell of sorts. The arrangement of one ache in different shapes.

I have been for some four decades, fiction ( ah, yes, despite the fear of order--because there are a few things only the form of fiction is capable of ), poetry, newspaper columns, and screenplays.

The poems, prose, and columns. None of it is my life. All of it is my life. Which began in Ottapalam in Kerala, took me around India, and a little bit of the world, and here I am, verse for the where.