It has been almost 4 years since I wrote my first letter to a
non- existent being summing all the thoughts a week’s time could permit. It will
feel more like a diary entry if one reads it, but as far as I remember, when I
wrote it, I addressed it to somebody in particular in my mind, hoping that one
day someone will lay their eyes on it and walk by the same muse as mine.
During my school days, never even one tiny thought of
grabbing the pen escaped my mind. I used to run and obscure myself from the pangs
of pulling out words from the imagination. Especially when we were given assignments
to write long essays I was absolutely clueless about. More appropriately, all those essays
I was not keen to exercise my imagination for. This continued year after
year, and I merely touched the average grade in all my English exams.
Until of course this gorgeous day came along. It was my grammar
exam, and we were supposed to come up with a story which began with, “On that
day..” or something along that line. That was a pure opportunity. For maybe the
first time I saw such an independent question which allowed a student to let
their imagination run free. Anything could happen on that day, anything…and that
became a weapon. I scribbled my way across two pages and ended up sketching a
heartfelt story about the attack on 26/11, Mumbai. It was my brother’s story, a
brother I never had in real life, and one who did not escape the story alive.
I remember I had a tear escape my eye while concluding the
piece. I was moved beyond measure by what I had just written. And to be
completely honest, to this day, I do not believe that the story was drafted by my mortal
self. Because can a person’s own imagination kill them?
That was a question which changed my life.
When the results were out, my teacher called me and asked me
to participate in the National Essay Competition. I was glad of course and did
not need to feign a beaming face, even though I knew that the words did not
arrive at any random call. When I was about to leave, my teacher pressed her
lips together before she asked me with a suddenly guarded voice, “Were you
there?”.
“No mam.”
She smiled without any expression but looked straight at me
with peering eyes and I dawdled to my class feeling a shiver down my spine.
Was it possible that I caught a glimpse of what actually
happened that day and made the brother in my dreams the crux of the terrible
events which followed? Was it even likely that I spoke someone else’s mind?
Ha! Maybe not. This is what happens when the imagination runs
free and becomes a separate entity in itself, and maybe, just maybe we think that
this Imagination’s voice is not our own.
The essay I was told to write for the National Essay Competition,
no doubt, turned out to be pure trash. I have blamed several elements including
myself for that failure. One of the elements was the essay topic itself to begin with. Then
there was the word limit, and then the time limit. I know those are too many demands
from a competitive arena but the truth is, Imagination cannot be enslaved by the
limitations of mere numbers.
My teacher was unmistakably disappointed.
Another year went by, I stayed utterly undisturbed by the
agony of creativity. There were of course moments when thoughts thundered
through me in a flash, and often during inappropriate moments like when I was crossing
the road or was under the shower or was waiting on the bus. And as soon as I
let myself cross a threshold, the thoughts escaped me, or rotted away owing to no immediate action. I am guilty of not taking the aid
of ink and parchment to jot down the strange events of a plain human mind, a guilt which I’m sure has agonized us all on random days.
But of course, on another glorious day I came by a milestone, and as far as my experiences
suggest, a day… rather a moment, changes the outcome of all our creative energy,
it changes our future to be precise.
So, on November 14th, 2014, I wrote down the
first letter, addressed to no one in particular. Hoping that some curious eye
finds it and wonders about the possibilities of the questions left unanswered.
That letter, as already mentioned, was the result of a week’s
curiosity of the unhinged mind.
And then, there was no stopping. A letter was a rare occasion,
but at least it kept going. I wrote about two to three letters a month, and
sometimes nothing for two straight months. Even though I was just falling in
love with this craft, there was the heartbreaking knowledge that this was not to be my bread
and butter. I could go from writing ten letters a day, to years without writing
a single word, and I did not wish to starve my mind of the physical needs of
mortality.
So, I kept going with what I thought I was moderately good
at.
Logic. A rational element of the human mind.
And as Andrew Stanton put it, we cannot let one element of
our brain struggle for hours at a stretch and expect it to perform with
shinning brilliance. No, of course not. We need to fluctuate the elements. Maintain the balance. And I knew, my profession, as long as it was about the
elements of rationalism, was to be the savior of my unrealistic ventures to the
realm of surrealism.
During all these years of nurturing this craft, until the
present day, I was so unsure of the ‘How’. I confessed to my mother and to certain
close friends on very rare occasions, that I did not know ‘how’ the words came to me. That there
was someone else speaking through the pen I held in my grip. I was
ordinary, but the thought which distilled on paper were things I could not
think of in my wildest dreams, or things I could not portray so perfectly, just
as they were. I was after all, the one below the threshold of average when it
came to Language exams in all my schools.
The ‘How’ was a question asked to me on unlikely days by rational minds and coarse tongues, and I
did not answer them, afraid that they will not understand, or simply consider
it a whim of the fanciful mind.
But this was until I found real evidence which matched my ‘fanciful’
understanding of Creativity. It wasn’t actually evidence, it was a witness. Another
person narrating the exact same events to a crowd of enthusiasts. Elizabeth
Gilbert, an undoubtedly charming writer in her forties, wrapped in graceful
divinity.
She not only elaborated her own experiences with a humor beaming
in raw originality, but she also conveyed the stories of ancients who believed
that the “spirits of creativity” lived outside the vessel or the body of a
mortal. Often called ‘Daemons’ or ‘Genius’, these were the mystical creatures
of the surreal world. Unlike today, they believed that an artist ‘had’ a Genius
and was not ‘the’ Genius. Quoting her on post Renaissance, “people started
to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the
individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear
people referring to this or that artist as being a genius, rather than
having a genius. And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error.”
When I wrote something, which impressed well on my mind, I
knew, as Elizabeth Gilbert puts it, “the Elusive One showed up”, and when I wrote
something ultra-close to gibberish, there was the consolation that my partner
was probably off to some vacation, bothering Jake Shimabukuro in Hawaii.
And this was it, the exceptional answer to the questions which
have left artists Divine one night and robbed them of all the jewels the next
morning, leaving them clueless about how to meet their own standards once the aid
of Divinity was set afire and reduced to mere dust, converting the creative
sections of this world to “alcoholic manic-depressives”. Mortals cannot beat
the divinity of a Superior, and every time they do, it renders their time
post-creation wrapped in nothing but chaos. However, the key, as Elizabeth so
perfectly embodies in her words, is to have the “sheer human love and
stubbornness to keep showing up” for your part of the job.
I suggest you hear the words straight from the one who conveyed
them:
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Date: 22nd July, 2018
Hyderabad, India
Picture Credits: Google Images
