It's for Its Own Sake!

 The day is empty. A typical Saturday idleness. I play with the pillows and try to hold on to one after another- Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Whitman or Poe, Sylvia Plath or Frost- anything which can mask this emptiness. Anything which can give life to this very day. And I try to cover half of The Glass Menagerie.The house is acting as if I am an uninvited stranger sitting in some corner and reading a magazine. There is clatter from the kitchen, slushing of water from the shower, sounds so familiar and air so seen yet unseen. Laura Wingfield and her glass menagerie. Her crippleness and her shyness. Her fragility and her fantasies. Laura….and her glass menagerie! I wish it was I who could dance with Laura. I wish it was I who would call her Blue Rose. (Please give undue stress to the single diphthong in the one letter word “I”)  She would have had a wonderful time with me.  And I am tired of this victimization of characters. They crash and burn all alone in American dramas. Too much of expressionism for expressing negativity and its dimensions in life. Their incapacity to be in reality overwhelms my capacity to be realistic and practical. Tom, Amanda and Laura- their inability for connectivity is so transparent that I am forced to think over it disturbingly after every narration Tom make from his memory.  And the text is not moving steadily, I am in stagnation. It seems everything is flowing back too much to Amanda’s past or flowing out too much to Tom’s future or hanging loosely so high in Laura’s other world! And I didn’t want to touch the critical appreciation part since it’ll remind me that it is of the syllabus and I am not suppose to “read” the text,  but just to know the summary and have a superficial study to jot down some points!  Superficial study! How shameful for these characters! I wish they would come out of these printed papers and slap us!

Every day she calls and says of things missing and things lost. How she is not in ease with the recent dislocations and how she is paying for her lack of culinary skills! Everyday she talks about the need for change and her blurring ability for conversations and her “useless” withdrawals. And the last time she kept the phone it was with a bang, with a shaken voice from the other end- “I thought at least YOU would understand!” (Her “you” was drawled but sounded beautiful) And I was thinking about how useless is her drawl in the YOU there, same as that of her useless withdrawals! I wanted it to connect it with a Gautier quote (though I wouldn’t dare to do it in her presence!) “Nothing is truly beautiful unless it cannot be used for anything; everything that is useful is ugly because it is the expression of some need, and those of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and infirm nature.” Human beings of poor and infirm nature…are not aware that useful is ugly and beautiful is useless. Always there is this unconscious inner craving for beauty. Someone can’t tolerate a misplacement of things on the table, a stain on the carpet, a bend of the furniture- we scream at ugliness and throb and throb for beauty! Beautiful faces, beautiful places, beautiful words, beautiful world! Everything should be beautiful! And useful! How paradoxical! Can “beautifully useful” be an oxymoron?

Gautier wanted to defend the “art for art's sake” by the useful and beautiful dilemma! And so words here are for their own sake. There is no purpose. Non- utilitarian. How comfortable!  This gives a justification for my incoherent, dissipated, disconnected writing here. It gives a justification for my decision to post it here. (The secret behind the decision is actually to avoid the dormancy of this blog). And it’s much effortless if the head is an "unweeded garden" full of “things rank and gross in nature possessing it merely".  If someone asks me what am I writing I would say “words words words”. And if someone asks you, what are you reading? , just say “words, words, words”. (That’s what Hamlet said, but he was mad or pretended to be mad. But often there is very little difference between the two). I always misunderstand that there are certain things vital to my survival. And it will take me sometime to realize that they are not. Not at all vital, not even the last thing needed for my survival. The mind rejects the idea first and there will be vehement argumentation and trails to show that it’s not the case. And before the final surrender a sense of “nothing to lose” put out my exhaustion. This “nothing to lose” comes from “nothing to gain”- it was for its own sake :)