Still Life

I know I should be working, honing, polishing, sharpening handouts, but a heavy weariness weighs me down. I cannot imagine the cause for this fatigue, but it does feel bone deep. I know I can ill-afford these almost constant naps; I have too many clamoring projects. But my eyes burn with left over sleep and my senses shift, unable to fixate on a coherent task. I feel unable, limbless, immobile, even, so that even the passing winds fail to sway me from this spot. A friend suggested that perhaps my fatigue emerges from my strict diet, the depleted portions from a limited list. Perhaps that is true; but my diet is not a new thing. I am quite used to it and comfortable with it. I have not over-stretched myself in physical labor by any stretch of imagination.

My spirit could also be homesick, a longing to go and touch something, some place of my birth and formative years, an event nowhere on the horizon. However, the buzzing of my tribe's presence every time I get on Facebook or emails reassures me immeasurably. A brief visit from some of my tribe feels more than wonderful. So it is not abandonment or despair that is responsible for this.

I believe this torpor is a natural cycle of my being, a condition that regularly drowns me as the year begins to set. Someone asked me for recommendations for a reading list for an upcoming trip, and I have been unable to come up  with any meaningful titles, something I'd thought in my youth, would never happen. I'd believed that I would ALWAYS be in the middle of at least 3 books, and the local public library would be my second home. However, things have not unfolded thus. My bedside is strewn with the most predictable of all reading, the epics. The new Atwood (of the Oryx and Crake series) is out, but I lack the will to hunt it down; today Salman Rushdie is in town, talking about his newest book, but the very thought of driving exhausts me. Once, I'd believed that as an active reader, I was an integral component of the world woven by words. This belief used to be the prime motor of all my willingness to hop aboard many a whirlwind and carousel, the dizziness convincing me of my relevance. Now, however, just sitting down is enough.

This exhaustion could be due to the time of the year. Elements are changing their wonted liveries; the golden sunshine glimmering on the still leaves has left for the West. Days are smaller, silver, breezy, like little jewels. This landscape demands almost constant rain, but the colors bouncing off the torrents have mellowed. The moon is getting larger, nearer. Perhaps the year wants me to sit still, take stock, and exhale the months passed. Perhaps I should listen. Perhaps this is a natural part of growing older, calming down, an increasing quietude.

Before I exhale, I breathe in the advancing Autumn. It smells different, like a dream of smokiness, of promise of a chill not here yet, of  velvet moonlight, of crisp dusks. I must confess, this particular evening smells not of endings, but beginnings. The air needs a little crispiness to herald the clanging of the Goddess' chariot; the days need to be silvery that Diwali lamps shine brighter.

After all, there are so many ways to banish the darkness; to banish such darkness properly, however, it needs to descend properly. I will not resent this sluggishness, since it looks to the busyness of the festive season. Inertia is a necessary component of animation.


 

The Journey Home: The Nightmare

There should have been plaster, there should have been Progress, there should have been people working, but my forgotten little ashen house sits across from where I sit, trying to occupy as little material space as possible, dreaming of a time when it was, desparing of ever being again. It had looked more occupied, more inhabited when it had no windows, than it does now, when the windows yawn black and reflect back whoever looks at them, denying their own existence.

I was promised that no matter what, this house would be done by June; I should have asked for specifics, like year and decade. I believe the house has been forgotten by those contracted to save it; it waits there, half its walls up, half the floor gouged out, the stairs cracked, vents opening onto empty spaces. No one comes to tend it for longer than a couple of hours a week in a good week. I visit it every day, dropping thoughts of well being on the ashes in the downstairs bathroom, on the cracks on the stairs, in the empty closet that is supposed to house the a/c. However, I don't need to be told that  my good wishes are impotent, like the dust that gathers on the untended windows and pipes of my house.

Suddenly, one day, I was told to call my cable company because the house was almost ready to receive such services. In a hurricane of fumbling, orders were sorted and appointments made, promising imminent livening up of my burnt life. However, all appointments and orders are cancelled and on hold now, since no one remembers making that call to me, especially not yet, since the hosue is so far from being "done."

Maybe I dreamt it, though people who inhabit this reality assure me otherwise. When I use all my spine to pose questions about possible completion of The Project, I get shocked, vacant stares at my audacity in asking such questions, which smack of blatant greed of squatting on the house. Patience, which I do not posses, is called for, as no one can estimate any longer how long This Thing is likely to take. In fact, it seems farther away from completion than it was two months ago. Maybe six months? Maybe more?

I know there has to be a lesson in all this; however, all thinking, computing, analysis elude me. I wonder if Rama, Odysseus, Sita, or any of my guiding metaphors ever felt this way; inevitably they did. They have had to. So, patient Reader, it seems what I complain of is merely my humanity; there is no fix for this.

I just returned from my daily stroll to my abandoned home; I wanted to check if the plaster on the walls was ready to be painted. There is no plaster; as I step out in the soft rain, I wonder at my grasp on reality, especially instead of the plasatering crew, I met the plumber in my house, doing mysterious tasks that are none of my business and anyways, beyond my understanding.

I have a recurring nightmare: a gnome, or a man sits in a dark corner under a cloud of foreboding and is busy with something I cannot see. My unchanging dream-fear is that he will turn around.

Maybe the lesson is from my nightmare? Maybe I ask too many questions. Maybe I quest and thirst too much. I have alluded to her before, but today, again, I am the woman from Garcia-Marquez's short story, who has run out of heartbeats to count and the man bothered by the noise of the wheeling stars.

The only resolution to my problems is that the unreal shift definitely away from the real. After all, that is how all nightmares are resolved.

Fallow Season

This weekend has been one of the quieter ones, the kind of quiet imposed on the centers of storms, the kind that is needed to sustain, the mandatory opposite of action. I do understand the balance such days provide, the kind that force me to just sit still and wait.

Now I don't presume to evoke ghosts of Milton, where the waiting has some cosmic significance or divine directive. On the contrary, actually, this waiting has been forced on me because my constant worrying over trifles, the various, varying demands made upon my conscious mind, and the fast pace of our disjointed lives has caused a system failure of sorts in the primary circuitry of my being.

I have been primarily couch-bound for the past few days, weighed down by a fever and an exhaustion that looms by 2pm, and I have spent hours, supine beside my computer with stacks of ungraded work, surrounded by floors that need cleaning and a house that needs picking up. I have had to take many, many naps, each feeling like an infinite stretch of time, where the world outside the door shifts axis while I am held captive by whirlwinds of unresolvable worries that clutch me in their nightmare jaws.

I acknowledge the necessity of this fallow season. It reminds me of other fallow seasons which have changed my inner landscape irrefutably. The one that comes to mind is the long three weeks of enforced bed rest when I was on the brink of puberty. It was ages ago, from where I stand today, of course. But that was the season during which I realised that my true love was going to be, had always been the fictional word. My students today ask me when I had the time to read all the mythology and tales I teach and I know I have my fallow season to thank.  My inner self had used that season to adjust, fit, evaluate, and compensate for the being I was growing into, while the stories of the past ages whispered important input and sketched indelible patterns on the basic structure of the self as it moved towards a stable, crystallized form.

This fallow season is no exception. The difference is in the stories I am feeding this self. These are newer tales (though it is the same Story), woven in different hues and textures. On the one hand, I am going through the Puranas (the most ancient, contemporary, changing, iconoclastic of Hindu literature), and on the other hand, I watch all the television series that I never usually have the time to catch up on, as I nap. Squeezed between the cracks are the occassionals, like the books my book club is reading and the latest Umberto Eco I just stumbled upon at the public library.

I do not hope to have a firm grasp on why this season has been necessary, or what it is supposed to give my inner landscape. Those thoughts are nebulous and will wisp away if examined. All I know is that some sort of regeneration has been required. My house is being worked on (for the time being), my child is fluffing up her wings and checking her compasses to begin her first flight into adulthood, and even my usually clueless conscious self can clearly see that a stage of our lives is closing up.

Today is the first day that I have been able to stay up this late after 3pm, and I've had only one nap, so I know that the time for me to get up is very near. Unlike the end of the earlier fallow season, however, I do not find myself particularly looking forward to the new season that awaits around the bend; I am afraid I might not have the energy for it. These past months have, I fear, broken something in me, re-wired something essential. I am afraid I might be proven unable, lacking in whatever the new stage demands of me, that this fallow season might be sown in dry earth, incapable of bringing forth all that it used to.

I lie here, shivering, the napping cats my main heat source. I hope and pray that I find the new stage a recognizable setting, with familiar choices and realised hopes. I invoke the kind gods I read of to rudder and steer my ship; I invoke the stars to guide my compass; I invoke the fallow season to sow enough for me to recognize the axis mundi from mirages; I invoke the Story to map understandable directives; and I invoke the true horizon to steady my course.