008 - Meditations on a Sunday Morning

A report on the future events of today

It is ten in the morning now. Well, five minutes past that. That’s when this went out, who knows what time it is now when you are reading this.

I woke up at six.

Four hours is a long time on a Sunday morning. What all have I done? I don’t know yet. I am writing this on Saturday. But I think I will wake up at six. I’ll lie awake on my bed for another fifteen twenty minutes, give, or take, around, or about.

An hour later I’ll decide not to use the phone anymore, at least till it is ten. Instead, an hour after that you will see me charging my phone having maxed out its leftover battery. YouTube takes up a lot of juice. Then I will proceed to open the iPad; might as well. It is half past eight, give or take, around, or about. Another hour later I will have my breakfast. When I will have finished that, this will have gone out. That’s for sure.

It is ten in the morning now. Four hours have passed by quickly this Sunday morning.

Guess I was wrong about that.

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(What Remains of the Day?)

That compels me to consider what shall be done with the hours ahead. It is a Sunday, one recalls, but even doing nothing takes planning nowadays.

A friend called thrice in the week gone by. All three calls ended with different shows I must watch. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. Which one do I pick? Netflix feels like the early days of Tinder now. Or the last days of Tinder. When did that ever change.

He had tweeted a fourth one. I know because I saw it today morning, I mean yesterday morning, when I wrote this. In fact I saw the tweet earlier in the week. I went back to see it again because I forgot the show.

I don’t like twitter much. I might like Instagram more, but it is heading down the same path that I took with Twitter. I am more careful with it, staying away from the strays and the filth, as much as one can. And so the path seems better. It is filled with art and poetry, but we all know where it leads still. But there’s time for that. It is a Sunday after all. I just read a poem by Billy Collins on it, he wrote it for me. I am sure he did, because he said so:

thealiporepost

Dear Reader by Billy Collins

Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.

But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.

Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be someone I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.

The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,
I watch you diminish—my echo, my twin—
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can't help traveling together.

Art by Roberto Ploeg

July 10, 2020

I saw a page from Amruta Patil’s graphic novel. I followed her last month. That was an interesting incident. That day I had decided to do something new. God knows what compelled me, but I decided I will make a graphic poem - a poem on the first chapter of Kafka’s The Castle. I even tried my hand at it. If you are not reading that right now, it is because it didn’t work out very well, neither the graphic, nor the poem.

That got me that day to go to Instagram for some inspiration and serendipitously found Amruta’s profile. More specifically, I caught her first work -

amruta_gauri

11 years ago, right about this time, I discovered Provence and ochre mines and the colour palette and style that is now my own. That phase was the start of a life-long pact with beauty; a life-long awe of the spiritual highs of nature and science. ❤️
Out of the blue, @ananyananya who worked in First City (magazine that published my ramblings as a column) shared this yesterday. #amrutapatil #provence #ochre #carnetdevoyage

June 25, 2020

I thought that’s exactly what I should do. I am reminded of my watercolour set and my pens and my journal where I paint and I write. And I thought that could be a good place to return to. Maybe I’ll do something with it tomorrow - that’s today.

But I know already that my pens won’t work. Ink spots have come and dried up on them, it has been that long since I used them. Well I have time, maybe I can clean them, refill, make them new. That’s a meditation.

But I will ignore all such urges this Sunday morning and scroll on Instagram instead. Nothing will seem interesting though. There are more ads than usual. I go back to the photos I liked yesterday. I’ll find a post on Alipore Post about Rohini’s, thoughts and plans in these quarantined days. Now that’s a meditation.

It speaks of newsletters as well. It will trigger thoughts of all the newsletters and links from them I have bookmarked. There’re so many of them. There’s stuff on email, things opened but unread on Chrome, saved for later on Pocket, liked on Twitter. I take count and I will bring the list down to this -

• Undula: A Story by Bruno Schulz - people are going nuts over it on Twitter

• A Meditation on Light and Land - a graphic essay!

• Soul of the Nilgiris - a photo essay on Goya. I love Goya Journal.

• The Cellar by Dina Nayeri

• How Dishoom scales with Quality - New Consumer’s interview with Shamil Thakrar

• This Talk Therapy episode with Alex Kantrowitz

• Edith Zimmerman’s Mermaid

• Craig Mod’s Ridgeline 79

• Tom Ryan’s Quest for Simplicity

And this one from Robin Sloan which made me think of my idea of serialising a short story on a newsletter.

Wait minute, I will think. Didn’t I plan to go through the Desi Books podcast this weekend? I will start with its first episode.

But not before I catch up with what’s happening on YouTube. This talk on short stories looks fine!

With that it will be an hour before I begin anything else. (Two!) Half the day is gone. I think I will tackle the list after lunch, but it will be two thirty by then and the hour for siesta will beckon. It’s a Sunday who is going to say no to that?

Finally I will start things at five. Five minutes will go by and I will decide that it is too much to do on a Sunday. I will plan to read them over the week, that should do it. Time will move around the house, through TV channels and WhatsApp groups. At six in the evening I will decide I should get back to my books now that nothing else is happening.

But then, maybe I can watch YouTube for five minutes before that.

Hours pass by but I don’t see them.

It is ten in the night now, around, about.

An email pops in. Another newsletter. It is What to Watch by Bilal, #97. Another movie, another show. Maybe I’ll watch it later, maybe I won’t. Netflix feels like…