075 - Something, Everything
This letter should have reached two weeks ago, but it comes now, almost a month after the last one. In an already sparse publishing schedule of a season in a year, such mid-season breaks seeds more questions in the mind of the letter writer than the reader, I can assure you that. 1
Bahair Haal, here we are, a seventy fifth issue of this now four year old newsletter.
Peculiarly, for a publication called Bombay Daak, only one of this season’s letters was sent from its eponymous city. The rest have been sent from a brown in May, green in June and drowned in July village, nestled in between hills, paddy fields and a river. The family is moving houses and I am stationed here as a chaperone.
To picture me in this milieu is to picture oneself in Katie Peterson’s2 poem Meditation Denying Everything. The poem grows with every word, and so beautiful the terrain it lays out, of the world and our bodies, unified in their shared shapes.
And my favourite line —
Who can blame us for wanting other worlds, but shall we take them, or let them come to us?
The longing to be elsewhere is universal. A place that has grown familiar breeds no surprise. Like the narrator of Katie’s poem, thus we lay the garden of our loneliness in the very places we call home.
But this lack of surprise is a trick our brain plays on us. The world3 is the same everywhere. Home is where our minds deceive us that nothing is different, it is where we have stopped seeing. What we long for then, isn’t to be elsewhere, but to escape the pervasive feelings in our immediate world that we want no more of. We are lonely because we are blind to what’s beautiful near.
All this is to say, finding new ways of seeing the same thing appears better than saying new things with the same way.4
In startup circles, true founders always value depth over breadth. The unicorns5 are those who can marry both. It is easy for me to peddle this advice as gospel, when I myself struggle with it. I have a number of creative ambitions, and often grapple with what to dedicate more time to. Of late, I am settling to the idea of either keeping my medium or my subject, if not both, singular. See something deep.
I read Jason Fried’s post called Separation recently.
Developing the ability to tease things apart helps you compartmentalize the less desirable from the more desirable, and see the whole map, with all its separate states of like and dislike, favorable and unfavorable. There’s a very good chance that when you do that, you’ll like a lot more than you despise.
Separate. Distinguish. Decouple. Isolate. Differentiate. One thing’s rarely everything, unless you make it so — he concluded in the post.
And that there is the way to see things better, in life, as in art, isolate, go beyond the surface, be curious and kind. Something is not everything.
I had a fairly creative week, as I managed to sneak in two small artworks, one is this monochrome take on how all the cities now look alike and how cultural identities have shrunk in the process and a bit more. The other was this little gift of colour I made. Both efforts to see better what’s close.
*
And as this weekend winds down, and this season of letters comes back from a stupor, I want to thank you for hanging around and reading. This season has picked a more personal vibe, I didn’t fight it, it is interesting to see every season of these letters picks their own personality, interesting at least to me, and hopefully for you.
Have a nice week, we shall meet again in two.6
If you seek evidence to this then I would encourage you to pick up Jane Borges’ Bombay Balchao and roughly three-fifths of the book in, you will find a chapter that is a series of letters that explains this
Peterson’s 2021 collection Life in a Field is great example of the symbolic nature of her poetry, the way she draws parallels between humans and nature, this review expands on the power of her work very well.
Also, Life in a Field is filled with Peterson’s husband Young Suh. I particularly loved his series called Can we live here? You will notice a line here at the end — I photograph, Katie writes. Same subject, different eyes I guess.
As in people
Doubtlessly a separate, irreplaceable sensation exists in each of us, which if we don't find and isolate in time, and cohabit with later, and fill with visible acts, we're lost — Odysseas (hat tip - Ways of Seeing)
As in people, again
Sending this one without even a cursory edit under time compulsions , apologies