both sides, now

the beauty in wreckage and vice versa

during the rise of cultural shift emerging out of generational shift, on some fine day in the late 1950s a copy of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King was being swept through, torn apart paragraph after paragraph, underlined, assaulting and easing the oscillating state of heart as Bellow went from buying a ticket to Africa at 55 with the grief of all things on his mind to parenthood, to divorce, ivy leagues, guilt of inherited wealth and everything he could spearhead through his memory on the plane as he looked outside at clouds leveling with him thousands of feet above ground. he’d seen clouds from ground up and below, beneath and beside. that passage, the experience, the book set fire in a rising lyrical poet’s body giving birth to the greatest folk song ever written about life. at 23, Joni Mitchell wrote the song ‘Both sides now’ and as i was losing myself inward by the seconds, scrolling through endless music library with a hope to stumble upon some composition, some song to pad the numbness up my belly while breezing through the streets, much like Emma Thompson in Love Actually, i felt a knot dissolve in my heart and i wept until my mask slipped its hold on threads.

i was taken back to a time of less knowing, before more knowing. before life’s better absurdities started to offer a little love to my younger self. all folks songs are suspended in time and place, but Both sides now was standing at the door, at turns, on rooftops, in the middle of an argument, at the end of relationships, between trying terms of nurture and other vague places left on their own. it has the proustian motion, but it surrenders before it even begins so there is nothing to take but to be in it. some would call it sad, but it is life’s grand parley. in a sense, it is complete.

Rows and floes of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way

milk is amazing. it’s the first thing we consume of the world and then if everything goes just the way it should, we keep consuming it in many different forms until the end of time. burnt cheesecake, blueberry yoghurt, new york slice, milkshake, mishti-doi, custard, kulfi, cheeseburgers. all milk, all serotonin agents. milk is white, the dominant-negative of the universe, the scale of faintness. it is produced by the female of the species and it looks angelic. all things about milk and what it can be turned into is all the things that are good about the invention of food and skills. perhaps the only thing milk is missing is a cinematic halo wherever it is.

since times before, i’ve looked at milk that way. much like Joni looked at clouds - in shapes of ice cream castles and feather canyons and angel hair.

But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way

i’m a dark roast person, no milk. a good friend told me about some quote that says hot tea while working is less about drinking and more about keeping you company. that’s what my relationship with coffee is these days. no milk. my room has regulated air because i allow very little to pass through, as a result of which, whatever aroma is let in the room stays until it is replaced by something else. so when the nutty mist of the coffee hits the room, it stays. no milk. the day goes on and the mugs keep refilling. there comes a point when i am jittery and the deep woody smell of coffee feels rancid, that’s when i start craving milk until i add some to it. the air feels different, the ceaselessly appearing murk in the heart sets in. there’s milk in my coffee, there is MILK in my COFFEE. i wanted it, so i must have it. here we go. sure enough, milk gushes in the mouth. the coffee doesn’t feel like coffee. “it’s a sacrilege”, it groans through. the unctuous flavour of milk feels thick in the mouth, heavy in the stomach. milk is always good, everywhere but when added to the coffee it pulls the muddy strings of glands, roughens the day, becomes whatever taste-volume carcinogen could be and that’s when i realize why i never go for the milk. it kills the mood of the mouth. milk is the easiest to digest, and yet there is lactose intolerance.

clouds, when muted worsen the day. they kill the light and they rain and they flood and they snow. your plans within plans get affected. your playlists change. if you are anywhere below clouds or ruled by the queen, rain is anything but pleasant. on a good day, Joni would have stepped out for something that could’ve changed her life, but it was raining. the clouds got in her way. in my way.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all

when any certain feeling is accounted for near absolute, it pulls the rug beneath the ever changing, ever evolving truth. what’s milk to JUST me? it’s good, it’s nice, it’s easy and if i’m ever to crave pizza again, i’d rely on the world to have enough milk to provide me until i die. so milk, is a divine product unless it’s in my coffee. unless suddenly i discover that my body cannot digest the sugar in milk, ultimately killing me. then it’s the worst thing, almost a pagan punishment for being alive and threat ubiquitous. it could kill me sooner than the anxiety that comes with it. so here i am- i’m a four cheese pizza fanatic and i hate milk in my coffee. i’ve seen it from both sides and i don’t know what to feel about it for certain. i don’t know milk, at all. what i know is the feeling that it promises me that itself is based on a very careful, ever changing relationship. a mystic. an illusion. of milk.

much can be said about love and its version of life. i don’t know how reciprocating both are to each other, love and life, but there is a relative harmony in their progress. there is destruction, uncontrollable havoc, but in harmony nevertheless. you see, i don’t think life’s better outcomes show up by ignoring love and the grief it entails completely. you become someone else, almost childish, and that’s about the best thing you can do to yourself- become a child. inhibit adult restraints. sure, follow a certain discipline and mull over conundrums and spend hours about the rights from rights and wrongs from rights and give in to wrongs but do not kill yourself. be. a. child.

you know how you date, or how you flirt, or how you play it so cool you suppress some things within or how you express too eagerly without reading them, or how you encircle them or draw away from them or paint a picture of numb arms and hair on your face and their taste and how their neck confesses a sin with your nose and how they make you feel altered about yourself and how you transcend together when you’re drunk and fly with the lines of Prufrock. That’s the being in romantic love that we’ve all inched closer towards more or less. on top of that, there is surplus. things that are surprises. things that you and your lover brings in and it becomes whole. you understand that there is yet, another gap that exists beyond the realm of textbook feelings. once again, you return to your child. and then again. and again and again and again. that’s love.

But now it's just another show
And you leave 'em laughing when you go
And if you care, don't let them know
Don't give yourself away

…untill you ‘give yourself away’. until your fantasy of love loses a very important person in creating a dependency- you.

i think being happy independently is an emotional art and it’s a separate, complete thing about you. all of us are semi-circles and we’re lurking to find someone with a diameter that matches ours. but in order to make a complete circle, the offering has to be a semi-circle, not 1/3rd, not 51%, even if fragmented, a complete and perfectly measurable semi-circle.

and you must keep your semi, even when the circle is complete. you are half the constituent of area. when you inhabit half, you have to take care of that half as you take care of the other. don’t ‘give yourself away’. you get to keep your independance separate because at some point, the infamous poison of love that seeps in demands and compresses and twists and produces tumults in your figure, in your half. it unbalances the circle, makes it a rhombus. the milk churns and twists in your stomach and it stays with you.

“the center of every poem is this:
i have loved you. i have had to deal with that.”
(Salma Deera, Letters from Medea)

and that’s just it. all love is all consuming and that is, historically and evidently a beautiful, transformative and dramatically exhilatering experience, but whatever you do - Joni says - even if you keep up the show, make them laugh, be with them, remain by their side when they need you, be their half even, but whatever you do- don’t give yourself away. There has not been a better practical advice that was figured out at 23 in a plane.

it’s restrictive to see a version of things and accept them as they are. historically, nothing has been mono-dimensionally right. it’s very important to have a knife in your kitchen unless you’re succumbing in complete secrecy, then it’s a tool. it’s very important to sleep, unless everything else is scary. then it’s an escape. there is beauty in wreckage, and vice versa. to figure out a counter vision, so as to think of things as whole, to have a perspective that is approaching cautiously, to be aware of ebbs and flows and whirlpools is to be completely and entirely there for yourself, by yourself.

i know it’s been really long since the last email, the last newsletter and that’s driven by my complete absence on my desk and tending to it as a lover, as i’ve been trying to. the thing is, i’ve been having a hard time and these months have traded with me my utter emotional and physical strength. i’m collecting, and as i do, i’ll tell you more about it next time. hope you’re taking it one day at a time.