COLUMN: FATIMA IJAZ: On love, heartbreak and writer's block

WRITER'S BLOCK

I Writer's Block in Pale Moonlight

The idea was hitting me like quiet, pale blue mid-light. I had a voice. It was in the beauty of its demise, that I have drafted these words. It occurs once a day, daily, since the fall when I lose my metaphor and my speech and the calamity that it besets my soul with is akin to disease on lungs. I know and recall the taste of wine, winter, winsome wandering and workaholic weekends. I remember all this with the clarity of a clarinet. I also recall the somewhat sudden lunges of day-scrapers and the foot-long shadows of their downfall on stone-cold pavements etched with city cruelties. A road-sign that clearly marks out designated areas for: walks with strangers: is a highly prohibited domain in the realm of the mad and lonely. It doesn't serve the purpose of parakeets for one, and second it announces and denounces victory over word. I should have become a weather-beaten stone-rod or the fancy of a crow in a field. All perfect and squared as I was. In the middle of all this heat. Scare-crow. You got me. I fancifully regret my clownish acts of standing up, and ask apologetically for you to forgive me, if it ever occurs to you. There is a desire deep within the dust of this dread that has promised to over-lap the fastest swimmer of the black sea. Or was it red? I suddenly find words at a penny's care right when I need them the most, here. There, there. Soul-quiet-easy and unaccountable despair has ridiculously assaulted my brain-nerve for the past well, plenty month-tirade. I can't believe in simple logistics, the occurrence of a banality little known to poets: word-prose. Gesture. Speed. Actual form of lightning within the pen, arising in sea-foam on the breath of the page. Asking where it is telling, a tale of many-great long voyages and tellability. I recall for instance the day, when the black heirloom of the sonnet-sea, the sky,saton the page of the world, outside my free shape-of-a-balcony and window, and refused rain. No, downpour. It didn't occur to the sky-scene, for one moment, to appease my sorrow and to appear. Tear down the exterior of the form of plastic blue and sometimes even perfect black, and appear out of its ears and pockets, sidewalks and canaries. It just simply refused my terrible offer. I asked it and scathing in purple poignancy, recalled the form of rain, from the time of Before. When these words become alarm-signals, remind me to sting you awake, with new coffee and bright vodka. It works. Even on wednesdays. This is glorious. The moment you think it vanishes, it appears. It is a magic monastery of self-exiled monks, with a mind of its own meter. What, you may be asking? The factory of words. Its churning out material of mechanical weight and life-long servitude. Have you noticed how those words appear on their own? (We cried this in linguistics classrooms, full of the concern of sparrows over the color white!) Yes, in the psychoanalytical theory of actuality, you never really concern yourself with what words you will be using next (as I have been prone to do, as an idiot does, stare at the bright-white cruelty of seemingly seemless day - and why, why? - When a new language appears it breaks you into life and you start to gallop forth on the speed of its horses and its nightingales. songs are red in their mystery, perfect-eyed, staring at you with a lullaby smooth-sailing vermilion-voiced, red-gazing little beautiful perfect nightingale. Screech! Was that one to many? A cat stops in mid-sentence, catching the water's glare. I would hate to announce victory after this mind-episode as if it were an easily-won thing. It is so not! And thus we must go back to the very-first fullbright question of the language-class: How is language formed? Where did it come from? Who has ever seen it? 7000 BC in its written form, how out of context, is science! In fact, it never appears in the right shape, on the correct page, with the ear-nibbled square declaring: form! And when language exists, side by side to you in this cold, paradoxical universe, I bet it never once occurred to you to look back and notice how it was moving, behind you, inside you. Appearing in the door-way. Hanging on the walls of rooms, sliding down sofa-railings. Laughing. Totally Dali. Ambiguity is the word it detests, this massive sphinx, re-inventing itself to remind me of a former visit when a word had occurred within its sheer - a single word that had bookishly changed my perspective on the creator-rights of its use. This word was: furiously-I. (I penned that word down to announce an occurrence, the poem in me was refusing this form, the form of a writer, and so it will continue to do, on many occasions which I dare not take lightly.) The furious-I created out of double-contexts, the misery of mystery and the mystique of the mad. I can now finally begin to see that the pause in language occurs out of furious-Is losing their flight and when they fall (and this is no co-incidence as each thing in your life was waiting for these 127 hours to occur) they lose their height, all of a sudden. Flat on the floor. And that is how I lost words. I fell, and quite a dramatic half-formed, suddenly white-voiced madness of words, deafened to its primal purpose, sways, up above and then becomes part of air, invisible. She was standing and suddenly flew to pieces, whirlwind. It arrives on a day likeSunday, as if its ordinary. It lasts for longer than eight years (divisible by twelve, on enchanted days, by four, and when time is not playing its cruel jokes, on eighteen seconds)

II I cry for metaphors: Diary

Bright-light and wide-eye-alert. I cry for metaphors, found them mixed in my sleep, day-dreaming. Calling back from the faint recall, the insomnia of spell and re-birth. I, biting my nails, chew down decorum and ask in unhesitating diction the following two remarks: is it possible to drown in love and then recover miraculously? like a long-lasted affair with triple-easy fortune and wind-bag retreat. I daresay the dustier the windshield, the brighter is the stain on the memory of life's wired wet form, of the first impact of rain. Schmack! It falls like a puddle on all fours and it is distinguishably light-hearted, the sudden free form of flying. A doorstep of a day away is awaiting the opportunity of a lifetime and you slide by like a chameleon of quick-speed, changing shape like the metamorphosis of Ovid in mid-sleep. I can really begin to tell the difference between day-care and rehab - both cost a tonne and weigh like feathers on the abysmal method of sand-dunes. Whenever that will be - I know that it is now. (Don't ask me to be direct about this, this was all indirect, wayward, ill-clothed) I like the idea of staring cold into the fire, and realizing dancers have dreams. Quite suddenly the mood changes, was ayesterday's notice - it comes slowly - as a metaphor - on all fours and hits you from the back like a balcony full of sea - Splash! I critiqued modernity to the extent that it became modern. Antic are the realms of antiquity. Doorbell. Gotta go. A fancy sonnet appearing like rain from the forest of mangroves. I suspect delight is a crazy word that fashions the intellect on sight. How difficult it is to cultivate a sense of time - its either this way or that, splashing through a puddle of ceaseless ill-willed humor. I cry for an instant at the insightful mess a tea-cup creates. Little by little it is all gone, the artifice, the actuality, the art. Falls to pieces on the floor, life. A giant kid recalls science vividly and an alarming detail is the sepia on phones. I won't let the metaphor fall, lady - that, and this ever-bending need to desire a page, once again. The city of the future is (Careful, an artwork compilation) very much what I need. Daybreak. Singing songs ofsun. It shall happen, eventually. When I will meet you and it shall all be decorum, decorum.Wednesday! Wet wings, full-of-light.

reference:http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?_adv_prop=image&fr=yfp-t-701&va=mangrove

III Is it Necessary; The Poem

Blocks of ice placed on the pink-newborn of evening sky, melting. A white-world with deaf silences is round like squares. The sky becoming perfect folds of blue silk, which is being neatly halved, then squared and the stone sits invitingly in the wrappings of air. Sometimes to turn back to a world, after its first pale silhouette has sunk into the crystal mirroring sea, is like writing a poem in reverse. You think of the entirety of the poem, its long-voice, its shrill calm, its very ambiguity, its paradox, its artificially brief laughter of pain. Its standing alone in the rain. Its soaking wet form, holding the invisiblesunin words transformed to water; its begging indifference to form. Its need to be hanging on the branches of trees like new-dried leaves, hung by a woman or a man or a child - but nothing inanimate, green, from the contexts. Poems live half-lives, they die on their own. They survive wet winds, are assaulted by nuances, and can catch the lightning by its toe-nail. Just when it was day-light, the writer interferes in this magnanimity of brief but lasting desire and draws an insane and epic volume of the tree. It hits nausea. It then slants back to life and runs in the incessant silliness of rabbits, giddy with speed, and hits nausea. Or be clear like the winter and draw a snow-man, as part of the white, white covering the face of white and write it all in edible white. Disappearing into the skin of the poem, like finding black words out of secret drawers, shining pistols. When you disappear into the creation of a poem, you come back up for a swift-shot of air, then drown-dive one last time, then out again. It doesn't last as long as winter. Its only a day. A single dive. On your return you find days stretched out into hieroglyph rocks, symbols. Mathematics is digits, its not verses.

IV Medicinal

Medicinal books sit quietly on shelves, as if by their own silences they can account for the missing heart-beat of swans. I like to think of it as a metaphor of sleep, and these books are the dreams of such adventure. A dream can raise the spiritual significance of a day no matter which way the notes of the guitar go. It is a reality created out of bookish realms of hallucination and imaginary context. A bad day for language, hits you deep when you are shot at the heart of doors. A shot at language can outsmart the dullest drought, and dodge the bullet of speed-laughter. It hits you like a hurricane, straight at the core-quiet of the nicest room in your imaginary house. It ravages in empty whiteness, the blank stare of the watching stairs, envelopes the windows, eats away at the charcoal of walls and leaves behind a stinging, lice-ridden stillness that is tangible. Words that are so heavy, you wouldn't be able to lift them even if you were a sorcerer. Magic poems appear out of cavity-easy-walls if you are one who cares for the sweetness of words. But these die the death of an instant - a mosquito's death, at the fall of a moment. There is a shot. Some white wing is torn off. Another is wasted, cut-off. The shot silences the heart-beat of a swan. The poem now reads like a punched-in timesheet or newspaper with a pattern of missing lines. Someone holds it in his hand disinterestedly and takes a sip of tea. The bright moon confirms and alarms at the same-time. With night-vision we can begin to see the shape of things. The shape is of certain books that have hitherto been unnoticed. The realm is the same imaginary palace (a house, a tent, a roof anywhere) and the dream is walking through streets and streets in its own unattainable form (to tangible reality) and finding this palace (another intangible realism). The solitary walker, the dream meets the invisible laughter-sadness-and-tears of a poem and together they trace out the halo of the moon (another imaginary realm.) In the context of these books (why can't they speak!) a solvent situation was created by audio-guitar-voice-book. But I meant speak in human contexts, tear out of the written page, and stand in audio-visual clarity and human-touch. (Someone finally reminds: "those are movies.") But I meant, medicinal books with arms and hands and conversations. Sometimes you have conversations in the rain, you speak to out-reach the sound of falling water. These conversations are wet, though the words are dry. Where do these words exist? Once they are spoken, wet for an instant, gone. What is the shape of words? This reality only open to watching ears. Why can't I visually observe a word, as it appears? A writer must be very alone, living with un-spoken words, then waiting for the words typed on long, white sheets to loosen their form from the perfect stillness of envelopes and invisible envelopes, and manifest in the silent-movie world of reading silences. But it seems a private affair, all this writing and reading business. A very mystical, quiet and private affair.

V Words of wind-fire-earth-air

Words ignited out of the silence of fire, are repeated at intervals till you realize in six poems, the value of one. The mind stays with an infinite-idea of sea-scope (the essence of the poem) and presses lingeringly again and again on the shadow of the poem. This is the shadow that is occurring as a recurrent nightmare, on the faces and eves of every passing thing. The poem haunts after its death, this is certain, in the way it over-laps upon words of another poem. In the solitary contexts of respecting the space around a poem, these latter poems are hurt by the incessant, pounding continuity of a first poem. Thus, to detach one-self from a poem, one must use scissors. This could be cutting a sheet of sky from the ample sky-universe. Or tissue from the heart. It could after all, be surgical. Whatever the operation may be, the step of the cutting of the umbilical cord, is necessary. Who knows how long this can last? After all, the poem's world is not a real world. It is fabricated, an artifice of snow - like a hallmark card on the arrival of snow. Greetings! It is not the pain of the poem that passes on to newer climates of foreign lands, it is rather the words that keep appearing. Am I speaking this as if it was objective fact? It is, given model-dependent realism.

Words inspired out of air, are easier to replace. They fall to the ground (the intangible ground) like pieces of feather falling, light-hearted, non-caring. They fall as they die, like a few strands of hair falling at a natural rhythm. They don't care to ignite on a page, only to fall as snow on snow. The white of the page absorbs their sensuous and easy water-fall demise as part of its nature. It embraces the words as if they were its own. These words of air are easier to forget, and one may not remember for days or years how or why they were created. Surrealist dreams. Half created out of wakefulness, and half out of playful wandering. A walk on the cobbled path of a small and picturesque town. These words care to mark the contours of arousal: of fancy, of love, of desire, of thought. In the world of thinking, this is like chewing on invisible sugarcane. The only harm they cause is disappearance.

Words of earth are existing, solid, rock-like. They can't be forgotten, or erased or re-written. This is like writing a poem in first-person, you can never re-do it, like an error can't be re-done. These are continuous creations. Appear out of anywhere, because they can't be hidden. They sometimes can crash into our real world, intruders from the quietsun-set of imagination. When they crash into our world they are clownish and friendly in appearance. Not knowing what exactly to do in a world not of their own, they can fall silent but keep staring as if they have no eye-lids. Its constant day-light for these creatures of the night.

The words that are conceived in the heights of the whirling winds, come as easily as they go. They eavesdrop and don't last too long behind doors. They are always in a hurry and if you would catch them to have a cup of tea with them, you would find them alarmingly inactive. They don't know conversations much. The written world is severed from the spoken world in the way that is obvious: one is audible in the real-world and the other is a mind-state in the unreal? world.

THERE IS NO WRITTEN-UNIVERSE OTHER THAN THE ONE THAT EXISTS IN YOUR MIND. PAPER WOULDN'T LAST IF YOU WERE NOT THERE TO OBSERVE IT.

Sentenced

When emptiness reaches

It becomes the sound of water,

reaching

or the swallow of a word, choking.

Or the bird of a callous hand

sketching from its beak

its own version

of reality -

this is, burning.

Not too long ago, a verse

was a vase,

kept like a porcelain panther on glass.

To be away from it.

Essential halo. gaping wide

from the center of eyes, blank space.

An inability to make sense of it;

thesun, the chemistry,

the golden daffodil.

Realizing in seconds, anything

like the form had been exchanged

at a toy-store,

you are left with plastic,

& the real world outsmarts you

with watches.

In exchange of words.

In exchange of words I got gardens

to walk into and lose myself

till I became a ghost

sitting next to the white flower, idly.

This, and also local stories about

madness hiding in the wilderness.

Sentenced first appeared in the Karachi University Magazine, The Falconer.