Camus, Pamuk, Kolatkar

November 22, 2015.

4 a.m. Sunday; as good old days when Brahma thought up a world for Vishnu to breathe in and Shiva to breathe out; or when Big Bang strobed cosmos; good old days of which all is an absurd guess. Lighted a diya to Elephant God, prepared filter coffee and settled into Orhan Pamuk: Other Colours, Essays and A Story and Kala Ghoda Poems by Arun Kolatkar. Orhan Pamuk is marked and underlined by reads days ago; brief musings on many things including uncles and aunts and Albert Camus. Pamuk flips me into guesses over years starting at around age 24 when sports fields got blanked by words; sports became spectacles to watch and discuss not play; words earned a regular salary, became rolling stones in the brains. The Stranger of Camus me read of a whim at around 25 and have been phoning up the scenes till date at 70. Saw the film at New Empire, now gone, with Marcello Mastroiannai in the lead. Like Narayanathu Pranthan in Malayalam --- Mad Narayanan rolls stones uphill, chuckles at their rolling down; wish a Malayalam director makes a film; Meusrault in The Stranger, Sisyphus and Narayanan share absurdity. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the king of Ephyra. He was punished by being forced to roll a stone up hill, watch it roll down, till eternity. Who got there first with the idea, not sure; myths seem to have a way of seeping across the cosmos. Camus walked into me at 24, has not left me; mixed up with prayers and visits to Titvala. Possibly, Pamuk is better in Albert Camus: ' As time goes on, therefore, we cannot remember reading writers without also revisiting the world as we knew it when we first read them and recalling the incohate longings they awoke in us.When we are attached to a writer, it is not just because he ushered us into a world that continues to haunt us, but because he has in some measure made us who we are. Camus, like Dostoyevsky, like Borges, is for me this kind of elemental writer....These authors, read when you're young and reasonably hopeful, will inspire you to want to write books as well. ' Agreed Pamuk. But me has not gone beyond the folds of newspapers and some bylines, forgotten the morning the newspaper is sold. Camus and Arun Kolatkar have kept me a bit insane, moody ...an insufficiency... despite Writers Workshop publishing three volumes of poems, unread... and all that... Kala Ghoda and The Wayside Inn, now no more, were Kolatkar spaces...'Hand on hip you sit, straightbacked/in a torchwood yellow sari, blouse ditto,/ playing knucklebones with some of your friends..../ and a seemingly endless supply of which/you can produce at will, by reaching down/into the depths of your well-stocked clevage,/guarded at all times by two alert breasts.' Kolatkar puts sense into a Camusian absurdity. Suffices me; prompts me epitah: Born conventionally; Lived conventionally; Died conventionally.