Emptiness as a Beginning

When I began the course on Art, Theory and Criticism at Jnanapravaha, I thought I knew what I was getting into. Chiefly, I thought that I was about to learn what fascinated me so much about contemporary art. Jeanette Winterson expresses this first beginning into the unknown beautifully in Art Objects, and I would like to quote her.

“Long looking at foreign paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, and then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence."

Her essay struck me deeply, because I had found in her words a kindred spirit; someone who desired and despaired of art in equal measure. Oh, what a gladdening feeling to know that someone felt the same! This session went beautifully, and I returned home with hope and excitement.

Over the days, things changed. I would lose track in the middle of lectures. I would suddenly find myself playing peek-a-boo with straying thoughts, shooing them away shamefully. I often chastised myself, “what on earth are you doing, thinking about possible wisecracks and comebacks you could have deployed in past conversations? Listen to what he’s saying!” I would feel miserable and hopelessly lost as I found myself veering towards blankness and incomprehension, three-fourths of most sessions. One day, a guest lecturer asked me about Modernism in literature and I couldn’t say a word. My favourite college professor’s disappointed eyes washed over in front of me, and I died a little. That the guest lecturer and I were students of that same professor, albeit separated by uncountable generations, didn’t help. I had let a legacy down.

I would walk out of the classroom with my mind heaving with incomplete, tentative understandings of terms, concepts, histories, backgrounds, critical analyses and interpretations encountered in each session, and I would discard them as soon as I left the building. I began feeling depressed at my inertia, and despaired over my feeble, wisplike passions. Why wasn’t I fascinated anymore? Why did I not feel wondrously awed? Why did I not feel grateful and eager about being a part of the course, having the privilege of hearing such intrepid, erudite people share their thoughts and work with me? Why did I not want to explore, create, ask or act on anything?

As usually happens, discussing personal crises with others has its limitations. I feel reassured of the support of the people who care for me. I feel relieved to unburden myself for a while. But the search is my struggle alone, and the answers still remain as elusive as ever. These are not questions who become neighbours; it is alright not to know them intimately. Furthermore, some answers exist in the form of doubts. No, these are questions which plague and agonise and disrupt your life – till they are led to the truth.

Trains are vehicles of insight for me. This is true even when I am walking, though not in the fashion of a flaneur, but in that state of simultaneous thought and motion, when you find yourself extracting answers as automatically as you are walking. Being in motion has a curious way of letting you let go. Immediate objectives are taken care of – you are headed somewhere, you will arrive somewhere at some point in time. So now, you are free to exist peacefully in between. And today I realised why I was feeling depressed and reluctant to learn or explore anything.

It was because of my ego – a BA graduate in English literature from Sophia College. This arrogance consists of three tropes: 

the ‘BA graduate’ – one who can effortlessly absorb, read, write, understand, analyse, assimilate and express a text of whatever medium/genre

of ‘English literature’ – one who has studied closely and carefully various texts in English, spanning across period, style, intent and form and therefore should have no difficulty in continuing to do so

at ‘Sophia College’ – one who is a part of an institution of higher learning which is not only well-reputed, but has an illustrious history, which bequeaths you with an inheritance of unmatched intellectual abilities, that you have obviously lived up to at all times, and will naturally do so in the future

I couldn't accept the fact that I was finding it hard to understand lectures delivered in English. In something that was so closely related to literature. I refused to accept how much I had left behind, and how much I had to retrieve, and/or relearn. I was worried that thanks to my limited understanding of the sessions, I would submit lacklustre assignments. That my teacher would read my essay and be unfavourably surprised, “this is what she gives to me, the girl who did a BA in English from Sophia?” What I forgot was that I had not done anything towards keeping any of the skills that I developed during my three years of college, from rusting. And they had; they were now useless and required rigourous practise. And that the assignments were not judgments, not ends in themselves, but they were the first steps towards learning something new and unheard of.

Starting from scratch – this is the challenge that Jeanette spoke of all along, but which I now realised requires both humility and bravery. As I begin reading this once again, it starts making sense why our teacher began our course with this essay.

“Long looking at foreign paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, and then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art, all art, not just painting, is a foreign city and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. No-one is surprised to find that a foreign city follows its own customs and speaks its own language. Only a boor would ignore both and blame his defaulting on the place. Every day this happens to the artist and the art.

We have to recognise that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.”