Visiting Oneself

Visiting Oneself

Writing is a calling that invites one to keep visiting oneself; to keep in touch with one’s inner being. Most people in society begin to see themselves as enclosed units that are as impenetrable as fortresses. How, we might ask, are we to enter our inner beings? Nature provides no entry points to that highly nebulous commodity called the ‘Self’. The writer is like a detective who has discovered a secret, invisible passage that can connect us with ourselves. Reaching the inner being, what one calls ‘me’ is a journey without a route. The destination called ‘me’ keeps shifting its location. One day it’s this and another day it’s that. The destination is made on something like quicksand; it sinks into nowhere in no time.

 

The human species moves ahead either by covering space (moving literally) or by concretizing time (moving imaginatively). This can happen by chance or by design, but it happens when the mind begins to stop using space to advance forward. There is an invisible road that materializes in the mind that concretizes a journey through perception. This second kind of advancement happens within the mind and happens at an infinitely fast speed. It is when this second phenomenon happens that one begins to find signs of reaching the Self, a journey that one rarely sets out to travel consciously.
The journey of perception is different from the journey of understanding. Understanding is done rationally with logic and ratiocination or exact thinking. Perception happens when your imagination helps you to make sense of something not through ratiocination but through your Self; through personally felt experiences that penetrate into your whole being rather than through the mind alone. A writer explores the world through perception rather than through rational understanding. As he or she does this they often come across an image, symbol or metaphor to describe what they have felt on their pulses. Existing lingual resources (linguistic devices like words, phrases or idiomatic expressions) will not suffice to help them write what they wish to write because these devices have been put together collectively in society. For traveling through Time one needs constant visits to the Self and then returning to the world outside, stitching together the two and then going ahead. Literary authors are pioneers in this category of human experience; they are like sages who meditate their way through as they conquer the world.
I have often chosen (consciously or unconsciously) to use Magical Realism as my way of going ahead with my writing because this method easily gets into that mode of perception in which  one looks upon the world not merely with the brain but with faculties that support the whole being; this single implement of digging out the reality as it actually is for me is what I employ while writing. My novel, The Tailor’s Needle along with some of the stories in my story-collections, Marriages are Made in India, and, Intriguing Women, employ either magical realism or something close to it.

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