Restarting the motor

Dear all,

I want to write but I can't get started. Do you ever get that?

I am writing Rahi letters at the moment. I can do that well. Dear Rahi, I say. I love you! And then I draw hearts and a smiling face. Your Papa.

I'm also writing a bunch of stuff for other people. Clever things, like. Interesting thoughts. Angled takes.

I don't know how to get started with really writing again so, after little thought and much struggle, I figure the thing to do is just type some words and send them out into the great ether and hope that this loosens something.

My house burnt down. Well, not completely down. It's still standing. It's just missing a roof and walls in places. All in all, it's still mostly a house.

That isn't metaphor, by the way. It really did burn down. That was the end of July. We spent three months staying with our neighbours and now we have a new place.

It's funny, how when you can't write, you really can't write. I mean, look at the material I have - my house burned down! That ought to keep a writer in business for years. I could describe it in physical terms. I could describe playing with Rahi in the house when it started. I could talk about the fire engines and about his tears and how I held him really tight and how he asked if his toys would also be burned and then how he said, it's actually good, I can then buy new toys.

I could talk of outpourings of love, of tiredness, of fights and of closeness, of borrowed clothes and used pans. Of strange little bursts of euphoria, of nights where the only thing that kept me going was the thought that I might die.

Some people are great soliloquists. Give them a stage, a topic, and they come into their own. Others - me, I think - really only come into their own in conversation. I need to feel - or imagine - a person I'm talking to, listening to, a person I'm with, people who respond. And right now, you, whoever you might be, are that person for me. You're helping me speak, and in speaking to you I am finding words.

It's "funny", in that way that isn't funny at all, how much I - we? - put around ourselves. Man is born free, said Rousseau, and everywhere he is in chains. I think the standard interpretation of that is that Rousseau was talking about society and the chains it put around people. He may have been, I don't know. But what I think now, what I can tell you from personal experience, is that society's chains are nothing in comparison to the ones I put around myself.

To speak, to sing, to dance. To love. To be afraid. To be sad. All so natural. Our birthright. And yet so many rules, so much self-imposed constraint, so much fear.

Do you realize, asked The Flaming Lips, that everyone, you know, someday, will die? Well, they will. All of this, all this fear, restraint, self-censorship, self-obstruction, all of this is absurd in the face of that fact. Why do we cheat ourselves out of life?

Over the last few days, I have had outbreaks of a very deep sadness that I do not understand.

Life, eh.

yours,

Pranay