Who are you?

It’s only when I crossed 40 that I realized I should do the thing I love the most, to write. So you could say it’s only since the last few years that I have no hesitation in calling myself a writer.

What do you write?

At the moment equal doses of fiction and nonfiction. Some years back it was only fiction and I did get success but not in the amounts I craved. So, to not let despair overwhelm me, I also began to dabble in non fiction—features on places, peoples, events, wild life, and even that strange but perfectly satisfying exercise called creative nonfiction.

Why do you write what you write?

I think I have a viewpoint on things and people that would interest others.

Why should we read what you write?

You know most of us writers lug around this baggage of self importance, this deep conviction that what we have to say is of critical value to the rest of humanity. I am no exception. Except that sometimes I hear twenty or thirty voices in my head, howling with laughter, and asking me, so, you think you are indispensable, you think the world will stop turning even for a few seconds when you are gone?

Is the world a better place because of what you write?

In little ways, yes. My son who is an absent minded genius in computer software suddenly put down his beer when we were having dinner one evening, when he visited me after a long gap. “You know, Dad. I enjoy reading your articles.” That’s it. That was all he said. We moved on to other topics. Mostly about his recent struggles and successes.

Some of my neighbors have featured in my articles. They glanced through them and for about two and half seconds a light shone in their eyes and their cheeks went a little pink.

A lot of characters in my nonfiction–like snakes, cattle, crocs–haven’t had a chance to read my articles. But I suspect they would be pleased to know that one more writer has joined a few writers to write about their usefulness to the environment.
Years ago, a sister in law, from the Our Lady of Poor Sisters gang and a teacher in a reputed school in Mumbai, told me that she and her gang laughed non stop for about five minutes after they read one of my humorous articles in The Times of India (It was about my wife and Saddam Hussein).

Things like that.

Of course there’s this big dream that I will one day emulate Updike’s or Greene’s success. Maybe in another fifty weeks or years. But I will.

And thank you, Kathryn, for being patient with all this rambling.

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Previously on the Five Minute Interview.

I have an op-ed piece running in today’s International Herald Tribune, which is online here: Speed up or get out of the way.

On Monday, the Cambridge Union Society debated “This House would return the Parthenon Marbles to the New Acropolis Museum in Athens.” Sponsoring the debate was easyCruise. The travel company offers a Classical Greece cruise that includes a visit to the Acropolis, the tourist attraction bereft of most of its treasures. An Acropolis reunited with its lost marbles is surely a seductive motive for those in the cultural tourism trade to back the repatriation campaign.

Of course, tourism companies and museums shouldn’t feel bad about sustaining commercial interests in the fate of the Parthenon (a.k.a. Elgin) Marbles, but guilt has always been an underlying theme in this tug of war between historical rivals, the English and the Greeks.

Nikos Kazantzakis (acclaimed for his exuberant Zorba the Greek, but excommunicated for tempting his Christ) put it rather aptly when he referred to the illegitimate acquisition of the Marbles, “In her sooty vitals,” he wrote in his England: A Travelogue, “London stores these marble monuments of the gods, just as some unsmiling Puritan might store in the depths of his memory some past erotic moment, blissful and ecstatic sin.”

And pro-repatriation Christopher Hitchens echoed Kazantzakis when he wrote, “There is, in one of the museum’s priceless acquisitions, a repressed and guilty secret.”

Underlying much of the popular debate on the Marbles is the outrage and hysteria surrounding the original theft 200 years ago, but the most legitimate argument for repatriation is the motivation behind easyCruise’s support of the campaign and one that is in line with contemporary archaeological theory: that cultural treasures should always be displayed in their original context.

But why should the unity of the monument be more desirable than its disunity? Every monument from the past exhibits its history and the Acropolis exhibits layers and layers of it, a true palimpsest (to quote Kazantzakis) of numerous historical periods. We can never reclaim what was lost when the Byzantines converted the Parthenon into a church, or when the Ottomans converted it into a mosque, or when the Venetians bombed it, or when Greeks recycled its stones to build other structures. So why should we hope to reclaim what was lost to the British? History is full of such wrongs. So why make right this particular wrong? Why cleanse the “sin?”

The historical truth of the Marbles in London and the Parthenon in Athens includes all the illegitimacy, looting and plundering of the past. I say that this “guilty” history adds to, not detracts from, the beauty of the monument.

Kazantzakis might even have agreed with me.

When, in 1939, he travelled to England, he visited the British Museum countless times and conducted his own little debate: In the case of a great disaster – earthquake, fire, Barbaric invasion – which artefacts would he be moved to save?

He spent days on end examining his three most “stable loves:” the Assyrian reliefs, the Persian miniatures and the Classical Greek exhibit. Incidentally, Kazantzakis was able to do this because the British Museum offers a unique opportunity to experience the world’s cultures under one roof; just one more argument often cited against repatriation.

Kazantzakis responded to the Marbles just like any Greek would: with epic emotion characteristic of the most nationalistic Greek he praises the Hellenic miracle, the attainment of the “great secret of perfection in life and art.”

Reading his philosophically charged account of his museum visit with its heightened and patriotic tone, it seems that Kazantzakis would solve his conundrum by choosing to save what, as a Greek, he “must” save: the Parthenon Marbles, his cultural heritage.

And yet, he does not. “I would not choose what I ’should’ chose,” he writes, “I would chose to save the wounded Assyrian lioness, my sister.” The alabaster relief of a dying lioness was carved in 650BC as Assyria fell to Babylon.

Granted, it was a different world back, a world ready for war and Kazantzakian scholar Vrasidas Karalis, of the University of Sydney, tells me that Kazantzakis would have seen the “strong emotions” and “raw animality” of African art and not the “symmetry and harmony of Greek art” as better able to express the “the atmosphere of barbarism and imminent collapse experienced by Western civilisation.”

But what if Kazantzakis were here today? Would he bow to nationalist pressure for Greeks to support the cause and call for the return of the marbles?

I doubt it.

Let us remember that this is the man who saw himself as a human being first and a Greek second, this was the man excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox Church, the man who was loved more by non-Greeks than his own countrymen, the man who requested “I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free” to be his epitaph, the man who knew that one must be at once “soaked in” one’s culture and yet removed from it so as to better see the truth.

I can only conjecture that Kazantzakis would keep things as they are. He would visit the divided monument in Athens and in London and be awed and astonished by the plundered history in one place and the guilty possession in the other. I too wish to be astonished by them, wherever they are. And as a Greek who does not live in Greece I am both soaked in my culture and free from it. Also, since I have no commercial interest or any other other interest in the Marbles, I can freely say to the British, keep the guilty secret; do not cleanse the sin.

I recently met someone from the country.

This person had always lived in the country. Real country. Cows, vegetable gardens, tree chopping, no running water.

We began talking about country life versus city life, as you do. He had not been in the city for more than a few days and already he missed the country. We were having coffee and breakfast in a little apartment (a box, he said) and he disliked the idea of being so boxed and close to other beings. That he couldn’t raise a loud political point or play loud music or make loud love without the neighbours being in on it all too.

I had lived in the country too and missed the freedom living so far from a neighbour gave you.

Soon the conversation became uglier. I remember the same bias I developed when I was a country person. There was something almost sub-human attached to those who lived in the city. As though, a city dweller, could not ever possibly be happy, because he or she was so far removed from what was essential to human happiness: proximity to “the land”, to what is natural, to what is age-old, to what is simple.

My country friend knew how to be happy. But I was not convinced that happiness could only be found by going “back to nature,” or backwards in any sense.

I’ve been writing some short essays as my alter-ego, Diotima. (The essays will make up a book of essays called Diotima’s Digression. Here is a relevant one on Happiness and the City.

The city life. A necessary evil? Cities are chaotic, crowded, and even cruel. City citizens spend an obscene amount of time in traffic, pay outrageous money for housing and exorbitant interest rates on loans and credit cards, inhale polluted air, and suffer from anxiety and stress.

But despite its many evils the city offers a world of goods. The city offers opportunities for career enhancement, earning good money, and buying the best clothes, gadgets, and homes. There are intoxicating parties and clubs here, tempting dining and drinking dens, and the best in cultural and intellectual enrichment. The big city also offers the promise of finding true love. Yet, even with all these goods, city-zens remain notoriously pessimistic.

But many, many years ago, one man went to the city and he was happy.

The year was 306 BC and Epicurus was thirty-five years old. He set up house (the famous “Garden”), invited his closest friends to join him, became self-sufficient, analyzed-away the problems in life, and by doing so, spent his days in blissful ataraxia (or tranquility) until the ripe old age of 72.

Epicurus shunned the “prison” of city life: the economic temptations, the societal pressures, the petty politics of work and everyday life. He was solely interested in the pursuit of pleasure.

Modern city-zens are also pursuing pleasure. Pleasure in material possessions, pleasure in wealth, pleasure in food, drink, and sex. But while city people the biggest consumers, they’re amongst the unhappiest. Why? Have the teachings of ancestor Epicurus been forgotten?

According to Epicurus, there is natural wealth and there is vanity wealth. Natural wealth is easy to get. It’s just your basic nutrition, clothing, accommodation, transport, and social interaction with good friends. In short: simple life, simple pleasures. Vain wealth is hard to get. More than that, it’s a trap. Vanity consumption can never be satiated because vanity demands more; a better mobile phone, a newer car, a bigger television set, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

Buying and owning things do bring pleasure and a sense of happiness. True. But here’s the flip side: pleasure brings pain. Overindulgence in the city (drinking, eating, spending too much) often leaves a citizen with one bitter hangover (headache, stomachache, remorse over debt). Epicurus wanted pleasure more than anything, but he also knew that too much of a good thing ended up being a bad thing. As far as he was concerned, happiness was freedom from pain and fear.

Epicurus’s recipe for happiness is simple. Make personal happiness your goal. Simply make happiness your goal so that your happiness isn’t dependent on wealth, cars, villas, or fame. Instead, possessing things or not possessing them should depend on whether they will make you happy. It’s the slightest shift in thinking, a mere philosophical game, but it makes all the difference.

Epicurus believed that a philosophical outlook on life cured a troubled mind and increased peace of mind, or ataraxia. This meant freedom from pain and fear, which meant happiness.

But more than anything else, Epicurus observed, a truly happy life is one in which you are surrounded by true friends. True friends don’t judge you by your wealth, success, or status. True friends and true friendships exist for their own sake, not for mutual gain. Best of all, friendship, being a natural wealth, is free and easy to obtain in a city.

It is the simple life, and a bunch of true friends, that brings happiness.

My story A Silly Little Thing is now archived over on the Pequin.org site.

Iris fell in love with George because he didn’t let cybersex interfere with his punctuation or grammar. He always typed with two hands and kept every finger poised over the keyboard as he’d learned in the touch-typing course he took prior to his doctoral studies. He’d taken the course to aid rapid drafting and redrafting of his research work and since remained chained to the robotic accuracy of touch-typing, even during cybersex.

Iris, despite having a PhD in linguistics, was quite happy to assume the grammar and syntax of sex…

Who are you?

If I could work that out, I wouldn’t write at all. I’m a hybrid in that I’ve lived for years in several different countries, including five years in Spain and more than eight years in Argentina. In a few days I return to a London winter. I’m Scottish, and was brought up in a small village in the Scottish Highlands. When I visited London for the first time, I found it intoxicating yet alien. I am a sociable man and dread the periods I have to shut myself away in order to write-during these bouts, it’s goodbye to camaraderie. My athletic life is also important to me. What else? I recently launched “The International Literary
Quarterly“. Regarding writing, I think this relates to seismic events I have been through and my attempts to synthesize these. My early years were privileged as my father was a successful businessman but my parents never married and when he left, we were plunged into real poverty. That stays with you.

What do you write?

I’ve just made my first foray into fiction-a short story called “Trip to Hell” which came out the other day in “Boston Literary Magazine”. The story is based on a relationship I had in Norway before I went up to Cambridge. Given that I had to write to a 1,000 word limit, it’s over-compressed, but I hope it nonetheless conveys the atmosphere of my year in that country. In fact, the town called “Hell” does exist. For a long time I have wanted to write fiction-prior to this I wrote critical articles, literary translations from Spanish and French and interviews. In addition to embarking on a number of journalistic assignments (I recently became a member of the NUJ) I’ll continue to write in all of these media and soon will write about the criminal personality-this subject enthralls me. Also, a radio play, with an interesting take on an aspect of William Gladstone, is in the offing.

Why do you write what you write?

As I said, I’ll continue writing in all of media but fiction will be my priority from now on. My next story will deal with paranoia. I am very interested in states of mind that border on madness or begin to be madness itself. The great love of my life-to date-went completely mad, an acute attack that proved to be total and, indeed, fatal. Anyway, my next story, and subsequent ones, will grapple with border-line states of mind.

Why should we read what you write?

I hope I will prove to be a strong narrator. In the end, this is the all-important thing. If the story line is not compelling, what’s the point of writing it at all? In general one can tell from the outset if the author has this button-holing quality-the first few lines say it all. Anyway, the writer is lucky to be read at all. There is so much literary competition out there and, apart from that, people have such busy lives, many things to juggle, so I certainly don’t take it for granted that people should read anything I write.

Is the world a better place because of what you write?

Not at all. I certainly don’t expect it to be. I am not a perfectibilian and I suppose we have to accept humanity with all its flaws. There is a murky quality to life which is chiaroscuro, with both light and shade. I have no literary agenda or axe to grind, and I fight shy of all literary “schools”. I do believe that the best writers are “amoral” in the sense that they can see a particular condition from different, and often variant, points of view. I tend to think that those who are dogmatic would be better– with their one-dimensional judgements– to give creative writing a wide berth. I would go along with Keats who gave primacy to “the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination.” In the end, what else matters?

In his Travels in England Nikos Kazantzakis talks about “rhythm.”

“Τι είναι λοιπόν ρυθμός; Μια κεντρική κίνηση όλο αρμονία, που κυβερνάει το στοχασμό και την πράξη μας.”

“What is rhythm, then? A single central movement, all harmony, that governs our goals and actions.”

My first response to this is that Kazantzakis’s “rhythm” is equivalent to will. To a central (and internal) desire, call, need. Will, however, is sometimes forceful, violent, a violent act, whereas Kazantzakis’s rhythm is quiet and meditative. (?) It does not intrude, it waits, then acts in harmony with one’s internal sense of self and one’s entire existence.

‘Οποιος έχει ρυθμό είναι λυτρωμένος με όλη του την ύπαρξη.

Whoever has rhythm is saved. Whatever he does is right because it is in harmony with his entire existence.

In this sense, is Kazantzakis’s rhythm linked to the existentialist notion of authenticity? To self-recognition? “Authenticity — in German, Eigentlichkeit — names that attitude in which I engage in my projects as my own (eigen).” (SEP)

In functioning according to one’s internal rhythm am I better able to act with integrity to myself, to be what I am, to act out my own choices (and not act in a way that is my duty depending on the role I adopt in my social interactions). If I move according to my own rhythm do I then act autonomously and in a way that only I can be responsible for and in a way that is my concern only? Does moving with this internal and harmonous rhythm ensure that I proceed to make myself what I am?

Love - romantic, passionate, erotic love - is often portrayed, understood, or lived as a type of madness. Scientists reveal chemical imbalances, psychologists classify it with various disorders, but while reading an old interview with Martha Nussbaum called “The Ethics of Literature” (sorry, no reference, it just exists as a dog-eared photocopied text found in a folder marked ‘personal’) I am reminded of the rational basis of this most misunderstood emotion.

Nussbaum, referring back to Aristotle, says:

…emotions such as love, grief and anger are based upon reasoning about what’s valuable, and in fact are suffused with reasoning.

And then, something from William Hazlitt:

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.

Falling in love then is surely a philosophical act, an act of reason. In falling in love we are acting to improve our life. Life with the object of our love is valued more than life without our love object. When we fall in love, we are concerned with the ‘good’ and how to live a good life. In this sense, falling in love is also an ethical act.

Fame achieved after death has often/always been associated with a sort of divine genius. An artist/poet/writer recognised after death is one who was ahead of his/her time, who produced work of extreme and timeless importance, who could only be understood and appreciated by future, more enlightened generations.

But I always felt this a consolation prize. The real prize - that of being recognised and knowing about it - never been awarded. The artist who dies in obscurity - the loser.

I’ve started reading Fowles’ journals - the first volume. And he seems to be of the same opinion.

November 7, 1949 -

Immortality is a convention, a white elephant. A futility. There is no logic in planning for it. No enjoyment, no beauty can come out of it. All life should be designed to be contained within life. Within the closed circle. Outside the theatre, the bouquets won’t be seen. The turnip who gains fame in his life, and lives, has an immense superiority over the poet who becomes famous after his death, and obscurely exists. Immortality is the gravestone of the spirit. What use is the gravestone? 

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

I would like to creep back into the blogosphere once again - after a five-month period of utter silence - and announce that my silence was philosophical. I would like to say that words, that language - well, my words, my language - could not show what I wanted to show, could not communicate what I wanted to be conveyed. I would like to say that - in the same way that Wittgenstein once concluded that metaphysics cannot be put into words, that such things make themselves manifest and are therefore shown and not spoken about - my personal metaphysics also could not be worded but would have to be shown. And because they had to be shown and not spoken about, I had to stop blogging to remain silent.

This has not been the case.

There has been no such philosophical realisation. While the blog has been silent, I have not. I have been busy speaking about things in other spheres, virtual and real. I have been typing away utter trivialities, sending meaningless bytes into cyberspace and receiving meaningless bytes back. This exchange has been relentless and, to my continued amazement, I have been indefatigable.

But I rather miss this place. This public monologue, with occassional dialogue on the sidelines. It allows for both silence and noise. Silence in the space between posts - when I can think about what can be said and what cannot - and the noise that comes afterwards, maybe a comment or two.