There is a planet, a pale blue dot against the unimaginably vast, black expanse of the cosmos, third in distance from a 4.6 billion-year-old, non-stationary, yellow-dwarf star, and home to a sentient species of quarrelsome primates who gather once a year, at public spaces in different places and times, to holler in celebration for their planet’s imaginary return to an arbitrarily-chosen spot in the ecliptic plane. They are exceptionally proud of their intelligence. Happy new year! Happy, happy new year!
Out of the tree of life, I just picked me a plum
You came along and everything started in to hum
Still, it's a real good bet
The best is yet to come
We sure hope so.
Snark aside, perhaps the significance of the moment we all celebrate, reluctantly or otherwise, is embodied in this word: “yet”. This has been a brutal year. Yet. We have slaughtered and starved and overfed and pillaged. Yet. We have elected monsters and warmongers and crazed prophets. Yet. We have disappointed ourselves over and over and over. Yet. Our journey is not done. Not yet. So there is still hope. At least, enough to place a bet on things working out.
TBLM has had a great year. We’ll be publishing our 60th issue next April. We are now open for submissions.
But wait, there’s more! Three of our poetry editors —Kinjal Sethia, Kunjana Parashar & Yashasvi Vacchani— instituted the Osmosis poetry prize. For still-evolving details, check out their instagram page.
Kunjana Parashar has had a very good year. Her manuscript They Gather Around Me, the Animals was selected by judge Diane Seuss for the 2024 Barbara Stevens Poetry Book Award.
So yes, we feel good. Perhaps we shouldn’t, given the scale of misery’s canvas. Yet.
Janice Pariat’s colophon “The Shape of Time” is a meditation on finding a spot in this world, one that has become a home. One is reminded of Katharine Butler Hathaway’s memoir The Little Locksmith (1943). Afflicted with tuberculous spondylitis as a child, which left her with a spinal deformity and an assorted family of chronic ailments, Katharine lived, loved and made meaning out of a universe that often seems devoid of any. She found an unloved house and instantly recognised “that whether I liked it or not this at last was my house”. She made the house a home and the experience transformed her.
All well-brought-up people are afraid of having any experience which seems to them uncharacteristic of themselves as they imagine themselves to be. Yet this is the only kind of experience that is really alive and can lead them anywhere worth going.
May the new year lead you, dear reader & fellow primate, if not to such a home, at least to such an experience, such a yet. Happy new year.
Colophon: The Shape of Time
JANICE PARIAT
I am writing this in a room filled with time. Is that strange or unusual, you ask? Possibly not. We are in time always, and if some physicists are to be believed, time is in us too. Do I mean I’m surrounded by markers of time? Well, yes—though there’s ever so much more to it than that, I promise. In here, no analog clocks, I don’t (ever) wear a watch, so time lights up on several screens, computer, tablet, phone, announcing the constantly privileged present. To my left, most starkly, stands a calendar, several candles, and a 15-minute hourglass. But time more quietly also adorns the walls around me as lines and loops of years the wood has seen. Sometimes, I catch myself following these oil-darkened patterns asking what year was this I wonder, and that one? And why has this season in particular left such a deep and enduring mark? On my desk, among other things, lies an agate stone, peculiarly grey and white, also marked by similar swirls. Each line a geological measure, possibly of thousands of years. To my right, two prints, up close also of agates, cross-sectioned, exposed, one banded, concentric-circled, the other the same with a mesh of crystals at its heart. Behind me, vintage prints of types of stone, malachite, tourmaline, labradorite, each showing the impression of time in their own way. In one corner, a cyanotype by an artist friend, of ancient monoliths rising on a slope just outside Shillong. What we consider time- and memory-keepers of our hills.
This structure itself, this room, annexed to the main house, built, conjured up over these last two months is a time monument of its own. I had returned home to find that what I’d allotted as a study space, upstairs, next to my parents’ bedroom could not function as I needed it to—it wasn’t secluded enough, out of the way enough; in fact, it felt too vast, too in-the-midst of things. So, we decided to shift, to a patch of garden that wasn’t quite being used to its full potential, overrun as it was by old flowerbeds stuffed with hard, clay-ey mud. These were all dug up, emptied, erased, flattened. The patch, on the edge of a slope, wasn’t strong enough to support a “pukka” cement and bricks structure, so wood it was. Which we found in an outlying sawmill, abandoned by a church that had ordered an excess of this material for building its own congregation space. What a relief there wasn’t need to cut anymore trees—that this one, I like to think, had found us. A kseh bilat, as it’s called here in Khasi, a type of pine introduced to these hills by the British, straight and tall, good for homes and furniture. It lay there in its enormity, ringed by years and years of being in a forest, being alive. The trunk was sliced and shaped and sanded into planks, and brought home, but not before the Bah Heps (for both their nicknames are the same) had built some legs for the shed to stand on, and a strong, sturdy frame. The bones of it, if you will. “This is so much like writing, isn’t it?” I told Sam, my husband, fellow amateur architect and designer of said cabin. “How so?”
“Well…” I struggled, “It’s all about the building of things.”
Even if this sounds like the most hopelessly obvious thing to say, stay with me.
Writing, like building a cabin, is all about configuring structure.
And what might structure be? The configuring of time. And space.
For so many of my writing years, I didn’t think about structure—at least not in any cognizant, usefully aware way. The stories in Boats on Land seemed to tumble out of a collective communal storytelling space; told and retold around me by friends and family until I’d absorbed them osmotically and carried them around in my skin for years. With my first novel Seahorse, I knew something was wrong but wasn’t sure exactly what that was. This story about the slippages and trickeries of time and memory narrated in the most stringently linear way. “It’s not working,” I’d wept. I was visiting a friend in Rome, and he returned from work that day to find me on all fours, rearranging the manuscript on the floor. “We start,” I declared triumphantly, “close to the end of things.” For a long while, this was my way of dealing with narrative structure—instinctively, haphazardly, and with a healthy dose of despair. By the time I wrote The Nine Chambered Heart, a more vivid awareness of structure had begun to creep into my practice. For each section, each voice, in the novel, I would allot four thousand words. No less, no more. What would this lead to? How would each story—some set in a day, some over years—contend with this constriction? Would it help me find, in some way, the essential, the crucially necessary? What would be left in? What would be left out?
It was all very well to be learning to think about and negotiate structure in one’s own writing practice, it was even harder to teach it in a classroom. At that time, as I still am, I was a Creative Writing instructor at Ashoka University, and in the class dedicated to discussing structure—and I see now how pointless it is to restrict and segregate craft elements like this—I admit I was lost. To Google for help meant coming across a plethora of abominable “structure exercises”. The ABCD trick that demanded a classic (Western) chronology: Action, Background, Conflict, Development, End. Others that offered The Hero’s Journey, The Three Act Structure, and something called Dan Hermon’s Story Circle, which to me sounded like a hippie summer camp. Yet others reduced narrative structure to a shape. A circle, a spiral, a cube. Which could be helpful, perhaps, but not, I’d imagine until there came an understanding that the shape of the story being told couldn’t (shouldn’t) be a cookie-cutter exercise. That instead, as I remember poet-writer Sharmistha Mohanty saying, structure, or form, is “not a given”. And so, for many semesters, I struggled. Until, while beginning to work on Everything the Light Touches, structure became a full, prominent force. Thinking about structure, I realized, began the moment you asked yourself, how do I tell this story? Where do I begin? Where do I end? When do I introduce this character or that one? How do I move along the timeline/s? And, most importantly, why? Structure is the meaningful or meaning-making ordering of information—so that the narrative is as effective as possible for what you wish to achieve.
Watching the cabin being built was an act of infinite patience.
What had been estimated at three weeks to complete ended up taking two months. On so many days, it felt excruciating—I couldn’t work, I couldn’t find centre or anchor without a desk, a table, my notebooks. All seemed in disarray. But this length of time allowed for a surprising intimacy with the act of construction. The physicality of it. In a way I hadn’t ever known before. The planks, I learned, couldn’t just be fitted anywhere, anyhow, they needed to sit well next to, and with, each other. The window we had commissioned was much too large for the space, throwing it off-balance, and had to be downsized. The skylights needed to be only that wide so the trees could be seen and not the boundary wall. The floor planks placed in a way that didn’t seem aesthetically dull—a mix of shorter and longer planks. An intricate jigsaw-puzzle that took days to complete. And all the while the Bah Heps measuring and calculating and weighing options. Building is an act of time. A shaping of space. And so is writing.
Not enough, or much, has been made on how writing/literature and architecture can be considered complimentary creative fields. Though David Spurs points out in his book Architecture and Modern Literature that they both are “potentially the most unlimited of all art forms in their comprehension of human existence itself, and this fact alone justifies the task of putting them into relation with one another.” There is admittedly some online discussion on how they are both about transforming voids into visions, how they both hold in great significance the carte blanche or blank slate—most famously illustrated by Orhan Pamuk, architect turned writer, who said he’d “abandoned the great empty architectural drawing sheets that thrilled and frightened me, making my head spin, and instead sat down to stare at the blank writing paper that thrilled and frightened me just as much.” Both writing and architecture are about balance—one considers the practicalities of construction, the availability of materials, the needs of the inhabitants and the other juggles plot, character, pacing, prose, etc. This argument, though, I’d hazard to say could be made of many other artforms, and what I find more compelling is their connection to space—how both offer an interiority, some more profound and moving than others. For Alice Munro, “A story is not like a road to follow…it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the rooms and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.” This concept of story as house allows you to imagine not just their connected structural physicality but also of story as a space one inhabits—and consequently where self, space, and story share intertwined morphologies.
In here, in this small shed, we have kept clean lines, conjuring, we hope, simplicity, clarity, and smooth unbroken forms. The ornamentation is kept to a minimal. We have tried to capture a view of treetops, of sky, of world, beyond the structure despite its compact confinement. It sits unobtrusively at the edge of the garden, hugging the main house but separate from it, tucked away, barely spied from the front because of a growing, stretching guava tree that has decided to play resident door guardian. But the shed isn’t mere punctuation in a small-town garden-scape, a framing, a structure from which story emerges; it is story. A sturdy, well-built, perhaps even slightly eccentric story, with its own shades of light and shadow, with its own preferred seasons, and responses to heat and rain and dust. And as with most of my beloved stories, it acknowledges quite palpably the presence within it of much longer timelines. This is why all around me, wood and stone. Serving not just as markers of time, but as reminders that we are embedded always in other profoundly longer stories. This awareness has shaped me as a writer—this story, I tell myself at the start of any literary project now, began so long ago. In fact—and this is when I spiral into paralysis—don’t all stories begin the moment of the universe’s conception? Apart from the fact that this “long perspective” has made writing short stories (for now only, I’m hoping!) an impossibility, I find I may be more attuned to—borrowing from architecture—the superstructure and substructure of things. Which allows, hopefully, for more meaningful responses to questions about narrative structure—Where do I begin? Where do I end?—and how might the stories we tell not collapse into myopically singular stories. For them to be resonant and rich and as wondrously, frustratingly, complicated as life around the shed already is—for our stories to take the shape of trees, endlessly evolving, growing in their place with a view of the sky.
——
JANICE PARIAT is the author of Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories and Seahorse: A Novel. She was awarded the Young Writer Award from the Sahitya Akademi and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction in 2013. Her novella The Nine Chambered-Heart, bestselling in India, was published in the UK and in ten other languages including Italian, Spanish, French, and German. Her novel Everything the Light Touches (Fourth Estate, Borough Press UK, and HarperVia USA), published in October 2022, was awarded the 2023 AutHer Award for Fiction.
Currently, she lives between New Delhi and Shillong with a cat of many names.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Song: The verse is from Frank Sinatra’s song “The Best is Yet to Come” (1959, Composer: Cy Coleman, Lyricist: Carolyn Leigh).
Banner image: Pale Blue Dot Image courtesy, NASA. Public Domain. Some basic facts:
This is a photograph composed out of the image data sent by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. The images of the solar system were taken from a distance of more than 6 billion km (~4 billion miles) from Earth. The spacecraft had just passed Saturn.
Carl Sagan’s advocacy led to NASA’s decision to send the necessary instructions to Voyager to give Earth one last look.
About the “pale blue dot”, Sagan wrote these famous words in his eponymous book:
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam…”
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You--the editors, and perhaps many of your readers-- have a profound sense of the absurd/tragic/comical nature of human existence. Our unique and mysterious sentience that only our species has evolved out of millions, including the great apes who share an almost identical DNA, has made us truly flukes of the Universe. Yet...yet I sense there is a reason, a reason for everything really.