Happy Saraswati Valentine Day

Hello from an understudy to the goddess of procrastination.

It just so happens that today is Valentine’s Day and Saraswati Puja, a.k.a. the one day in the calendar that is officially dedicated to Saraswati, the divine nerd of the Hindu pantheon. There are some who find parallels between Saraswati and the ancient Greek goddess Athena — both are said to have sprung, fully formed, from the minds of divine patriarchs (Brahma and Zeus, respectively) — but I’m not convinced. Athena has a tendency to side with powerful men while Saraswati’s stories have her going up against Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Athena also tends to go out and do things. Aside from the many stories in which she appears among mortals and yanks their chains, Nike, the goddess of victory, is considered an attendant or attribute of Athena. There are associations of war and athleticism with Athena, which suggests she’s inclined towards activity. In contrast Saraswati reads books, plays the veena, and minds her own business. As you might have guessed, she is the kind of goddess I am happy to get behind.

Back when the rifts between Hinduism and other Indian religions still seemed bridgeable, Saraswati was a goddess who had devotees from many religions. (Maybe she still does. As a single lady who stands up for herself and chooses to be alone, Saraswati is neither docile nor domestic. She is perhaps too independent, too bookish and too unimpressed by testosterone to be a favourite of the Hindu Right).

Spotted in Kolkata, an army of Saraswatis. Photo: mine.

Rather than keeping people out, Saraswati Puja used to bring together artists, writers, musicians, academics of all shapes, sizes and faiths. We’d seek her blessings by putting brushes, pens, notebooks, laptops and instruments at the feet of the idol of Saraswati. We’d wear yellow clothes and eat yellow food (it’s supposed to be Saraswati’s favourite colour even though she herself is only seen in white). Some would perform a formal puja, but more important than any religious rite was doing things of which the goddess would approve. On Saraswati Puja, writers wrote at least a few lines, readers read books, music was played — because Saraswati is the discerning one. She’s not the sort to be mollified by ritual and performance. I’d like to believe she’d rather you stayed home and read a book, watched a film, made music … wrote a newsletter.

I’ve been stalling the writing of Dear Reader with the kind of diligence that would make me a fine candidate for the goddess of procrastination. (Incidentally, there was actually someone with that portfolio in the ancient Greek pantheon. Her name is Aergia). There’s no good reason to not have sent out a newsletter in January. The year began with me reading Cosey’s fantastic graphic novels, which I devoured (in French!) and which I really want to tell you about. The problem is that every time I’ve sat down to write, I’ve successfully found something else with which to waste my time. A number of you have dropped pointed comments to me, about how it’s been a while since there was an edition of the newsletter in your inbox. You were probably hoping it would shame me into sitting down to write. Instead, I chose to focus on how lovely it is to actually have loyal readers and turned briefly into a marshmallow.

Titled: Why I Haven’t Got Round To Sending Out this Newsletter

But I digress.

The other day, a friend of mine gifted me a novel with a blurb that described it as “a love letter to life.” That seems like a tall order for a book, but the moment I read that line, I remembered this fragment:

“And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?” he asked.
Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.
“Forever,” he said.

Look, if you’re one of those razor-sharp readers who didn’t get seduced by the heady beauty of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s prose and furrowed your brow at the depravity and blind spots in Love in the Time of Cholera, I applaud your unwavering moral compass. I confess I’m not so upright. I open a novel with the expectation of being wooed and few writers do this as deliciously as Marquez. Love in the Time of Cholera is one of those messy, flawed romances that makes you want to use words like “frisson”, only because it sounds lovelier than “goosebumps”.

The ending of this novel ruined me. After a lifetime of being kept apart, of their love story being punctured by other people, Florentino and Fermina’s happily-ever-after is to be at sea with one another, quarantined from the rest of the world. It’s gorgeous, ridiculous, entirely romantic, and because of those final lines, “forever” became synonymous with “love” for me. I could hear Florentino speaking that one word, its sound softened by lips and teeth that meet in a play of flesh and air, an almost-kiss past which slip out the “f” and “v” consonants. Sure, both Florentino and Fermina are now in their 70s, but what is love if not something that endures and can excavate beauty out of the most unexpected moments?

Marquez pulled out all the stops with Florentino Ariza, the poet and lover who often feels like a male fantasy (this applies to a lot of Love in the Time of Cholera. Marquez is many things, but he is not one of those authors who places women at the centre of his text. His women are strong and memorable, but the hero is almost always a man). Florentino has slept with 622 women while pining for the one he couldn’t have, which is ridiculous enough, but there’s a whole lot more that’s icky about our man. It’s almost as though Marquez set himself a challenge of enchanting the reader with a protagonist who makes a mockery of morality and pushes both boundaries and buttons. Sometimes disgusting, consistently heartbroken, often funny, and steeped in darkness, Florentino is quite a character. Do I want him in my life? No. Will my pulse flutter when I imagine him whispering “Forever” in my ear? Yup.

So yes, this is not a novel (or hero) to make the feminist heart go pitter-patter, but Love in the Cholera (translated by Edith Grossman) is a grubby treasure that leaves you with a sense of uneasy satisfaction, and also many questions. What will you accept in the name of love, both as a reader and as someone who longs for a love story? How much will you forgive in the hope of a happy ending?

In short, definitely the sort of book that qualifies as “a love letter to life” for me.

Though if we’re talking about literary love letters, how can we not talk about Possession by A.S. Byatt? If Love in the Time of Cholera shows love as a curiosity that’s sticky with sex and taboo, Possession makes platonic feel sexy. The romance in this novel unfolds through letters, diaries and poems; through polite words that never let propriety slip even though they’re riddled with aching intensity.

Byatt created two fictional, Victorian poets for Possession infusing them with traces of real legends. Randolph shows flashes of Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Emily Dickinson and Christina Rosetti are folded into Christabel. I remember reading the book and being convinced that Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte were real people whose collected works of poetry I needed to have in my life. It’s incredible to think that Byatt not only crafted this incredible story of how two academics in the present discover a love affair that’s been a carefully-guarded secret, but also wrote enough poetry to con a reader into thinking these two fake poets were real.

Painting by Jonathan Wolstenholme.

Another title that can proudly raise its hand to be on the “love letter to life” bookshelf is Sheila Heti’s weird and wonderful new book, Alphabetical Diaries. For 10 years, Heti kept a journal, typing up daily entries on her computer. Then she pulled out sentences from a decade-worth of writing and arranged them in alphabetical order. The outcome of that experiment is the kaleidoscopic Alphabetical Diaries, which technically should be a memoir (since the sentences are all from Heti’s journals) but becomes something more akin to fiction. The scrambled fragments are the opposite of stream of consciousness with sentences that have no connection to one another being forced together. A sentence from 2018 could be next to one from 2015, disconnected in every sense to what comes before and after, but now connected by something as random as an alphabet.

Every letter gets its own chapter in Alphabetical Diaries — Z, predictably, is very short — and in that chapter, every sentence begins with the same letter. Quickly, the sentences show flashes of patterns. Names recur, relationships reveal themselves, and the mind works overtime to organise the chaos. Let me give you an example. Here are two sentences from the I chapter:

I am not Leonard Cohen. I am not sure that I like this realisation.

We don’t know what realisation Heti had actually been writing about or what emotion was originally sewn into that second sentence. Here, organised as Alphabetical Diaries is, it is stitched to the first and together, they become an amusing moment. Originally, that second sentence may have been earnest or wistful or nervous. There’s no way to tell what it was originally meant to convey and despite nothing changing in the sentence, it’s become something new.

Very often, you can feel the disconnect between sentences in Alphabetical Diaries and whenever that happened, I found myself marvelling at the human mind’s need to find patterns and organise chaos into coherence. We’re a species of storytellers and finding meaning is as important to us as our opposable thumbs. We’ll make meaning out of anything and everything. It’s our way of making the chaos and uncertainties of the world feel manageable. Maybe that’s how homo-sapiens found the will to survive.

I’m the sort of person who tends to roll her eyes at auto-fiction, but Alphabetical Diaries is one of those crazy literary experiments that works because Heti is an editor extraordinaire. Ironic, earnest, funny, sentimental, smutty, esoteric, Alphabetical Diaries is gentle, intimate and strangely unputdownable. There’s no suspense, but it feels tense in parts. The tones and moods shifts from sentence to sentence, keeping the reader on her toes and delving deeper and deeper into the heart of the book’s writer, who may or may not be Heti anymore.

Heti takes a hammer to linearity, chronology and conventional ideas of structure in Alphabetical Diary, and what emerges from is a shatter-pattern that feels as much like a novel as an intimate and candid introspection. When you unmoor thoughts from context and chronology, do you retain any sense of the mind behind them? Are you seeing the real Heti in Alphabetical Diaries or has the rigid randomness of her process created something, someone, new? Has the non-fiction birthed fiction? Your guess is as good as mine.

Fiction and non-fiction together, because the imagination is more amazing than anything in life, and life is more amazing than anything you can make up.

Now that is a love letter to life.

Before I go — Saraswati Valentine Day is all well and good, but the world continues to be a hellscape, with war, tragedy and unrest bleeding us dry. It’s also a Wednesday and the day job beckons — let me leave you with a few lines from a poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

I want to live here as if I am, forever,
burning with lust for the unknown.
Maybe "now" is much more distant. Maybe "yesterday" is nearer
and "tomorrow" already in the past.
But I grasp the hand of "now" that History may pass near me,
and not time that runs in circles, like the chaos of mountain goats.
Can I survive the speed of tomorrow's electronic time?
Can I survive the delay of my desert caravan?
I have work to do for the afterlife, as if tomorrow I will not be alive.
I have work to do for the eternal presence of today.
Hence I listen, little by little, to the ants in my heart:
Help me bear the brunt of my endurance.

Here’s to enduring, and finding strength in love letters and life — because what else can we do?

Thank you for reading and not losing patience with this newsletter writer. Or losing patience but still reading this newsletter.

Saraswati willing, Dear Reader will be back soon.