intimacy

my tavel to gokarna 2 weekends back, was fraught with long distances, delays and switch overs. the travel was made amusing thanks to jean paul sartre. well, amusing isn't the right word. hmm, can't put what i felt in a word. may be a para would help.. :P
His book 'intimacy' is very truely a very up-close study of us. us humans. our relationships. our emotions. by the time i read the third story, i actually was feeling a weird sensation... a mixture of hints of suffocation, paranoia and languid stillness. the kind of feeling one has when after having slept 14 hours continuously and being awake half wishing to be in dream, staring at the ceiling, one becomes so comfortable in the sheets that the idea of slightest movement is repelled by body itself. you can't will to lift your arms. the body in its languor decidedly becomes heavy.
sartre's words become the sheet on which we are lying. it knows us well. very well. in the little confines of the self, the sheet gets marked with our true contours, our true smell, our true warmth.
and being so intimate is not comforting when you are alone. the loneliness only more accentuated now. your own touch on the arm and cheeks now transforms from indifference to mild irritation cause your body knows it won't have the pleasure of anybody else's touch. a body is useless and would wither away sooner if it doesn't find love of a warmer skin, the cut of a longer nail, the softness of the more delicate soul.
i put the book away with an alarm after the third story. will only pick up that book much later in hopefully better days where intimacy is not a jail but abounds.

written on the body

Since a few days, i had imposed a self-censor. I wouldn't use the adjectives 'beautiful' and 'kickass' (to be forever on a quest for beauty is not normal. i must taste some normality too once in a while); and i would try not to be introspective all the time. (trying not to be so 'full of myself' all the time, there's the whole world out there that needn't be reflected onto me..)
but how else could I describe Jeanette Winterson's 'written on the body' but delectably 'beautiful' and what else can one do but reflect when confronted with such poetic mirror to our hearts. its one of those literary pieces which you want to hold unto yourself like your lover, for its beauty and for its truthfulness.
I read half the book the day I bought it. and then tried to resume it the next day on local train. Now local trains are a many things, but definitely not a temple to beauty and truth. And this book deserves nothing less. It deserves to be read on a sunlit day, sitting on green grass, unperturbed by anything other than the steady bustle of the river nearby. well if not that, the cot must do, but it will be utterly disrespectful to be distracted from it again and again.
so it had to wait quite a while until a weekend when i had some leisure time by myself to read it.

The book is a portrait of love. a love who's sighs and gasps you wish to cling just a little longer every time. what makes the work even more noteworthy however is the fact that Jeanette gets us under the skin of the protagonist turning us into accomplice while throughout keeping us in doubt about the protagonist's gender! what genius! imagine portraying love without letting ever know who you are actually empathizing with. you know his/her desires, fears, loves, vices, friends but you don't know if its a he or a she.

while being a brilliant innovation of narration, its such a strong political (humanist/philosophical/gender based... whatever label you want to put.. i am not good at that) statement. love, in its completeness, defined sans gender. get this copy in the hands of all homophobes, all cynics.. and generally everyone. why should anyone be robbed of experiencing such beautiful work?