I am aware I have not written much during the last few months. Written anything here, I mean. In fact, I have been writing quite a bit; about thirty thousand words over the last two months, which is to say a first draft of the introduction to my dissertation which I discarded, and a second draft which went through three more revisions before I submitted it to my research progress committee. And in the months before, I wrote my third and final chapter which is another fifteen thousand words. All I want to say is that although I had not written anything in here, I had been writing quite a bit.

I had been reading books and watching movies as well. Yesterday I finished reading a really old Sanskrit play in translation—Bhagavaddujukam (~7th Century CE). I read Ghost-Eye to review a review for a journal. I tried and failed to read The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. I watched Hijack and Slow Horses on Apple TV, My Cousin Vinny, and rewatched A Bigger Splash. During my writing the introduction, I would return to my room and watch a movie before going to bed. I watched Sandesam, two Dasan-and-Vijayan movies, Mazhavilkaavadi, and Gandhi Nagar Second Street. I listened to Varathupokk and Mukesh Stories on Storytel app.

The last few months also saw the beginning of an ongoing phase of much difficulty. Trying to find a thread to tie together the three vastly different chapters of the dissertation kept me waking up from sleep, jolting me out of bed and out of the room. Every time I fell asleep, as I slipped from wakefulness into a tired, dehydrated sleep, some concept or figure or formation from the dissertation would blast itself to my mind. While it was one of those sleepless nights that helped me write the central argument of my thesis, these sudden joltings, night after night, gradually instilled in me a fear of sleep and approaching my bed—no, returning to my room after work—terrified me. To manage this fear—I kept myself up late at night binge eating cup noodles and greasy food from the hostel canteens. I would have three dinners after a day of not eating anything.

At the same time, there were other ghosts wandering around. I had noted down many observations from daily life, from my recollection of memories, from books and from my two visits to Pawna. These were waiting to be developed into longer form writing, but I could not do it. I felt tarred and feathered, and the guilt of having left so many people before they could leave me was something I confronted every day. I had my chapters and introduction ready for the dissertation, but my supervisor wanted me to present them to the research committee, while many people were finishing their pre-synopsis seminars with half-baked introductions and chapters. Every time I sat down to write something for the blog, all of these things would come to me as a substance as thick and dark as pitch and refuse to come out through words.

This post is an attempt in trying to goad these thoughts and observations into words. For the last three days I have been holed up in my room, asleep or doomscrolling reddit, waking up only in the evening and eating less than two meals. I read bits from Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, from Orlando Furioso, from The Odyssey, and from The Litanies of Dutch Battery. I couldn’t function without something extra in my system. My attention wandered from The Possession to academic works to Wikipedia rabbit holes to reddit to Software Defined Radio to Dublin Core Ontology to e-book publishing pipelines. Today evening the pitch that was in front of me began to take on not only its figurative darkness and slovenliness; it began to resemble the hardened earwax dug out online and the contents of my bowel in the toilet bowl. It had to be expressed the way doctors express pus out of an abscess. As I write this, I become aware that this expression cannot be done in one sitting, in one post. It will need more patience; it demands that I sit with everything that has been unsaid and find words for them. And I have to do this while also struggling with my research, which at this point has taken on some shape and can stand on its own. I also have to churn out two academic articles while doing this. Maybe I will find energy to do all that because I do this.

While the posts from this blog can be read as individual units in a chain of expressing myself, I feel this post might mark the beginning of a series of writings around a mass of feeling that I have been struggling putting to words. For one thing, this mass is amorphous and I do not know how connected my particular observations and thoughts are to this amorphous mass. Or whether there are any connections at all.