To all chronic trapezoids

Then why this sudden withdrawal, this reclusive, even misanthropic, impulse, the sense of not being in sync with the times? Well, here’s my hypothesis and yes, I admit it’s more sympathetic to trapeziums than circles. I believe CTs perceive a distinction between the ‘coterie’ and the ‘community’, between the ‘club’ and the ‘satsang’. We’re instinctively uncomfortable with the former; and though we experience the latter only waveringly, it’s still what we yearn for.

What’s the difference, you ask? Well, a club’s essentially exclusivist and territorial, concerned with protecting its own limited ‘jagir’. The ‘satsang’, on the other hand, is a more generous, inclusive and receptive association, and aspires to freedom rather than security. Unlike the club, its spirit is exploratory rather than self-congratulatory. It’s united by a set of common questions and ideals, not by an overlapping series of personal agendas. It’s concerned not with product, but with process. It is born not by networking, but by serendipity. And it’s always larger than the sum of its parts. Most importantly, the ‘satsang’ regards art as a means to an end. As part of a larger journey of self-discovery. The poetry, the dance, the music, is the seeking, not the sought. There is an often impulse to fetishise and reify art, implicit in dogmatic pronouncements about good and bad art. While I don’t subscribe to aesthetic relativism, I do think formulations about what works and what doesn’t, need to bearrived at with humility, self-interrogation, even humour and a constant awareness of personal and historical fallibility. Oh yes, I’m not immune to the charms of club membership.

How tempting it is, given the lonely terrors of the creative journey. How comforting it would be if art were a linear career track with convenient signposts that proclaim what we’d all love to hear: ‘you matter’, ‘you have progressed’, ‘you make a difference’, ‘you are relevant’, ‘your work is loved and so are you’…!The other day musician Ravi Khote made a comment that struck me. “We can’t keep waiting for the scene to happen,†he declared, “We are the scene.†And there was no presumptuousness in that remark, no arrogant desire to replace the old order with he new. Quite the reverse. It was rather an acknowledgement of a plurality of sensibilities that make up any creative universe. It struck me then that the dislocation, the sense of not belonging, is, in fact, a way of belonging. Feeling out of step with the times is one historical response among others. Being trapezoid is one way of being perfectly circular. CTs of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose not even your angles. And if this is our post-lapsarian karma (and I know I’m mixing religious metaphors with impunity!), then so be it. To belong. But never quite.

(Arundhati Subramaniam is a well-known poet based in Mumbai)