It is the end of the year and there are lists all over the internet, books read, films seen, music heard or seen or read, and like everything else on internet this could also put one into momentary excitement of thinking back on books read or films seen or music heard, or acts of kindness done or contemplated but undone; and that is what seems to preoccupy me, the dread of the undone, the unseen, the unread and the unaccomplished.
So here is a list of the incomplete, of the possible, of only the beginnings but no ends-
In April while coming back from Delhi I put Philippe Jaccottet’s poems in my suitcase but cannot recall why I had to take the book out of the suitcase and so could not carry them here to Pune. From Delhi I also picked my copy of Proust’s ‘Swann’s Way’ which I read religiously before bedtime for two weeks and then left midway.
Sometime in September I pulled Grazia Deledda’s ‘Reeds in the Wind’ out of my bookshelf, read it habitually in the afternoons for fifteen days and then cannot recall why I left it but possibly because I found it too slow and calm for my mood then. Though the images I conjured up of the quaint Sardinian village with the assistance of her writing still give me pleasure when I re-conjure them in memory.
I remember brief encounters with Leonora Carrington’s and Clarice Lispector’s short stories. I also nurtured momentary obsession with Brian Evenson’s psychological horror. I returned to Anne Carson’s poetry intermittently, and read some of Thom Gunn’s poems to teach in class.
At some point in July or August I downloaded a lot of historical cookbooks, some to do with recipes in Homer’s time and one book on Italian recipes from 16th century of which I only remember the wisdom on whether to drink wine before, along with or after meals. I have also watched snippets of a documentary on meat production called ‘Our Daily Bread’, but haven’t still been able to muster the courage to sit through the whole of it, specifically after watching a scene in which the stomachs of vertically hung pigs are being mechanically rid of intestines.
I watched the first twenty five minutes of Godard’s ‘Masculin Feminin’ and my crush on Jean-Pierre Leaud (from when I first encountered him eight years ago) was rekindled for a day. I re-watched the first fifteen minutes of Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita’ and was surprised to find that I had completely forgotten about the statue-of-Jesus-hanging- from-the-helicopter opening sequence.
I recall an Alice Oswald poem on love vaguely, but I recall the ‘silence’ in Trakl’s poems clearly; I was so disheartened and shocked to find out about the violent murder of Pasolini that I immediately wanted to read as much as he had written to resist the violence that took him. I have only read a couple of his poems and the beginning of a letter on the Greeks.
It also occurs to me that at some point I was reading Reiner Stach’s anecdotes on Franz Kafka, of which I remember the writer of ‘The Trial’ leching at the cleavage of a landlady or tenant, visiting brothels and being meticulous about accounts.
I think I was reading Roberto Bolano in the first half of the year but have conveniently forgotten most of what I read. I was reading Maugham’s account of his travels through south-east-asia while I myself was traveling through Vietnam and Cambodia, and therefore I do remember a lot of what I read there, and have vivid images of Maugham traveling through dense jungles on the back of coolies and coming down with malaria at some point.
I have read more than half of Patti Smith’s new book ‘Devotion’ and part of a cultural history of ‘Anxiety’. I have not stared at Frida Kahlo’s portraits as long as I would have liked to, neither have I minutely observed the progress of sunlight on my terrace as the day passes.
In June, post a deep afternoon nap, while reading an article in the New Yorker on big data, I dropped my laptop over a cup of coffee and had to buy a new one, so that article has still not been completely read.
These are all the things that I remember or perhaps want to remember consciously, there might be fragments hidden in the subconscious or erased because of the pace at which I encountered them. As the fragments pile up, the incompleteness bears down my consciousness, but another half-read chapter comes to mind- this one from Giorgio Agamben’s ‘ The Fire and the Tale’ where he writes of writers who believed that a work of art is never complete, it can always be re-written, added to or edited. So fragments are as complete or incomplete as a whole book or poem or film or song.
