Preface to WHAT WE ALL NEED: An Anti-Literary Manifesto

AN ANTI-LITERARY MANIFESTO FOR 2004 AND 2005

Or MERE TYPEWRITING

(the PREFACE TO WHAT WE ALL NEED )

“This book ain’t writing. It’s merely typewriting.”—Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac’s On The Road

“Words, words, words.” Hamlet (when Hamlet is asked what he is reading)

“To tell who you are . . . is so basic.” —Chinua Achebe, in a BBC interview.

The true story behind my five years of literary silence is too convoluted to narrate here, and may only be revealed at length when the full versions of the following excerpts are published. Instead, what follows are representations of my writing or my defective typewriting, provided here partly to reassure my justly unhappy reader that reports of my being snuffed out have been greatly exaggerated. Yes, this work is in the nature of filling the gap, even though that is the definition of life itself: we fill the gap between birth and death, striving somehow not to be bored or to be snuffed out before one’s time.

True, I bear some responsibility for my long silence. My perfectionism and my desire to write the best books I could have—to compete in the literary marathon while dragging along a hundred pound rock called depression and benzodiazepine dependency—have delayed the completion and release of perhaps half a dozen books in the last ten years. As a result, I have become more distant from my writing self, alienated from him, a stranger to him.

No more. From this moment, I proclaim my passionate belief in imperfection as comprising the essence of human nature, perfection being inhuman and unnatural. Indeed, I will go further and say that Perfection, and even the desire to attain perfection, is stymieing, self-destructive, dangerous, inhuman, elitist, nefarious, anti-people, anti-democratic—and perhaps even cholesterol-raising and fattening. Besides, a man who is in pain, who cannot see, a blinded Samson in chains, let us say (which is how I have sometimes felt, though no Samson by a long shot) has no option but, with his last remaining and imperfect powers and breath, to perform his final act of self-assertion by bringing down the house, or the temple, even if in the process some innocents were to die. When freedom and breaking free of oppression, internal or external, are the overarching imperatives, fine literary distinctions or hair-splitting scruples are a luxury. My objective is at all costs not to prettify, not to hide and lie, not to be a smiling villain in my writing, but to trust the power of the truth, the raw material, the untamed inspiration.

Starting with this book, I will release a series of books that are unready, raw, overwritten (and sometimes underwritten), and imperfect on every page, and which will be strong candidates for that high honor: the award titled “It’s Only Typewriting—But Heartfelt Typewriting”. In these books, and in this manifesto itself, starting from the next sentence, I throw myself open to contradictions, repetitions, circularities, and subversive mistakes to trip up the pompous. All my academic degrees, all my learning and most of my experience: it is gone, fled, blasted by Valium and assorted doctor-prescribed chemicals and vaporized into the ether. I declare myself a linguistic barbarian, born in some forgotten black hole of Hindoo Asia, unfamiliar with the rules of genteel writing, a Genghis Khan of the English language, an Attila the Hun of literary sensibility and appropriateness.

Yes, as a writer I feel at times that I am almost back at my starting point, when I had nothing, no tools, no refinements, no powerful friends or potential contacts, nothing except something to say, something bursting to get out, something that I wanted you to know, dear reader. I am an unaccommodated man, without a home in the world, with no country I care to truly call my own (or that will happily call me its own), a man without knowledge and prejudices, separated for the last five years from his library, his desk, his own papers and correspondence and handwritten compositions, bereft of some of his own insights, his favorite book-friends with their markings. From a vague claim to some scraps of wisdom and understanding collected like rags from various dustbins around the world, and on past a bizarre memory of being labeled Spokesman for the Male Libido by a major Indian newspaper and Rushdie of Catholicism by another, I have reverted to a state of complete ignorance, meaninglessness, foolishness. All I have to blame as the inspiration and cause for my future books is my decision to stain some pages, to call it writing, and to make it available to potential readers.  

No, that’s not all: I have something to tell you, dear reader, something I have hidden for many years now, something that must come out, that must be told at all costs, because if not told, it will destroy what is left of me and what it hasn’t yet destroyed. All I can do is present you with my humanity, spoiled, soiled, broken, and yet resisting surrender, resisting the urge to vegetate, to give it all up, to cry Uncle, to cry Aunty, to let the usual suspects with dubious motives dictate my literary productivity. What I had in me, in my person, character, and mind, was placed there, I believe, for a purpose. Every mistake I ever made, and I have made thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, was made not so much that I could learn from it (I never do learn), but that I could write about it from my sorrow, loss, or defeat, so I could write about my unredeemed and unredeemable, fallible yet ultimately triumphant humanity. 

This book is written in defiance of markets, market research, custom, good sense, and the packed and learned stacks of what already exists. I wrote it, that’s all. Yes, it is I who wrote it, and not some arty-farty critic or smarmy Oxbridge London journalist with a well-thumbed Derrida under his arm, and whose prose must compensate for his flaccid masculinity. I bow to no one, to no man, to no woman, no goddess of small or big things, no turbaned doyen, no darling of the Oxbridge set (“He is one of us”), no Associations of the Smiling and Oily-Jointed and rubber-spined clawing each other for the privilege of heaping honors on the already over-honored, no watchdogs of prose or poetry or joke collections, no Grand Panjandrum of Morality or Good Sense or Common Sense.

Publication, honesty, transparency, and confession—even if they weren’t inherently worthy, noble, and perhaps even sacred endeavors, regardless of the consequences—have the practical benefit of helping us imperfect human beings along in our quest for truth and liberty, for genuine discussion and understanding, for compassion and love, and sometimes for liberation and release. It is better to be free and human than to be straitjacketed by visions of the Ideal, which turn out to be impractical and unattainable for most men. Simply breathe and be and do what comes naturally. If you want to sing, sing loudly, and tell the critics to go jump into the Grand Canyon. If you want to dance, dance, dance in the public square, dance in church, dance in your living room, wherever your fancy dictates. If you want to write, and communicate thoughts to the world, do so, and do not worry your little head that such thoughts may or may not be approved, and are not written in the Queen’s English. There is a time and place for all things, and publishers who can afford to pay for copyeditors and such may do so. 

But if you are a man of the people, a man alone with a need to express yourself, and you find these constraints are denying you your voice, operating as censors and fascists and tyrants, silencing you for ten years at a time, that is the time to rebel against all, to aim a hygienically packaged globule of upscale saliva at the face of art, meaning, beauty, Ultimate Truth, and all else, and to say: I am the Truth, this is my way, this is my life. Amen.

So liberation and coming out in the open, freedom for the fundamental contents of my thoughts, and providing a few readers with the redemptive laughter or the recognition that is an act of grace in itself, are my overarching objectives, the objectives against which everything must be judged. Once I have achieved this liberation by my publication of the raw and untreated, unrefined, un-sifted and strained, then I may decide, if means and time allow, to rewrite and represent what I have written in a form that is considered a bit—and only a bit—more arty, more lofty, more joyful and aesthetically pleasing, perhaps even more digestible to a larger audience. I cannot allow myself to be limited or confined, to be silenced, by the literary standards that I often attempted in earlier writings: to be entertaining, witty, elegant, stately, meaningful, true, powerful, and spectacular in every paragraph if not in every word and every sentence. There’s not time enough, energy enough, and life enough for that, at least until some formula has been invented to prolong life, lucidity, energy, and literary capability by at least three hundred percent or by twenty years, and perhaps reverse some of the chemical damage done by pharmaceutical poisons posing as friends. 

For five years now, I have been sitting on some emotionally powerful material comprising many books, most of them incomplete, battling many personal odds to finish them and present them to the world. But now, the fact that all of this explosive expression is in hiding, it is contained and quarantined, and reduced to harmless digital gibberish on my hard disk, much of it hardly ever reflected in my speech and in my life—I find this situation intolerable.  I see this material as repressed expression, as emotion that I myself have repressed. As if I were on the run, as if I had suddenly become unable to speak my mind, as if my vocal chords and my fingers had suddenly become paralyzed, unable to engage in oral or written expression.

As if I had arrested my own freedom and chained it in a Guantanamo of the human spirit.

As Freud said, repressed anger (and perhaps expression) causes depression, and this depression makes it harder to do the work of writing and publishing the books. But when I don’t write or publish what I write, how can I say with conviction that I am a writer, let alone a courageous writer? Have I not been my biggest oppressor?

As a partial and temporary solution, I have decided to publish a book that brings together material taken from a few of my incomplete books, about three to forty pages from each, and to give it the working title of the strongest of the books. And to publish it, no matter if the production is less than pristine: not only to provide a partial glimpse to my most sincere readers, but far more because it is my own act of self-liberation. Thus, this combined “works-in-progress” book itself becomes a literary manifesto by broadcasting my intention to complete and present all of these books to the public, health and finances permitting. Because I presently lack the resources to finish and publish these works, it allows the possibility of collaboration with like-minded people who are like me, suspicious of the Establishment, but would like to help bring these books to the readers who deserve to see them.

Besides, there are issues raised in this book which need to be aired in the public interest without delay, without waiting for the completed works. However, any final judgment of a book that is just a tip of a 4000-page iceberg would be absurd; I ask for open minds and suspended judgments.

Sometimes grudging, and proudly, I have paid what may be the going price (plus VAT plus a ninety percent surcharge for writing while brown and unabashedly male) for writing the truth and almost nothing but the truth, even when it offended the Masters. After fifteen years of this, I believe I have earned the right to be heard on my own terms. Because by choosing a life of writing, I chose to banish myself from society, from the society in which I had a place and a role, and instead spend fifteen years in sterile rooms, my restless body and bursting spirit chained to a desk far away from the red-blooded stimulation of life while I pecked on a soulless machine which often had the nerve to try to correct my spelling, even when I had intended it exactly the way I had spelt it—meanwhile, losing much that is priceless in the pursuit of the ideal writing life, a life owing allegiance to nothing other than to the word, the page, the book, the finished work, the honest, spilling-your-guts truth.

I can wait no longer. The books I shall present simply honor the original emotion or impulse that had me sitting at a desk, indoors, shut out from the world and the people I loved, just so I could express my primary loyalty to the calling for which I am convinced I was placed in this world.

Sometimes, it may be a blessing for an author to have no illusions, no powerful friends, no expectations—to have been written off, disappeared, rubbed out of existence by the Masters and their brown underlings. This is complete freedom, the freedom of anonymity and coming from nowhere, of a Nowhere Man whose books are to be found nowhere, even just after a publisher assures you they have just been released. I can now write as I always wanted to.

You see, even in the Revised Kama Sutra, I was quietly restrained; “No c—-s”, said my first editor, David Davidar, reacting to a particular passage in the manuscript dense with cunning stunts, and I obliged (fair enough; for a brief period then, he was my champion and he had let pass monumental liberties in that book), restraining myself to the feline “pussy” and the sacred and almost sexless “yoni”; even though the powerful, earthy, stunning, and irrepressible c—t managed to surface in one other passage of the book, possibly escaping his eagle eyes.

Besides, one of the advantages of being a nobody is that you have no ego, no fake pride, and nothing to lose. The very notion of an ego attaching to a writer is a foolish concept anyway, a fundamental and profound fallacy, because it is not the I who writes; the I is merely the vessel, the tool, through which The Work is written, through which the Divine or the Muse or some force we don’t fully understand writes. Or else, why would we be fool enough to undertake such a risky, often thankless, frustrating, anonymous, and lonely profession such as writing? Comparisons between writers are odious, even if I may have sometimes slipped into that error. For in a world of literature stripped of the illusory ego, only the work matters if at all, not the person who wrote it.

As for anally retentive obsessive authors who revised a certain manuscript two hundred times, that’s their story, more power to them; but they are not going to mess with my mind or cheat me of my free will. My first duty is to get out into the open air everything that is written, as it exists, as it was given me, without apology or hesitation. Once that has been done, I may consider editing a few, finances permitting, and without cheating myself out of new writing. Never again will I aim for perfection, or let my equanimity be disturbed by dishonest or jaundiced criticism, which experience compels me to accept as the overwhelming rule rather than the exception. I will aim simply for a slightly smoother, less rocky, clearer reading experience, wherever possible. This is my First Unrevised Edition of this book, and there will follow more such new books issued as First Unrevised Editions.

There are endless reasons or excuses to delay these books, and yet, this is a time to blast all excuses and go ahead. One such excuse: in the last few years, I have never had access to the big picture; my current struggle has narrowed, jaundiced, and limited my view of the Big Picture. So be it. In the entire totality of the universe, none of us, not even an Einstein or a Rajneesh, can have the complete picture. Each of us sees just one or up to twenty of the millions of facets of this universe, some of which are beyond the power of sense to perceive, or of language and thought to describe.

A further reason for embracing the imperfection of a provisional book is that it allows for the possibility that I could change my mind, or be corrected and understand more and differently as I plod on the road to completing the books. This is why to take this book as the final word (if there were any such thing) on anything at all would be absurd. However, for now, the book as it is will have to do.

Finally, the description of this work as “works in progress” is sometimes more metaphorical than actual. We are all works in progress, and even if certain aspects of our life some of us may be regressing, we are all progressing towards that ultimate milestone called death, when we are conclusively finished. No one is finished until that moment; and as for literary works, there is always a possibility of improvement, of a second edition, of a change of mind.  Besides, my book The Killing of An Author is nearly ready for publication, and another is not far behind.

Long live the spirit of liberty in India, the U.S.A., and the rest of the world!

Richard Crasta, (September 12, 2005)
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