'WHAT IS LITERATURE?'

Not the question I’ve always asked myself, rather the one I’ve evaded the most because I know that I would come up with a thousand explanations, none close enough to the actual truth, in case I asked myself this. It so happens that I like telling myself that ‘I’ began solely because this girl liked me that way. That I decided to stop killing ideas because she said they sounded fair enough, being alive. It could be the truth, for all I know, and it could be a whole different dimension far from truth, for the same. Of course, it is fanciful, writing to a crowd that you know would read you, or writing for that special person who exists to complement the existence of the writer in you, or some portion of the lot that you would appease in a way that would never happen if you didn’t deviate from being the ‘ordinary you’. And it is an end in itself to assert that you write because it gives you pleasure, or that it puts you out of pain, in which case what’s important is not the effect of the words but the effect of the writing of them, the effect of being rid of what you once felt to be full of – A scratch where it itches, of sorts, while sometimes, I feel that I write just to see how good I sound and it feels good to see the final cut, the last draft, the end result of a process that you tend to forget about once it’s done. Of course, no one would ever dig the source of a song once it’s been sung, for all we know it might as well have been a bunch of jarring melodies, non-sync, but put together, it makes a song. A song that sounds good, that too.

So, why write?

Fell out of the sky. I wasn’t looking for it in the first place, and neither have I kept tabs enough to start a scrutiny on Sartre, it was merely an impulsive reaction to put me out of a present state of chaos, but maybe only to a chaos different from this but a chaos all the same. It’s always reassuring to know that you aren’t the person that you were: makes it sound like progress was an inevitable intermediate even if ‘downhill’ is all you’ve gone. All the same, I like to think that I might and that I would get something out of it.

I need a reason to read. Never had one.