At work, with hope

'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction' - Virginia Woolf.

How uncomfortably, disagreeably true, I think. The woman who came to this conclusion must have doubtless learned her nonconformist ways by enduring much opprobrium in her time because of her writing. She nevertheless managed to write, and hold her own among the literary giants of the twentieth century to good measure. The words ask me - does being a woman indeed, in any way, intensifies one's inability to pursue one's ambition in writing.

The basis for my exploration of this question begins with the belief that in order to write, both man and woman need the time and space that allows uninterrupted, intense thought.

Literature could well be the more rational cousin of visual art and music - when the manner of creating art is painting, the world is captured as the eyes see it, and the heart reveals what it has learnt from the eyes and gives the canvas its colours. The mind plays a subordinate part in this process, and the different perceptions involved can be pieced apart only with difficulty because painting by its very nature incorporates every aspect of the artist and his environment. It is the expression of the dialogue between the senses and the heart in its purest form. When the instrument of expression is music, it is one level of reason away - when one sense is being used more than another, there is one more stage of translation that is required to project what the heart is saying. Even so, the mind need not exert itself much to accomplish this - music too finds a way to escape without reason disquieting it much.

If words are to be the manner of expression, the sensory stimuli in their raw form must find its way into the heart of man, and pass in whole along with into the mind of man for him to consider, study and understand. For words to find a permanent place in one's soul, a man needs an untiring mind. Conversely, for a mind that craves continuous thought, writing is a joy. It is the only means of expression for those who think more than they do, who think more, and more often, than others do.

When I try to understand how one goes about training oneself to be able to write as one wants to, I sense the beginnings of a fundamental paradox in literature. Upon some searching, I find few academic streams which are in some conclusive way related to writing. I find courses on creative writing, literary criticism, degrees and diplomas in literature or journalism which include courses that involve different kinds of writing, on grammar, punctuation and spelling. Many schools have innovative cross-genre courses which involve vast reading. Students are taught to of the great authors and poets who have enthralled generations with their remarkable minds and their distinct sparks of brilliance, explored the intertwining strands of thought and feeling and their expression in ways that has influenced, provoked and inspired us for centuries. One way that academia can hope to nudge more such thinkers and writers towards their destiny is by allowing them to absorb the greatness of those who went before and surely, gradually originate heretofore unexplored threads of substantive debate and path breaking thought. I store this thought away because I sense a contradiction hidden within it.

Perhaps this is why a University education is the most tried and tested way to inspire brilliance in literature. It may not always generate more successes than failures, but it is likely that it among those who begin their quest outside academia's protective walls, the ones who become the writers that they wanted to be would make an even more pitiful minority. Perhaps that is why I only listen perfunctorily, and only believe with half-belief when people conclude that sublimity in writing, or any other manner of expression, can be achieved under any circumstances if one applied oneself enough. Any manner of brilliance requires focus, and in writing this focus must almost continually be directed towards thinking, if one is to achieve sustained brilliance. A great writer must, therefore, whether as a child, an adolescent or an adult, have always been a great thinker.

One can conclude then it is largely because of such thought that great literature is produced. That explains why I could not find many courses that exclusively focused on writing, or why the ones that did seemed rather shallow to me. I feel like they are designed to school one more in the art of interpreting literature, and less in creating it. Many programs include courses which have the potential to open the floodgates to great thought and great writing. They encourage the sampling of vast reaches of knowledge, to varying extents. Savoring and scrutinizing all manner of thoughts, ideas and pools of information may not be easy, or even possible. However, study, observation and intermittent analysis of literature on various subjects cannot but produce new ideas, which both men and women can be trained equally well to express and document. Every piece of information, every picture, and every previous trail of thought contributes to the writer's reflection, imagination and expression. In this sense, nothing, really, is original. So there it is – education can only give direction to one's thought, perhaps advise one on how to write, but just as it cannot impart wisdom, it cannot teach one what to write.

This brings me to the contradiction - literary writing and literary appreciation often spoken of in different breaths - concomitant, but definitely separate, almost sequential. But the very prerequisite to creating great works of literature - the ability to read, understand, critically examine and interpret – is adopted by education as an end which overshadows the initial purpose. These are skills that can be taught because their academic goals are clear. They can be articulated easily, programs of study can be weaved around them and progress can be measured. But they are secretly meant to produce literature.

The uneasy truth that emerges from this thought is that one is either a great critic, or a great writer. One could, with a little trouble, be both a good critic and a good writer, or even achieve greatness in one of those realms; but it is infinitely more difficult to achieve greatness at both. It is a man who is happy in the knowledge that he loves art but cannot paint to express himself who becomes an art connoisseur. The mere study and appreciation of literature must be for those who do not wish to write, or feel that they do not have the facility or the talent for it. I believe that those who have art in their souls do not have the ill-fitted to appreciate - they only watch to be able to see, listen to be able to hear and read to absorb. They observe with the intention of learning, sometimes only as much as is necessary for them to engage with their minds, and they do not pronounce judgment.

When we are in two minds about something, we prefer see the world as an eager participant to our dialectic - we go about convincing the world that it must be a certain way to prove our point, and then we convince ourselves that we have convinced the world. We find ways to temporarily resolve dilemmas that can never be resolved by carefully selecting in what helps our case, and selecting out what does not. Woolf encompasses with great perspicacity every predicament ever faced by women in pursuing a career in writing in a sustained manner. I wonder - is this not just a sliver sliced off a basic dilemma faced by any person who chooses to engage in purely creative pursuits over a life where those very instincts are swathed in many layers of pragmatism and the mundane? These very doors that an education opens in the mind were no doubt closed to the women that Woolf speaks about. But with education more accessible now to women than before, should not men and women face the impediments of money, leisure and space, both in their surroundings and their mind, equally?

In modern times, with the coming of many revolutions that involved more numbers of men than women -industrial, military and scientific - men have often been charged with being suited to jobs that involve little creativity, or more than creativity; might not a woman's difficulty draw more attention since expression is naturally her realm? Even if there are men who face the same difficulties in literature and art, might they be considered a minority and hence ignored in the larger debate on the subject?

While it seems to be where I’m headed, I find the conclusion that there is little distinction in the difficulties faced by men and women in their desire to write rather distasteful. I think about how many more men there are who have achieved fame through their writing than women. It begs the question, and does not address the many trials that women still go through simply by dint of their sex - most of them would make good arguments for why they have always had to dedicate a large part of their mind to domestic and other affairs that hinder their facility for continuous and earnest writing.

In 'A Room of One's Own', Woolf seems to refer not only to the many doors of opportunity that were closed to female writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also to the oppressive bounds of propriety and near total lack of personal liberty and poetic license that they had to contend with. Given the conservative Victorian condition that even men had to submit to for most part, what must it have been like for the women?

She is very cogent in her reflections and conclusions draw from observation, extensive research and experience. She lays out women how women all but lived in near oblivion for centuries. They were denied the right to have character, individuality - in effect, all the things that give a person his personality. They were written about extensively by men, but they themselves lived like shadows, rarely seen, heard or felt, invisible to history. They were more celebrated and admired in art than in reality. . ("Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? ... Women do not write books about men... Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"). While men may have been burdened with responsibilities of their own, the most trouble they would have been put to if they decided to take up something as off-beat as writing or theatre would have been the indifference or contempt of other men, and the renunciation of some human comforts. If a woman tried to become another Shakespeare, she would have been shamed, beaten and locked up or worse. If she rebelled against the scandal and the censure, she would have had to live such a conflicted life and that she would most likely go mad or die. Women were always written about, they never wrote. Woolf herself was driven to find ways to deal with the discord in her life. But despite the hostility she faced from many quarters, she did manage to write, and may well have been few who did. And though I have little research of my own to go by, by sheer dint of how many more works of men I have read than of women, I am inclined to concur with her view that society for a very long time has denied women the sort of personal freedom that is required to live in peace, let alone write.

In our times, however, one wrestles with the idea much more than one might have a few decades ago. Are as many doors closed now? What holds someone like me back from writing? What are the obstacles faced by intelligent, educated, urbane women who have jobs to ensure their financial independence and a milieu that afford them personal independence when they want to write?

In some part, I might say this is true. As I discovered earlier, one way to achieve a state of mind congenial to writing is at a place where the mind is used exclusively for thinking and absorbing, a place like a University. Outside the walls of academic study, the mind is assaulted with many more things to do than thoughts to think. It begins to behave like our body is expected to - in a reasonable, predictable and cyclical way. It begins to obey the hands of the clock as our body does.

A writer's mind must not fall into a routine of being idle and busy in a familiar manner. The use of the mind must be seasonal - I would even go so far as to say that there must be times, extended periods of inertia, when the mind is in a state of semi-sleep. It is during these indolent, dreamy times that the seeds of great thoughts are born. All minds have these moments of dormancy, but they are often few and far between. When they come, their leisurely mien is mistaken for lethargy, their inactivity for fatigue.

When the mind becomes accustomed to being occupied and empty at around the same time everyday, then along with busying the mind with the rightful purpose of working, emptying it also becomes a job. And a mind with a job cannot know thought in its purest form. It acts in reaction - at work by being busy, and at home by being empty. Thoughts that flit past, that have the potential to grow into beautiful ideas are lost to the overarching purpose of being empty. After all, a whole day of work has just ended.

I remember being told when I was younger, and under the illusion that I could be many people at once - "If you think you are bound to choose, you are mistaken! Is it not possible that you can find ways to pursue your creative instincts in the fields of science, business, administration, finance?" And the world around me, at least the world that I see or hear about and that is quite far away from me, vindicates that optimistic question, almost an assertion. So many fields of work - computer graphics and animation, web designing, financial journalism, technical writing - all stand testament to the immense resourcefulness of the creative men and women. Yet, what I did was choose. It is possible to train the mind to reach towards different goals and adopt different states of being simultaneously, but it is also likely to be disruptive and might lead to irreversible conflict. The fruits of such labour are not worth their while. I feel safer instructing my mind to be one way for most part of the day, and allowing myself the luxury of deferring the exercise of training now and then.

I know that had I been a man, I might have grumbled similar things. I might have felt the same the ennui brought on by a job that pays the money, but is grudging with the privacy, the time and the food required for thought. A man too is faced with domestic and financial responsibilities. He too may feel trapped for being unable to pursue his passion for the writing, exacerbated by the expectations and presumptions associated with his sex. Then why do I feel uncomfortably, disagreeably, that Woolf may be as right today as she was 80 years ago?

Perhaps it is because I also know that something very basic about how men and women understand themselves and one other, and how they act upon their understanding has not changed. If you bring in monetary considerations, the balance, while more favorable towards women now, is nowhere close to tilting. Almost everywhere I look, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the easiest thing to believe is that men are superior to women - physically, and hence without debate, intellectually. The fortunate thing is that far fewer people are taking the easy way, teaching themselves to think, and much more significantly, believe different things from what their instinct and their history tells them. It is a fortunate thing that we do not define society as men anymore, that men do not define art as women anymore, because, happily, we can apply the same brush to both men and women when it comes to such things as pursuing one's dreams.

Perhaps I still believe that whatever be the constraints of society, I can be many people at once, and that precisely because I can, this quandary will stay with me at all times in my life. Its acceptance and resolution I see as a virtue that I must inculcate in myself, entirely incidental of my being a woman. Heaven knows that there are many qualities that the world wants to imbue me with in order for it to function the only way it knows how to - perhaps I will learn a little, learn how to use more of my energy taking its personality into mine than impressing mine on it so that belonging to it becomes easier, and one day, when I'm weary enough, I will learn that it is easiest to eliminate all my disagreement with so many of its ways by embracing them, one by one. I know that must do some of this if I want to continue to write, yet continue to contest and dismiss all the things that impair my vision or chafe the essential fabric of my mind- but I believe that the resolution of the problem, and the means and the method to write anything, fiction or otherwise, lies entirely with me, incidental of my being a woman.

(I didn't realize how long this post was until I copy-pasted it on MSWord to run a spellcheck on it - 5 pages in Times Font, sized 12. I should really write more often, for no better reason than to spare myself and other people such monstrosities.)