The Purge

I will not record what he said while crying: it was a striving intellect ceding to grief. He remarked that the pain was curiously physical: his whole forehead had pulsed with pain: his disbelieving grimaces were unable to return to repose. Later, while talking about it to a girl, his heart had beat hard, and his chest suddenly had a Gordian knot. He was surprised, he had not expected such fathomless attachment. But it was his mother who had died. He had always rebelled against attaching any significance to relations, especially to motherhood. Finally; he thought with frustrated irony; that meant something, even to his 'mind'.
As this is a study, not a story, I must mention that periods of emotional collapse and heinous indifference had alternated. This had begun as soon as a few hours after the news reached him in Madras, not many days after, when it had finally decayed into memory........
His father had always been mildly patriarchal, now he tried not to see him as a desolate stranger in a black expanse. The image flashed the moment he thought of him. His brother he was curiously indifferent to, even now he is. The family's remnant, with three males, struck him as obscene.

"The arabs have a thousand names for the camel, the Inuit a thousand names for snow, the Indians a thousand names for relatives, because there might well be as many."

His play had featured the help his father had received from his mother's sisters during his bypass, and Karthik had promptly given into their ministrations.

He had also improved drastically with the violin. Finally he didn't give a damn about where his fingers were going, so long as they were going somewhere, and this largely made sure that they went the right distance. Of course, he still wasn't Srinivas, and mostly would never be, Srinivas claimed that his grandmother corrected his errors with a cane to the knuckles, while playing.
While playing, they all trooped in, and listened. The greater the number, the greater his unease, and the fingers, chained to his mind, profaned the composition. Of course, they all loved it, and irony distracted him from grief, though the scene reminded him of an uncomfortable one with his mother. He had felt too conscious with her around. (A mother's rapt attention is not very conducive to any pursuit, really. As I write this, I know that Karthik would feel momentarily devastated.) He had given up and told her very sincerely to leave, he was completely unable to concentrate. And it was Endaro, a song he deemed himself unworthy of playing, much like Chandalas were denied entrance to temples. He felt profoundly remorseful now......
One of his aunts had assured him that while her daughter played the veena, she closed everything, including the windows, and even, insanely, the lights. A realisation shot up in his mind - he had looked forward to playing the violin in front of every one, dreamed of playing it in front of audiences; some talented amateurs in Singapore, like Srinivas, and readily assimiliated him, despite his skepticism. He knew he was evolving, he had never really doubted that there would be a day when he would play to his mother without the irony that she loved whatever he scratched on the strings. This effaced some of the guilt, though still, how long would he put simplicity off in the name of the intellect?

He told me that, probably, he could think of himself as 'just another kid' though that was clearly impossible. Of course, I countered back - you cannot deny that you often relished being immature with your parents and family - knowing that you were absolved in advance.

His intellect, sometimes pretentious, sometimes sincere, had done this, and even his absolution lay in the same labyrinth.

Borges, Brown, and ingenuity.

Fredric Brown is unknown, at least, to the vast NUS library, which contains nineteenth century editions of Walt Whitman, and other American writers. He remarked once that its easy to write without plot, conflict, and resolution, without anything specific, so long as the world is persuaded that you are a genius. Jorge Luis Borges would be an eminent example. It is almost passe to cite affinities between Borges and Brown, in their masterful ingenuity, brevity and ironic wit. Let us also observe that while Borges wandered through medieval philosophers, logic, and ancient epics, Brown's life and career restricted him to toying with the SF , fantasy and journalistic tropes of his time. His varied tastes, however, hearkened back to the best of literature, to Lewis Carroll and even Spinoza. However, his work reveals a mere familiarity, rather than an erudition.
Brevity seems to have been an obsession with both, one compressing a vast, tunnelling erudition into three page parables, the other often disguising a single idea in a single paragraph as a story. A formal affinity exists between Borges' Circular Ruins, and Brown's brilliant Solipsist. The former sketches a mystic's successful attempt to dream a human being into existence, his subsequent fear that his dreamed son would realise that he is illusion, and his relief at discovering that he is also but the dream of another. The action - or symbolic inaction takes place amidst the ruins of a murky fire god, within four pages dense with allusions and symbols. The Solipsist races through a man's eponymous belief. He imagines everything away - only to discover that God is waiting for a man such as he, so that he might lapse back into a divine oblivion. Now it is his, not His, task to create everything back again. In Brown's magnificiently ironic ending: it takes him seven days. 'Solipsist' clearly conforms to the idea < paragraph =""> story structure, and reveals an astonishing, though in retrospect, obvious symbol : God is the only solipsist, and if so, all of us are.
While Brown's output is uneven, Borges is too learned to ever create something inferior, though several of his later works are plain and too obviously inspired by his precursors, lacking the ingenuity consistent in Ficciones and The Garden of Forking Paths - collections that sprung confusions like "The Aleph", "The Circular Ruins" and the brief, but epochal Lottery in Babylon at an unsuspecting audience.
Which erects a juvenile concern still unresolved - the value of ingenuity and intelligence in literature. To discount Brown as immature and 'pop culture' is puerile, to reject Chekhov is unacceptable. Hamsun's crepuscular protagonists are not limited by Borges' meta-fictional, antiquarian logic, but neither do they achieve any significant resolution. Walt Whitman's poetry is inimical to intelligence, but nourished by a spontaneous genius.
An artists choices are myriad - but perhaps a Borges' drily assessing his works in forewords and afterwords suffers less torment than Hamsun, or, more significantly, yields less to it. And for me, a frog by compulsion (Singapore.)and a dreamer by impulse, it is better to let the water seep in, and dream of sleep, and serenity.