An Ode
Journal excerpts, May - July 2020 May 3 Sadi: Vishal ko naye woh bhi mil gaye— Vishal has also found new— May 4 4.23 am. With Vishal on HouseParty—“every day feels like a fucking Odyssey”—in the best way May 12 ownership in friendship: for example, I post Vish / Aesh vids etc w/o asking for permission. I don’t feel I have to. May 13 Vishal and I underlined the same Tsvetaeva quote in our Sontag essays: May 15 Vish a music healer. Like he’ll find the right song to settle my heart. May 17 I have started recording house party calls. thinking about the new intimacies that are made visible because of defaulting to screens for communication, contact, friendship, love. The things I notice about Vishal because he is on a screen: Light and shadow play on his clothes, the trees behind him. May 18 I feel I am touching my friend these days, and becoming a part of his touch, in ways that offline reel doesn’t allow—touching in some ethereal medium where the imagination of a touch is its very spirit, and I want to say it isn’t flimsy at all but very, very concrete. I know it when I see/feel/touch upon it. It does not feel like some secondary realm of touch for me. Screens are where touch is taking place, spatially, in real time, in memory. May 27 I smoke my joint faster than V. June 6 The tinny speakers on this hot Karachi day. Vish introducing me to a new qawwali . I’ve watered the plants. What else brings me back … vishal on houseparty, coffee, aesha, charas, the next cigarette, always the next next, all day i am smoking, merrill, ……… light. Light & merrill. [reheat coffee] June 18 Vishal’s Merrill came yesterday. He has been providing long hours of silent company on HP and I’ve made three new playlists. June 24 5.55 pm. Desk. Vish on HP. I love him. June 27 I wake up looking forward to the day. Friends and coffee and love and conversation and cleaning and cooking and watering the plants and Merrill and Vishal and—all of it, all of it— July 10 2.22 am. Happy birthday dear Vishal. I’ve been making a video for him— Unable to move beyond two Merrill lines, Vish says same, w Merrill he has to stay and soak and read— July 11 4.01 am. Am I killing my brain or levelling it up. For infusing hash in butter, consulted guru W. The rain thru Vishal’s camera feeling like a memory I know. Exactly where, too: the walk from 1837 to Prospect. 1837. In my dreams I can never remember the digits. July 30 3.31 am. Listen, night, but will I forgive myself and I do therefore I forgive you too, Is Vishal on HP. 4.05 am. Reading old journal entries on light and then I switch the tab and there’s Vishal in that gold NY light, ah A walk in new york [poem draft one w gaps] 4.42 am. Daal almost done. How Vishal is like Aesha and Aesha like Vishal, in that I can turn around and say whats on mind ask anything and they will look up from whatever they are doing never interrupted or agitated and then answer and promptly go back to what they were doing, as in I can take their attention for granted much as my own. “Can I use a shriveled tomato?” “Which months do you like” “Whats this word in Urdu?” Petty investigations of life. But he is on a screen, another country, and she is right here— So he has put on a qawwali and our spaces collapse to become some new ether, where his present converges with and influences mine tangibly. Therefore he is not just on screen, but in the air.
Aesha: Khwab? Dreams?
Sadi: Scarves.
Time moves slowly today, which is wonderful, lets me breathe easier. I am trying not to rush … Gentle and steady.
Door of Forbidden Closeness
How he folds the spine of his books while reading, never all the way. How his fingers tap when a song plays. Sometimes as he’s falling asleep, there they are, his knuckles nudging the rest of his body into awareness of the music. And when I look at him like this, noticing these details, I am touched, I am paying more attention to his touch and the light and shadows touching him, and sometimes, taking in these textures and solidities, I feel the touch transfer because I’m thinking so hard about it. It is not the absence of contact which is on my mind then, as much as the presence of another kind of attunement, a touch guided visually, feeling-ly.
June 7
kuch toh paar kar liya hai
Door of Ambiguous Closeness