Every creator goes into this period of lull. Suddenly the creative juices stop flowing and he enters a zone of mundane blankness. You hear the crawling of crows and not the cuckoos. You step into your garden thinking that some fresh air can bring some new ideas, but you end up noticing the weed that has propped up in the corner. I feel that this ebbing of thoughts from the shores of creation is a quintessential part of creators life. You fail to get impressed by any form of beauty and you spiral down and venture into one of those stale, moth-eaten creations. Big popular creators handle this ebb by playing sophomore to some old school of thought, but as a wandering tramp in the streets of creativity I preferred to stay quite and let this dark clouds pass by.
To say that I was in one of those thoughtless droughts for the last two months would not be an understatement.
Firstly, I shifted to a new house and was preoccupied with the nuances of shifting houses. Packing of my books ended up a week long activity, credit to the distractions then-and-there by the variety of themes that books offered from zen philosophy to the mughal history. The variegated themes left me in the middle of nowhere. Also I had to deal with the house-owners to get my advance money back. This mental tension leaves a footprint on creation. I wrote at least four posts and trashed them without publishing as I myself was stuck by the banality of those writings.
Secondly it is the creators nightmare - Power cuts. Though one might think of a romantic backdrop of candlelight kindling the creator to the heights of creation, I was only left with mosquito bites. Once of my trashed posts was a story of a artist who gives up painting because of the continuous power cut situation in Tamil Nadu (14hours a day). But then in Tamil Nadu, one cannot speak out as you might be labelled as hurting sentiments. Here one has to 'adjust' and everyone does so with a panache. So I didn't post it. On one of those power cut nights I felt like a primeval man left only on the mercy of his own hands and legs to survive with the harsh reality of nature. Surely. mosquitoes are above homo-sapiens in the food chain.
Third and most important contributor to the creative constipation was my lack of travel in these two months. The sequel of 'Our Bangalore' lies still in my drafts because I did not travel much these two months and it meant my horizon stayed where it was without any scope for expansion. Also, my unpublished travelogues about my 'Himalayas trip' might still need a lot of refinement in the highs of Ooty before I can publish it.
Staying continuously in one place brings staleness and as always a wandering bee gathers more honey.
How I miss those travels in the window seat of those cramped second class compartments in Indian trains with the aroma of 'railway-tea' and a book to quench the intellectual appetite.
I might end up in endless rhetoric here justifying my absence in blogging. But i can seek solace in the fact that this gap might be a crouch before the jump to better literary spheres.
