Ordinary Person

There’s something about her writing that brings me back. It isn’t a Fitzgeraldean crescendo, building up in the tender night, tugging at your heartstrings eloquently and ethereally. No, it’s sprinkled with sawdust and rusty nails, but once you dig deeper—at the risk of getting injured—you’ll find a hidden gem with so much depth and candour: multifaceted and transparent.

But I’m sure many people don’t dig enough, either from fear or because of their superficiality.

We’re quick to label writing as coarse or ill-natured when we have our own periods of vulgarity during the day, which the Sauvignon never solves. A faux-elitist conservativeness is what I call it. A wound and a tattoo cut through skin, and just because the latter seems attractive, it doesn’t mean the former doesn’t bring with it the pain of experience.

But I go back to her, and I like the diamond in the rough—if you’ll permit me to use a cliché—or the abstract tune like Miles Davis’ Paraphernalia submerged beneath layers of Grindcore. I find Meshuggah bringing individual units together to form a polyrhythmic machine before finding another swirl of life in Chet Baker and Paul Desmond, playing a standard like Autumn leaves when I read her: The latter’s unique, alto tone evoking more than feelings, placing me in another space and time.

There’s so much beauty in art, but it lies in perception and never in battles for superiority or petty, feud–counter feud poetry. We’re just individuals, and from a bird’s-eye view, we’re one with the earth we walk on, shaped and moulded by it, and what we create should facilitate growth and nurture a collective, artistic consciousness. So irrespective of the approach: confessional, descriptive, satirical, a separation between the writer and his work, or pure stream of thought, this journey is beautiful.