in my last act of betrayal, i leave

in katabasis, two phd students go to hell to bring back a professor. a snooty prof who they hope will be their advisor. the price? half their lifespan.

my first year of phd has concluded. i am sitting on my professor's dining table as i write this. the same professor who was on the admissions committee that selected me into this phd program. i am cat-sitting for him. and i started with his copy of the book until i got my own from barnes n noble today. it's only fair i write this piece on leaving & madness. the world handed me this metaphor, how could i not make use of it?

i am fond of literature. it is very similar to magic. when r.f. kuang wrote "...the most mysterious and capricious of disciplines, admired for its power, derided for its frivolity, is in the brief the act of telling lies about the world," she could very well have been talking about literature.

& when r.f. kuang wrote, "she would sacrifice her firstborn...she would sever a limb. she would give anything, so long as she still had her mind, so long as she could still think," she might very well be talking about me. my brain is, perhaps, the only thing i respect about me.

the only trend i've been a part of in my life is leaving. homes, cities, friends, jobs, people. all clustered together is what i let go of, especially, when i moved from delhi to syr to enroll in this program. there's something about leaving that cannot be metabolized cleanly and fully. it breaks a continuous narrative that we tell ourselves. luckily, i had no continuous narrative considering all i've done is leave. when the infrastructure of being rooted to one place dissolves, the self becomes the only coherence that makes the image. quite the burden, if you ask me. the romantics were right about this one. exile is the one condition that made poets out of ordinary people, and madmen out of poets.

anyway. i am not too fond of poetry (too full of metaphors for my liking). i wanted to get to the word madmen. i like to think of madness as a kind of indefinite, continually deferred, involuntary leaving. stationary. limbo. unable to arrive, thus unable to depart. ophelia doesn't go mad and then drift into the water, the drift and the madness are the same event. leaving is how the literature shows us the interior breaking. because the threshold belongs to unreason.

a lot of the leaving i have done in the last seven or so years has been to arrive here: the phd program in literature. but what now?

it's a dicey field to put a foot in and say i want stability. i am not talking about academia, but literature itself. the reason i believe the line "...is in the brief the act of telling lies about the world" could be about literature is because it requires us to never fully commit to one version of it (replace it with anything). it is an ontological risk.

plath and woolf killed themselves. so did foster wallace and walter benjamin. antonin artaud and robert lowell were institutionalized. latter for mania. they needed to be contained from themselves & the world. althusser strangled his wife, william burroughs shot his wife. special mention of fisher, who hung himself. there's a reason one of my all time favorite films is kill your darlings. lucien carr killed his stalker. i like to believe him and ginsberg and kerouac were in a love triangle. i diverge.

for the right to think, to become a part of the discourse.

it is not for no reason there's memes of all writers being a tragic story.

i, of course, have been initiated to this world already (the ssris and the mood stabilizers aren't for nothing).

madness of leaving. madness of literature. the former is what i am adept at. i have built my own little special place in leaving. a cozy little hut, full of cats and bread and wine and fuzzy socks. the latter is where i excel at.

what would be the end of me is leaving literature. to leave would be to tell myself that all the wagers i had put on all the leavings earlier was for nothing. not that i lost. but that i shouldn't have played in the first place. now that, is betrayal. to myself, the professor whose table i am sitting at, the keyboard that i typed my personal statement on, the people who celebrated my acceptance, the parents who made sure my education was done right at their bodily expense, the students who wake up in the morning to be taught by me. to people who want me alive. keep me alive. to me.

sacrificing one madness for another madness. and the world goes on. as someone who has made leaving into a livelihood, to leave literature would be to not even have a game to refuse. even bartleby, in his infinite preferring not to, had something he was refusing. i would have nothing left to refuse.

a night-time stream of consciousness writing with blue mascara on (2 posts in a week? unstoppable!) thank you sm for reading <3