NOTES FROM DEAD HOUSES The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Ludwig Wittgenstein And they wrote and wrote on reams of bitter paper, all that they did not know, yet they wrote with such an extraordinary sense of entitlement, that these limited men decided who we were, how limited the expression of our thoughts would be, how we would conduct the rest of our generations for untold years to come. Those under whom we were the colonised, the colonies, and the forever foreign. * Notebook (n.) a book with blank or ruled pages for writing in. Also - notepad, exercise book, logbook, journal, diary, pocketbook, cahier, daybook. A writer’s notebook must be what an artist’s tangible studio looks like, what with its bits and bobs, seemingly pointless information, bland half-sentences that once meant something – long forgotten now, like a short cord of cotton wire stuffed in a coin pocket – a list of things to look up at some point, to-dos, lists of lists, work things, private things, the performative things, in case another opened it. Just vestiges of time stored in words and pages. * Open – Close / * What is it about the being of a notebook that evokes so many disparate thoughts about its purpose? It is at once about aesthetics, and the politics of the notebook. It is mystical, and alliteratively, mundane. The forbidden private and a catalyst for how the story of this land has been written. Perhaps it is in truth only prosaic, this notebook, any notebook rich or poor; the glamour lying only in how it smells of possibilities. What a cabinet of wonders the pages within a shut notebook have the potential to be. * / Private – Public * A notebook may best be understood through some adjectives, some acquired properties and an odd history or two. In an exercise in myth-making here is how we might be able to decipher the many ways in which notebooks have shaped the modern world. Notebooks as architecture The simplest notebook is a book of variable size with a set number of pages. The covers at the front and back are habitually thick and made of a stronger material. The pages within are usually ruled evenly or left blank. These small books are bound together and sold to those who need it. A simple notebook is meant for the user to use it to jot down this and that, passing notes that are sometimes important but mostly don’t keep up with the ravages of time. The quirk of an analogue machine like the notebook is that there is too, the potential to make it a very complicated piece of thing. The pages could be dotted or checkered. They could be in different colours and odd shapes. There could be pockets and sleeves inserted into the back pages to hold loose papers, ticket stubs, bills and other oddities that we tend to unwittingly collect. Collection is sometimes the only control we are able to exercise over daily life. And just like that, a notebook, harmless to look at, might hold the vaguest, most vacuous descriptions of peoples written with severe limits to the knowing of a language. This notebook/s would go on to condemn diverse, complicated people to a singular vision of a native, an ethic and an aesthetic at once exotic, at once inviting judgement and derision. When the white man wrote what has become history, geography, society, language and everything else, he erased all these subjects that came before he and his notebooks did. Notebooks are record, also erasure. * Notebooks as edgeland Geographies everywhere have a section of edgeland, however vast or blip-sized. It is where the forest meets the edge of a village, a village meets the outskirts of a town, where the green bleeds into the grey of the cityscape. It is a liminal space. It is a hedge between the centre and the provincial. Take a filled notebook. Rare must be the writer who hopes never to have anyone want to take a peek into her thought-full/less pages. One could write or draw or paint or sing in a notebook as if half for one’s own creation and the other half as if the notes would be displayed for posterity to study. The best of notebooks is somewhat a mix of what is intimate and what is self-censored enough to be of voyeuristic interest to an audience. Notebooks are edgelands in the mind, caught like the lines of a country between conscious thoughts and unconscious actions. * Notebooks as language A notebook is forgiving – we could misspell, we could make the most outrageous grammatical errors and the notebook would not care. In this freedom of selection in deciding what goes into the notebook, there is a private language that is constructed between the user and the object. “Only I can navigate my way around my notebook,” the user might say, with absolute authority over such a conviction. Perhaps the notebook could be read by anyone who could read the language, in case they came across it. But no reader could possibly understand why the user of the notebook chose certain thoughts, words, made notes on a particular day and not on others and so on. In this way, a notebook may be called a physical extension of the many complicated streams of thought ongoing in a person’s brain. Using these very personal codes and language nowhere else found, a writer can build a Wunderkammer, cabinets of curiosities once assembled with things and animals from the orient. He has, if we were to look into notebooks past, built fictions on people and communities, written down money matters, described numbers in great detail, decided fates of vast lands with just the thingness of pen and paper. Notebooks have thus translated the inner into the outer, the (high-highly) subjective into the universal. * Notebooks as gender Women wrote too, obviously. They wrote journals and adventures and travelogues, and poetry, manifestos, histories, and whatnots. But their notebooks were, and continue to be filed under kitchen writing or dining table literature. It is after all only the notebooks of men that write rewrite the stories of the world. * Notebooks as Huma Untethered. Birds that rest on clouds and feed on dew, thus having no use for wings and legs. The phoenix-like huma stays afloat all its life, a bird of fortune that can bestow kingship upon whomsoever it flies over. Removed off the metaphor, when one’s thoughts so evolve that they break all limitations, one becomes like a king. It is the limitation of language that the power of kingship is equated with an evolved mind. The first descriptions of these magnificent mythologies were contained in notebooks that travelled far and farther, the early mimesis of the myths themselves that would follow for centuries thereafter. * Notebooks as power “It is only by realizing that love of power is the cause of the activities that are important in social affairs that history, whether ancient or modern, can be rightly interpreted.” Russell Men who had the gall for impiety, for refusing to admit the limitations of individual human power were the men who loved power more than average. Restrained from self-assertion by a layer of morality and imperial (pretend) modesty, they occupied positions of power. A posit universal and just as continuous. Imperialism by any other name would taste like rust just as violent. * Notebooks as confession, company and cameo In old forgotten diaries, did those who made notebooks of mostly ill-informed decisions write with doubts? Did commerce trump all, as it does now? Where were the avant-garde? The rebels, the naysayers, the consciences? In deep forests late into the darkest of evenings, at perhaps a daak bungalow, with a hard drink in hand for the hard times, were letters on loose pages the only company to call on? To think of distant homes in the moors, of wet days and windy seaside, everything not-here, did the imagination run riot. Did they thus spin anthropomorphic words? They must have known what was fiction and what was truth in those proto-post-truth centuries. The cameos they feverishly wrote for audiences elsewhere, the legacy they ascribed to the journals they carried, did those books become heavier after the pages were closely filled in? In what language are requiems written for such notebooks? * Notebooks as objects for collection The thingness of notebooks houses the qualitative texture of distant parts of the world. When we study old notebooks and their contents, we can read a lot between the actual words and the intentions. Read between the lines, as it were. The very idea of collection is generally tantamount to appropriation. Wunderkammers were weird bridges between atavistic mythologies and scientific modernisms. The way our species is bulldozing through, literally moving earth in ‘exotic’ locations, perhaps a contemporary cabinet of curiosities would contain cameos of specimens that will have gone extinct within our own lifetimes. Then, perhaps the collection of such pages would be an act of collection as preservation. Too, an act of predation. The urge to collect is almost a masculine need, an aspiration for acquiring the idea of equality through imitation of the powerful other. As also through congruent lifestyles, by trophies of visual cultural memories, by performative politics. Anything for power, anything to relieve the trauma of generations of violence. A new phone, shiny clothes, the language of the colonizer – there are many ways to create interrupted narratives. Like salt prints, these narratives are ephemera, really. There is yet a long way to go from all the violence. * A notebook: so innocent an object, so potent a weapon. * Follow instructions. Close notebook. * Postscript as notebooks Imaginations of what the early notebooks of explorers, perpetrators, the narratives that the natives might have held in their experiences and such other writings underly Garima Gupta’s works. Notebooks are imaginative, subjective, powerful beings; they derive their properties from the act of being closed to those lives that they make notes about. These tensions between what gets into notebooks and the impact they have on people’s lives are among the varied layers Gupta thinks about. Wildlife trade feels unethical and immoral; too, it is mostly illegal. But what drives people to it as consumers, as tradesmen, as those who benefit from it? Hers are not questions of judgement or even of the ethics of such lifestyles. The job of art is to open the notebook and show what possibilities there are for questions for you, the viewer, to ask.