How to write about one’s self? Granted, we are opinionated and we have our idiosyncrasies to deal with as well. I have decided on a simple if irritating format; I’m sure that in the process, I’d omit the more pertinent facts, but it can’t be helped. I do realize with increasing alarm that I habitually expect readers to read between the lines- as if they knew me intimately- in matters wherein I’d fare better if I didn’t exercise this vagueness. But you can’t go wrong with basic facts such as these:
Name: Elle E.
Residence: Singapore
Ethnicity: Indian
Religion: Hinduism
Zodiac: Capricorn
Hair Colour: Black
Eye Colour: Brown
Favourite Colour: Green
Language: English, Tamil
Personality Type: INFJ
Superhero: Wonder Woman, Batman
Eternal accessory: spectacles
(onwards, ho!)
This is a cursory overview of very general characteristics about myself. I don’t believe you’ll learn more about me after reading it. However you can go back to the main journal and try to surmise bits of me in between the lines- that is, if I don’t seem that reticent. I’m sorry. This is not a room splashed with my “personality’s” entrails. All you are going to get is a little splattering at the north-eastern corner, behind the club chairs named part i, part ii and part iii.
(part i)
I don’t knit, bake or cook; I don’t go running in the mornings; I ceased my bicycling days long ago. My mother worries that I don’t get enough sunlight, that I don’t sleep early enough, that I spoil my eyesight by reading, reading, reading…
I am a lemon tea guzzling, library lingering, tenuously scribbling, gaucherie-stricken, otiose spinster. And no, I am not at all bitter.
I think, stress and panic; I reminisce about Hamlet after that and feel insignificant. I work better in an ordered, beautiful and organized environment. I am usually meticulous. I constantly draw up ‘to-do’ lists.
I am a crepuscular creature.
I have a male alter ego. He was born in the darkest of winters in an obscure Eastern European nation; he has a shock of black hair and smoky green eyes; he recurrently appears in most of my fictional forays.
I am naturally inclined to philosophise, alliterate, obfuscate and in rarer modes, poeticise. I prefer pacifism and objective history but if all of us become diplomats, war wouldn’t exist and then where would we be?
I believe in chivalry – I’ll admit I like the excesses of courtly love. I keep a traditional longhand diary as well as a commonplace book. My favourite words are ‘eschatology’, ‘aha!’ and ‘phantasmagoria’. I like spontaneity in creativity but it’s hard to come by and harder to achieve.
I admire an open mind. I revel in the contradictions of humanity. I follow traditions dictated by the family. I can’t tell if it suggests a weak character. Perhaps I am that, but I can’t change this fundamental aspect.
(part ii)
I am insecure about the way I sound on the phone. This is because I listened to my voice recordings and, oh god, I give the impression that I either drink like a fish and suffer from a perpetual hangover, or that I’m the manacled, wailing ghost from Pliny’s age-old tale of sorry spirits and innocent young people.
I walk like a nun, with my face buried in a book. I can’t read maps. I’m helpless with directions. I’m the sort who’s perpetually lost. I daydream excessively. Control freak. I eat too much and exercise too little in a world overrun by evil waifs. I come off sounding too earnest occasionally. I have no sense of humour. I want to be an ultra-sophisticated, philosophising, bohemianesque 17th century man of letters.
(part iii)
I like gargoyles and vampires, nonsense verse and courtesans with golden hearts. I like my shadow, the idea of magic and the possibility that Merlin exists. Yes, I like the whimsical and I am whimsical.
Besides the usual body of politically correct list of hate, I can do without the following quite brilliantly: roaches, dog day afternoons, repetitious TV programmes, the prurient nature of recent popular music, homophobes, essentialism, Harold Blooms, messy rooms, contretemps and overconfident adolescents.
♣
Behaving Like Corinthian Heroes
“we reached the country of the Lotus-eaters, a race that eat the flowery lotus fruit”
Once upon a time, once and once again, there was a little girl with a whacked mind. When she grew up, her irresponsible nature overtook her little, better senses. She ran away to join the Ithacan army cum navy cum men (she did a Woolfian Orlando; she transmogrified into a man), to follow their island’s monarch to the ends of the world if needs be. Forsooth, nobody expected to do that. It was simply procedure to pledge an awful oath of allegiance and equally polite to forget this little detail. Like her fellow brawny men, she didn’t expect the siege of Troy to last more than 10 days. The idiot Agamemnon should have listened to her king’s many cunning stratagems, but no!
But I digress.
What occurred after the war is when her story truly begins. To cut a long, somewhat pretentious story short, she decided to become a Lotus-eater. And really now, who wouldn’t, with a master as deliberately ridiculous as Odysseus? Lotus-eaters were lazy men, of unknown, maybe international, origin. They made an appearance in a scandalous book of some oddity by the name of The Odyssey. Apparently this long poem was sung by a blind fellow who audaciously called himself Homer. The original, real, bona-fide Homer was that senior citizen, or strapping young man with rippling muscles, who initially composed The Iliad, another poem quite notorious for its homoerotic overtones and stupid, villainous kings who went on and on about personal glory and eternal glory and all the other bloody glories of the mediterranean world. Bona-fide Homer became a vagabond due to his intransigent, dowdy nature as well as his grouchy refusals to succumb to the pliant Muses after a particularly delicate and difficult escapade involving a Trojan effete and a wooden horse.
I shouldn’t wonder at his opprobrious ability to deny the patronizing Muses, given the fact that pawky Homer was as blind as a winged mammal from central South America.
Where was I? Oh yes. Homer was blind and she (our rampaging hero) was a fashionable Lotus-eater and Greece was shamelessly illiterate. It wasted precious time on naked men who liked throwing the discus and carrying on as if there was no pleasure on earth besides the discus and its one, inane function. It should have founded a proper, popular education system instead of gallivanting with swans and gold coins and the perpetual naked man-person.
The year was 18—, the land, France. The masculine masque discontinued; Elle E. suffered ennui being Orlando. She donned fashionable feminine garb and the world resumed with much less fuss and normalcy. Suddenly she could use her head. She could think and still be redundant. She refused to be a mediterranean cretin. She decided to become a polymath. Ha. She was bored with the otherwise affable boys from Lotus Island and that holy manna. The continent was her playground, France her sacrificial altar. Furthermore there was talk in the air, of a more exciting sacred gatorade: the essence of wormwood. Absinthe.
She became one of them: the incumbents of the Parisian cafe. To get to the crux of her time-travel, they were smart- maybe it’d rub off on her. She didn’t want to miss the chance of a long, dizzy lifetime.
These latter day Lotus-eaters, they were all the rage; tannic acid junkies, the brave new worlds they conjured in their leisure. These intellectuals, born and bred in an atmosphere of ease and poverty, of blue cigar smoke and oysters, of Absinthe… She became one of them- she became a poseur. Perpetual depression had its magnetic charms for her. And languishing was second nature to one such as our dear Elle E. .
Alas! her mouth began to ache after some time. The French language was particularly tricky to enunciate, and all that spit kept getting in the way…
One day, to her quiet horror, our hero fell into a deep slumber in the midst of one intellectual-like meandering of the mind. The amiable French turned Claudius. Gently, they carried her quietly snoring form and left it outside, at the mercy of bitter continental weather. To add insult to indignation, the secret fraternus of Parisian cafes ordered the immediate closure of all such houses of the mind. Our freezing hero was issued an ultimatum even old Bony (God rest his soul) would have envied, but which, in her secret heart, sounded a lot like a certain creature in a certain part two of a certain Peter Jackson motion picture, talking to its digital double conscience, finally uttering those very anticlimactic words she hints at to you, faithful Reader.
That was that. Enough hearts had been trampled upon, dreams mangled. She “cleared out” of the despicable land. “The bloody, pretentious gits,” she muttered as she looked west. The future lay with John Bull and his precious Albion.
The year was 17—.
Here ends this curious tale’s transcript.
