paperwallah. Word count

I am bereft of words.

Empty as a leaky cauldron. All talk it has been the past seven weeks. An endless carousel of literary festivals and book launches. Where everything must be explained, answered, described at length, spelled out, explicated, clarified. It was exhilarating, exhausting. The talking on panels, beyond panels, at gatherings and readings. At the end, I messaged a writer friend in Goa who’d been on a similar campaign for her new novel. “Are you safely ensconced at home?” I asked. “Yes, reading and cooking and not talking too much.”

I’m doing the same.

Not that this must be taken as a complaint. It’s part of the job. This is what (mostly all) writers (must) do. But I’ve been thinking of words — how they poured from me in a torrent — and their rationing. Have I been precise? Have I used them well? Do I treat them as I would a taken–for–granted lover? It has been difficult to get back to writing. To placing words on a page with diligence and self–discipline. Is there a well, a deep, dark reservoir that empties and must be refilled by silence, repose, reading? What if words came in fixed allowances? Tidy parcels tied in string allotted to each one of us every day of our lives. This, of course, brings to mind a poem. Jeffrey McDaniel’s ‘The Quiet World’.

In an effort to get people to look

into each other’s eyes more,

the government has decided to allot

each person exactly one hundred

and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it

to my ear without saying hello.

In the restaurant I point

at chicken noodle soup. I am

adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long

distance lover and proudly say

I only used fifty-nine today.

I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond, I know

she’s used up all her words

so I slowly whisper I love you,

thirty-two and a third times.

After that, we just sit on the line

and listen to each other breathe.

Rather than proliferation and excess, I’m intrigued by restriction. How many words do we utter in a day, a week, a decade, a lifetime? Do written words count? Would they steal from our allowance? What if there were limitations? Set by others, yourself. Entire texts have been written under this premise: Georges Perec’s La Disparition (A Void), which follows a group of people looking for a missing companion, is a lipogram without using the letter ‘e’. Yes, not even once. He was a member of the French Oulipo group, founded in 1960, which sought to create literary works bound by patterns and constrained writing techniques usually based on mathematical models, believing that they could trigger ideas and inspiration. Perec’s best-known work Life: A User’s Manual interweaves stories about characters living in a fictional Parisian apartment block, and complies to a complex system of constraints — lists of items, objects and references that each chapter must allude to. Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea : a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable, is, as the subtitle suggests, an elaborate exercise in linguistic trickery. The novel, narrated through letters, is set on the fictitious island of Nollop, home to Nevin Nollop, creator of the pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” which is preserved on a memorial statue and which the government takes extremely seriously. Through the book, the letter tiles fall from the inscription, and as each one does, the government bans the letter’s use from written or spoken communication. Consequently, passages become increasingly phonetically or creatively spelled — “I miss ewe all teeplee. I am sorree to atmit, Momma, tat I am presentlee a snoop!” Lipogrammatic examples are far–flung and assorted, including Christian Bok’s poetry collection Eunoia , Yasutaka Tsutsui’s book Zanzôni Kuchibeni o, and Charu Nivedita’s Tamil novel Zero Degree , among others. They fascinate because, far from being mere ‘word games’, they are a form of constrained writing that wrench away the words we know, and shake the flippancy and casualness with which we toss them around.

A prose poem in Sridala Swami’s recent poetry collection Escape Artist captures this. ‘Redacted Poetry is a Message in a Bottle’ imagines (as though you might be a castaway on a deserted island) that you own one book, and its words are the only ones with which you can speak to the world. “So you compose your message in your head, you mark words in the book, and you carefully cut them out one by one, knowing all the while that for every word you use up, others will be lost on the reverse. This is the opportunity cost of making your message. But you do it anyway, because you must. At first your dispatches are voluble and profligate. Soon you ration your words.” It’s a delicate exercise in the precious and unsayable. It is about knowing that when you speak certain words you’ve lost the chance to use others. The poem slows you down. It nudges you to rethink, to deliberate your relationship with language.

And silence.

(Janice Pariat is the author of Seahorse)

@janicepariat

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