'You are not alone'

Last night I watched a couple of things on TV - an event so rare it should be recorded here.

First, there was a brief glimpse of (I don't know which season of) KBC. This lady, after having reached the Rs. 20,000 threshold, was allowed to chat for a while with the Big B. She charmed everyone by saying how she has played and won KBC many times - once a day, in fact - in her mind.

Apparently she talks to the Big B every day while working out: they play KBC and he asks her questions and she answers, each answer the right one, until at the end of her hour or hour and a half she has her one crore. Then she stops, because one crore is enough for one day and there are more games to be played and much conversation still to be had with the Big B.

I was surprised and charmed and delighted by Pujaji's unselfconscious, frank confession not only to the world but also to the object of her daily speeches. I could never admit - not even now, when I am half-confessing - that I also talk to people I am never likely to meet in my life because they're dead or fictional or worlds away from my life. I can only imagine that I would pass out if I should ever happen to meet those dead/fictional/otherworldly people I'm such friends with in my head.

Then later, I watched X-Men: First Class. And where Michael Fassbender says, "I thought I was the only one" I said, with Charles Xavier, "You are not alone."

Oh yes.

Redacted poetry is a message in a bottle

Imagine you have one book with you, a reasonably large one, with lots of words in it. It is your lifeline, because you are now in a place where all other means of getting in touch with people has been taken away from you. There is only this one book, and it speaks to you and your one chance of speaking to the world is through the words that make up the book.

So you compose your message in your head, and 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 that will speak, there's another that will be lost on the reverse. This is the opportunity cost of 'writing' your message out.

But you do it anyway, because you must. At first your dispatches are voluble and profligate. Soon, you ration your words. As the pages become cut-outs the books speaks to you differently. It must be a classic because every time you read it, it has something new. And you get different things out of it.

The end of the book does not come, as one assumes, when the last page is turned. It comes when what remains are the unusable words. Everyone has a different list of these, but because this is the book you have and this is your list, the words that remain include 'anneal' and 'recombinant' and 'brise'. This is not to say that you do not love these words, or are not happy that somebody - the author of the book, for instance - found a use for them; just that you can't imagine what you could have to say that would include these and other such words.

But you learn these words because - after you have said all you have to say, after you have used up all the other words - these are all that are left you. Until other words come from the outside, until they can be recycled, the words you don't want or need are your companions through what you hope is only a temporary silence.

**

Speaking of redactions, Ron Palmer and Stephanie Young in Shampoo 38.

A Short Film About Talking

In her dreams she has many conversations. At first there’s just the two-tone call, like a doorbell she ought to answer but can’t. But as people wake up they drop in to say hi and catch up. The morning slides from sleepy to frantic. Windows open out onto a world she cannot see. The screen is voluble but silent. Only the urgent drum of gtalk and msn punctuates her sleep.

Later, when a film is complete, this is how they design the soundtrack: with chat alerts to indicate that someone has spoken. The sound recordist spends his days in the studio listening to conversations constructed out of these few sounds. In time each arrangement seems to say something different. They talk about this obsessively: the frequency of pings, the most effective arrangement, even the silences that could mean so many things. She knows every sequence by the notes that rise and fall, crowd or thin out.

Just before she goes to bed, she looks at the timeline to see the audio track, dramatic and ragged, insistent to the last. In her dreams she listens to people talking, their voices clear as bells, and looks for windows and words.