On Transmission

For weeks, I’ve been thinking about Frank O’Hara’s manifesto “Personism,” in which he announces the beginning of a new movement in poetry. He writes: “... [Personism] puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.” O’Hara’s manifesto emphasizes the relationship between the artist and the artist’s audience. The poem is not a sculpture to be viewed as one might an artefact in a museum, but rather as a rose in a garden; it can be picked up and touched and smelled and is as much yours as the next person’s. He likens a poem to a telephone call, diminishing the distance between the poet and the reader, and the lack of distance between the poet and the reader is the poem. In this vein, I’m reminded also of the Bengali word for a batch of letters, which is ডাক, or dak, and also means: to call or ask for. A letter, a poem, is an outstretched hand — an invitation for the reader from the writer.

And my text and my approach to its preservation shall follow in the tradition of personism, which is to prioritize the audiences of art. My intended audience is my family, present and future; it is primarily for them that I want to preserve my grandfather’s poems and my grandmother’s recipes. My family is scattered across the globe; some are in the United States, some are in England, Japan, China — thus, my primary consideration is for accessibility: family members must be able to read the text without immediate physical access. I will use two forms of online service to disseminate the text: the first is a Wordpress blog, because its user interface allows computer novices to create websites without coding abilities, allows a user to host their website on the company’s servers at inexpensive yearly rates, and — because of its large user base — is unlikely to shut down and endanger my content any time soon. The website would be minimalistic in its design; it would consist of five webpages — one that will display pictures from my grandparents’ lives, one that will contain my grandfather’s poems and translations, one that will contain the narrativized versions of my grandmother’s recipes, and the last will have my grandparents’ biographies, and the last page will consist of a digital wall upon which others may post similar creations — poems written by family members, drawings, stories, anecdotes. This is so that my project does not stand in isolation but is also a forum that collects and encourages the histories of people and their loved ones. My second digital medium is a scanned pdf of the print version of this book which will be uploaded to a google drive, such that the text can exist in another place as a back-up and can be sent to others via email.

I will also produce a physical copy of this book by manually printing it at the Bow and Arrow press. The book, like the website, will contain my grandparents’ writings, biographies, and a few empty pages at the end for readers to put down their thoughts and responses to the works. I’d also like to print the pieces on pages with wide margins so that readers can add notes and comments in the margins; I want it to be a living document that allows readers to hear my grandparents’ calls and also allows them to interact with other readers. I will keep this original in my grandparents’ house in Jaipur, where they live today, where much of their generation of my family still lives too. I will produce copies of this original and send them to the houses of my grandparents’ siblings (six on my grandfather’s side and three on my grandmother’s), so that each branch of my family has one copy that can be passed down through the generations.

I’m not producing this content for any commercial purposes; it is a private endeavour for my family, and as such, is only susceptible to a handful of cultural, material, and technological forces. When the paper begins to wither away, or when enough time has passed that most members of my family no longer remember us, the physical book will cease to matter — and that is inevitable! I’m under no illusion that this book will outlast all others; it will only exist for as long as my successors care about the past and about the people they came from, and who is to say how long that shall be? If our obsession with history is any indicator, this book might maintain relevance forever. As for the digital media, that is susceptible to rising server costs as more and more data is created and there is less space to store it; or to the apocalyptic possibility of a crash of the internet or the destruction of servers; or perhaps it will simply cease to exist when my family no longer wishes to pay the hosting cost for a website. By freeing this text from the grips of profit-making and a desire for all the world to read it, I wish to restore it to itself, and to make its existence contingent on those for whom it was written — my family.