This is my newsletter #29: Kaavya Ranjith
Say a series of dots create a line. Another finite series of dots creates a separate line. When these two merge, and get lost in each other, we lose most vocabulary for sources, origins, and beginnings. In other words, a knot.
Hi, my name is Kaav Ranj! I’m really just someone who likes to make stuff, whether that’s poetry, art, photographs, video, food, or business ventures. Sometimes they all collide into a brilliant knot and those end up being my favourite experiences to live through.
In this newsletter, I want to talk about the crucial importance of knots like this - when things come together to emerge anew. Hegel calls this the hypothesis, a sort of middle ground between a movement (thesis) and its opposing, reactionary movement (antithesis). As we’ve seen over the past year, movements do not stay silent. They are loud, sharp, jagged. Reactionary movements, even more so.
And so: a warning. Nothing about this newsletter will flow smoothly. The music is eclectic, the sources are constantly dislocating from themselves, and the entire thing has rough edges and hairpin turns. But they connect, I promise. It’s just up to you to figure out how they do so.
It’s as political as intersectional activism, and as entertaining as musical remixes of popular memes.
Something that’s been on my mind today - a line from ‘Like to Be You’ by Shawn Mendes and Julia Michaels.
I don’t know what it’s like to be you, but I’m dying to.
It’s an emotion we’ve all felt - the separation from another, perhaps now so more than ever. It’s something we see in literature over and over again:
“After all it had always been this way; that he was a little apart. Again he felt in a profound way that he was both inside and outside what he saw; that he was both connected and passing through. Harold had begun to understand that this was also the truth about his walk. He was both a part of things, and not.
- Rachel Joyce, in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” - F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
And the most beautiful way I’ve seen this feeling visualised, is in a video game trailer. Everything is a game by David O’Reilly that manages to fuse itself with existentialism, and its trailer offers a narration by the late philosopher Alan Watts. If you’re ever anxious, let this be your comfort.
Another project I often come back to is Utkarsh Pathak’s study of kinetic memory - how the things our fingers remember can be connected to digital data. You can find it here.
When it comes to music, a constant balm is Kaleo - an Icelandic rock band that continues to amaze with the dedication to their national geography. In one video, they perform live on an iceberg. The next, inside a volcano.
How much of our land, our spaces make us? Is that specific patch of earth we walk on a plane for the art that springs from it? I’m not sure.
Every morning, I look out of my bedroom and catch the Persian Gulf crashing onto the rocky edges of Bahrain - and I smell India’s earth. I miss the koel, and the carpets of flowers fallen in early winter, and I try to bring those landscapes to this pinprick island through song recommendations, or emails like this one.
Another way I’ve heard land and terrains is on post rock album The Plains of the Purple Buffalo by *Shels. All I can say is don’t play with the volume with this one - the introductory haunting lilts quickly crescendo into a roaring call of the wild.
Now, for some links to songs from different lands and people:
The Twareg Tribe / 1960s Cuba / Russia / Mali / France / Jordan / 90s Lebanon / Bahrain
Another way I’ve been coping is through film & video. There are so many screens you can fit between yourself and a TV set these days - and I’m guilty of browsing my phone through a few too many Netflix sessions. These are the ones that made me put my phone down:
The Trial of the Chicago 7 (available on Netflix. TW: Does contain violence and racial discrimination)
Guftagu by Delhi based storytelling collective The Urdu Project
I hope you use these links to go down rabbit holes, rub these threads together and find new knots. I’d love to hear about what you discovered! You can follow me and whatever I’m working on @kvrnj.
Have a beautiful Sunday,
Kaav.