Practice

Any kind of artistic practice involves so much of manipulation. There is so much to and fro in achieving an end. Take water colour for example. The artist uses washes over and over again , sucks or drops more colour and keeps on repeating the process until the desired result is achieved.

The process of repetition is the key to a rich product. Repetition allows overlay and thus gives a lot of depth to work. Depth gives multiple readings of a single work and it creates different moods during different times. Oil painters keep on mixing colours till they achieve the desired result. This process is perhaps meditative.

Architects use tracings, through which they repeat processes. Through repetition and mixing, one may layer ideas. It also involves iteration of mistakes, then correcting them. One keeps going back and forth, revising the earlier thought at each step. Thus these processes are not linear, neither cyclic. They are like eddies, which keep micromanaging themselves. Such processes give rise to techniques, which can be used in varying scales of work. 

I work on my writing like above. I first write in the crudest possible way. Probably because I think in mixed languages. Then I try giving it coherence, by first putting it grammatically correctly, then polishing sentences, words and phrases. But I purposely delay all these steps since every time I read my text afresh, I am able to refine it further. At one go, all seems fine, but in another instance, it appears terribly wrong. Many a times, I find no relevance of a plenty of texts that I once began writing. Then I realize how convoluted my mind is. I discard a lot of such texts. I also preserve a lot of such texts, only to laugh at my silliness. But when I look back, I can estimate how far have I come. And this is the reason why archives are important. They allow to trace trajectories.