Read it Live
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Ex blows out. The stream of smoke is steady, wispy, seemingly endless. He exhales a decade and two years in one breath. It billows back at him in eddies. In this one sitting he sees everything he has done, seen, been - as vaporous and ephemeral as all he breathes out, seen to unseen. Hangs there, this smoke, flailing against the invisible whip lashing of the ceiling fan, clings to what it can; leaves its distinct unpleasant odor of existence and its whimsical ashes of having been, everywhere nowhere, all blown by and by. In between perpetual re-intakes of smoke, Ex takes in a little oxygen. A heady room, at his almost-Teak desk, two minutes to noon on a Jumayraat in May; smoking, barely breathing, thinking. Thinking, how long could there possibly be left to this, he takes up another cigarette, begins all over.

The landscape is contiguous, he cannot quite get over it. In his last class of the spring semester, in complete contrast to his first year at the Institute-which ran out of, over and beyond each semester-early in May, he disbands the circle of reading and writing together. Attendance is sparse, Ex takes up the podium and delivers a brief lecture, as he is rarely known to do. “Everyone here, aesthetically, seems irretrievably damned, somehow incriminated: culpable, for in all our tangible yet barely intelligible pasts, coming down as it were a menstrual stream of history, on the stark whole, we have all somehow managed to contribute to making everything ugly.

“Over the course of a year, I do not know if I have had anything old, new, important or even interesting to teach you; but inadvertently, if I have transferred anything, aside from a lyre or two of what I attempt not to turn into name-droppings, it may be threefold. One, Socrates’ oracular joke on wisdom holds, forever. Two, Borges is yet true too, and you yourselves are living proof, that there is yet too much beauty in the world. And three, I myself am sufficient substantiation of the ugly I posit, all around us, and the inevitable inability of beauty to overcome it.” Perhaps that makes of me a novel, he thinks. He decides not to broadcast this, concluding instead: “Where I fail, where I fall short, there you can begin. Perhaps you don’t have to fail, or fall short. Maybe you can all go beyond all this, make things beautiful - at least in literature, all other forms of art, and thought, till everything else reconfigures itself contingently.”

The podium stands tall, he looks down at it. An inverse italicized z, with a wide-enough-for-a-coffee-cup base, atop; the slanting floorboard for notes, perpendicular; and, the little jutting horizon line protruding below, to stop all lecture notes from sprawling everywhere. As Ex removes his thick dappled matt black notebook, curving up at the edges from rain, he notes graffiti all over it, the podium’s face. Perhaps not, a passing thought backtracks to his final remark; chairs clattered together in some disarrayed square circle, eyes lowered, he makes his way, awkwardly as always, out of the room.