Noise
One that refuses to leave and the one I invited in
This essay was written as a part of a collaborative exercise with fellow writers in the Delhi NCR Substack group. Links to their essays are at the end of the article.
There’s a print I planned on making1 and gifting my parents on their anniversary this year. It’s been in my head for six weeks. I have the lino block sanded and stained, the ink, the tools, the time, not a lot of time, but enough.
What I also have is a tab open, to someone else’s work.
She’s roughly my age. Her art practice is a few years old, like mine. Last month, her prints sold out in just 40 minutes. Her studio photographs well and she posts almost every day. Her captions are warm and unbothered like the surface of something steady underneath.
I close the tab only to open it again. Minutes later I close it again, put away the art supplies and tell myself, I’ll begin tomorrow.
Story of the last 2 months.
Is this envy? Envy is cleaner; it wants a specific thing and you can reason with it. This is more diffuse. The noise of measuring myself against a version of an art practice I can see from the outside but cannot inhabit. Her visibility, steadiness, abundant time, a sketchbook full of evidence, and the fact that her work exists in the world while mine exists in my head, where, you’ll notice, no one can buy it.
In Masnavi, Rumi writes about the ney, the reed flute, cut from the reed bed, crying ever since. The sound it makes is the sound of separation. The reed remembers where it came from. That remembering is the music.
So when I open the tab for the seventeenth time, what I’m hearing, I think, is not pettiness but the longing. For the practice that another artist has, for some version of mine that exists outside my head.
I thought naming it would help, but it only made it heavier. Now, I can’t dismiss it as small-mindedness. I have to take it seriously, sit with the wanting, and knowing that wanting it harder isn’t bringing it any closer.
The desk keeps getting messier, the light worse and the window between bedtime and exhaustion narrows further. And I let it.
One night, after my daughter had gone to sleep, I was clearing the playmat.
This is the last task of the day in our house: toys go into the shelf, books back on the rack, the mat wiped down. A task done without thinking: my hands were on the mat, my head on the tab.
I picked up a pen she’d borrowed from me earlier. Then I noticed the mat.
It was punctured. Small holes, dozens of them, in loose clusters here and there. The mat is made of rubber. It isn’t supposed to perforate. Wrong material, I thought, of course, the one time I don’t read the listing carefully…
Then I looked more closely.
The holes weren’t random. They weren’t a pattern either. They were what happens when a tiny human, completely absorbed in what she’s doing, jabs a pen into a surface over and over because the act of jabbing is fun and the surface is there. There’s no plan, no end goal she was working toward. She had simply gone into what I call “the zone”, that state where the next action is the only action. You do it, and then you do it again, and don’t check whether it’s adding up to anything.
I sat there for a moment with the pen in my hand.
Then I packed up the toys at speed, went to my desk, picked up a scrap of lino, and jabbed the gouge into the surface. A puncture, a dot. Then another. Then another.
The dots were small. Slightly uneven, because my hand at 1 am is uneven. Some deeper than others, some closer together, some further apart.
After about 25 minutes my hand started to ache and I stopped.
I came back to it 2 days later. The dots were more uniform that day. By the end of the week there was a small field of them on the lino. It wasn’t a picture of anything, wasn’t trying to be.
The dot is too small to hold its own ambition, let alone anyone else's.
There is no better dot, no more disciplined dot, no dot that someone else is doing more consistently than I am. The form is too small to hold any of the things I had been using to measure myself.
Most of my practice has been about removing noise, the chatter around a clean line, the stray nicks, the mark of a hand that wasn’t steady enough. You learn to sand, to sharpen, to control. And here was a piece made of nothing but chatter. Noise as the work. Different noise, though. This one I invited.
You would think the comparison stopped after this, but I still open the tab. I still feel the gap. That noise hasn’t transformed into something useful or poetic. It’s still loud and often crippling. But somewhere, my breathing changed.
The noise refuses to pack its bags and leave. And I’ve stopped waiting for it to.
Because the dots don’t know about any of that. They’re too small to know.
If you've found your own version of a dot, a unit small enough that the noise can't reach it, I'd love to hear about it.
Thehraav is a museletter about building an art practice and a life that can sustain it — noticing small things, reading between the lines, and just taking a breath. Most days I'm winging it behind a corporate desk, as a toddler mom and a slow artist, punctuating a busy life with low frame-rate moments.
Take what you need and leave the rest. Thank you for being here. :)