The disease of imitation. Imitating, we live, trying to bank on a reputation we do not have, cashing on a credibility we didn’t build, and priding an achievement we never deserved. The dark sides of imitation. As in the story, the Portrait of Dorian Gray, we seek eternal youth at the cost of our spirits. The spirit, intangible and ethereal, fleeting and ungraspable is easily forgotten, forgotten until we realize that an edifice never grew without a foundation, until we realize that by bidding on our spirits we drained our lives and while the mask of youth remained, unfractured and intact, the insides crumbled. The irreversibility of the past, the lost time, and a future coloured of longing and regret, the knowledge suddenly precipitates into a realization. Looking out the window, the impending gloom appears parading through the sky, approaching like phantoms from the court of heaven coming to imprison us. With a disposition inscrutable we stand paralysed. There are no struggles inside, the intractability of our position seeps in and for a split moment we try and pleasantly wonder what life would have been otherwise. No return. The words flag us. No return. The words incinerate the insides. No return. Overwhelmed by this deluge of emotions, battered by the bellows growing quietly inside, trying to muster our self together, we stand choked. The trauma vents itself through neither tears nor voice. Like being slowly lowered into an abyss, with darkness and despair engulfing all around, we close our eyes seeking a momentary relief. The ghosts of memories then begin their assault; the choice that tugged us here paints itself once again. Only, no longer real, it haunts, like a gleam of hope in an abyss of darkness blinds. The minute, the miniscule, the chance that we could have chosen a different path, the chance that this fateful destiny could have been avoided, sucks us deeper into the maelstrom of melancholy and regret. Spare me. Forgive me. Our memories, our mind, our spirits desert us, torture us, and leave us ripped apart. Punished by conscience, we see the cleft within us, one rising against the other, whipping, menacing and berating. Judgement, our own, unforgiving and dispassionate makes us wonder if there exists a punishment more savage. The little voice that once cautioned us, today blares and stamps, its attachments all snapped it persists and professes in a manner- cold and dispassionate- like a hangman executing death. We sigh. The clog in the voice splits apart. In the next moment, energy drains through, the will to live dismantles, knees wobble, breath chokes. Death so sudden and abrupt seems now a forgiving gesture. We wonder if agony deserves such easy an end. Thud. The body falls onto the floor. Black seas of despair roll in white worlds, overhead the ceiling blocks the sight. For the last time we conjure the world we traded, we relinquished, we abandoned as the phantoms arrive to liberate us from the agonising chains of memories and past.
On Reading Fiction
What began as a pastime has now grown into an addiction, an obsession. Like a piece of music-enchanting, that lures by its notes and silence, till the listener loses track of all time and consciousness, and is transported to a world fashioned on the cords of his imagination I have found fiction. In a life that runs from morning to night bearing the burden of a routine, punished by a monotonousness- irrevocable I have found in reading the pleasure of experiencing worlds penned in the ink of imagination of authors separated in realities across time and space, often by margins that are untraceable. Fiction is the road leading to those worlds. Fiction is a manifestation that draws as much from what we all see to what one alone can see, it is the amalgam of a private and a public world, a view of existence from another’s perspective. In fiction there runs much that is lost in between the lines.
The physical realities portrayed can always be borrowed, the emotional content slapped though can only be drawn from a private experience. Language fails to override barriers that restrain communicating emotions, we empathise with what we have experienced. Endowed by the power of imagination we are capable of not merely recreating and innovating realities-tangible, but also emotions- intangible, a capacity that allows us to recreate the emotional reality of a situation we perhaps have not found ourselves in before. Fiction is what narrows the gap, language can perhaps never bridge. When I hear of someone being happy I relate it to my own state, one experienced prior and which I labelled as being happy; unfortunately though I might never know the form or degree of happiness that I was being conveyed. There shall always remain the gap between what he experienced and what I assumed him to have experienced, for I can only relate to what I can conjure in my imagination. My understanding borrows from my pool of imagination and experience, one that perhaps might be at complete disunion from those of others. In fiction I take a step closer to those inexperienced worlds.
The curse of human life, that our languages can never communicate sensations felt most deeply, the solace being that more of our experiences- those belonging to the same class, culture, overlap to an extent where we mistakenly fathom a vanishing of this gap. It resides nevertheless. It is engulfed in this gap, that we sometimes grapple with a flickering loneliness in a rustling crowd. Those fleeting moments of understanding when we see how each one, no matter how close or apart has eventually to stand alone, those transitory moments of terror we try and drown in the violence of chatter and relationships. It is this sensation that is the curse, the fate of mankind when we have everything achieved. The stupid is thus more happy and peaceful than the thinking. The one rushing to a goal is thus more contented than one who stands at the end gripped by this phantom. Fiction is a story, a narrative, an art that attempts to bring us closer to that isolated world we each nurture inside. At its end we do not embrace together in complete understanding but look at each other better through our own lenses, a step closer from where we earlier stood.
Fiction is the manifestation of mankind’s emotional creativity, one that I believe makes it stand out from certain other art forms. It is the testimony of an ability that allows us to take a different perspective- Vladimir Nabokov dawning the perspective of a paedophile in Lolita, Mario Puzo wearing the shoes of a mafia don, JK Rowling adopting the view of an orphan child entrusted with the responsibility to overpower a dark force, the fate of a hero he would much rather trade for a life normal and regular and many others who shift their perspectives between the very many characters they write.
Long Back
One day when the sun was no longer staring through the windows, its light and embrace falling on the buildings like a serene warmth engulfing from above, I lay languid on the bed torn apart by the eternal and irrevocable choice each man held, to do or not to do; like to live or not to live. What if freedom was not as pleasant as we imagined, what if it was not the antonym of being chained, what if the chains around were to hold us intact, and the freedom we secretly yearned could only rupture us, tear us into bits and pieces like an explosion inside snapping every hope and thread we lived by.
Like a circle growing eating everything inside its borders, I felt hollow. Strength slowly drained out as the clock ticked further. Imagination skipped a beat, the door creaked
“Where have you put the jam?” I heard from a peeping face.
“It’s in “, my eyes closed now, the words spouted out, “the drawer second from the left”. Pushed from a cliff I felt I was once again on solid ground before I plunged once again.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah, yeah, yes”, she was leaning from the door midway between the room and the hallway, “I slept late so..”
“Okay.” and she left. With the door shut and my eyes closed, I once again found myself. The sense of touch had returned and with it the sense of the bed and blanket on my hands and legs.
A friend had once asked “Isn’t the anticipation of pleasure a pleasure too?” The anticipation of an uncertainty was sure an agony. Something beyond or between the realm of happiness and disappointment, it lay in between them and before them, it tortured until either happiness or disappointment seemed like the salvation. The battle reduced from joy or sorrow to the certain or the uncertain.
The agony of uncertainty grew with each moment, with each thought, with every breath. How different could be the agony of uncertainty for a student awaiting his result, for a convict his sentence, for every man staring into the unknown? But through the eyes of the society we see the hierarchy, the man who has more at stake, the one who stands to lose more sits higher in this pyramid. Through the eyes of that individual spirit they all seem equal, each one stakes for that moment what he alone values. In the eyes of a collective judgement even Shakespeare would seem farce. But this was the era of intellectual communism, when everyone and where everyone was just as able, if not to create at least to judge, where the audience was the critic and the critic was the audience, where legends cowered before the judgement of this collective, where masterpieces were in every showcase, in every room, in every nook and in every corner, where everything was just as good. And through these invisible hands of flattery and praise we strangled the genius in each other, through these poisons we watered mediocrity until everything was excellent, until everything was extraordinary, until everything was unique and until everyone was a genius and until we thought we were all happy. Until we had pushed all to the edge, intoxicated with ecstasy and adulation, waiting before the slightest of disturbance would push us into an abyss of no return. This was the era of greatness. This was the heralding of an unprecedented human achievement. Or was this just another illusion?
Tossing aside the blanket, I leapt from the bed and reached the threshold of the kitchen. She was standing beside the platform, lapping with the knife the jam on the bread. She turned and smiled. This had to end. Reaching for my voice, “I have to talk to you about something.” I didn’t know if the expression on her face beckoned me to continue or stop. “This might sound silly and awkward, actually this will sound..”, I stared at the knife smeared with jam “You might think I have gone crazy or insane or..”, an inscrutable expression hung on her face, ” I think I am in love with you.” This had to end.
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This was a recurrent dream and it ended always with us kissing, and the knife lacerating my palm; and at the sight of the alloyed color of jam and blood I would wake up. The first night it felt real, like my spirit had been teleported back. Imagination was cruel, like an enchantress it had me lured away from reality and then punished me back. Dots of light, spotted in the darkness past the window seemed just as ruffled and disturbed. Some flickered, some dim, some just there.
Later, like everything else in life the dream became a habit and it no longer ruffled the placid existence. It came and it went, like a part in a monotonous routine. The dullness of life seemed to have gorged even the delights of memory and dreams
At the Shores
“When Gods wish to punish man they simply grant his prayers” Oscar Wilde.
Standing at the shores, staring at the horizons there is a comfort dawning, gradually washing away the pangs of existence and being. The ungrasping infinite spreads before, the immensity of its size drowns the sight. The waters turn from muddy to blue blurring eventually into a horizon drawn together by a sky streaked with gold and orange and waters pale and dark. At first the eyes and mind seek flutteringly an end, the sheer size then perhaps entrances them to a silence and calmness descends. As the trivialities of life slowly wash away, there springs from the insides first a disbelief at the possibility of such a state followed by questions, umpteen and bursting. A part of being locked away since time forgotten now begins to slowly creep and walk into the ethers of existence.
On all sides one is thrown open to the scrutiny of the horizons. In the confines of such freedom one feels the burden of a dream accomplished, a hope come true, a desire fulfilled. From the skies the white shore appears like tearing the waters from the forests, and a consciousness stranded in between suggests a lone man struck by existential angst.
Freedom from responsibility is a paradox, one never realized but one that claims the most as the pursuit of our lives. Freedom like immortality entices more by its impossibility than by its meaning. Like immortality it is a divine angel, one our fantasies build around. It is the fodder of our dreams, the end of our pursuits. The unachievable that fuels the eternal hope of our lives. The pursuit of absolute freedom is tantamount to hunting for corners in a circle. They don’t exist. Freedom is an adult fantasy that for many unconsciously, for few consciously but for all resides in the recesses of spirit.
For some rats unless they chew, their teeth can grow to sizes causing them pain maybe unbearable. Mankind without something to pursue would perish from a suffering similar. It is though debatable if the demise would be from the coming into picture of all that has been so far sidelined or is the human addiction for a goal such that existence without it is impossible.
When everything worth has been accomplished we will need the mirages that lie unnoticed today. Freedom, for all its connotations is today a word that whips essences of sacrifice and nobility. Something that is ingrained in all of us to desire even if few understand what its implications in the absolute sense denote. Like careers we are all made to pursue. The choices on the other side are made too hideous to ease our dilemmas. If freedom was not just the figment from our fantasies but also the road to our most hideous self and ugliest horrors would we still dare to risk it?
As the sun drowns, darkness starts to diffuse rising from the forests striding towards the shore and the sea. The white sand stretches clean and unobstructed and devoid of another human presence it strikes cords of solace and terror alike. Light and darkness battle, drawing a twilight on the canvas of sea, shore and forests. Clouds fused with colors of blood and gold and clouds disappearing into caverns of black roam through the skies, angels and demons sway along within and without. From the lapping sea a crab emerges. As it walks away the waves eat away the trails. The waves dash forth again and again trying to claim back their hostage. The crab walks free of its past, walks free of its environs, ecstatic and delighted of having tore the shackles, oblivious of its present and future as a pack of eagles begin to descend and plunge from the skies. From far above the skies doom dawns. And in its last agonizing moments the crab learns what he mistook for shackles was indeed the shelter.
A man sits flopped against the wall. Light enters the room from a haggard window, crouched between walls like holding them from crumbling the room into utter darkness. On the floor the slanted beam grows into an oblong patch of light cut into three by shadows of rusted rods. Drops of water trail across the ceiling and dive into the patch of light. Nobody knows how long the man has been here, so long perhaps not even the man himself. The window is no mere an inlet to light and air, it is the nourishment for the man’s hope. The color outside transitions between light blue interspersed with blobs of white to pitch dark, with moments of pale red and orange. The window stirs him into an anxiety and anticipation, one that feeds his hopes of freedom. The window does not kindle any nostalgia, there are no memories, there is no past, there is no existence that extends beyond these walls. Ever since he remembers, the only images that flood his mind are the ones that he discerns with his eyes. His imagination runs past his confines, conjuring a world outside, fashioned around himself, a world that keeps him alive and hoping for freedom. He peers through the window to ascertain his imagination against reality. Some days he sees it, some days he doesn’t. People say he can only be hallucinating, there is no reality outside at least not to confirm his conceived world. His face lets no sign of doubt flutter out of it. He looks ahead clutching onto his only hope, what for the rest is a delusion, a mirage for him is the nourishment of his existence. More than food, more than air he wants the window to be there.
The groan of waves rushing to shores frightens the night. Fire blazing on logs of wood lights the beach as a pile of dry leaves and ashes smoulder at a distance. The canopy overhead is dotted with sparkles, the surf arriving at the shore marks the boundaries of the sea, disappearing and coming again. The forests are veiled with pallid yellow light growing from the fire vanishing immediately into an undergrowth of darkness.
Once the walls holding a man fall apart, once the chains that reigned rebellion dismantle freedom evolves. Though not always as pleasant as previously conjured, sometimes it leaves the man distraught and without a purpose. The man who sought his identity in the rebellion, now stands obscured plagued by the freedom engulfing him. Rebellion sometimes is directed not against a cause but merely to assert one’s existence, by one either too coward to acknowledge his impotence to forge something anew or by one ignorant of his action’s ends. Che Guevara is known to have said that Rebellion should never be against something rather for something. A rebellion against something is directing one’s energies to destruction and creation of a vacuum, in the latter case, however, it is the means to establish a newer and possibly a better order of things. The state of present, the weight that encumbers us often leads us to equating freedom with a liberty from it; unfortunately though, the weight is sometimes to keep us from bursting apart. Fired by the passions of the moment we struggle vigorously and in the play delude ourselves into defining freedom in accord with our whims and fancies. Once the battle ends, reality descends and with freedom we descry a terror of strangeness collapse above us as well. In those moments as we look around standing over the crumbles of our own shelter freedom appals us for we slowly begin to long for the past once more.
Random 5
A novel often has so much imagery one simply collapses of sheer dazzle, it is beneath the curtains of imagination that the real play of words unveil. Writing is a medium of art that lends itself to carefully embroider the baggage of emotions, from the colours of ecstasy and delight to the threads of despair and disappointment writing presents a canvas that one splashes his angst upon and against. Fiction is often a writer’s dream that he believes could only be true on paper.
The dullness of life have as much to do with promoting art as the colour and vibrations of life. For since often enough art is the manifestation of an artists’ imagination, it is only obvious that while some tread into the realms of imagination flamed by the surges of life, a many walk up to that road to seek solace from a reality they find themselves bound in. That fantasy on paper splashed with characters borrowing from the writer’s soul and imagination, the plot mirroring bits and pieces of his own life, and above all the voice that silently creeps in amidst all the clutter of characters, story, plot and conflicts to blurt out a secret long held. Sometimes with even the most tangled of plots, the most disconnected of scenes, one glimpses a thread of continuity running through that has nothing but the writer’s life to hold itself.
That we are touched upon by someone else’s agony is often an acknowledgement of one of our own. It is in the meaninglessness, dullness and conflict of life that art finds its true source and shower. Without them the planes of imagination would have been but dry and rugged, the panorama that now weaves before us would have been but a desert and our lives colourless. Our suffering is the ink we dip our imagination in, that we draw happy faces out of it does not erase away the reek of agony and angst off it, it merely is an unconscious acknowledgement of an existence we are too afraid to admit otherwise.
There was no coherence in his characters’ thoughts, they were swinging between one moment the vilest and the other the noblest, from conventional angles it seemed a character contrived, from close-ups however one saw the image of reality gush in. That it switched between such extremes was simply an affirmation of the author’s emotions turned inside out. For once in life, even if on paper alone, he was able to portray what had embarrassed and clutched him into insecurity, ever since the day his life had been torn apart into two voices. Is age the slayer of innocence or is it experience?
He rose from his chair and walked up to the window, outside everything was hung like a painting in a portrait- colourful and immobile. He longed to see some movement, once more the dynamics of life. And yes it was the life he had detested and still did, it was the life he had run away from, but living in this cottage left alone with himself had opened him to a tragedy even worse – to become a vegetable, a mute spectator- while the world cried and rejoiced, to become inanimate- a commentator of life.
To gain immortality is one of the commonest and the vilest temptations, that excess always ruins, never gets to our head- life or living. Our instincts pine, like a child that yearns everything it is denied, for immortality. It is one of those adult fancies that submits itself to no reason. Immortality is an example of what being denied makes an object, that it is unattainable veils it in an aura of charm and perfection- one that only imagination can weave. Its purpose, its utility, all shroud in darkness while the limelight surrounds itself on immortality, May be even immortality is one of those medals we proclaim to pursue in public only to raise ourselves in the private. It is not for immortality that we seek and perspire, it is for the contentment of an achievement unprecedented, only unfortunate that blinded thus we care not a candle if it is a blessing or a curse we are running for. We choose to cross the fences, to claim ourselves first on such violation, what lies beyond simply vapours into irrelevant when lust for a recognition unattained so far rises.
In the transitory spasms of praises and adulation we begin to long for an elongation of such periods till eternity, and pity that we drag what others want to lengths, that we rub away what we desire.
Eternity is a curse of our imagination where everything is stretched to a time indefinite and every sorrow to a suffering infinite. In face of death the clutches and crutches of our imagination lose grounds, a freedom we rarely savour descends, eternity would snatch away all that. The momentary pleasures of love and hate, longing and despise would all burn away in the length of time, everything that shields from the existential angst would be cut loose and leap and loom, that which we barely escape for 80 years would burden us forever. Who then would choose immortality over death?
Memory
Every life shelters its own tragedy behind the smile. As every dream translated to reality shades in its own aura of struggle and scar. As every battle triumphs above the mutilated corpse of its enemy and its follower.
In the sparkle of the eyes was lost the sheen of the face as in her beauty was lost the emotion of her face. She walked on the pavement alongside the lake, hands in the overcoat, her gaze lost in the mist above the lake like searching for a soul, in a crowd, long dead. Globes of light, perched on pillars of metal, diffused along the bounds of the lake, and in her eyes we saw the arc of this flame tendering a lake of ice in its midst. Now resting her chin against her bosom she leans against the rails, away from the lake where the sight of a life lived once sways past, the crackling of sorrow and delight plucks her insides and she jerks her head to one side hoping to shed the burden of memory aside. The loneliness of the grey morning, heavy of mist and despair, drags her back into the past she wants to be forgiven. Like a raw wound she scratches back her past every morning, trying to burn the pain of sorrow in the solace of a memory. The sorrow mirrors on her face, pours through her eyes as she battles to keep the heart inside comforted.
She starts walking again, and drained of purpose and strength flops on the next bench. The morning seems distant like the horizons, as clouds burdened with grey and pallor roam the skies swallowing away the rays of orange and silver in their cloaks of darkness and despair. She lies down on the bench and stares at the skies, in the paleness of blue and black she tries to draw the sparkle of a few stars. They twinkle in the memories of her past but disappear in the darkness of the present.
In the silence of a morning so desolate and unforgiving we hear a chuckle, two girls amble across the road, their giggles tear across the silence and the blade of a memory slashes once again through her heart. This time the memory spills and trickles, a lone drop falls along her temple, its warmth in the chill reminds of a forlorn kiss.
Her memories bound her to the burden of an unforgiving past. The sorrow that walked with her as a shadow was her choice. Without the memory there would be no images, no visions but would the loss erased from her mind be ever etched out of her soul? Was emotion the slavechild of the mind, was her loss profound enough to gallop past the play of memories or was it shallow enough to be drowned in the darkness of amnesia? Her memories were both her tormentors and her saviour. The memory of a happiness plagued her of a hopelessness, the despair that it would never again return, but in a reality so grim it was the momentary flicker of such a memory that made her survive. The fleeting relief followed itself by the punishing despair. Lying on the bench she saw this punishment stretch to an eternity, soaking away each moment, every waking breath, every passing day of hers.
She rises and sits and with her head buried in her hands we see the sorrow ooze out of her in small gasps, the witnesses to her confession all seem dead, nature stands there mute as she pulls herself back. She rubs her eyes with her palms, the blue sea of despair rolls in the redness of her sorrow. She stands up and starts walking back, her face dawns the garb of a resolve and her manner the solemnity of a ritual. Looking at her I once again slip the emotion of her face in its beauty.
On an Inspiring Note..
“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.”
Oscar Wilde.
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”
Jim Jarmusch
..I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
in Letters to a Young Poet
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Marianne Williamson in Return to Love
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree
in 1984
