Chaotic circles

Caught in the chaotic circles
She sits back and enjoys the show
Remorselessly she rejoices
In this melodrama that she so blissfully put together,
Piece by piece it unfurls,
The mysteries untold, she holds
Now it’s a tragedy, now a comedy…
Her life is every drama ever conceived
A patchwork of half-written metaphors,
A mélange of half-brewed potions,
She fills it with her whims and fancies
And makes it her own
Originality is but an illusion!

It goes up, it goes down, never a plateau
It churns within, it burns without
A pauper walks by, and it turns upside down…
All the sages and all the saints
All the madmen and all the maniacs
Watch silently as her life corrodes…
Smug in believing that she perishes
Under the torrent of their caprice
Unaware that she sits beside them!

Now she knows how she feels,
Now there is nothing she feels,
Now the words are hers,
Now the words are just letters,
Neatly tailored together…
But incomprehensible,
Just like herself!

Does this fiasco of sentences have a meaning?
Does it have an end?
There isn’t one in sight,
For there wasn’t a beginning…

??

Reflecting upon the recent five month long hiatus from the blog, I am utterly surprised at the various places my pseudopods have poked at! I have been a million different people in the last five months, and every new person has been just as real as the one before and the one after!

The degree of reality of the world within and without me has always been my favorite to ponder upon. Without, the most real I have felt has been in wrath and anger - for, in hatred there's always honesty! Within, there has been none - for everthing has been so transient, and most of what I have felt, I haven't at all beyond a moment.

Even so, there has been an unrelenting, indescribable torrent within me. I wouldn't call it a temperament, or a trait, or anger, or benevolence, or passion... those are big words, and too murky! Perhaps it is a tinted canvas upon which everything else resides, and merges in its hue. Perhaps that is true for all of us... we are all made up of a plain canvases, with a tint of ourselves - each unique. But the canvas is barren, and painted one by one with things universal - aspirations, beliefs, emotions; each one exactly like the other. The difference then lies in the shade of the canvas, not what it is filled with. And how i see your canvas, full with its sceneries, is tainted too by the hues of mine!

Thus I ask, what is real? The canvas, after all, is empty!

Moment of disgust, or revelation??

I started my day with a quote by Eric Berne saying, 'The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing' ... It was the perfect fuel for my ongoing journey towards a sense of paralyzing loss of all that we once had, all that mankind was supposed to be but isn't, contempt for everything mankind has made itself, for the resort to gimmickry.. for the death of mankind, and along with it, the death of its home.

I started reading Brave New World sometime ago ... I never thought of Huxley as an author who would change my thought process so much... perhaps it's not so much change as it is an amplification of thoughts I had supressed for years because I believed they were absurd... but today, I see absurdity in a new light. I see absurdity in everything around me... even as I type this on my laptop, all I can feel is a tingling sensation in my fingers every time they come in contact with the plastic on my keyborad, so much so that I want to amputate my fingers.

I had a revelation a few days ago... like the protagonist in Sartre's Nausea, I was transported to a world of naked disgust! Except what digusted me wasn't an inert tree trunk, but everything manmade. As I looked for a blind spot to focus on to divert myself from more humane concerns, I was suddenly struck by the fact that the stain on my mirror I tried to concentrate on was so artificial.. I wondered if it really existed. Would one call that existence? It had been forced to come into being... and it was just there. What was the purpose of that stain? Then I looked around, only to realize that everything in the room except myself was so artificial and just there... I wondered if I should even say that these things exist, that the room exists... All these things did not come into existence ... They were forced to be there... and just be. To what end? Why was there a stain on my mirror, why were there lines on the tile, why was there a scratch on the sink? What sense did any of that make? What was the purpose? Why? Why? Why? As I groped for something that made sense to me, i shivered ... I looked outside to find a tree or a bird, but there was none.. all I could see was the sky, and even the sky seemed so sullen, so sad, so disappointed with the fact that no one looks at it anymore, that it is lost somewhere behind a cloud of dust... I looked at the mirror hoping that I'd see something natural there... a human being, flesh and blood... but all I saw was the metal on my nose, the cloth on my body... and I wondered, even humans aren't human anymore. My heart sank with disgust. I turned the faucet on hoping that the sight and sound of water would make me feel better... but that only made me think that even the flow of water is so artificial. I stepped into the shower, the same... with every inch of my skin that I covered with soap, I annihilated myself... It was madness...

Narrating the incident, I seem to have forgotten why I started writing of it in the first place...I do not wish that everything man has invented over the years be destroyed, that we live in rain forests... After all, it is technology that has made my hopeless romance come true. But I do wish that we would stop, stop inventing, stop modifying, stop vandalising what we were born into. .. I miss Mother Nature!! I need to breathe ....

Should I call it irony, or should I call it life?

Telling a friend about the recent much awaited developments of my life, I was struck by my lack of enthusiasm! It didn't come as a disappointment... I guess this is where Philosophy saves me. It got me thinking how everything in life is so ironic!

Right from the moment a child is born, he is thrown into a world of paradoxes... birth never comes without pain. A child enters the world; yet, we celebrate its cry. When a child, there is an almost urgent need to grow up. But when the child grows, everyone is left with a hint of sadness.

Our entire lives, we live for the future. Every act, every breath is for what is to come. Our existence is based on anticipation in entirety, in eternity. The wait... the wait for growing up, the wait for going to school, the wait for getting good grades, the wait for finishing school, the wait for going to college, entering the 'real world' as we are so often told, the wait for finishing college, getting a job, once again entering the 'real world' ... it's always a wait. We start one thing, in anticipation of its ending... jump to the next in anticipation of what lies after this.... if not a job, it is the next phase of life.... marriage, children, grandchildren. We're forever waiting.

The wait has become so intrinsic to man, both at an individual as well as a universal level, that we haven't learnt what to do when finally the wait is over and we have in hand what we had waited for. In not knowing what to do with it, we device something else to wait on.

Does our real life ever begin, or are we always telling ourselves to wait??? I go to school, when I go to college, I will enter the real world... Oh I finished college, that wasn't the real world, my job will be. I am at my job... it's not good enough, maybe I need a husband for my real life to begin... my husband and I are just two, I need someone to mother... now I am a mother, my kids have grown up and left the nest empty... their kids will fill it up. ... before we know it, we are left with nothing to wait upon but our end. A life wasted?????

True, we all need purpose in life. We all need direction, a sense of comfort in the hope for a future that's not empty. True, we need to work to make sure that it isn't empty. But are we extracting everything from our present to fill our future with?

I sit here, with something i have always wanted in life, with the knowledge that I just need to cross this one last bridge to be what i have always wanted to be... and I find myself thinking 'is this it' ??? I don't know what to do with it. I tell myself, it's just the last moment jitters, it will pass. I see my future fulfilling, but my present is hollow. There is no more wait... and without the wait, there's nothing for me to live for today.

Everything that man has ever done, or is doing today has been FOR something... Why is it so difficult for us to just BE?

I always thought that I lived in the present more than anyone else I knew. And I still stand by it. But even so, it wasn't enough... Words fail me right now, like they do everytime I am overwhelmed by the nothingness of this life... I guess it fits, NOTHING CAN DESCRIBE NOTHINGNESS!!!!!!!

A Madman's Prayer

In whimsical silences,
In blithe madness,
In quiet desperation,
In unrelenting sadness
Lingers passion,
Passion that fears no consequence
Passion that wills no witness
Passion that knows no bounds
Intangible, unbridled,
It runs wild in the woods
Is it a chase?
No, just a deliberate life.

‘But why’, you ask
‘Why bear the pain of isolation of a private insanity,
The pitiless accusations of those in reign,
Those fowling eyes preying
Upon the dauntless passion you behold,
Those spears thrown to condense you to pillage,
Withering cold, in pain.
Don’t you see, oh! Madman, oh! Maniac!
The blindfold against which you battle
Is but invincible.’

But this incorrigible rebellion that you accuse me of
Is no more than misconstrued exhilaration,
A private affair with madness
Not for anyone to witness,
Only to feed the void in my soul
The void that you possess, but I experience.
You say, ‘but the void is in your soul’…
I say, there is just one soul, yours, mine and everyone else’s.
The void too, is one.
The madness too, is one.
I only dance a different dance…
But the music is one…

So I beseech you
Don’t revile me if I fail to relive your life,
For as I strip naked of your mellowed minds,
And as I break the chains of your hollowed hearts
I expose for myself the bare beauty of your being…
And I marvel at the grandiosity of your petty pursuits
And I fancy your fascination with frivolity
In my misapprehended madness,
I love you like you have never learned to love.

.

My self-imposed sabbatical has reached a point where I feel completely brain-dead. I try to contemplate once again about some mystery of the world, but I find myself inadvertently retrospecting about the days when I used to spend endless hours marvelling at a sentence I would read in a book. Now, nothing I read or hear stimulates me enough.

Is it because I may have become tolerant, and that I need a stronger stimulant to bring in the same effect? Or is it because I have mentally exhausted myself? Or is it because I am subconsciously trying to push away any form of stimulation because I do not want to revert to a state of brooding contemplation? Perhaps, it is simply because a mind doesn't really work in isolation...

My journey from a hyperactive mind running ahead of time, to one that is frozen in a timeless spell, was a gradual one. It took certain disappoinments, ineffectual attempts at trying to modify and justify what I witnessed to comply with my beliefs, a rebellion against the schism between what I had idealised and what actually is. Perhaps, the journey hasn't quite reached its end. Perhaps, this quiscence is really an immature defense against something that I can't overtly fight. But perhaps, in this miscontrued revenge, I am really harming myself. But to not do that would be a compromise. Perhaps, I chose misleading mentors who, under the facade of nihilism, really upheld an idealism too idealistic for reality, too psychotic for psychosis itself.

It's marvelous how we perceive everything around us. More marvelous is how our perception evolves. Yet more marvelous is how our identity also changes with our perceptions. Perhaps, I am at a stage in life where I am still trying to find myself. I try to tell myself that perhaps, at a later stage everyone reaches an equilibrium... but does it really happen? Are we not always evolving? Does anyone really know who they are or what their reality is? Like Benjamin Franklin said '... the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment...'

So I sit here, although not old enough, and doubt everything that I have experienced and known, felt and believed... I sit here, beholder to a change, personal but with an undeniable universal impact, and try to fathom what really is and has been my reality?

I know I will never have all the answers. I know that I will continue to alternate between my experience of life as reality and an illusion. I also know that if I stop or if I finally understand what I am chasing, I will have no reason left to live...

So here's to this journey called life... that has no one truth to it, no one consolidate reality, and never an end...

Humans first!

Lately, I've been pondering over the implicit fallacies of mankind... about our faulty defenses, our misperceptions, our errored attributions, our misconstrued beliefs, and everything else that is collectively wrong with us. It was triggered by the ritualistic rekindling of bra-burning feminism on the occasion of Women's Day. Perhaps, procrastinating this note has added on a lot to it. And since, by wishing to include all of it in one piece of writing I risk coherence, I have, with much trouble, decided to stick to only one aspect - what triggered it in the first place - gender.

Once upon a time, I was all for equality between men and women. Generations before us fought for it, we still continue to. But perhaps, we are building on a flawed foundation. Is there really anything like equality between men and women?

I strongly believe that women and men are built differently. Equal rights are one thing. But to compare two qualitatively different entities is a quest that will never have satisfactory results. It is irrelevant to look into how this war between genders originated. However, we can't sacrifice generation after generation in a struggle for something not only unachievable, but also emotionally devaluing. There are certain characteristics that are common to everyone - men and women alike. But there are a lot more that are exclusive to each. I don't understand androgyny. What defines it anyway? For years, women have struggled to prove themselves worthy of the same jobs as men, the same social status etc. Well, we have done a pretty decent job... but somewhere along the line, haven't we lost ourselves?

By consistently trying to equate ourselves with men, we are telling the world that we believe we are inferior. Inferiority isn't even a factor here. Because there can be no hierarchy between two things that are mutually exclusive. I believe that the constant need for women to be at par with men has arisen as a result of misinterpretation of religion and culture. It arises from the inferior notion of women that is promoted primarily by religious fundamentalists, aiming at constraining something that they might find potentially overpowering. Of course, women have also introjected certain unreasonable notions. But, keeping aside the complexities of the process, let’s try to realize here that we’re chasing something that exists only in our minds!

Whenever there is a difference between two entities, there is always a battle about which one is better, which is ‘right’… why? Why can’t we try and foster acceptance and respect for our differences, instead of continually wearing ourselves out trying to be something we aren’t?

And why is it even an issue? Do we see men prancing around in pink panties and painted nails, telling the world that they’re as good as women? Then why do we undermine our femininity?

Being a believer in individuality of all, despite gender differences, I hate talking about men and women as separate entities. Everything I have written above lacks conviction, not because I don’t believe in it, but because I believe in something beyond the sex of a person! So, let’s try to look at ourselves and others as humans before we do as men or women!