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 ....
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