Change...

"THE ONLY CONSTANT IS CHANGE" - Heraclitus

Since the human race started contemplating, we've known that the only thing that is constant, assured and certain is change... Change...

Blame it on sub average introspective qualities, or on facticity, but for most of us, change is a series of progressive events that collaborate together, piece by piece, into what we call life. We just watch it go by, or get so lost living it that we never appreciate it... we make ourselves believe that there isn't any change, but isn't every day really a new day? Even when we are as static one may believe it is humanly possible, we are living a change, albeit in the form of time just slipping away, it is still change - change beyond ourselves.

There's another category among us - ones who embrace the first and foremost of 'the seven habits' as Stephen Covey liked to put it - those among us who are Proactive in the change. We're constantly on the run... doing new things, harboring a strong will to learn more, see more, do more... always manipulating our environments. If we can't change our perception, we change the object. If we can't change the object, we fight the perception that we're becoming dangerously comfortable with as each day passes by, if we can't fight it, we ignore the object. But there's always an unrest, an itch... for something different, even if it is my window curtain...

For some of us, comes a point in life when all the years of maneuvering actually begin to take shape... when we no longer need to kneed the dough... it just happens. Suddenly, the otherwise dormant universe becomes Proactive for us. Suddenly, change comes and how! You want to turn away, but it won't let you... and then you realise that all this while you had been deluding yourself with the belief that you are changing yourself, when you had only been changing your environment. And now, the world is changing you, and there's nothing you can do about it, except change... But all you really want to do is shrink back in your little cell, your dark comfort zone, even though you hated it... because, well perhaps it's so much easier that way.

There are so many songs about change, so many Philosophers have contemplated over it since time immemorial, Psychologists wonder about it every day, every one of us lives it every day... yet, why are we so scared to confront it, why do we coy at the thought of letting this current of change take over us? Why do we always have to be in control, even as we complain about it every second? What do we really want?

What are we made of?

Sleepless nights and midnight caffeine kicks... what are we made of?
Love that never arrives, love that's pushed away, dormant years and bouts of madness, love of hate and hate of love... what are we made of?
Stardust and chemicals, dust that dissolves in the invisible waters, pursuits of illusions, illusions are reality... what are we made of?
Restless souls chasing peace, peace that always eludes itself, hushed tears and violent screams... where is the truth?
Is it on a mountain top that exists but only in my mind, or is it in the sand dunes that are blowing in the wind?
Lies that we sell, truth that we deny, pasts we never forget, present we never believe, future, always too far... where is our reality?
Souls that are sallow, hearts that are hollow, minds marred, children charred... where is the rescue?
Cries that are never heard, blame, blame, blame. the flame never dies... but who started the fire?
Too far beyond to retrieve, the savior is dead. The war is not ours, gratuitous is our enemy... What are we made of?

ABYSS ABYSS ABYSS ...

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.