Their ways - II

"Because if there's just been black since you remember, grey will seem like white until you see a lighter grey - until a yet lighter grey - and this way, you'll never know white from grey, even if you got there eventually."

His hand muscles always got somewhat tense when he spoke about something he cared about.

He went on, "I try optimism instead. It's generally sweeter than clarity, or chasing it, anyway."

She continued looking at him intently as she agreed, "It is. It gives the most convincing - not to mention terrific - illusion of clarity."

His head turned sharply in her direction and he said, louder than before, his hands tenser, but face just as calm, "No, you don't seem to get it."

"Of course I do."

"No. You absolutely don't."

They both sat staring at the still water before them and the green hillocks beyond the lake for about five minutes or so, and then left.

-

"I feel like an absolute misfit here, sometimes."

"Where?" he asked indifferently.

"This world we're in."

"What do you think about others? You think everybody fits in seamlessly here?"

"Most seem to be doing well."

He looked around at the trees, and after a good two minutes or so, returned his attention to her.

He said, "Everybody has problems. Some adjust, some don't. Of those who don't, some complain and some are creative enough to finds ways to deal with it effectively, and find their place."

"Some may also begin to enjoy the discomfort."

"That sounds like some medical condition."

"Discomfort can be beautiful."

"I don't know anybody who wishes for it or likes it."

"Yes, because we are hardwired to dislike it, to wish it away, to actively work on making it go away. But leave that aside for a moment, and talk about quitting avoiding it. What about if you kept it close to you, by your side? It could land you in a beautiful place."

"So, when you said you feel like an absolute misfit here, you didn't raise it as a problem."

"I did - "

She paused for a moment, and spoke again,

" - but that's for another reason. Forget about that, and tell me, have you ever felt as if your thoughts were not your own - belonging to you, but not truly your own, just some response to everything around you - a solution to whatever of the situation your brain can gather and compute, a rearrangement of everything it can grasp combined with your own motives - and I am not talking here about motives you chose."

"You mean the idea that you're all preprogrammed against that feeling that there is something more to you than that-"

"Why won't you answer me? Have you been there?"

"I have."

"Does it make you feel anything?"

"No."

"Do you think it would be interesting if it did?"

"I'm not sure," he said, quickly.

"Because it deviates from - "

"It's just a little crazy, nothing else."

They both sat staring at the trees a little more. Then he let out a sigh and said to her, "Such pursuits are seldom useful. I don't know, but I get the sense that this will soon turn into something unpleasant for you."

She didn't say anything. They sat for a little while longer, and then got up and went home.

-

Next morning, he made coffee for her, kissed her and told her to have a good day at work.

Once she left, he picked up his notepad and wrote.

On her way to work, she thought about the difference between people who liked their windows rolled down and those who didn't. People who sometimes did this and sometimes that didn't qualify to be part of this thought.

-

A few days later, they were back by the lake.

"We need to find a new spot," he said, chucking a stone into the distance.

"Haha"

"No, I am serious."

"Of course you are."

"This place creates the need to continue our last conversation here, in the same mood. All the times we've come here feels like just one long day in all that never ends."

"Starting from the day we met?"

"Yeah."

"I feel nearly the same way."


"Hmm. Are you still in love with me?"


They sat there talking nevertheless, for about a half hour more, about things that didn't make any difference to their lives or how they led them.

-

The following evening, he sat on his chair reading something, and she was seated comfortably on the floor near his feet, writing something while humming a song they both recognized. His hand occasionally found the side of her head and when it did, he stroked her hair gently, briefly.

The next morning, she had left for work before he'd woken up.

On her way, she wondered what home was for her. Was it at all about comfort? No, she thought, more about finding herself in a new place every time. That felt like home, yes. She looked forward to returning to him in the evening.

Meanwhile, he opened his notepad to a fresh page and began writing.

-

[link: Their Ways - I]

Reminders

A touch of insanity,
he argued, is never a defect
It completes sanity, he said,
or something to that effect.

The residue of all your experiences over your years,
consolidated in your memory
Now flat, static
barely visible, barely graspable
Evoking any feeling only as a function of your current state -
Your current state itself, at every point, being a function of all your experiences.
Write it down
Paint it
Sing it
Be with it whenever you can
Be with yourself whenever you can
The more of you there is, the larger the universe is

Be in touch, be in synch,
Enjoy your share of clarity
Enjoy being puzzled too,
Know that most good questions have no answers
Learn to love
And love madly. Don't be afraid.
Don't adjust.

That you'll be alone forever doesn't matter
It makes no difference
It'll keep you alive
Your desires alive
For, that way, there will never be a time you wouldn't know what to do with your own silence
Happiness will resemble a sense of longing more than it will, contentment
That way, your heart will outlast your mind.

Where meanings get gauzy and where time gets lost

For the mountain range, by every rise and every descent
The ocean, in stillness and in wave
Air current, with its every whim
Music, in all its indefinable glory
So many breaths are not enough
Clean laughter echoes from many unexpected directions
Eyes may shut but the sky will keep speeding away
And I will keep chasing it

Slowly, time will start to slow down
Slowly, words will start to fade out
Slowly, the head will turn and the eyes will see
The ears will hear and the skin will feel
Slowly, the mind will give up so artfully managing everything
Slowly, it will learn to be

That piece of music

Occasionally, when I (incidentally) observe people,
I am dragged into this other world
that I am only able to process superficially -
the trouble with it not being its complexity,
which, for that matter, can be easily broken down,
but its profoundly impoverished essence
that unsettles me.
This world where lives begin and end on each other.
Human lives become everything you revolve around.
This world where starting from infants to 80-year-olds,
everybody seems to be coping.
Caught in a mesh of hypothesized roles and goals,
barely catching half a breath,
and some pretending, within that bleak framework,
To be romantics, and some others
To be cynics --

Lying down in the tranquil of the night,
As the music, my mind and I shared one harmony
Half tempted to fling my phone and things like it outside the window
Arriving at a million new places by conjecture
Arranging themselves in the mind's playground
Forming rapidly the shape of an ethereal realization
Of which I needed neither to be certain nor uncertain
But that served as beautiful stuff to be maneuvered
Into quiet new learnings.

-- This world where actively destroying everything
except human lives is legitimate
Where, on the one hand
the dismembered body part of a coldly, elaborately murdered animal
qualifies as food for billions
And it becomes a big deal, on the other,
when a handful of humans are killed in an earthquake;
while we're at it - tectonic activity is magnificent!
But in this world here,
everybody wants to live inside their tiny brains,
satisfied, as it appears, with their keyhole view of the world;
thus demarcating their domain of functioning and exploration.
Afraid of living a life of rich stimulation,
of rich imagination and of rich thought -
blaming it on the need to survive.
What it is that they are so mindlessly trying to preserve,
even they don't know.

With elusive, self-initiated thoughts
Concatenated tacitly
Leading to an inevitable collapse of control
Easing into a blissful, catatonic state, I
Drifted to the conclusion that, I
Possessed no emotion that could match that piece of music.

Just a discussion

Words bind ideas. It is nearly essential that ideas must suffer this sort of confinement.
But ridding thought of words lands you in a strange place- where there's beauty, but no means of survival. Or so I think.

At times though, words do prove to be useful, even beautiful - when they are arranged in such a way that there is more energy between them* rather than only within them.

So, now, that brings me to a place where I both love and hate words. And I'm left wondering, at times wordlessly, why I cannot remain indifferent to them... There's no calculation here, just a mild mess.


*I can't think of a better way to explain that. Here, it refers to the value attributed to (a combination of) words that transcends their mere semantic sense (that probably comes from subjective reading... I don't know. If you get what I'm saying, you would be confirming this for me).

Because there is nothing to do when late nights become early mornings

That pillar obstructs my view
A single source of light hides behind it
I get to see a part of its glow
And I get to wonder

I worship the wind
It ricochets off many invisible surfaces in the dark of the night
And somehow finds its way here
I was a good student at Geography
But I sometimes find myself worrying it might get exhausted.
It won't
But what if it does?
What would I do?

I hate it every time it occurs to me
that I have a finite understanding of the universe

But on some nights, and on some days
When clarity prevails
It does in the absence of thought,
intellect and reason.

I'm bound to my planet, and likely to remain so
Nobody had asked me
Surely something must be wrong?
On spending some life with it, I've realized
This was precisely the plan
And I am in it.

04/02/11

I feel the need to write tonight although I have no reason or inspiration to do so. I can’t think of anything to say that won’t sound like everything I’ve said here before. If I write anything at all, it’ll be woven around my standard nonsense- those stale ideas of constancy, numbness, discomfort, timelessness, changelessness, hopelessness, unease. They are like the keywords in describing my every experience. So any effort to put down thoughts is guaranteed to fail.

I dive into a fictitious world every free waking minute of my life, unless my mind is too tired for it. And that happens way too often. My neural networks are catching dust; poor Na+ ions seem to be perpetually perplexed. And the neurotransmitters are probably on a holiday. Disorientation reigns. It’s a state that is inflexible and unaccommodating. It causes reluctance to carry out activities that are typically fun. Quite plainly, it’s dull and renders one incapable of exercising will. The psychologist calls it unresolved conflict. The psychiatrist calls it a mood disorder. The pragmatist calls it a phase. The optimist calls it a threshold. The artist observes silently. The narcissist calls it (pronouncedly) idiocy. The commoner calls it sadness. The realist calls it life.

I’m eating my sandwich in college and daydreaming away royally. Two girls I haven’t noticed yet seat themselves at a comfortable distance. The next minute, I snap back to my surroundings with a start when I suddenly hear, “-that’s my MOST FAVOURITE track EVER!” I look at her almost wanting slap her for being so loud. But I gather myself and get up to leave. I join my few friends in college I call my saviours and indulge in small talk – often taking individuals or groups of people into perspective and belittling them for how stupid/frivolous they are – not only obscenely elaborately but also with an obnoxiously high degree of superiority-complex. To what end? Except for a few great laughs, nothing. The answers lie in that place where all these compensatory mechanisms originate.

Summer’s approaching. The 2-pm direct heat on the forehead feels incredible, almost like a physical blessing. Long walks on sultry afternoons are therapeutic. I colour the world around with the music in my ears. Life becomes easy again, free of bother – in harmony with my surroundings. A little surprisingly, I ask myself why I wanted to slap that favourite-track girl. Without thought or reasoning, I resign myself to the wordless understanding that the answer lies in my asking myself that question at this point.