Spin. Spin. Spin....
Spin a little now...in a dance or a song you sing alone...
Spin a little tomorrow....in hope, in love and in despair...
Spin in chaos and look for quiet through eyes that have long lost their bearing..
Spin.
Dream.
Live.
Spin.
Pause...pause a while. Just one small moment?
Catch your breath and let the world whirl on and on with its heartbreaking insanity.For you, there is time enough for more of living. Come out and sit...
Watch the world through your urban window. Catch it in your fantasies..wrap it in colors you like...do what you want..go where you want to..
This is your one small moment of silence...your delusion..
Go run...run and chase it down if you must...this moment of silence...
Don't tell me about your moment of silence...there are none really. The only absolute absence of sound can come in the absence of life...
You breathe.
Blood rushes through your body. Every vein thumps a dark red.
Your heart beats.
Life makes a sound. Every second..seventy five beats a minute...
And silence? Insist on it still if you want to....
We live in sounds and voices....Remember in smells, colors, fleeting images and permanent pictures...Why must you then think of a moment of silence?
Antithesis....
That ferris wheel? Remember? Some fair a long time ago. You screamed till you were hoarse and rode yourself into a dizzying spell of wonder and nausea...that's it. Life.
A crowd of faces and sensations. What good will it do to you to deny it?
You could push me into a soundproof room with bare walls..No sounds there right?
I will walk from one end of the room to the other..Footsteps. Sound.
I will scratch my head and think of what to do..how do I get out? Sound.
I will knock on the door. Sound.
I will imagine the passage of time. Tick tock. Tick tock. Sound.
I will give up and sit on the floor. Sound.
I will fidget. An itch on the forehead. Sound.
I will let the mind wander.
Silence? Finally?
No wait...where?
My thoughts are noise.
My mind is sound.....
The world is never still.....
You stop at twenty thousand hertz. Life doesn't.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Cold Mirror
My mirror has gone cold. Cold and stark.
I leave my body away from my reflections..
I was born with it and I will die with it. But do I want it? Did someone ever ask me whether I want it? Do I want to manifest myself in a tangibility that only breeds discontent and disassociation?
Its not an empty box of course…but I see it only as a lump. Of muscles and flesh and bones. Of words, thoughts, images and sounds and of a belief that it carries a life in moments and memories. But it’s only a belief.
Blood, people, voices, living, dreaming...seeping into the pores..frozen along the ridges of your scars.
Fleeting. Drifting. Floating.
My mirror is cold.
It says nothing. Nothing of me in my face. Nothing of time. Nothing of illness. Nothing of anything. No motion. No change. Am I caught in a stasis? Have I stopped?
I chopped off my hair some months back...I look at it now and see it as a sub-consciously sought reminder of a survival. Survived? Have I survived?
And there I end...if I were the mirror, there would be no more of me.
I die.
The body turns cold.
My mirror is already cold. Corpses. The two of us.
Don't tell me that its just a surface that captures enough light to reflect back the object or image placed before it. Does it reflect? Or does it recreate? And don't say that its inanimate and only meant to give a faithful picture of something else.
I stand and stare, wishing some grey warmth back into this full mirror. Nothing.
And that nothing itself is a slaughter.
Of what you ask? Funny...I thought you live through a little bit of that yourself every morning.
You....you are getting slaughtered.
My mirror is cold and its cold nothingness is an vortex of mute violence.
It screams across explanatory physics.
It disrupts my chaos.
It pushes me deeper into my own muck.
It watches me flail around helplessly.
It's pleasures are peculiar and cruel.
Its cold.
I can see the voices in my head standing a little behind my reflection in the mirror. A moment of mocking silence and then they begin. Their mouths move in chaos. They push and they shove each other. They live independent of me...I escape in sight...I cannot hear their words.
I read their words but I don't see the lies they tell and the lies I weave with them.
I see the weaver but I cannot discern the pattern. There is a contradiction in pattern for it arises out of confusion and deception. Its deception to trace a pattern and essentialize it for the sake of reason. What reason do I have to reduce everything to its bare essence? Who am I? What am I doing? What is my purpose? My essence?
Questions clash in futility and the mirror lives a mute life. Cold. Cold. Cold.
Questions in dreams and the dream of a question. Am I a dreamer? A dreamer not of night dreams in sleep..sleep of a diluted yellow...but a dreamer of the day?
I see nothing of my dreams here. I see no memory of them.
I saw a face once in my dream...patched together with rough glue like a jigsaw puzzle. My hands felt sticky then. And you, my dear were the puzzle...
A man walks to and fro between two walls in another dream. Brick to brick..length to length the walls are identical. Life goes on beyond them....but the man is caught inside that walled vacuum. He doesn't know from which wall he started walking first. Each wall is an alternate of hope and despair. His walking is futile. Why doesn't he just sit? He is futile....
I see nothing of these dreams in the realities of my cold mirror. Yet I know they are there. Dreams are never gone are they? They float like bits of vomit that did not get totally washed away with the flush....in dirty circles of stench and regret they spin... round and round they spin in that tiny little square world of water.
It is...it was, just a dream. A bad dream.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Repeat these words until you know them even before you dream.
But who taught you the difference between the dream and reality? Your mother? did she run and hush you in the dark and tell you its just a dream?
Dissolve.
Dissolve that line between dream and reality.
Think.
Think in continuity. Perceive and feel in continuity. A dream and a reality woven into each other...indistinct and inseparable. Indifferent too, to our sad attempts at perverse rationalization.
Where was I? How did I think I would end this?
"Mirror mirror on the wall
How do I end this all?"
I leave my body away from my reflections..
I was born with it and I will die with it. But do I want it? Did someone ever ask me whether I want it? Do I want to manifest myself in a tangibility that only breeds discontent and disassociation?
Its not an empty box of course…but I see it only as a lump. Of muscles and flesh and bones. Of words, thoughts, images and sounds and of a belief that it carries a life in moments and memories. But it’s only a belief.
Blood, people, voices, living, dreaming...seeping into the pores..frozen along the ridges of your scars.
Fleeting. Drifting. Floating.
My mirror is cold.
It says nothing. Nothing of me in my face. Nothing of time. Nothing of illness. Nothing of anything. No motion. No change. Am I caught in a stasis? Have I stopped?
I chopped off my hair some months back...I look at it now and see it as a sub-consciously sought reminder of a survival. Survived? Have I survived?
And there I end...if I were the mirror, there would be no more of me.
I die.
The body turns cold.
My mirror is already cold. Corpses. The two of us.
Don't tell me that its just a surface that captures enough light to reflect back the object or image placed before it. Does it reflect? Or does it recreate? And don't say that its inanimate and only meant to give a faithful picture of something else.
I stand and stare, wishing some grey warmth back into this full mirror. Nothing.
And that nothing itself is a slaughter.
Of what you ask? Funny...I thought you live through a little bit of that yourself every morning.
You....you are getting slaughtered.
My mirror is cold and its cold nothingness is an vortex of mute violence.
It screams across explanatory physics.
It disrupts my chaos.
It pushes me deeper into my own muck.
It watches me flail around helplessly.
It's pleasures are peculiar and cruel.
Its cold.
I can see the voices in my head standing a little behind my reflection in the mirror. A moment of mocking silence and then they begin. Their mouths move in chaos. They push and they shove each other. They live independent of me...I escape in sight...I cannot hear their words.
I read their words but I don't see the lies they tell and the lies I weave with them.
I see the weaver but I cannot discern the pattern. There is a contradiction in pattern for it arises out of confusion and deception. Its deception to trace a pattern and essentialize it for the sake of reason. What reason do I have to reduce everything to its bare essence? Who am I? What am I doing? What is my purpose? My essence?
Questions clash in futility and the mirror lives a mute life. Cold. Cold. Cold.
Questions in dreams and the dream of a question. Am I a dreamer? A dreamer not of night dreams in sleep..sleep of a diluted yellow...but a dreamer of the day?
I see nothing of my dreams here. I see no memory of them.
I saw a face once in my dream...patched together with rough glue like a jigsaw puzzle. My hands felt sticky then. And you, my dear were the puzzle...
A man walks to and fro between two walls in another dream. Brick to brick..length to length the walls are identical. Life goes on beyond them....but the man is caught inside that walled vacuum. He doesn't know from which wall he started walking first. Each wall is an alternate of hope and despair. His walking is futile. Why doesn't he just sit? He is futile....
I see nothing of these dreams in the realities of my cold mirror. Yet I know they are there. Dreams are never gone are they? They float like bits of vomit that did not get totally washed away with the flush....in dirty circles of stench and regret they spin... round and round they spin in that tiny little square world of water.
It is...it was, just a dream. A bad dream.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Repeat these words until you know them even before you dream.
But who taught you the difference between the dream and reality? Your mother? did she run and hush you in the dark and tell you its just a dream?
Dissolve.
Dissolve that line between dream and reality.
Think.
Think in continuity. Perceive and feel in continuity. A dream and a reality woven into each other...indistinct and inseparable. Indifferent too, to our sad attempts at perverse rationalization.
Where was I? How did I think I would end this?
"Mirror mirror on the wall
How do I end this all?"
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Warps of Living.....
Note to self:
I will not live in contradictions and dilemmas
I will not run after answers to looped questions.
I will not look for traces of times and people gone by.
From the failure and futility of this...these systematic 'notes to self'
11 months into my return to this god forsaken hell hole of a city and while the heat blisters and weaves itself into shimmering waves outside and runs in endless loops inside my head, I eat, sleep, sweat, curse, lament, think and well...exist.
Time flies...its been one year come and gone already.
Time runs and crawls at its own pace..what's one year in the many to come and go?
What have I done in these 300 odd days? A little bit of this, that and the other? Much as I love the sound and play of these words, they really tell all and say nothing. I thought then, that I should attempt a list of things I have done in this year...things done, seen, thought of and learnt too? A list like that and a blog post on that are a cliche I am told. Damn right its a cliche. But then what in our lives is really new? Where we have been living for eons, overlaps and repetitions are but consequential aren't they?
And so, for the list in random non-sequential and un-patterned thinking.....
A return to the city is a return to its people.It was a sudden (in the truest sense of the word) decision to leave the city and then to return. The city changes and stalls at all times. It traps and releases...at the end of each day, it just is there..silent yet loud. My people here....yes they are my people, the very coordinates of daily living...well my people here are as caught in the flux of living as I am..some more than others. Forms and shapes have changed. My space is ever widening and shrinking daily. Old associations I carry along with fights, cursing, laughter and love. New ones I try to fit into this pattern. I returned to the city and my people. Some took me right back and some...well some left me behind and walked away.
People will ask for proof. Numbers, facts , figures, dates, definite instances...actions and deeds..that is all that matters. Our cynicism is not limited to our selves. The essential doubt extends to all beyond us. Nothing stands outside its purview. What I work hard to believe in, will be questioned at every word and every comma I use. And then I am told that in my being questioned and ripped apart, is the truest test of my belief. Is my failure proving your point well enough for your cynical satisfaction? Words and ideas loose force.....I say its over...I am done with bits and portions of my past floating in and out of this present life. But I am told, its not over yet. What do I believe? A simple notion held in the heart or another's conclusion premised on analytical objective observations? Its proof you want. Its proof I don't have.
The idea of abstinence is slightly warped. Its delusional. You can get rid of the things and habits in physicality. I do not doubt that. But can you divest yourself of the idea? Can you abstain from the idea of it? Nothing ever leaves us does it? People, places, things, habits...tangibility alone is transient. Whatever remains beyond that...is there...just there..The tail ends of a flash of living...
I live in a world of morbid distortions. Having said that, I wonder what example to give...which part of my life do I throw open by way of proof? I am thinking now whether its the morbidity which has increased over this one year or the distortion. Or perhaps its just the active awareness of these that has increased....Does it even matter?
The year's made me high on existential angst. Then yesterday I figured that there is an existential boredom too. I have fallen victim to both I think. I believe I have done almost everything I could to release myself from this stupefying slumber. I have stopped at nothing (by my standards of course). I have even gone and spent time in shopping malls. Where my first five and a half years in Delhi were a record of not going to malls (other than that one time at the end of the first year when my parents and their friends dragged me to one...), this second phase in Delhi has seen me tripping over to malls across the city (actually only to Select City Walk) with a frequency which is fast becoming a cause of concern to me. I was proud of my I-don't-go-to-malls stand and record. It was at once coming from a personal dislike of closed, air conditioned and falsely manipulated spaces and from a rebellion...no a weak pseudo rebellion against the sham of modern existence and philosophy. Select City Walk does nothing but increase my existential anxiety (note that its anxiety and not angst this time..... not that it makes much of a difference at the end of it all). Its a strange place indeed. Each person walks by you in a cloud of rich expensive perfume. Women are dressed as physical examples of the clash of cultures and times. Stick thin, straight hair and a smart short black dress from Zara...perfect. But what is that atrocious bunch of I-am-newly-wed bangles doing on your wrists woman?!!! Another woman comes with her husband and his parents for a late evening coffee to Costa. I sit in the corner, deep in the attempt of disappearing from there and make the City Walk world go poof....and I see all four of them in earnest conversation. Avid face expressions, frantic hand movements and vigorous head shaking...they all probably live in the same house anyway. So why did they come here, in the middle of head hurting loud un-music to have a conversation? Couldn't you all have talked at home? Is this some new idea of real family time? Costa, a site of family dramas unfolding and decision making?
Young parents with younger kids...early initiation into fast living?
Old couples from the Delhi nouveau rich houses...seeking a place in changed times?
Kids bunking school....rebellion?
The whole world collapses inside those three malls and resurrects itself anew in warped realities.
Its a play of my anxieties you could say....in all probabilities it is....but I am have consciously decided to now un-mall myself. Temporarily at least.
We lead lives in alternatives. There are a million different roles we play and a thousand divergent lives we live. Everyday. All the time. To that extent we are schizophrenic. And in this year, this time, the spaces between my lives is increasing. We construct and structure our worlds through lies..a small one here and another one there. Wrap it. Wrap it. Wrap it. Wrap yourself away from a false world. Wrap yourself inside your own world of lies. Only now my lies confuse me. I forget what I said. My lies contradict their own selves. One to the second, the second to the third and the third to the fourth. In endless exponents they come and walk away with the small little truths that I thought I was. I wonder now, even as I write, will there be something left for me to salvage and protect when this world crumbles? If you strip me bare of my lies, nothing of me will be left I think. I am long gone already.
It costs about a hundred ten rupees to travel in an auto from CP to home. I lived a hundred rupees worth of life yesterday in that time and money while returning home.
Home? I found my home in people. A people? Some people?
Its just people. Thats all. The be all and sum all of all our lives. And when they leave? For they will, there is no doubt about that. Then? Does a home end with people? In the life I lived in those 25 odd minutes in the auto, I kept wondering if I could induce a flash of psychedelic recollection. What bits of myself would I have recollected? And from these recollections would I ever manage to find that one tiny crack that could perhaps take me back to where I was and who I was a long long time ago? Don't call this regression. Don't label it anything. It's nothing at all and yet it is all that we want sometimes. You and I....to return to those false ideas of innocence and simplicity..When there is nothing simple about the moment of conception then how can our human beginnings be simple? Innocence is not a word. Its a lie.
There is much of the I everywhere. In your world and mine, that is all that matters. You are. I am......we lost out on much of the us that was ever possible. We only delude ourselves with doubles and plurals. Its a singular life of singular living. Where do we create the space for plurals? Why? This is irony. I ridicule the plural here and yet even as I write I find comfort in the plurals of living.
This is my refuge. From a world of lies and from my own lies. A refuge at times from my own self. You.
You sleeps deep and easy. I write.
I cannot quantify my year of living again. I am changing. One day at a time....we become strangers to our own selves and call it growth. The ideas that we are....that I was are drifting away...But from my distortions and delusions I am happy enough. For now.
I will not live in contradictions and dilemmas
I will not run after answers to looped questions.
I will not look for traces of times and people gone by.
From the failure and futility of this...these systematic 'notes to self'
11 months into my return to this god forsaken hell hole of a city and while the heat blisters and weaves itself into shimmering waves outside and runs in endless loops inside my head, I eat, sleep, sweat, curse, lament, think and well...exist.
Time flies...its been one year come and gone already.
Time runs and crawls at its own pace..what's one year in the many to come and go?
What have I done in these 300 odd days? A little bit of this, that and the other? Much as I love the sound and play of these words, they really tell all and say nothing. I thought then, that I should attempt a list of things I have done in this year...things done, seen, thought of and learnt too? A list like that and a blog post on that are a cliche I am told. Damn right its a cliche. But then what in our lives is really new? Where we have been living for eons, overlaps and repetitions are but consequential aren't they?
And so, for the list in random non-sequential and un-patterned thinking.....
A return to the city is a return to its people.It was a sudden (in the truest sense of the word) decision to leave the city and then to return. The city changes and stalls at all times. It traps and releases...at the end of each day, it just is there..silent yet loud. My people here....yes they are my people, the very coordinates of daily living...well my people here are as caught in the flux of living as I am..some more than others. Forms and shapes have changed. My space is ever widening and shrinking daily. Old associations I carry along with fights, cursing, laughter and love. New ones I try to fit into this pattern. I returned to the city and my people. Some took me right back and some...well some left me behind and walked away.
People will ask for proof. Numbers, facts , figures, dates, definite instances...actions and deeds..that is all that matters. Our cynicism is not limited to our selves. The essential doubt extends to all beyond us. Nothing stands outside its purview. What I work hard to believe in, will be questioned at every word and every comma I use. And then I am told that in my being questioned and ripped apart, is the truest test of my belief. Is my failure proving your point well enough for your cynical satisfaction? Words and ideas loose force.....I say its over...I am done with bits and portions of my past floating in and out of this present life. But I am told, its not over yet. What do I believe? A simple notion held in the heart or another's conclusion premised on analytical objective observations? Its proof you want. Its proof I don't have.
The idea of abstinence is slightly warped. Its delusional. You can get rid of the things and habits in physicality. I do not doubt that. But can you divest yourself of the idea? Can you abstain from the idea of it? Nothing ever leaves us does it? People, places, things, habits...tangibility alone is transient. Whatever remains beyond that...is there...just there..The tail ends of a flash of living...
I live in a world of morbid distortions. Having said that, I wonder what example to give...which part of my life do I throw open by way of proof? I am thinking now whether its the morbidity which has increased over this one year or the distortion. Or perhaps its just the active awareness of these that has increased....Does it even matter?
The year's made me high on existential angst. Then yesterday I figured that there is an existential boredom too. I have fallen victim to both I think. I believe I have done almost everything I could to release myself from this stupefying slumber. I have stopped at nothing (by my standards of course). I have even gone and spent time in shopping malls. Where my first five and a half years in Delhi were a record of not going to malls (other than that one time at the end of the first year when my parents and their friends dragged me to one...), this second phase in Delhi has seen me tripping over to malls across the city (actually only to Select City Walk) with a frequency which is fast becoming a cause of concern to me. I was proud of my I-don't-go-to-malls stand and record. It was at once coming from a personal dislike of closed, air conditioned and falsely manipulated spaces and from a rebellion...no a weak pseudo rebellion against the sham of modern existence and philosophy. Select City Walk does nothing but increase my existential anxiety (note that its anxiety and not angst this time..... not that it makes much of a difference at the end of it all). Its a strange place indeed. Each person walks by you in a cloud of rich expensive perfume. Women are dressed as physical examples of the clash of cultures and times. Stick thin, straight hair and a smart short black dress from Zara...perfect. But what is that atrocious bunch of I-am-newly-wed bangles doing on your wrists woman?!!! Another woman comes with her husband and his parents for a late evening coffee to Costa. I sit in the corner, deep in the attempt of disappearing from there and make the City Walk world go poof....and I see all four of them in earnest conversation. Avid face expressions, frantic hand movements and vigorous head shaking...they all probably live in the same house anyway. So why did they come here, in the middle of head hurting loud un-music to have a conversation? Couldn't you all have talked at home? Is this some new idea of real family time? Costa, a site of family dramas unfolding and decision making?
Young parents with younger kids...early initiation into fast living?
Old couples from the Delhi nouveau rich houses...seeking a place in changed times?
Kids bunking school....rebellion?
The whole world collapses inside those three malls and resurrects itself anew in warped realities.
Its a play of my anxieties you could say....in all probabilities it is....but I am have consciously decided to now un-mall myself. Temporarily at least.
We lead lives in alternatives. There are a million different roles we play and a thousand divergent lives we live. Everyday. All the time. To that extent we are schizophrenic. And in this year, this time, the spaces between my lives is increasing. We construct and structure our worlds through lies..a small one here and another one there. Wrap it. Wrap it. Wrap it. Wrap yourself away from a false world. Wrap yourself inside your own world of lies. Only now my lies confuse me. I forget what I said. My lies contradict their own selves. One to the second, the second to the third and the third to the fourth. In endless exponents they come and walk away with the small little truths that I thought I was. I wonder now, even as I write, will there be something left for me to salvage and protect when this world crumbles? If you strip me bare of my lies, nothing of me will be left I think. I am long gone already.
It costs about a hundred ten rupees to travel in an auto from CP to home. I lived a hundred rupees worth of life yesterday in that time and money while returning home.
Home? I found my home in people. A people? Some people?
Its just people. Thats all. The be all and sum all of all our lives. And when they leave? For they will, there is no doubt about that. Then? Does a home end with people? In the life I lived in those 25 odd minutes in the auto, I kept wondering if I could induce a flash of psychedelic recollection. What bits of myself would I have recollected? And from these recollections would I ever manage to find that one tiny crack that could perhaps take me back to where I was and who I was a long long time ago? Don't call this regression. Don't label it anything. It's nothing at all and yet it is all that we want sometimes. You and I....to return to those false ideas of innocence and simplicity..When there is nothing simple about the moment of conception then how can our human beginnings be simple? Innocence is not a word. Its a lie.
There is much of the I everywhere. In your world and mine, that is all that matters. You are. I am......we lost out on much of the us that was ever possible. We only delude ourselves with doubles and plurals. Its a singular life of singular living. Where do we create the space for plurals? Why? This is irony. I ridicule the plural here and yet even as I write I find comfort in the plurals of living.
This is my refuge. From a world of lies and from my own lies. A refuge at times from my own self. You.
You sleeps deep and easy. I write.
I cannot quantify my year of living again. I am changing. One day at a time....we become strangers to our own selves and call it growth. The ideas that we are....that I was are drifting away...But from my distortions and delusions I am happy enough. For now.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)