Vainglorious Flights...

It's a vainglorious effort to step out of this whole structure, to deviate from the collective conscience, from belongings and identities, from labels and possessions. I am ignorant of what do I hoard by possessing, what do I hoard by belonging. When the mind calls for aberrations, the disentanglement from the quelling attachments and belongings, the withdrawal begins and soon after the commencement of these withdrawals there sneak in the hollowness, the emptiness, the dis-figuration of fixed patterns, the threat and premonitions of alienation which is more weird  than non-existence. So from the half way itself I turn back...I escape from belongings only to 'belong to escape'...to be possessed...to be attached.


 At one half the mind lectures itself  the essentialities of conforming, of confinement, of adherence to the script. The other half tempts to strike out the script, to reconstruct or never to construct at all...to weld the wings, to unfasten the shackles and just...whoosh...!!! And even if it ends like the flight of Icarus, that sensation of immense emancipation at the moments of that complete flight before the burning down and final fall by heading towards the sun will alone serve for an ever sought gratification.

Sanely Insane

I first met her at my apartment elevator. Unlike some other indifferent tight-lipped creatures who either cast their eyes fixed at the floor or at the ceiling (making the moments all the more awkward) this tall lady, gigantic in figure, frizzy haired (but comely in that frizziness) and dead white in complexion, had an unfeigned smile and an unassuming countenance. Rarely found pleasing genuineness.

“Which floor?" she asked and without waiting my reply she continued..."I am new here, actually not new. I have been abroad for some years and now came back. I am all alone...it's so suffocating you know..."

       

She was highly garrulous whenever I met her in most of the evenings on my way back from college. "I have been to temple, every evening I go there...it's good for my mind..." and the prattling may extend for some time, complaining how the loneliness is stifling her, how she misses her only daughter who's in a far away boarding school, and her husband who comes only once or twice in a year.


 Noticing my new acquaintanceship with the lady my friend had a new warning to give, "hey...don't listen to her too much...there's a news that she's out of her mind. Her family doesn’t live with her. However hard they tried she's not yielding to be treated". 

"But she seems normal..."

"Normal? Oh no dear, she's not normal". My mom reminded me of how my personal estimations often proved wrong and how my slippery judgments always betray me when it comes to people.

“When are you going to understand all these?”

Yes...when am I going to stop the rejection of normalization? When normalcy rejects me? Of course it always has a propensity to reject me... 
   
 Funny enough for my friend the personal estimation evidently proved wrong. The lady said of her purple painted walls, "purple is good for my mind...my husband says so...."

She cleaned and cleaned her squeaky-cleaned flat and said, "someone is putting some dirty powder all over my floor ...every hour I cleans it up but still it's untidy...

"Hey...don't drink the water from the tap, some one has mixed poison in it…I use only the bottled"

As she started throwing things from her balcony in a grip of frenzy the watchman grumbled, "It's pathetic that the lady is not celled. What if she strangles someone...? Mad creature! 

 Things went rampant and her husband did the inevitable. Whether she yielded or not...it was just "inevitable".

A few months later when she saw me at the library the frizzy haired tall gigantic woman  with her unassuming  smile rushed towards me from the other end... "Hey you...it's been a long time…I was just planning to meet you. I have joined a distance course in literature. I think I should do something seriously... at least to escape this damn boredom...so will you please help me to sort out some doubts...it's very confusing...the books..."

While she was running her eyes all over the book shelves still maundering, my friend who was with me quickly grabbed my hand and dashed to the exit door saying, "Are you 'mad'? Don't you know that she's 'mad'?"

Amused by my smile she asked..."What so funny?"

"Nothing...the idea of insanity...it's so strange and stupid sometimes!"

"Oh yes, stupid for you insane people!"

As we laughed a feeble current of pain and muddiness aired through me... still laughed…”it’s good for my mind?”...am extremely good at acting (often to myself)!

   

Love at 'Heights'

I am Heathcliff! He's always always in my mind not as a pleasure, anymore than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being...Catherine's words just linger and linger... It feels that some words have a high sense of superiority and priggishness that when they form a beautiful idea they just horn in every time some thoughts in relation to that idea go through our minds. So when I think of "love" these words show that priggishness. 


Every time I go through Wuthering Heights a dozy snake lurking somewhere in the inside gets up and stings me and stealthily returns to it snooze leaving me to wriggle with a poisoned pain, reviving the complexity of my notions on this BIG FAT LOVE. "Fierce, pitiless, wolfish" Heathcliff and "self-willed passionate and egotistical" Catherine with their blazing passionate bonding got etched in my mind for ever grudging to leave me. Heathcliff even digs the earth, opens Catherine's coffin and looks at her face with an ardent wish to die, to merge with her, to defrost the separation created by life and death, to attain that mystical reunion. Surely it's the story of the unfulfilled and destructive passion of two strange creatures, unfulfilled only because of that very strangeness and larger than life essence in them.  This fictitious love has its all consuming nature, a sweet torment and tempestuousness throughout it's existence. It gives me a taste of this piquant emotion, lifting me from a shallow notion of love as an addiction, as an obsession, as a mere desire for a sense of belonging or a cloying attachment to another being to a different plane unknown and ineffable. 


May be it's just a girlish amazement on the beauty of their idealized love which floats on a platonic level. Patricia Meyer in her Female Imagination speaks of Heathcliff as "powerful, manly, mysterious , fully conscious of his own worth, frequently brutal, he remains nevertheless absolutely submissive to the woman he loves. Heathcliff is every woman's dream." So my adoration for Heathcliff  and Catherine might be an infliction by this so called "female imagination". Whatever be it, it's this possibility and pleasure of feeling the unfeeling, knowing the unknown and reaching the unreachable that prompts me to revel in fictions.  

The Essential Confessions of a Catharsis Seeker

"It's irritatingly confessional..." , one of my highly erudite pedagogues' reprehension on Kamala Das's poetry.


"As I was flung between the assigned feminine roles and the rebellious self questionings on the unquestionable social conditioning..."...oops! Is it "irritatingly confessional"?...I pause in between but my pen scorns to pause...it's unabashedly facile when it's confessional. 


So...why confessional? It's like you click click click your inner chattering and when these self-centric pieces are born it wedges the gap between 'you' and the 'inner you' , that vacuity is gone, the outline of the inner landscaping becoming bolder and bolder and there is this sudden clarification, this drained off feeling, a purified sense, a cathartic effect. Oh yes...catharsis! This "externalization of the internal" as Wordsworth puts it even rationalizes the irrationality of some queer ways of perceptions and thoughts.


Every thought dangles itself incessantly until it's gorged by these grossly confessions. It has become an essential menace...the essential confessions of a catharsis seeker.


I also know that by confessing
by peeling off my layers 
I reach closer to the soul...
I shall some day see
My world de-flashed, de-veined, de-blooded...
                                                      -Kamala Das