The Speaker Doesn't Matter...

                  It says suffering gives you clarity, strength and so many other virtues. It says pain, loss and longings are all part of human lives, like the inevitable death, like all the realities, like a shadow of happiness. That there will be rough edge at the end of anything smooth and glowy, just like there will be a silver line in every black sinking hole. The paradox is universally understood. The paradox is universally accepted. But then when every flesh and blood and lonely spirit shrinks into their own black holes, there occurs the turbulence. The longing. The forbidden fire. In fire the desire stutters and whines.

Who is the speaker in the poem? Who is the character? Where does the plot leading to? What is the central theme here? As I write these questions my own answer paper is empty. The protagonist is uncertain. The author God is dead. In fact the author never lived. The story is in first person here. The author is not omniscient. The author is in uncertainty. Like many other authors. So who is the speaker in the poem? In the story? Who is it? My existentialism and its crisis have led me to untrodden paths of self-doubt, misery and the illusion of knowledge. There is nothing more dangerous than being in an illusion. The more you are deceived the more you deny the truth. But this author had only interpretations. Who wants the author's intentions and interpretations? The experience of the reader has a different story.

The author's story is like a river. There happen many people. Charming, intense, passionate, vibrant, who confesses intimacy and great affection for the protagonist. The river flows unstoppably. It zig zags along those huge boulders. There are sun, moon, the bent branches along the banks, the peeping trees, umpteen pebbles, the rocks, the...the river is jubilant as it touches all of it...It perpetually senses the beauty- It can know the beauty- It becomes the beautiful. The river then slowly flows away...its thin milky hue calmly making its way to the forlorn desolate sea. The sea...the sea...the turbulent blue giant. The sea gulps it and dances it away. The sea is neither the antagonist nor the life saviour...the sea is the accepted vastness of silence and the roaring end. The sea is the ultimate paradox. The sea knew all of it. Even in the beginning. It heaved and silently waited. For that violet hour...

Woolf's lighthouse may see the suffused river in the sea. May be Lily Briscoe would paint it. Only this time the other way...turning her back on the summer house and looking towards the sea...like the other artists. There is no Mrs. Ramsay left. Lily wanted her painting to be like butterflies on cathedral arches. New airy thoughts on a firm foundation. But this time Lily should paint the river in the sea. The butterfly like river which flew/ flowed its whole way through those rocks, shattering chiseling its head hundred times, carried away by the fire and the passion and made its way to the blue blue pretty dark blue sea. Exhausted. The river is the reconciled version of Sylvia- who once tried to drown herself and never wanted to go back to the land...or may be the river carried Woolf herself along with it…for the bliss of drowning herself with a pocket full of stones. How wonderful it would be. Lily the character in her novel painting her own author who had melted into the river. Who is the speaker? The speaker doesn’t matter...the character is free to act. The reader has a different story to tell... the reader has imagination to imagine. Perhaps even the death of the author. The author God had only illusion of knowledge. The author is destined to die- the author is both the deceiver and the deceived. 

Someone has to die so that the rest of us should value life.