'Waste in Niggarding'...

At times I make a conscious effort to better the "flexibility of my adamancy" in being "inexpressive". Can adamancy be ever flexible since "adamancy" itself stands for "inflexibility"?  May be it's feasible for a person who finds comfort in the belief of being "partially adamant"! Somewhere from my childhood I picked up the romantic impression that "silence" is more charming than "voice". My dad always had and still has a silent understanding with my quiet withdrawals, has an unsaid appreciation on my dull tastes...his understandings were silent and beautiful. That’s why when I texed him once a short apology grieving myself at my thoughtless misbehavior he didn't bother to reply but brought me my favourite audio book with an implicit smile sparkling in his eyes to cheer me up. I badly wanted to show him that I have always known his "voice of silence" but with great difficulty I blinked back my "expressions" convincing myself that "he knows that I know that he knows!" [Now this reminds me of my heroic concept about my father figure. During my early teens (and sometimes even now) my dad was my yardstick with which I measured the likableness, dignity and individuality of "the other guys". Freud might state this precisely as a part of "father fixation". And how far I have changed the adamancy in that perception pattern is a question I deliberately keep away from confrontation].

A tincture of "expression" is wanting among the variegated shades of my idiosyncrasies. Expressions of???  emotions...closeness...the manifestation of my sentimentality. I find myself least demonstrative when it comes to the unfurling of affections. It's as if I am hoarding at one corner all the fondness that's destined to be gushed out at the right time and at the right circumstance. And later when I have to patch up for my frugality I find myself floundering...expressions slipping and sliding...

In Shakespeare's words,
Making a famine where abundance lies, 
 Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel
....makest waste in niggarding....
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee. 

  Wasting the “expressions” in "niggarding". 

PS: I really long for that skill to depersonalize what I write (See...again that adamancy of in-expressiveness...it's like a virus!). Eliot said that writing should be a "continuous extinction of personality" rather than the "expression of personality" which I cannot conceive at all. I hope that the dominance of subjectivity in these "expressions" is humble enough to derive "universality". Each post is an "expression" which I have failed to express somewhere.    

Confusion Worse Confounded

Everything is connected and intertwined...but the farrago of varied ideas and systems of thought have turned into a big mess impotent to form a synthesis, unable to find a clear ideation. As my professor was lecturing today on Aurobindo's Philosophy and Integralism, the necessity of going beyond the physicality of things, from finite to infinite and so and so, suddenly a desire for a complete ignorance came over me...the bafflement of a confused soul...it's better not to be aware of all these possibilities of elevations and the blindness of self- limited human intelligentsia than to be known about all these and still failing to be there in that illumined state. 

There is this notion that we view the world through language. My world is thoroughly bewitched by language for my major concern is 'language' and its beauty...the technical as well as the aesthetic aspects of it. Along with it goes the critical interpretation and analysis of the splendid ideas expressed through this wonderful means. One idea overlaps the other...a whirlwind of theories, ideas, imaginations and concepts...a platter of myriad perspectives...I sympathize and  empathize with characters standing from their different zones and perspectives and there comes the sterility of a proper judgement because each character has it's own undeniable justification to make. This is not a romantic gibberish but a reality in which I wade through. It's all about "life", the limitlessness and profundity of literature, its ability to play with our emotions and feelings, touching the subtlest of our sensibilities, molding the centers and peripheries of human psyche. 

My prof once told me that what we get from all these, (by pruning and refining the wilderness of our intellect) is a final solace! Am I getting that final solace? Isn't that solace seems so distant and unreachable when ideas often augment rather than taming the wilderness. Undoubtedly he deserves the claim of that solace since he is a mature sagacious full fledged individual who perfectly knows how to channelize his acquired erudition where as I am only a wobbling beginner stuck and perplexed in the midst of these upsurging confusion. So may be I should be much more patient and awaiting for some time to march on calmly inorder to inweave a proper cognition...!

PS: Apologies for this muddled piece since I typed this out of a sheer need for deluging my chaotic musings crossing the sleepy frontiers of a restless night!

Flimsy Reasonings and Rude Rejections...

He was critically scrutinizing the contours of my face, his eyes threatening to decipher the meaning of my every expression, to discover all the twisted ways of my mind, to fish out all my self deceptions...yes he has always unwrapped my self deceptions and conceitedness smoothly winning over my defensive arguments which I bootlessly do to prevent my ego being wounded. My EGO!...it was freakishly wounded and harshly subjected to alterations each time he brought out a new discovery about me. 

Why this rejection? I just want to know the reason behind your rejection. Or are you unable to trace the reason? Are you that much self ignorant? Or are you not convinced of your own flimsy reasoning?

Surely he has shown the best and the worst in him to me alone...for he seemed to be a web of  coded mysteries and great composure to others while there slept in a swirl of emotions and affections stored inside the caverns of his heart. He has given me the best words and the worst hurts. He always had the finest to offer, the finest of his considerations and possessions. So why do I reject him? Surely I cannot question the gravity and naturalness of his love, the transparency of his feelings. His earnestness is beyond the reach of such questionings and doubts. Are you unable to trace the reason? Or are you not convinced of your own flimsy reasoning? Is it because I am incapable of such strong affections and feelings? Or is it because I want to define him purposefully as another version,  another victim of my overwhelming detachment and negligence.

I am afraid whether I can return your feelings. I am helpless that you feel that way...His face testified the bruises of mortification...A hefty silence...silence that lacerated me into a strange shame and desire for non-existence. He struggled to digest the idea. 

It's exactly this fear of rejection that prevented me to ask you these much time...and finally it happened! 

And it's this fear of mortifying you that compelled me to dodge you from asking me! 

Mortifying? It's not just the question of mortification dear...I think you should retrospect once in a while at least to get a glimpse of that knowledge of how ignorant you are! 

Another discovery! My EGO!... freakishly wounded and harshly subjected to alterations each time he brought out a new discovery!

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

A Tryst with facebook

When one of my friends was told that I am on facebook she blurted out a response with her eyes bulged out "What Nasnin?... you on facebook? That's really a news! I could hardly imagine you social networking since your nature seem so far from such "silliness" as some people of "your type" would call it.Your face would have been the last one I would have searched for in it". Well...the sudden exclamation of my friend didn't spring up surprise in me as her perception about "me" and "my type" and her idea about "my nature" was in no way unfamiliar to me though that perception was mixed with misconceptions which I badly wanted to attack, but always remained as a "rattle in my throat".

If I try to figure out the reasons which persuaded me to be in fb, the resultant explanation will be some clichéd expressions like" for pleasure" , "to keep in touch with the disconnected friends", "to pass time in a more out- flowing way" and so on. What ever be the inconspicuous motive I started "facebooking" at my leisurely evenings, at my lazy holiday afternoons, in between my ever unfixed study hours... At the threshold my humble expectation was that it may help deluging my pent up mental friction from my obese mind satchel glutted with the dusty pieces of self expression. Desiring this effect in my mind I updated my "statuses", uncorked the perfume bottle of my ever admired quotes, displayed my "favourites", "commented" on the relevant and the trivial. I got back in touch with some of the friends ,some I bothered about, some I least bothered about to meet again. I saw people idealizing themselves, saw a whole range of intentional and unintentional emotional exhibition by the mirror of language, people trying to be different, some genuinely  and some not....people who have grown silly though that silliness proved incongruent to their person at times...but still silly as they became blind to that incongruous silliness.

 The realization of the visible fact that, that very despised self absorption (the peeling off the self absorption was one of my subconscious motifs which I recognized later) got nourished and flourished and triumphantly propped up its head every time I "faced this book" dislocated even more the already dislocated wry patterns of the "self". It spoiled my evenings of sweet solitude...those pleasurable sittings with a 'not seeking anything', 'not running after anything' attitude rather than dragging my mental status to a status space , before people who don't care at all or who pretend to care with a compliment of clicking a "like" or typing out a "self-proving comment".


Perhaps I was just seeking an identity in a new way, exhausted by the hammering questions of identity crisis to which I could not have remained impervious, added to the other exhaustions by the constantly weired  concealments of my furtive mind. As the temporary abstentions from 'facebooking" gained me back the vanishing sweetness of solitude, I decided to keep off permanently. The gullibility and vulnerability of my nature insisted me to accept the truth that it's not my cup of tea. But still the "deactivation" of my account rather than the "deletion" of it explicates the never halting wheel of escapism from which man is incapable of an ultimate extrication.


Looking from a different perspective,the moments in facebook and the people I met in it, people sprawled all over like the different colour patterns in a cubism painting, or the abstract elements in a modernist's canvas, or simply the detailed mirror images of real faces, faces untouchable..."a heap of broken images"...just got stashed away in that mind satchel in a disguised solidity (the solidity is because of the "deactivation" and not the "deletion" which allows me to go back to it to if I choose to go back, for a real visit unlike the airy visit to the past by memories).


PS: I remember my prof saying "When people ask me why I am not on facebook I usually tell them that it's because I love to keep my face in a book!". I think it speaks for some of us too.  

STILL???

Stillness...the night is still...in some of the quiet minutes in my room I often think of "stillness of mind"...may be because that's what I felt as most confusing and unattainable of Krishnamurty's teachings...the continuously chattering mind...mind blabbering even before sleep...this restlessness...this inability to wipe out the all smeared words which stains the whole consciousness...smothering the whole being... if words may withdraw themselves, thoughts may stop poisoning."Me" just as a "bundle of memories"..." memories as responses to thoughts, responses to the thoughts on past". Why can't I be still...???...be still with this still night...be still with the stillness of those leaves...or even quiet...just like the quietness in the swaying of those straggling boughs which're not supposed to be quiet when they sway...why this internal mess...this psychological crippleness??? I want the stillness which is not the stillness of sleep...which's not the stillness of the dead...but the stillness of the completely awakened mind."Can I be still???"

BLIND

A flash of lightning has tossed my thoughts of beauty and sound of rain into a thousand flakes of premonitions and scoops of distractions...distractions by inhibitions...inhibitions by "growth"...growth of bad consciousness...bad consciousness by my sleeping senses...thrusted upon me by my elapsing years and stolen genuinity....am blind...blind to the rain...blind to the crawling drops on my window glass...to its coolness...to life!