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Theory of Relativity
When I was a child, winter quilts turned to mountains in my father’s arms
as he heaved them out of an icy silver glacier of a trunk.
They became snow white hills spread across the bed
as I jumped and glided over them, squealing with joy.
How big the tables looked as I hid beneath them,
pretending they were caverns or secretive dark stations
where ghost trains came and went, visible only to my eyes.
How big my tiny sorrows—an unsolved sum, a pack of new crayons I forgot in the classroom,
lost and never again found. How big the life in front of me, how expansive the space
between memories. Now as I look back, everything is finite
like the mouth of the tunnel drawn tightly on both ends. The promise of a future
slowly turning and gleaming back in the past. -
The Apartment
Solitude is a room we enter to escape all others. Loneliness is the one we wake up in, alone, when everyone leaves.
Through closed eyes, I feel the tiny hands of the sun playing with the wind in the trees, and say to myself, “Wasn’t this enough the other day, when I swore I saw God?” Why is it then— (And this I don’t say out loud) Why is this moment failing me so? There was a time I thought this was enough. So I counted the sun, the leaves, and the birds, and placed them all in my pocket. Now in this moment, which comes for us all, one at a time, and is here for me now, I empty all my pockets and I see a sky bricked up and painted blue, paper birds glued to the ceiling and I think of time as it is for my mother— one long tunnel moving both forwards and backwards. Suddenly, I am again sleepwalking as on a heated afternoon sitting at the back of a rickshaw in a bazar, and wake up suddenly in all the din of the real and here. Or when I was ten and during a power cut I looked into the heart of a candle flame and had an epiphany that time would continue to pass without me if needed and woke up again with that thought on another day, 20 years later, like a twig that fell down the river once, still finds itself drifting every day, unable to stop. I think now of a life that seems like a lifetime away already. I think of my father watching TV in the other room, and my brother studying, and now following my mother to the kitchen, and my mother following him back and then stopping by my father, commenting on some ordinary thing or another. Perhaps the weather. Perhaps the grocery list. Perhaps a bill that needed to be paid. It feels like there was more of us to go around then. More annoyances too. More spaces to be cut into other spaces. More reasons to open and close our doors, and turn away our eyes and ears. The wind chime is the only sound here now and outside only the downtown sirens sing. Downstairs, a man plays the drums. Next door, a jingle of keys and some fumbling and a clearing of throat. Sometimes, I imagine these strange people across these walls, sharing the same air and water, and think of them as my many uncles, aunts, cousins. I guess, in a way, we are one big family here, in this apartment building. -
The Theory of Music
Descend
The music that came from the sky
Had to already be in descent.
So, we only ever caught a faint tune of receding madness
Collected, like rainwater
Without petrichor or invigorating bursts of squall,
Into tamed chants buckled to frail human words,
A flower plucked and for all its beauty, already wilting,
The light of life already dimming,
Like a dream told upon waking,
Like fingers on a drumhead,
Feeling desperately for the warm vibrating aftermath.They were in agony then, seeking a form fit for gods
To see again the clouds and the light
A whisper, a cry
Something to bottle the thunder and the strange rains
That fell sometimes of their own accord
On bluelands they knew not the names of.
Some drug for the half-crazed mind
That sought to paint on the air with its eyes and ears
And the rest
All the rest
Left for the wilderness of the heart
To yearn and never fully find
And in that yearning and not finding
The music
That kept slowly expanding back into the sky.Awaken
Music, a creature now strung into waking
Raises its many heads, and hence summoned, looks around
And is no longer content with its own mellifluous being
But must demand more ears, arms, legs,
And other corporeal beats, bits, and pieces.
And right away, fate too must intervene, so art meets artist
Like clouds making rain and the winds thwarting it in time to rekindle the fire.Lead us through the land and string us along
To the strange rhythms of a mystic land.
Electric guitar, send your current through the spine
And raise and lift what was dying and renew again
Create in the ruins the sounds from the past
And make a gateway so all may coexist,
Feet by feet, arm in arm.
Welcome the ancestors and the primal future.
Allow the free floating wind to howl sand and grate
And wail along the columns, lengthening itself into shadows
Of longing frozen in orgasmic pandiculation
An oblivion that must in eternity come to know of everything
With a promise to forget.
Painting the SilenceDisturb the silence
And leave a ghost of a ruin behind where the tunes must continue to haunt alone
Looking for the ones who created them and where they came from
If not the sky?
Life rushes around them at different speeds
And the tunes continue at the pace they were set to, in all their innocence and metered programming.
The wind, the ancient musician, roams through space
The water, a songstress, sings and roars, as does the fire and the land.
Why else gravity holds them so close if not to hear more closely
What they all have to say?
The birds too join in.
Men and women look at the sky and wonder how
There are many wars but only one stream of peace
And all that rests on chance and destiny, like love.
Leaves and lives fall into place like notes and sounds
And then they say it is just music.Rise
After the first hint at awakening
Things are bound to fasten up and escalate to a finished state
That gets as close as it can get to the original sound
Without ever being it
And that too only lasts for the time being.But that first eye of the nightwatch
On the waiting hill
Forever follows you home.Birth a God
Music is what it takes to birth a god
So there can be life and death
Flood and draught
Happiness and sorrow
For things to rise and fall
For time to move again
One beat, one breath.Song of the Spheres
The universe feeds energy to the machine
And watches it respond.
What is that which moves to music
Like the waves to the light of the moon?
This predictability of a pattern
And the breaking of it,
Between the moment and its eternity.In zeroes and ones,
The spheres sing.The glances they exchange on screen
Converge and diverge
And in their coming together and being apart is born again
The music of life.Stars, Lies, and Languid Eyes
I see Akbar in a dream, waiting on a horseback
And the moonlit blue sky fading over paper pink flowers
Like a still from a movie set, forever crafted into predictable space.
The stars look down somewhere from far above
But are hidden to him just like the future is
Though you and I can read it in history books.
Yet I wonder how much he can see in the swish of the horse’s tail
And the back and forth restlessness of the hooves on spot.Moments fly in space all at once
Like dust suspended in the sun.
Here is the randomness in mathematics, he says,
Flirting with all the borders, boundaries, and edges
And their crossing and filling up,
Holding close alike the silence and it’s theft.The Origin of Sound
Music, that taste of eternity in a packet
Is a tease that promises to leave us hanging.The stars still in ecstasy
Invite us to scream the self into a shared oblivion,
And make music of our joy and sorrow.
Our ancestors, they say, have developed a taste for
Astromusic, alien music.
The universe laughs at us with its secrets.
As furious, strong, and original as ever,
Distant quasars continue to dream.The record that continues to revolve with the planets
On repeat like a cosmic prayer
In an otherwise silent room,
What can it manifest?The rich music of the lonely.
The weightlessness.
And in all this vacant spaceThe First Force, The First Sound
A breath taken and never returned. -
Notes from Spring
Spring drew on… and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps.
Charlotte Brontë
But the true nature of the human heart is as whimsical as spring weather. All signals may aim toward a fall of rain when suddenly the skies will clear.
Maya Angelou
Go grab your favorite cup of coffee (or tea, if you prefer tea) in your favorite mug, find a sunny spot around, and curl up. If you have a cat or even better, cats, do let them know they are welcome. We are going to talk all things spring, poetry, and the art of being present (with a healthy scoop of existentialism, of course).
The world continues to warp around us, but spring is here as always, the buds poking their heads up as they have done for centuries, the blades of grass continue to flutter in the breeze, following their own meditative rhythm. And so should we.
You were not just born to center your entire existence on work and labor. You were born to heal, to grow, to be of service to yourself and community, to practice, to experiment, to create, to have space, to dream, and to connect.
― Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A ManifestoYou know, when I was little, I imagined if I could choose a name or a month I would have loved to be born in, I would say April. Though, being a May child is close enough.
But May is the child of summer. And spring has my heart.
And even though it is not so warm yet, I cannot wait to ditch my so many sweaters and jackets and scarves and appear out of it all, in my white tee and shorts, barefoot like Heidi, and run down the green slopes of the Alps, feeling light as a feather.
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes. – William WordsworthI can see daisies, daffodils, and dandelions, sprouting all around the place. I am beginning to run into more and more neighborhood cats coming out of their secret gardens. The cherry and plum blossom trees have started sprinkling the boulevards with their pink and white spring showers. Come to think of it, without trees to remind us, there are no seasons.
The more I observe the spring trees with their buds and blossoms, the sky that continues to grow brighter and ever so bluer, and the birds that are getting livelier and fluffier, twittering heartily, the more I see all that is wonderful in them, and all there is to learn from them. The tree facing my window feels like an old friend, changing with me. I invite the birds to my balcony, enticing them with sunflower seeds. When I work out, as much as I would be delighted to be mistaken for the swaying branch of a tree by the birds, I lack the grace and loving wisdom of my wonderful old friend. I like the certainty of its steady presence. I learn from its ever-changing frame and flexibility while being rooted in one place.
When I moved here, it was completely bare. The birds still held on, clipping at some buds that seemed so tiny that I felt they weren’t even there. I thought the tree was dying. There it was, brown and bare, standing in the middle of this floral cornucopia and a flurry of green flittering fullness of all the other trees in the area. And just when I grew fond of its bareness, urging it to hang in there, it sprung to life. Almost overnight. Like a miracle. Na. Scratch that. A miracle. For it was a miracle.
This Morning by Mary Oliver
This morning the redbirds’ eggs
have hatched and already the chicks
are chirping for food. They don’t
know where it’s coming from, they
just keep shouting, “More! More!”
As to anything else, they haven’t
had a single thought. Their eyes
haven’t yet opened, they know nothing
about the sky that’s waiting. Or
the thousands, the millions of trees.
They don’t even know they have wings.And just like that, like a simple
neighborhood event, a miracle is
taking place.
I Wake Close to Morning by Mary Oliver
Why do people keep asking to see
God’s identity papers
when the darkness opening into morning
is more than enough?
Certainly any god might turn away in disgust.
Think of Sheba approaching
the kingdom of Solomon.
Do you think she had to ask,
“Is this the place?”How easy it is to take nature and what is natural for granted. Oh, the miracle of this body, the world that is alive! The poem the sun never ceases to write on the sky, with every rise and fall. The wind that roams the world, kissing everything. Gravity that never ceases to tell me that it wants me, a call I never fail to answer as I snuggle back into bed or the couch for a few more minutes of napping. I am grateful. There is much pain in the world, there are days when I feel like a blank and everything feels dreary and pointless and yet I am grateful for what is. Throughout the day, I follow the sun. I stay by the window. The sky helps me breathe. I check on it again and again just to make sure it’s still there.
I too have known loneliness.
I too have known what it is to feel
misunderstood,
rejected, and suddenly
not at all beautiful.
Oh, mother earth,
your comfort is great, your arms never withhold.
It has saved my life to know this.
Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning.
Oh, motions of tenderness!– Mary Oliver, “Loneliness”
I really feel connected to the tree. I am beginning to understand and root myself in its stillness, and move, and find a whole another life in it. There is no need to go anywhere. Everywhere can be found anywhere, if you look close enough and have enough love in your heart for it. Though, with the water in us, we are bound to grow restless too, and in that, we ebb and flow like the waves. The land, water, and air bind us all together and set us free.
On some afternoons, I can feel the tree, all of its being looking and feeling, alive, gracious, and open, with a loving gentle gaze that doesn’t understand fear or separation, so at one with the sky above, the ground below, and open to what life chooses to surround it between the two. In my friend, I sense no divide between the perspicacious mind and the warm beating heart. The immensity of it, the humility of it. All I seek in a God, right here.
I admit I feel a bit deformed in the face of this company. A part of me is spiritually stunted shaped by the noise none of us can escape. A thigmotropism of sorts. Though whatever we have kept away, open only to the sky, continues to grow more and more, deeper and fuller and further inwards and outwards. A corm of sorts, a silent room for the mind. Though I love the moments of stillness when the door to that room opens and the conversations that sometimes flow from there.
Have you felt the stream of eternal time that we can only touch for a moment yet never imbibe? Here’s an exercise. Find a tree, a plant, a flower, anything in the wilderness or in the balcony outside your window. Or the sky. And for some time, sit still and give it all of your attention. Observe. Do not seek to dissect. Just stay in the moment with it, at its pace. Imagine you are the sky. The tree. The plant. Think of the hours that seem to go on endlessly. Experience how time expands and slows down. Take a deep breath. And then notice, in contrast, the world around, running at such a high speed, burning through time. We think if we pack a lot in a short amount of time, we can expand how we experience time. But seems like we have it backwards. All my life, the moments that I can replay in slow motion, that seem to grow even more immense as time goes on, were moments of inner stillness and slowing down, what is called ठहराव (Thehrav: the stillness that comes with patience, calmness, and the quality of being relaxed, with a still quiet confidence and contentment) in Hindi, moments when the door to that secret room of the mind opens up and the space where change first blossoms.
In India, spring is the season of temperate pleasant weather and arrives much sooner in the year. The wintery chilliness of the shade thaws and the cold wind, warmed up by the sun, turns into a cool pleasant breeze. I still remember how I knew as a child when spring came around. I still wore my socks, but the sweaters turned into vests. The potted plants on the terrace began to sprout buds- orange, yellow, and pink. My father moved his chair slightly towards the dappled shade. My mother took out her yellow saree and the season of Basant came around, filling up the skies with kites of all colors, shapes, and sizes. Children on terraces everywhere, in a joyful hypnotic state turned up like bright flowers looking at the warm blue sky full of milky white clouds yet untouched by the scorch of summer. Their mothers, gathering the crisp clean laundry smelling like the sun, constantly worried about them falling off the short balustrades, and shouted at them over and over again to be careful and were ignored. Shouts of Ai-Bo could be heard in each direction as kids engaged in competitions to cut down their opponent’s kite. One child’s kite set adrift in the free wind became another’s treasure, floating down from the sky. How many times did my brother get distracted by those shouts while doing his homework in that season? Sometimes a stray kite would land right by the bedroom window and how could he resist? He could even hear it coming down, if it ever got stuck in the branches of the Rangoon Creeper at the back of the house. He just couldn’t wait to get his kite up in the sky and how excited were we to write something on it so that if it were to fall into another’s hands, it would be like exchanging a secret message. The tiny words flew up into the sky, open to all, yet readable by none from that height, their fate resting on the winds.
I have read poems describing the beauty and abundance in autumn and even winter. And I know spring is the season where growth that has been invisible like an underground stream, sprouts through and is made apparent. It is the timid walk of newly sprung beauty on its way to become more and more flamboyant. I confess I love spring’s promise of summer more than summer itself. But what fascinates me even more is the back and forth between the realms of winter and summer that is inherent in this season. You can often see the sky split into layers of grey and blue and intermittent rain and sunshine. This is the season that prepares the mind to face everything with the same humility and composure, both joy and sorrow. A season that welcomes both weathers with open arms and holds in it the blossoming hope for a better tomorrow is truly a lovely one.
I also believe that the same is true of human spirit too. We need intermittent sun and rain. Spring showers are necessary for the growth that takes place in this season. Just as sunlight is. We too need change and challenges to grow as well as moments of love and appreciation.
As I look outside right now, I can see the tree yet again as I first saw it a year ago. This time, I can see the buds and I know how they will fill up the branches in a lush green gladness and filter out the scorching light from the summer sun into a beautiful kaleidoscope of komorebi that will play across my floors. But what I can also foresee is the autumn day when slowly, one by one these very leaves will float away like ghosts of the past and how I will try to catch them in my balcony, stowing some away in books, with a sinking feeling of something passing away and my own inability to capture and stay locked with them in an eternal spring. But I see the budding branches and they seem to dance and chime in, “We are here now. We are here now.” They seem to be saying, life is now. Always now. We are not a prequel. It is happening right now. And I answer back, “I am here. I am now.” And that is enough.
Sometimes when I am in a moment I find too beautiful for words, I find myself feeling tormented by its transience and my own inability to stop time and capture it. There are things I want to say to my dad that I felt no need to say back then but now I do. I want to ask him how with all he had experienced in life with all its sorrows, did he manage to keep all that was dark away from us and share only joy and love? Sometimes I want to tell him how having him in the world made me feel invincible. But when I was invincible, I felt no need to tell him, the way I do now. The world has cracked up and I need so much love to fill it back up and it will still not be enough. I feel so afraid to ask for it.
These days, I do feel a little lost and dejected but also full of hope and anticipation, as whimsical as the rain and shine of April. I feel like the world around me and my life can no longer be taken for granted and left on autopilot. It is no longer a question of expectations and walking on paved roads. The linear gameplay has been replaced by an open world. I feel like I am walking through a wild forest and as much as I am gleefully startled by its surprises and enchanted by its strangeness, in awe of the many little paths that can be carved through it, I also miss the guidance and companionship of the road well-travelled, saturated by road signs and set ways and times of doing things, the mainroads of existence that are tried and tested.
Especially in my 30s, I am beginning to discover that the more I try to find my own path, the lonelier it gets.
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind. – William WordsworthI am beginning to understand our reliance on systems and traditions, generation after generation. Why we need all the ways to distract our minds for they are prone to look at the abyss of the infinite universe. Ask a suffering man and he will tell you why the finitude of our bodies and the forgetfulness of our minds as we slowly grow senile is a blessing too. Why it is important to go through the decline that comes with age, to detach from the life we do come to love, especially since it is finite. How many times do we find some moments momentous especially because we know they will not last except maybe as a wonder memory and a finite one at that.
I always imagined freedom as a blue sky with its immense possibilities. But the endless skies eventually open up into an immense blank space where, whether one is prepared or not, terrible beauties await. And life till now has not given us a wide palate for relishing those cosmic scenes with calmness. For faced with a completely empty dark space, face to face with a cosmic event, who would not miss a sunny windowsill blessed by a house cat, unread books, and unwashed coffee cups, opening into a busy street teeming with people and their dogs and their vehicles, where meaning is still being made, unmade, like a bed full of dreams indistinguishable from reality?
Faced with freedom, it is natural to feel lost. In those moments, I try not to look away from the tree outside shaken by the wind under a stormy sky. For spreading your branches to the sky does not mean opening yourself up only to its blue immensities. Freedom may not offer the same shelter that cages do. But you can take a deep breath and brace yourself and pray for an openness to face anything that may come, rain or shine. Spring is a living proof of this.
The weather changes so drastically in a couple of minutes these days, it is startling. The tree holds my gaze as the sun grows dim behind the clouds, swaying in the breeze, and it continues to do so as the sun beams brightly on my face once again. It is almost saying, soothingly, “It’s okay. Everything is okay. It is all the same.”
Lately, I have been watching Korean series again and I am glad I am. Their slow pacing and attention to the little details of ordinary life remain unmatched. These days, I am watching a series called “Would you like a cup of coffee?” and every time someone drinks coffee in it, which is a lot many times, I find myself making a cup too.
I am also napping a lot lately. Something to do with the change of weather and being in my 30s I guess. I am discovering that for taking naps in the spring sun, there is nothing better than reading poetry and dozing off till you are half awake in the poem and half dreaming it into being.
(For this spring season, here are some of my recommendations 🙂
I attended a marketing presentation last year which talked about how humans tend to make most of their decisions based on emotions rather than rationality, that is, heart over mind, contrary to what we might want to believe. And it is so easy to spend a lifetime fooling ourselves into thinking otherwise. And if that is so, we come to realize, how important it is to take care of how you make yourself feel, how you make those around you feel. It is easy to shove your feelings under the carpet because you don’t have time for them. But believe me, if left unattended, they can run the show, even from the sidelines.
(By the way, did I mention, horror and psychological thriller happen to be their favorite genres?)
The world is an overwhelming place to be in right now. I get it. But look at how spring arrives nonetheless and spreads itself over everything. Our joys and sorrows alike. And that too is a lesson. I am beginning to realize that when faced with irresolvable problems, when you are in the weeds of existence, it might be easier to focus on planting your garden. Instead of being hyper-fixated on what it is that you cannot resolve, focus your energy on things that you want to do, things that make you happy, small healthy habits that seem possible to accomplish, and things that are in your control.
Like spring cleaning. Like making art. Like dancing.
And slowly, you will find the wildflowers overtaking the weeds.
So, what are you planning to plant in your garden this season?
Just remember, all the raw materials that make you your most authentic self are already there with you and always have been.
I read Margaret Atwood’s Life Before Man recently, and came across these lines:
And I wonder how they make you feel.
(Also, do you share my love of old brown books?)
Let me sign off with another poem by Mary Oliver, and I will leave you with a sweet aftertaste of her words.
(Until next time, take care and don’t forget to stop and smell the roses! 🙂
On Meditating, Sort Of by Mary Oliver
Meditation, so I’ve heard, is best accomplished
if you entertain a certain strict posture.
Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.
So why should I think I could ever be successful?
Some days I fall asleep, or land in that
even better place — half-asleep — where the world,
spring, summer, autumn, winter —
flies through my mind in its
hardy ascent and its uncompromising descent.
So I just lie like that, while distance and time
reveal their true attitudes: they never
heard of me, and never will, or ever need to.
Of course I wake up finally
thinking, how wonderful to be who I am,
made out of earth and water,
my own thoughts, my own fingerprints —
all that glorious, temporary stuff.
-
Mouse Trouble: Tales of Combat
Okay, so we have a mouse problem. Or a mice problem.
One thing is for certain, I have not seen more than one at a time. But I am not sure if it’s the same mouse I see (or, more often, hear) every time, or a different one. I have not noticed anything remarkable like a bitten ear or something for me to distinguish if it’s the big bad boy Johnny from the dumps who got that cut in a deadly alley pipe fight, or his little timid brother Joey with a pink feet fetish.
I had been noticing the signs for a few days. Food stuff or some random shavings found at the odd place, bite marks on my tatami. I brushed them off as, oh maybe it was Chanchal, my partner, having a midnight snack or something. (Not the bite marks on the tatami. That would be concerning, for both of us.)
And so, it continued for some days till one day, as the day always arrives when the phantom sound finally gets a face attached to it, or feet, whichever is your preference… One day, I was sitting on the couch, reading a book, and I look to my side and there it is… this tiny little thing, with two little ears and an eager nose, right there, on the mat, looking around with shiny eyes, taking its sweet time. I really wanted to reach out and say, “Hey sir, would you like a shopping bag with that?”, “Can I interest you in our special menu for the day? The usual snack stash? How about we try some cardboard or fabric for a change?”
When I lived in Chandigarh in India, I had a room on the roof. I traded amenities for independent living, I guess, when I picked that place to stay during my research. Don’t get me wrong, it had its own charms. The clouds came down on my roof top at night, I never had my fill of seeing the stars so close. The rain brought its own charms as I looked out through my little window at the hustle bustle of the street.
But my god, did I fight some wild battles there.
I remember the first time a cat walked into my room. That was heavenly. But soon other things followed. Not so heavenly.
It started with ground attack. Cockroaches. Oh man, it was not good. Nope. They had this strange way of creeping up suddenly. Sometimes, I would be working on my thesis for hours in the middle of the night till I began to see spots in front of my eyes and in my peripheral vision, there it would be, a lone cockroach, scuttling along the floor. At first, I always thought it was a figment of my imagination. But turns out, it was a real cockroach almost always.
Now trust me, I kept that floor cleaner than a church alter every single day. Like crazy. (Something to do with the avoidance strategy I had developed to cope with my denial around procrastination.)
So, I have no idea why they came. Or for what.
But the cockroach was very much there, scurrying around, ceaselessly, and then suddenly pausing like Inspector Clouseau, its moustache twitching, looking vacantly into space.
As if that was all. But no. This was a ground attack that could at any moment turn into an aerial attack. Ever heard of the flying cockroach? The most terrible thing made by nature.
You had to keep an eye on that cockroach, from the other end of the room and pray to God there was only one of them. Which was scarcely the case.
And in the list of beings to keep an eye on, there is also another. Much more terrible. The lizard, the terrible terrible lizard.
Don’t ask why, I just can’t stand them!
It is hard enough that lizards often have those dead reptilian eyes and always make those guttural grating sounds from the corner of the roof to let you know they are watching you when you are trying hard to be oblivious to them. But what is scarier is when unknown to you, they decide to walk all the way, upside down, crawling on the roof, stop right over your head and then blissfully in an amnesiac erasure forget their one superpower, how to stay glued to the roof, and decide to give in to gravity, pretending that falling on your head and into your t-shirt was a happy accident.
Also having a fan overhead doesn’t help the matters.
And oh, don’t get me started on the night the termites grew wings, much to the glee of the lizards. That horrible night, the termites took flight by a thousand inside my apartment, and I happened to have somehow bought the tickets to that annual feast and celebration. I spent the night in a tent inside my blanket, warding off invaders and trying to reach my landlord. In the morning, I was left to deal with the aftereffects of their infernal debauchery through the night. I swooped their wings away as the newly wed couples that survived decided to settle in for the year. The lizards were nowhere in sight. Probably too gorged to stay up.
Did you know that lizards generally don’t have long periods of deep sleep like mammals? Instead, they go into a more restful, inactive state where they remain alert to their surroundings, but their energy levels drop. They might nap or be in a state of torpor, especially if it’s cold, and some species even “sleep” with their eyes partially open. Talk about a horror story.
I have had a mouse problem before too, you know, when I was living in Chandigarh. It was much more sinister in some ways. Because you see, that mouse travelled by the kitchen pipe and also had a fixed haunting hour. Since I was a night owl in those days, I always heard the clanging in the pipes exactly at midnight. That was one punctual mouse. But it had the eerie punctuality of a haunting ghost.
Or maybe I had been reading Bram Stocker’s “The Judge’s House” in those days.
Anyways, that mouse had tasted the freedom of hunting on the apartment grounds and looting my storage areas. And it was out for blood every night. It resented that I was awake at that hour that clearly belonged to it as nature intended and no amount of clanging back on the pipes discouraged its ascent.
Anyways, with time, I almost figured out how to deal with all this jungle madness.
I closed off some of the spots from where the termites had emerged. Sealed the pipe from where the mouse tried to get in. Sprayed a line of control with a pesticide to repel the cockroaches without having to kill them or suffocate myself.
I just stayed out of the way of the lizards.
And I would have won the war.
If they had not called for back up.
Once, I was working at night and heard this low hum, almost imperceptible at first. Then it grew stronger, and I looked up, and at first couldn’t make anything out, staring right into the blinding light bulb, till in a flash I saw their terrible silhouettes as the descended. Wasps!
They darted trying to make headway for my eyes with precision and speed. I covered myself with the blanket and prayed to God they had not infiltrated my emergency camp. Slowly, I could hear their humming again as they glided around the walls with military-like coordination, buzzing aggressively as they swooped through the air, their sleek yellow bodies slicing through the space with deadly intent.
I tried to take a small peek. They were circling, scouting for any sign of weakness, poised for the next move.
But that was not all that was happening.
The pipe in the kitchen began to clang, and taking the rodent’s midnight clanging at the jail bars as a battle cry, three cockroaches decided to encroach over the control line and claimed my room’s floor as their territory.
I was surrounded.
I lost the battle that day.
Of course, I spent the coming days looking for ways to repel wasps. Whoever wrote the article about spraying soap water on wasps clearly didn’t have any combat experience. You cannot spray anything at wasps without turning them into fiery little devils on wings who are willing to go kamikaze on you.
So, when I say I have a mouse problem now, to me it is like trying to resolve a skirmish in the neighborhood as a retired veteran.
Also, I have become too soft now. I almost find the little guy cute.
Anyways, with nothing better to do and trying to avoid the traps, I placed a complaint on the apartment portal. They sent a young guy, who informed us that apparently, the mice had overtaken the middle wall of all the apartments in the building and used it as a sort of travel channel to hunt for food. And the apartment authorities had given in, a sort of peaceful avoidance and denial of the problem. They sent people over to attend to the problem as more of a band aid solution.
Anyways, this guy was dedicated to help us out and ended up closing many of the openings to prevent them from entering the apartment. He commended the clay work we had done to close off some mouse holes on our own. And truth be told, we did not see a mouse for months.
(However, strangely, the water service in the apartment did get disrupted that day.
I like to believe that had nothing to do with the mice mafia.)
Anyways, over time maybe, there was some understanding between the apartment authorities and the whiskered gang to avoid our apartment for some time to throw us off the scent.
But after a few months, of course, the mouse was back.
I knew it, I could sense it for sure. But I was in denial. Those unaccountable shadows in the dark. Those crinkling sounds between the wrappers when it got dark enough.
I just wanted the peaceful times to be back.
I did not lay down any traps. At first, I relied on wishful thinking.
Then I told myself, well, mice have the right to this planet too and they do not believe in paying rent to be on this land that nature intended for them to be on. How brave and revolutionary!
Then, one day, I ordered some ultrasonic pest repellant lights in a shopping spree.
And oh boy, they surely made an impact.
But not the kind I was hoping for.
I woke up the next day and found my peace lily toppled to one side, half of its roots gone, with a huge pile of soil on the floor by the side.
Maybe they went mad because of all those blue light waves.
But I understood, being a veteran. They had left a message for me.
This was an invitation to war.
I was furious! They had done it. They had crossed the line of control.
I made another complaint and the old guy who walked in this time had been in the army.
Exactly what this battle needed.
He wore a cowboy hat, was tall with broad shoulders, sported a bit of a beer belly.
This guy was ready to hunt some mice.
Or something bigger, if the opportunity were to present itself.
He said he had hunted before.
Talking of hare, he mentioned how they were introduced to Vancouver Island in 1960s and tended to reproduce at a crazy speed. And something about the Helmcken highway interchange where people drop off their pet rabbits. I checked it later and this is what I found online:
People in Victoria, BC, have been dealing with an overabundant rabbit population. The rabbits have burrowed under buildings at the University of Victoria, creating tunnels that undermined their foundations. Neighbors have discovered baby bunnies on construction sites, but there is nowhere for them to go. The BC SPCA has limited capacity to house them and requires a specific quarantine due to a lethal and highly infectious rabbit hemorrhagic disease. Non-profit groups like Vancouver Island Fluffle have turned away abandoned domestic rabbits due to the high number of abandoned rabbits they can’t take in. The provincial government is also discouraging people from dropping off their rabbits at the Helmcken highway interchange in Victoria.
I looked over at Chanchal who had bunnies as pets when he was young, (who got eaten by cats, thereby making him wary of cats), and he looked alarmed.
“You know if you ever have extra rabbits on you, a good rule of thumb is to drop them at the pet store,” added the guy as he bent over to look behind the fridge.
And we nodded. Sure, that would at least cheer up a kid looking to buy a rabbit as a pet.
He continued, “Because, after all, they need something to feed the snakes there.”
We gulped. That surely had our attention. I also began to notice something else.
Unlike the last guy, this one had no interest in sealing any mouse holes. That was not his concern. In his books, battles could not possibly be fought by simply building fortresses and praying that the enemy goes away because their favorite joint was closed for the night and decides to order from Uber Eats instead.
This guy was not trying to prevent mice from coming into the apartment.
He wanted them to come crawling. By the thousand.
He wanted them to get trapped.
And die.
One by one.
For eternity.
He was all about laying traps. He placed them in-between the book piles. Behind the couch, under the bed, inside a cupboard. I later used most of those traps to circle my peace lily because it couldn’t survive another attack and to my mind, if a mouse still wanted to go for it, it was asking for death.
Anyways, over the next few days, things kept getting stuck in the traps.
Everything.
Except mice.
First to go was my broom that I had to cut free with a pair of scissors. Next to go was my favorite sock.
And then, one time, it was me.
Don’t ask.
A part of me was glad. I don’t like killing living things.
(Except fried chicken. That is controversial. Sort of a gustatory martyrdom. No comments on that one.)
Anyways, after the last sighting, I sort of ended up making my peace with it.
The mouse has been staying away from my plants. So that’s good.
In a way, we have a roommate now. Also, since Chanchal stays up late into the night, I am glad he has some company.
And anyways, I get the message that if I try anything funny, I am going to hear back from them the next day.
In case you have important information regarding keeping mice at bay, do not respond here because I am sure, they are keeping some noses on this blog too. They can smell mutiny.
Maybe we can find a different ultrasonic way to communicate.
And maybe having a cat can help. Though I seriously doubt that.
It clearly wouldn’t work with cats being cats these days:
Moreover, I might land into more whiskered trouble. I am sure, my tatami and plants don’t stand a chance.
For now, this makeshift peace of bite marks and bits and pieces, continues.
Till the next cry for battle.
-
Because I Could Not Stop for Time
The time traveler, it seemed, had been left behind by time. And as is the nature of things, time took away everything else. The traveler who could not catch up, was left floating in an alien space where all that could perish had disappeared.
Here she was, in a cosmic corner where she was made privy to states of being that had a presence beyond time. She wondered if she too, now, was to be one of them. Was she now at the periphery of knowledge that was no longer immediate?
But what did it mean to be left behind by time? Would she not age? But what about her constant state of being that had continued to drift? Did that not mean that time had continued to flow? If not, then was eternity the absence of time? Was time like the grim reaper, eating away at lifelines, probing everything to shift ever so slowly towards maturity and dissolution, only to reap it all back again, scattering it all, like seeds into a flux? So, did nothing really change?
Or was being left behind by time as good as being immune to its effects, like being a god—an unchangeable witness to a constant conglomeration of beings, whose legs, wings, tails, and stalks continued to grow or disintegrate into newer faces, blossoms, and sounds?
She too pondered over this, of being thrown outside time. And she wondered that if she had been spared, what bit of the universe had replaced her? If something had escaped the time bubble, something must have entered it. As she continued to drift around, a new fear took hold of her. If time had left her, was it the same as saying that time had stopped for her and her alone? If so, would she disintegrate, cease to exist? Could space exist without time? Could anything exist without time? Could she imagine an uncontained state of void? If so, that was all that could exist—but wait. Could even void exist without time? She could not imagine it. As she could not imagine ‘not existing.’ But something had to change. Her form had to change. Form itself had to change into something else—a sound, maybe? Or simply ‘being’ had to change. And what if change did not exist outside time? Maybe nothing existed. Not even nothing. What was this state?
What was this state? Not even nothing. Maybe nothing existed. And what if change did not exist outside time? Or simply ‘being’ had to change. Form itself had to change into something else—a sound, maybe? Her form had to change. As she could not imagine ‘not existing.’ She could not imagine it. Could even void exist without time? If so, that is all that could exist—but wait. Could she imagine an uncontained state of void? Could anything exist without time? Could space exist without time? If so, would she disintegrate, cease to exist? If time had left her, was it the same as saying that time had stopped for her and her alone? As she continued to drift around, a new fear took hold of her. If something had escaped the time bubble, something must have entered it. And she wondered that if she had been spared, what bit of the universe had replaced her? She too pondered over this, of being thrown outside time.
Or was being left behind by time as good as being immune to its effects, like being a god—an unchangeable witness to a constant conglomeration of beings, whose legs, wings, tails and stalks continued to grow or disintegrate into newer faces, blossoms, and sounds?
So, did nothing really change? Was time like the grim reaper, eating away at lifelines, probing everything to shift slowly towards maturity and dissolution, only to reap it all back again, scattering it all, like seeds into a flux? Did that not mean that time had continued to flow? If not, then was eternity the absence of time? But what about her constant state of being that continued to drift? Would she not age? But what did it mean to be left behind by time?
Was she now at the periphery of knowledge that was no longer immediate? She wondered if she too, now, was to be one of them. Here she was, in a cosmic corner where she was made privy to states of being that had a presence beyond time.
The traveler who could not catch up, found herself in an alien space, where all that could perish had disappeared. And as is the nature of things, time took away everything else. The time traveler, it seemed, had been left behind by time.
When I think of the time traveler who was left behind by time, I think of being trapped inside the mind in a constant state of glitch where one moved back and forth and hence, not at all, for if this motion went unrecorded, then the state of being, as perceived by us, was left almost unchanged. The time traveler has no idea of this glitch. She thinks her thoughts are progressing linearly, when in truth, they are caught in a constant loop. But within that loop, time too is trapped, unable to flow linearly, from the past to the future—constantly gaining in mass.
Or maybe, what is trapped is our mindset that refuses to imagine time otherwise. What if the past and the future are in a constant state of co-existence that our minds cannot grasp? What if all that which we thought lay before us, is already here? Let us move further, not backwards, for our language continues to be linear, bearing down upon the toing and froing flux of our minds.
Now the question we must ask ourselves, dear reader, is this: How can we possibly imagine the utter absence of space and time?
Our understandable inability to answer as such questions makes me think of robots short-circuiting as they, in turn, think about this evasive sense of being that they cannot pinpoint, but which we, as their creators, would know to be dreams and emotions. What is this absence which they feel, even without having ever known it? There are things that are not there in our programming, it seems.
The absence of time, space, and matter, can be written about, but how do you visualize it? Maybe it cannot be seen. After all, sight as a sense may be overrated in the scheme of the universe. What do we know? Sight could be blinding us in this context. I apologize for this roundabout way of saying things that cannot be avoided and must inevitably be used as a crutch, for we are too deeply engulfed in the automatic associations certain words and senses bring to our human minds.
Let us, for a moment, imagine a world where sight is a hindrance. We cannot. Something about the way we were made among other beings on this planet, asserts the assumption that sight serves an important purpose in our day to day lives and so we resist countering this ‘fact.’
We are made of time, space, mind, and matter. To imagine otherwise, is to cease to exist. And though it may be something you can think of, how do you imagine it? How do you imagine presence or absence? Presence, you might say, can be imagined and even empirically verified. But how do you imagine absence? Is it simply the absence of a presence that once was? What of that which never was? How easily we relegate all that we cannot see, hear, touch, feel, think, remember, or imagine, to a place that, for us then, simply does not exist.
And yet, how is it that slowly we are probing into those spaces? It is amazing that humans can record and remember. After all, our short lifespans on a geological scale would otherwise inhibit our development. So, humanity as a collective being, must record and leave something behind in time, like notes for an amnesiac who cannot remember after every few hours, all that she knew before. It seems, slowly and slowly, before venturing forth, you need to learn all that was left before you came into being.
For as the darkness continues to descend and meanwhile, you do not want to walk around doing the chores you already finished doing in a state of forgetfulness, which too, continues to play like a loop.
Maybe somewhere in the deepest recesses of our minds, doing laundry or dusting the shelves reminds us of our Sisyphean existence, and a part of us that dreams of the universe beyond the laundry basket, wishing to venture forth into the unknown.
I sometimes think of it so: it is the philosophers who are left with this wondering, as all others continue the slow yet essential drudgery of keeping the debilitating forces at bay. A philosopher’s task is to continue to throw darts into the unknown, not knowing if and where they will land, or worse, be prepared to be fired back at. Their only tool is the mind and a constant battle to transcend the limits of their bodily senses that pin them down to the human programming. It really fascinates me when I think of philosophers assuming they are gods, of scientists suddenly turning spiritual at the threshold of a discovery, or poets actually becoming cult members.
And why not? When you are faced with those mysterious states of being that have a presence beyond anything that you have known all your life, the experience does suddenly turn spiritual and paranormal. For admitting that there is something beyond what we know collectively—not as a regurgitation of its components, but as something entirely new, another dimension altogether—is to take a leap towards the super-human, is to step outside our programming. It is not to travel anywhere but to suddenly wake up one day and see the world with new eyes.
And yet, it is not the same world, surely, as Heraclitus would have us believe. So, in a way, we are traveling. And the philosophers are the sailors, navigating us through terrains that go beyond the known and the unknown, slowly charting bits of it in moments that erupt in our world as nothing short of revolutions. And that, in itself, is not an easy task.
Yet, often, even in those moments, as the world rejoices and looks on in awe, the thinker continues to have a nagging thought: What if this color that appears as an emotion and spreads across the mathematical network of the electronic chip like a slowly blooming flower, is at its best a programmed miracle?
I know what you are thinking. There are no answers here. Only loops. That is exactly my point. But I will leave it at that.
-
Knowledge of Place
I
There is a floating thing in the wind that keeps us. An underwater stillness. And just when you think you are surfacing— the camellias combust under the blue, open like extraterrestrial eyes looking through measured windows of street houses, for life that has left us alone in this first death. Lost days like sparrows teem in a confusion of distracting blossoms and bushes.
She is not at home, she says. She is not at home in this world. She is the fourth wall closing in today, tomorrow, and yesterday into herself. Some days, her grief is slow like molasses. God leaves the world to trees. Some thoughts get caught up in the thorn bush one random evening and cannot find it in themselves to go on under the one and only sky— Other days, she hides time, and I am nowhere and everywhere. I grow older quickly and realize I have never been to the room I was born in.
I am there today, with the lost birds. They tell me they are not lost. So, they cannot possibly be found.
Antelopes keep running through the forest in the rain.
She stays up late nights crying kin min, kin min. Our family songs turn into talismans locked away in a suitcase wrapped in layers of mildew and a dark wooly heaviness that she slowly cries away like a chant meant only for our ears. One by one, trees leave her forest. She dreams of a house with wind and rain. And I smoke into daybreak signaling to the lone swimmer of the sky.
Whose is the last cry that breaks the dawn?
The birds are silent.
In my 3 am dilation, my lonely hour, my agony hour, I analyze her sky, placing the hours in a row. She lies awake on her bed, her hair tied up like an hourglass of quicksilver.
I cannot imagine this— sunlit spaces, mayflies, and water lilies. This is the Summertime Broadcast of My Mind.
She, the maker of my horizons, the constructionist of my roads— my blank record and this night— she listens intently. This place isn’t what we think it is. I am not who I think I am. We can never be as sure as the ground is. In this osmosis of thing and spirit, lovers only exist where they are not. Burn this too in My Death Fashion, touching everything. Rabid eyes stare. When are you going to tell the truth?
So, I tell her about Queen Anne’s lace. Within,
the grass
springs
up—
an elusive space for wanting. We lie down like shadows. We change places under the sun. Truth fades in and out of sleepy towns, palimpsests, and alleys.
Mother
breaks
down
in blossoms , cryptic codes
and grows a bit like a new found daughter.
II
Riding through the columns of light and dark in a city barely awake, we could be a parenthesis, (an after-thought). You must make a home of this place. My father, clutching his suitcase tied with a piece of my mother’s saree, is right here. This place will not be yours until you do. I see houses made of porcelain falling one upon another, boxes on boxes, suitcases on suitcases, filled with a flurry of dry flowers. I think of my basement, the burrowed burrow. Of me and my brother. And of the mole trying to skip spring cleaning.
I didn’t know it at the time. I was too busy rocking and rolling, my head still in a cloud of smoke, my bones free floating in a stream of black ecstasy that falls every night from the tallest city lights in showers of young old downtown gold, blurred, molten. In my mind, I was still retracing my every move in concentric circles of pleasure, unable to foresee the valley my father was planning to name after me. Here, take it. A heart made-up in all the wrong places. Here’s the box. The emptier it is, the heavier it gets.
I go back home and change into time; I find home, it was you; and you, all your homes; are me.
Ta kakisimoyahk
There is a place inside. Make a home there. Worship, drown and emerge with the bloodline of afterlife, acknowledge that pain was all along what tied us.
Ta kakisimoyahk
There is a place inside me. A quiet dark place. You may start a fire here between the river and the mountain I may then conjure again, that insistent voice that rose as the ground shook and the gods took turns to bite off bits from our nest, leaving us open to the rain’s love and the sky, too big, as it fell through our eyes and became a black river and then a forest full of black birds, that we carried away with us, furtive like our fears.
The night came alone, as always.
She stood for a while, under the jacarandas.
III
I try to dig up the voices that make a place and water it and when the time is ripe, lift the land, spacing it off to the sky— an offering to be torn apart, again, shred into fine dust, falling back, full circle. No one knows we were here. Sun stretches the day to its limits. Like an eternal lemon candy. Boys in tanks snort ride the summer on skateboards. In offices, we acknowledge the land, declare it stolen, carry on with shame, one foot at a time. It’s the seasonal injustice. Everyone catches it, like the flu. The voices come back, this time quiet, forgiving, making our ears red. We shift in our seats, take a bus elsewhere, carrying ourselves along. The light gets heavier. A new breeze walks in, and seasons change like clockwork. Servicemen jaywalk across the street, impatient, unwilling, obtuse. I uncover my burger like it is some exotic flower. The sun beats down in orange bursts and pills. The walls of my eyes turn citrus yellow.
Once more we must change places under the sun. Make our own beds.
We know now where we stand.
The water does recede, with the answers.
Fireflies keep escaping into the night.
-
The Ocean & the Selfish
I want to address a certain kind of preoccupation with knowing the self that has been troubling me lately. It troubles me not because I want to rid myself of it, but because I sense an unconscious belief in the rationality of this inclination that I wish to make conscious.
Often times the things that continue to drive us unconsciously are not inherently bad. [Enter the gut feeling]. But in their being unconscious you invite a risk of forsaking an unconscious intelligence in exchange for a borrowed belief followed by an uncalled-for self-criticism as a result of the failure to act in accordance with that belief. (Or worse, an inability to reawaken the unconscious coupled by a disillusionment with the borrowed belief— the accursed limbo that can terrifyingly last a lifetime.)
This preoccupation with knowing the self comes with a set of habits and behaviors that may come close to being selfish, self-centered, with the act being labeled navel-gazing. But the alternative, the lack of self-awareness can come across as agreeableness. And it is that which makes the world go round, doesn’t it? It is what makes the advertising work, the fear-mongering rule, the propaganda sway, makes the exploitation cloaked as tradition continue to take control, the algorithm echo-chamber continue to ring, and the biases persist while making sure that our inadequacy is fed constantly and remains cashable.
The world today seems to be designed for expansion. Yet isn’t it strange how inevitable is the contraction? It reminds me of the “Monkey’s Paw,” a horror story written by W.W. Jacobs in 1902, a cautionary tale, warning against the dangers of tampering with fate and the unforeseen consequences of getting what one wishes for. We, as a species, wished for progress, longer lives, options, ease of access, and development. We got what we asked for. But we also got more pollution, new diseases, more loneliness, more poverty, and war. It is a give and take. There is always a terrible price to be paid.
My proclivity for solitude developed early on when I realized the impact not being in touch with myself and how I was doing had on me and the people around me. How I show up in the world depends heavily on how aware I am about what is happening inside me. Sure, I can drown this difficult yet necessary conversation with the self in a thousand different ways but in my experience, I would only be delaying what inevitably needs to be done. Luckily, my unconscious unease with any long gaps where I go on without that self-talk is way too inconvenient for me to simply carry on without it. But beware the danger of that feeling being suppressed for too long that it almost dies out. At any cost, never let that happen.
The idea is to expand inwards. And I know that sounds like a load of humbug. But let me explain.
I am sure you have come across these lines a countless time:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
William Blake’s famous Auguries of Innocence. I read these lines in an old brown quotation book my mother had received as a part of her university prize. At the time, I had not read the entire poem but the philosophy behind these lines was the one I was fascinated by early on. It made sense to seek the macrocosmic in the microcosmic. It was like looking at a miniature house, zooming out and then playfully, playing around with it, a low-risk way to test any hypothesis.
I have a distinct memory of all the moments in which I was face-to-face, one-on-one with something bigger than myself. The sky, the sea, the mountains, the pain or joy opening up to swallow me whole. These moments are memorable in being akin. These experiences moved me in a way that started this preoccupation with knowing the self, of being a part of the whole that is both part and whole, like a piece of the sky, fathomable yet as much like a sky as the whole. Here was a propensity for truth that could somehow be monitored, an ocean whose deepest depths, though far from being fully charted, presented some hope of being navigated, the being who with enough experience could be calibrated, I could laugh and cry like a lunatic, unobserved and true. That even in putting forward a deception, I could not possibly deceive. That divine freedom of knowing. Just knowing. The closest you could come to flying. Consciously or unconsciously, my hope has always been that in striving for this, I can somehow understand the world. That if I could see myself in the strongest, the most vulnerable, elemental sense, reduced and enhanced to my essence, that moments like that would open up the world to me and me to the world in a way that nothing else might. Like in a miasma of fluctuating lights, I have a chance of catching a glimpse of something true and honest within myself, if even for a moment.
To put it plainly, I am fascinated by the self the same way a child is fascinated by a snowflake that happens to fall into her hand that she loves because it is that chance part of the whole that she is allowed to be in such close proximity with.
The self is the sample of the world you get to be the most intimate with.
How you show up in the world, the kindness you extend to it, or how much you allow yourself to be exploited because of parts of self you could not accept and hence, give space to resentment, greed, distrust, or hatred, is directly proportional to how much you understand yourself.
But what does it take to know and reassemble the self?
For many of us, our self is a black box that we take where we go. There is no need to open it. We have our name, our religion, nationality, occupation, and goals. And these are enough markers to recognize ourselves. But are these enough?
Or are we just barely scratching the surface, afraid.
The hardest part of knowing your “self” is not liking it necessarily because it is “you.” And that is the mother of denial.
Well, there is a whole wide world out there ready to feed on your inability to sit with yourself in the same room. What happens when you cannot rely on the identity markers outside of you that you thought you could rely on forever? The self doesn’t crumble like a house of cards but our ability to accept it does.
In her 1961 essay “On Self-Respect”, Joan Didion writes about the time she was not elected for the Phi Beta Kappa:
To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed wonder of someone who has come across a vampire and found no garlands of garlic at hand.
[…]
Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect.
“On Self-Respect”, Joan Didion
When we lose self-respect, we lose control and spend the rest of our lives reacting to its injustice and our insecurity, through war and greed.
I have hope in the self. Why? Because we cannot go on to deceive ourselves forever and always. The self is where we are often face to face with the real. Didion writes:
Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer who spots Bat Masterson about to cut himself into the game, one shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation—which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something that people with courage can do without.
“On Self-Respect”, Joan Didion
The real challenge lies in accepting the self. Think of it this way. The world is out there to sit jury on your flaws, real or unreal, to commend your virtues, real or unreal, often subjectively or arbitrarily. But at the end of the day, when the curtains are drawn and the lights are out, you are your best judge. Because you know yourself in a way, with the intimacy that no one else does. It doesn’t matter what you say. What matters is what emerges in the still quiet moments as you sit with yourself. As Didion puts it, “It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.” No one needs to see those parts of you, but it is essential that you do and when you are ready, come to terms with them. If you were to try to brush them under the carpet, be prepared for the unconscious mind to take hold of them and keep them close and shiny for late night replays like a bloody Gollum from Lord of the Rings.
To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.
“On Self-Respect”, Joan Didion
Think of your flaws and mistakes as hurt and lost potential. Imagine them like little fluffy chickens who haven’t learned to fly. Now, do you want to feel ashamed of them or would you rather take them under your wing, nurture them, accept them as they are while striving to make sure they grow, even if only to become KFC some day? I got nothing against fried chicken.
If you come to accept your shortcomings and mistakes, no one gets to use them as puppet strings. No amount of advertising, no amount of propaganda can mislead you, cashing in on your insecurities. External criticism cannot hurt you because you have seen yourself fully and understand and accept that you will always be a work in progress and never perfect. And thank God for that (for the same reason we have been spared from eternity.)
For what seemed like the longest time, till my 20s, I felt a sense of alienation from self. Women are often more prone to this, but men are equally susceptible. It felt like I inherited my mother’s own anxiety to be a good daughter and a good woman, simply following what I was told was right without knowing why. Hence, the feeling of inauthenticity continued to creep in. Then came a phase where I invited the world in and that is what took control. One form of being controlled was replaced by another. A new version of right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, good or bad. The judgements kept coming from all ends. I got split into many different selves to continue performing at optimal levels. And surely enough, the self, split into many selves, divorced from the stream that sustains our authenticity, eventually, fell into my arms, exhausted.
At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.
“On Self-Respect”, Joan Didion
I went through all the phases of blaming and blame shifting, resentments, avoidance, isolation, guilt, shame. I could not say no when I really wanted to because I felt guilt, and I could not say yes because saying yes would mean betraying the needs of my injured self. So, there I was, stuck in the limbo.
It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one’s sanity becomes an object of speculation among one’s acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
“On Self-Respect”, Joan Didion
We need to be authentic. Being agreeable is not a virtue. Let’s stop commending and encouraging women to adjust, to please, to bend, to be agreeable. I am still in the process of learning to say comfortably what I can and cannot do, want or do not want, and to not guilt trip or judge myself for it. I am critical of myself, sure, but not in a way that I reject myself. For everything I do, I ask myself, why am I doing this? What are my reasons for it? There are things I want to do, those I want to stop doing, but for now the goal I have set myself is to simply be in control of the reason, in the hope of making the unconscious conscious.
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.
“On Self-Respect”, Joan Didion
Another surprising aspect of this journey which is the one that fascinates me the most is how as you continue to go deeper into yourself, you find yourself woven closer to the people around you in a strange way. You understand the insecurities that everyone feels in a seemingly noisy hall full of people. All it takes is a conversation with one person there. The more you know yourself, the more present you can be for those around you. But also, the more you know yourself, the more you begin to respect another’s need for control and space.
A drop may not feel like much in an ocean. But if you see the little things as keys to bigger things, you begin to understand that in relation to the enormity of the universe, our two hands, are in fact, a perfect fit, perfectly capable of designing the lives we deserve.
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Slow things
Slow things take time in their soft warm hands, till it rises and expands.
Slow things demand time. I have no time for slow things and yet I am slowing down to make time.
I want to go back and take it slow. Once we were all children released from the mouth
of a gigantic green spaceship and told to run off red and wild into the world. The scenery flowed by us
and we were breathless and wondering like stars, and it seemed like the world teeming with so much color would never end.
But then from time to time, it did. And so we started looking back,
tried to slow down, wanting to slow down, without knowing how.
My old heart is racing these days but not in a good way, say the doctors. I can’t wait for time.
I am restless. Like a moth, I have not found my spot yet, to land and play dead on.
Cars rush on the roadways, endlessly, endlessly, like so many jitterbugs, glittering.
The Christmas lights dance in straight proportioned lines, mathematically,
sending signals to the sky, that the darkness intercepts, then absorbs without meaning to
as I close my eyes. I say I want to slow down without anticipation,
not like the stealth of a tentative feline waiting to spring,
but like the unwinding of a spent emotion with no fallout, no recoil.
Like stretching my toes till they curl into space
as inevitable as gravity in slow motion.
Like the memory of a slow kiss landing on my forehead, two soft lips never leaving.
Like staying for a while, pretending not to nap on the sofa, no one ready to leave.
Once I waited for him in the dappled light, answering an epiphany that I thought never came true.
Only it did. I want to take a breath for that moment and keep it for a bit.
I want to lie down and prepare for moss and grass. Feel the sunlight, a slow burn on my thighs.
Here I lie in this warming of cold feet, till I am one with the wood
where nothing is too hot nor cold, but simply is
equal for the moment.
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A Prayer to Save the World
Your body loves you
Loves the world of birds and trees
Loves to lie down with it
In life as in death.
The world would gladly let you be organic,
full of love and naturally perfected abundance.
The body shields you.
Your skin lines a purpose in every fold.
Every bulge out of place
Is touchable love, hurt, grief, guilt
a magnum holding onto itself
to unleash only butterthoughts
into the world.
In an ultimate act of forgiveness,
the body hides in the mind,
hides the world in itself,
dreamstepping into present.
Here is the true desire to be,
forever simplifying itself into
the single-syllable language of
breath.
"This is the jungle of the mind. There are no patterns on this terrain."
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Uhi K; 