Sunday, July 29, 2007

The Lonesome God

The whole city has turned into a den of informers. Earlier, it was possible to tell, looking at profiles, doctors from clerics, clerics from teachers, teachers from businessmen. But now those physical boundaries are becoming increasingly vague.


It's impossible to step into the road : The main road that lies like the spine of the city : without the feeling of numerous eyes on your back. Eyes in the rearview mirror. Askance, narrow, round, slitted. Black, blue, gray, pale. But all expressionless. There's nothing beyond those eyes.



But as I shifted and turned my gaze, the eyes were gone. The car was moving again along the road that creeps from information to information. And the uncanny feeling of being spied on, hangs in the air.




Now the question is : who sold the boy off? I have to track him down. That is my 'task'. For last 3 days I have been enduring constant yet absent gazes of this city, trying to get back to the trail of my prey.


I decided to start with the place where the boy was taken in. A whirlwind of information, was rushing forth along the road and its side branches. It was difficult to focus the mind on what I need to do. In a desparate attempt, I held my hand in the storm and suddenly closed my fist : somewhere a window slammed open. From the window that popped up, a genderless voice spoke :




If you must choose, then choose between the one and the many.




Amidst the haze of duplicating, intricate and illusive details, I heard a distant yet clear gong. It sounded like the wall-clock of my own. While I headed for the source of it, I tried to unwrap the puzzle I was provided as a clue. It could very well be a red-herring. Still.

(I vaguely remember having to make a similar decision somewhere. But when and what I have no idea.)


Yet soon, my mind was preoccupied by another thought : Always the clue is in the form of a command : a direction for the directionless.




This reminded me a story that I read in my childhood, where the protagonist gets lost in a maze, loses all sense of direction and gets wrapped in an ill-defined despair. He feels no difference between day/night, light/darkness, life/death. Obviously this is not the real story( which I have forgotten), but the fabrication of my mature mind from the real one.




Still I remember my fear and anxiety at this point of the story, which used to overwhelm me so much, that I used to close the book. I never got to know what happened to the hapless vagabond or how he managed to escape.


Now, I regret it, faced with this puzzle, that I didn't read on.


The haze has subsided considerably. It seems that I have left the main road quite far behind. The echo of the gong and the voiceless clue was leading me toward an open space. The sense of being observed secretly by many definite eyes has transformed itself into an overt indefinite gaze from above. This unnerves me.




Not because I suddenly realize that the choice of the puzzle has already been made and the one has been chosen against the many, but because I am not sure whether choice is supposed to be one or many.

Am I going to have to decide again?




Anyway, I was looking at a delapidated house in the middle of nowhere. The details of the existence have been ruined by years of indiscriminate observation and reporting. They are all scattered across newspapers, popular storybooks, horror movies.



Expectedly, the door is unlocked and the rusty hinges turn with a freaky creaking noise, as the door opens to a dark corridor.



As my eye got used to the darkness, I realized that I have unknowingly hit a gold mine.



On each wall of the corridor, written in red ink, were messages and premonitions :



Beware, enemies, for the Other One is rising.

Unite and fight. Seize your right.

Belief will lead you to your goal.

No mercy for the Non-believers.



All those who have, leave it here.
All those who don't, take it from here.



All these innuendos made me think. What do I have that I can leave? What is mine, truly? And, what do I not possess? who, or what is the other one?


The only part I could solve, not without a shiver of realization, was the interpretation of union. I can only get what I want through union or abstraction.



This in turn gives some clue as to what could be the other one. I realized to surmise the other one it is necessary to know the 'eminent' one.


'One'. I demanded. 'One, Un, Uno, Ein, Ek, 1'. Nothing seems to capture the idea. Because all of them are symbols, again realization of the idea they try to portray. As opposed to that, can we not imagine a silent vision where everything is present?

Suddenly my lost yet obedient memory was with me again. I had known no other concept, then. Before that, from history, none = ' I know no concept'. Then was invented ' . I was born. It is to my birth is the prophecy related. None and I could no more exist in solitude. 'None and I' was the natural, logical name of our boy. But we prefered to call him : You.

We loved you. You : the improvement and extension of mine : Always one shell ahead of me. You used to read my mind perfectly. Even within the pulls of the destabilizing systems, I could recognize you from afar : a blur .

But soon you got lost in the flood of facsimiles that were produced. In place of you, now there are : Them. I have been placed on top of a tomb, or, at the root node of a tree. I could observe everything as if from a very distant land, but couldn't do anything. Slowly the whole process stabilized again. The extension of one to many has taken up the whole space : beyond measure : encapsulated by a second.

For a really long period, every road to visit, every time to shelter in, every book to read, every music to bathe in, every memory to chew were swarmed by them. I and you : we : lost ourselves. I lost my memory and you lost your identity. I have been wandering the pathless streets of theirs, where breeze of information : futile, pointless and dialectic : made me weary.

Waking from this opportune dream, I suddenly feel that many things are clear; and, others are not worthy of clarity. Is this another sign that things are changing? I remembered another story from another childhood, which in my present narration would be :

I was sure that even if I end up finding you, it'd be impossible for me to stay with you. I'll have to bid good-bye to you once again. But this time, after you leave, there'll only be me, in my full spectrum of power. Once I had chosen infinite friendship : open embrace : wave among waves. Now the cycle wants to close down itself. The time for the reversal of choice has finally come.

The writing on the wall was a true hint after all. Through union, the other one will rise. And, now I understand, with some despair, my search for you is nothing but a step in that process being myself again.

They've disappeared. You'll not be for long either. I'll be there till the end as a bubble of self-contained memory.

Until the sanity bursts.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Words and The Fable

...and, so the foolish shepherd continued to forge fun out of his ability to pretend. Everybody was outraged to the limit : he amused himself with the thought. He remembered, now, the first time the idea hit him on the face. Upto that point life was pretty dull.





Dullness, he thought, emanates from being nobody special : having no special ability : not being able to stand afar from the throng. Dullness is some attribute of the mass, the group, the crowd that he didn't understand.





With nothing happening around, he even prefered a tiger or two to come and stir the jar. And the idea that struck him one dead pale afternoon was : If even the most cruel realities of death and danger have decided to steer clear of this village, why not create realities of our own?


Why do we have to toil in this adverse world? Waiting for the infrequent change of destiny?

Then as we all know from the famous fable, he started his life of pretense : he turned his life itself into a storybook where there are twists in the tale on every second pages. Ordinary people : afraid : awestruck : spellbound. A lunar glean on their faces.

People were agitated and one day the tiger attacked the village. Nobody paid any heed to the futile screams of the shepherd.

His helplessness muffled his words.

---------------------

What do I want to write, here? My intention was to rewrite the fable in my own way. But, it's become really difficult to separate myself from him anymore.

My helplessness has muffled my words.

I have journeyed far and long. Into realms of deepest imagination. But, faced with a hard reality, I've always tried to say : See, I've been acting all along. I forgot to tell you, then : made a mistake. But, now I'm not pretending. I'm telling you I'm not.This words are true, true, true...

I called up a friend to share the idea of this post.

He said : It's you, right?

I said : I, yes.

He mourned : I've known you only through your words!

Words, more words and still others.

Where do you hide from them?

Saturday, July 21, 2007

A Detached Memory of A Father

I am standing with this vastness under my wounded feet. This I have been granted (by whom, I don't know).

I have to cross this uncertain(hazy?) landscape before darkness. To collect aid from the other side is my purpose. This journey I have to undertake twice a day for next six days.

I stand here, with haste in my mind, mesmerized by the endless plains of solitude. This I can not describe the way a painter'd have done. I don't have the power to collate borrowed words into an image, let alone a feeling.

But this loneliness, I must mention, has nothing to do with the person that is me. It has nothing to do with my dreams and desires and conscience : what secret I've suppressed : what I've repented for : what I can not control : what stories I'll be part of.

I can see my importance silhouetted in the fading light of the impending twilight. The sole survivor of an wasted generation. But there is nobody to share this uniqueness with. Obviously.

And also this is a part of a story : role of a cameo. It always is. I ask you : who is telling the story? who is hanging on to each and every word so keenly?

The father of a faraway time. Your son is dreaming another dream. Your words are the threads for him to weave with. Starting with these words of yours(?) : "However hard I try I can not get the lonesome valley and long hours of tireless barefoot journey out of my memory." he would write down somewhere : "Like a ghost, the image haunts my mind. It has become my default presence amidst clemency."

The heedless son would make your words speak of different tales, to fulfil his own agenda, to emphasize his insignificant arguments and to advertise his fleeting belief. He knows not the details of the evening : this evening I am leaning on. He knows not my wound in the left foot, and my pain. Nor my haste to skip this monotone plain of green hollow : to reach the skyline on the other side.

My childhood, locked inside that image of fragmented shadows and dark hues : nobody to guide, no one to wipe the sweat off the brows, nowhere to go that can be called home, nothing to wait for, no dream to lie down upon : who has written down that history or that fixation in the flow of events?

And even these are not my words. Not even these. Someone must have copied these symbols from humanist, communist, nihilist, socialist, capitalist, individualist, romantic, existential, paganist, populist, fascist, marxist, modernist, materialist, imperialist, libertarian, postmodernist, psychedelic, illusionist, nationalist books and journals. They have been put in my mouth.

This shadowy vastness : fixed wordless eternity, and the bloody wound are granted to me . These are only what are mine.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Infinity

After more than two days of fruitless inactivity, today I have broken free.



49 hours ago, I was visited by the apparition of an idea. It left me awestruck. and comatose.



I read the last two lines along with you. It has unearthed/dug up one major curiosity : what is the sublime idea? As an author, I've the responsibility of figuring out something that matches the excitement of these two lines.



If you ask me, now, for a word, I'll give you this : Infinity.



The eight symbolic fruits were hanging from the tree in the courtyard. The fruits were perfectly spherical. This at once surprised and pacified the young novice. His name : Unknown Query.



He, sat beneath the great tree of eight fruits, and meditated. The following time was counted, not by predictable and eternal movements, but through random visions that weaved in his mind an unending tale.



At the end of the story, the storyteller asked the inevitable question :



And his answer was :-



There are trees like this one in distant lands. The number of fruits are different in all of them, and shapes, too. Here, forgive my use of the word "distant", as you know and I have only come to know, that to recognize distance is to look from outside. But I have seen them all within me. If you ask me how many trees are there, I'd have to show you the fruits of the tree within me.



The storyteller nodded in agreement.



He opened the book that was once called, "Death of Mathematics". There are no page numbers in the book. It's meant to be opened at a random position. The page that opened now says,



There is no meaning you inject to this lifeless text, by saying "now". Which now? this now? that now? Alas, your "now" was lost when you were busy saying "now".



Disturbed, the storyteller, again opened a random page.



We came this far. But couldn't reach it. We have no energy to carry on with. Here is a clue that someone told us on the way. May be, it will be of some help for you.



'Look for your secrets in exhaustion and awe'



Now, totally confounded, our little storyteller went to the 'New Age Bookstore'.



The storekeeper, was trying to arrange all the books in shelves according to category. But he was having a hard time doing it. When asked, he pointed out to the storyteller named Normal Preacher, that a few years ago the name of the book was changed to 'Death of Language'.



He didn't tell him that he was a little down. In fact, he didn't say anything. A complete contrast to yesterday, Preacher thought, when Dig Deeper, the bookstoreman, was enthusiastically sharing his feelings with him.

Deeper, at last, driven by penitence, wrote down on the back of a voluminous book :

Penitence, it is not. The contradiction between my present and past. Present gnaws at my heart; a familiar voice tells me how base I have been. And I agree spontaneously. Although it has long been my conviction that there is nothing solemn and nothing base...

On the other side of the book, was written a poem :

Which way are you going?
How long can you bear the pain?

Where you are heading,
There'll lie a fork in your path
Then again,
Then another.

How long will you choose
between them?
How long...

The poem abruptly ends here. The first thought that came to Deeper's mind was that the subsequent part must be written somewhere. and the second thought was that the poem was meant for him. He looks at the title : Death of Philosophy.

The author just died a second ago. Deeper was there when the black-robed individual declared that Futile Fame, the renowned author, had written a manuscript, that starts like this :

I once claimed in a book that today there is no mathematics, no language and no philosophy which can claim consistency. Here, in my last written document, I admit that it is not my arguments and figures and analogies and rhetorics and sarcasms and wits that prove my point, but simply the contradictory fact that I have been using mathematical logic and usual language to "prove" what is my personal philosophy, in that book.

Silence, is consistent. Silent, I shall be.

Saturday, July 07, 2007

By that time, we had started manufacturing several identities. We had distributed ourselves in those different s(h)elves. Old conservatives and humanitarians protested for a long time, but nobody heeded to them. We had already developed a process to generate wishes and desires mostly by copying and merging from the grand dream-base. In this process we had learnt that desires of one identity are not really independent. But one also can make a collection of dependencies and choose from there. We had done that. Till that point, it was controlled chaos. A leap in dimensionality and degrees of freedom.

Freedom. We had always sought that. In the ancient historical archives, one can find the annals of freedom : from religion, from state, from economic oppressors, from morality and from corruption, from poverty, from wretchedness. And these are not all. If you can recall the oft quoted line from the legendary Moscan Poet, Miklos Balazs :

Rhetorics, verurteile ich Sie.
Es ist nicht ich dieser Sie Kette zum Stein.
Es ist mein ashen Zunge.
Wenn Sie aber sind, nur link
würde ich eher auf Ruhe hocken.
Aber leider, sind Sie in diese
Linien von meinen, auch gekrochen.
Rhetorics, verurteile ich Sie.

it's apparent how people at the turn of the milennium suffered agony for not being able to destroy the image of words that they themselves have rendered. They sought freedom from falacious, impotent expressions.

Finally it was our turn to strive for freedom. Freedom from ourselves, our binding identities. And everything was going as planned in our experiment, until the Pseudos appeared.

There has been a lot of discussion in Active Forum. Mosly people, it seems believe that I am responsible for this new Pseudo hazard. Here I regretfully admit that I had unknowingly played a role in the Pseudo Revolution. I'd like to describe how it all came about.

Pseudo is a mimicry and extension of our shelved selves. They came in a jocular fashion. Instead of deriving an identity through combination of several others, they started using existing identities. That created much confusion. I still remember, ( Pseudos have just entered the floor then) there was a huge debate between Acilino and Akilina, regarding whether these new entrants could be classified as art-forms like us. I'll quote Akilina here :

There is a sharp distinction between existing art forms and the pseudos. When you demand that every new art form is imitation of previously existing art forms, you must consider the granularity of imitation. Fusing elementary assumptions and ideas of several entities is one thing and arbitrarily creating facsimiles of prevalent existence is another.

But nobody listened to her (including me). We dismissed her logic as materialistic. We fiercely objected to her use of the word elementary. There is no such hierarchy, we argued. There is no whole and no part. We heavily encouraged the Pseudos. There we committed the mistake.

This recognition from the incumbent genres, resulted in a population explosion of the neophytes. The chaos now took an indefinite proportion. In the overall pandominium, I observed basically 3 levels of Pseudos :

1. Commonplace Pseudos --- These used to steal identities used by us. They were the most confusing ones. Because the concerned identies were getting modified outside the system of the true owner. This resulted in a lot of contradictions in the identities. Some of the owners among us, had to leave their affected identities once and for all.

2. Dream Pseudos --- These entities specialized in mimicing our dreams. They unlike Identity Pseudos, didn't affect the existing identities from inside. But by alluring them with the in-built desires and dreams, they created malfunction in the system. This resulted in many of the identities becoming voluntarily inactive or confused.

3. Abstract Pseudos --- The most harmful of all of them. Any abstract concept, idea, theory they used to pounce on. Their strength was their ability to manipulate general philosophies through imperceptible alteration, juxtaposition or truncation in the word sequence. Most harmful, because they at times hyptonised a whole class of identities.

The most fearful part was the game. The Pseudos are within us, any of us, may be allof us. By looking at the choice of topics and the style of imitation, is it possible to detect who is playing who? Are there any styles at all, or are they also blind imitation of some other which is again...

Friday, July 06, 2007



This is an offhand and vague sketch of one of the most powerful writers of last century, made by Rustem T. who was a friend of this little known author. In fact, I didn't know about this sketch until recently. Last week I bought 'The exhaustive work of Rustem' and came across this one.

Istvan Tamas (2051 - 2112), had really been instrumental in forming a new literary genre, when everything seemed to have been achieved in our literature.

Born in the town of Tatabanya in Northern Hungary, Tamas witnessed in his youth, the Europe that was rapidly casting off shells and changing shapes, both politically and culturally.

But, almost ironically, Tamas as a novelist, shied away from this celebration of change and focused rather on constancy, as if in an attempt to defy the fleeting nature of his times. He neither resembles the old moralistic genre nor shares the current enthusiasm for mechanization of art in a form of word game. ( In fact, he was one of the last authors who denied the now established fact that formation precedes meaning)

His own places and times, also really don't appear in his writing, except in a very obscure manner. Probably, 'The Fragrance of a Lost River' is the only exception, where he is conjuring his past, his memories of a small industrial town and his nonchalant observations on growing mediocrity, in a dreamlike fashion.

May be, that is why he didn't attract much recognition of the critics.

This nonchalance about the present and resigned devotion to the eternity, brought me close to the works of this master philosopher.

I was in my sophomore years when I first got hold of 'Experience of reading a book'. For the readers who haven't been acquainted with the wizardry of this great master, let me mention this much :

This is a letter from a reader to the author of a successful novel. In this letter, the reader relates her reading experience of the book. She mentions every bit of detail of the surrounding. The books she had read just before, the books she is reading alongside this novel, the books she is planning to read. She even writes down the lyrics of the song playing in the background.[These details I thought, are very important because no two events occur independently anymore]. Sometimes the novel itself takes a backseat and the exotic world of the reader is unraveled through the pages of the never-ending letter.

I was totally taken aback by the hidden circularity of the book. This was the time when I have started to equate infinity to circularity. So this is what I thought about the book :

The letter is never-ending because there are innumerably many things a reader has to share with the author. Suppose the letter was finite. Then upon reading those finitely many symbols, I as another reader would've other thoughts to share. I'd write another letter, in which the earlier letter would be embedded. Thus an infinite sequence of embedded letters would only establish a true relationship between author and reader.

'No piece of writing is complete in itself',

Tamas wrote in 'In search of silent literature' whch is a collection of articles on future of modern-literature. He also went on to declare that,

'Every literary creation is bound by its circumstances and should be placed before these circumstances while reading'

Throughout his whole career, Tamas has written a number of novels, short stories, articles. He almost always dwelt with complex and esoteric topics like dreams, reality, causation and time. He has also written quite a few critical essays on the art of reading. Although he never favored the idea of independent formation of symbols, he at a later stage of his career, strongly emphasized on the interpretation of symbols. In that regard, he can be noted as the precursor of many of the successful present day authors.

His ideological battle with the critics and authors of his time, deeply motivated him to write the most convoluted novel of all time : A duel with a columnist. I admit that I managed to understand only 10% of this novel. But the fact that remains is that he lost the duel and his genre is more or less obsolete at present.

I can't give you the full list of works by him (because, nobody really bothered to develop such a thing). But I can tell you the names of the books that I have in my collection :

1. Experience of reading a book : 2078

2. Fragrance of a lost river, a memoir : 2095

3. A duel with a columnist, 2087

4. A few broken pieces of glass : 2093

5. In search of silent literature : 2095

Tamas retired from his literary career in 2095 due to his increasing neural disorder. I'll try to provide some more information on this unknown or little known genius of words in some of the later posts. Also if you have any information about him, feel free to share with me.

Bye for now!

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

A blank stretch of time. An unforeseen yet welcome break. And there was water, waist-high and unfathomable in gravity, in every direction from where I stand.

Marooned. This is the word she used. It sounded like the only word in the existing language. For the whole day it reverberated in the huge green pool of water, the rain washed trees, the gloomy looking discolored houses and the vast cloudy grim sky. It echoed in my mind.

As is said, the books are your hiding places when you feel you are out in the open and the people on your trail are going to spot you like that. I picked up 'Snow'. I opened the book where it was bookmarked.

One random quote from that page : "Do you really want guidance from me?"

Now, my question is who are you seeking guidance from.

If you are Ka, you'd be prompt enough to say 'Seikh Saadettin'.

If you are a student, I think the answer would be 'Prof. Sengupta' or Somebody else.

If you are an employee, you'd certainly blurt out the name of your manager.

But actually I was asking you, yes you, typing away mindless sequence of letters.

You have closed the book already. You cannot concentrate on a single book. Because it's not the guidance of a book that you seek.

Confusion. That is what you need in this shapeless monotonicity. You pick up another book. This time it's Borges. Lying on your back, following the tiny garamond fonts, you think that you've found the recess.

Because the story you are reading is not claiming itself as a story. Small sentences. That's what is used. Like objects in a dream. Clear. Fragile.

It's too rigorous. I like it. I have a vague feeling it's written by me. Actually there's no doubt about it. Just that I cannot remember when. A feeble satisfaction. A deep uncanniness.

Like Fune, I imagined, I can hold on to every second of details. What details? The "objects" floating away in the shabby river of two days.

"Objects" :

1. A pouch of pan masala
2. A piece of paper, blank of course.
3. A cigarette packet, empty
4. A towel!!!
5. Branches and flowers of trees
6. A shoebox, again empty

Now wide awake, I am sitting in the balcony, looking at the liquid constancy. Missing my childhood. Paper-boats. Dancing in the rain.

"Miles and miles to go before I sleep"

Curses. Upon the system. For the rain. For the lack of infrastructure. My non-distinct voice plunges into the uproar. I too have to go somewhere. Someone I don't know is waiting for me. I need this to cleared at once. This is urgent.

But the point is : where'd you pour this stagnancy, if it has already crept along all the veins of my city?

Details. Inscrutable pieces of information. Place them side by side. They have a story to tell.

Stories. Fantastic lives and dreams. Let them intersect at a point of space and time. The point explodes with countless details.