nectar at edges

‘other versions of myself, / familiar and strange, and swaddled in their time’ – John Burnside

Fantasy is good – but if it has the courage to transcend oneself, one’s fate and one’s condition. And it has the rarer courage to not think this as fantasy. To scorn the so-called objectivity.

Burnside’s above lines remind me always of Hesse’s Steppenwolf: in particular, the theatre of Pablo. Many are unable to imagine anything temporally removed; still some are unable to think of themselves in other forms. Yet, when I am in Chennai, it’s not difficult for me to imagine Bangalore. Why should it be then the case for time or shapes? In myself the today-sad one, I see the germ of wisdom growing, that which will make me happy. In myself the today-sad one, I see the vinous tracing of thoughts and desires, of actions and graspings that thought led me to, and that makes me now-this-self. I am thinking: at every moment, I am changing. The next moment, I will be then-that-self. I will not remain now-this-self. Now-this-self will not be just history, but also a historical perspective from the point of view of the new now-this-self, the former then-that-self. And this new now-that-self will never equate to the former then-that-self, for the latter was dependent on my imagination and the former is dependent on reality - including the ever-changing reality of me, not just whatever lies beyond me. This flux, let’s call it with Reality, the one with capital r.

‘our world has nurtured in us such a multiplicity of modes of awareness that it must be impossible to bring them to a common focus even for the notional duration of a step’ – Tim Robinson

When I see the walls of Brihadeeswara, the dried moat, the fading panels, the heavy Nandi, when I see them across centuries: people of several hearts crossing these stones, today a royal pomp, tomorrow a milk abhisheka of the Celestial Cow, the drawbridge raised up and inside only stars playing and running around, every night in secret joy, with the devadasi dancing interminably: boy selling dates and woman selling flowers, smell of roasted coffee somewhere in a morning that I don’t know is it already been or is still to come or is: in one step, a leap much more gigantic than Armstrong’s, I, unlike Robinson, do not try to bring these multiple existences into one common focus. Rather, I live them and let myself be maddened, be dazzled and be distracted by each one of them. Rather, I celebrate life.

                                                'All night, on the surgery ward,

you were still playing catch on that strip
of lamplight and grass between home and the rest of the world'
                                                                    –    Burnside

Home and the rest of the world – this duality exists only inside the narrow, spatial world some choose to confine themselves in, for they are afraid of an undefined space. The man asks, keeps asking, so … how much is mine? He keeps on marching, with interminable steps, to know the bounds of his possession; he’s already conditioned to think in dualities. He’s conditioned to think in right and wrong, true and false, good and evil, light and darkness. He will even try to disprove God, the One, through Two, the duality. For him, life is Venn diagrams minus the Universal set; for him, darkness is where light is not, not another form of light. But, yes, as reasonable men, even if not reasoning, everyone starts out from home.

What when we step on the border, that separates home from the rest of the world? Can we go to and fro, transcend limits as and when we wish? Can we belong to space rather than to home or/and to the rest of the world? Reason will be useless away from home: it will ask, what are you doing away from home, in the land of aliens? Reason will only be blind. How then shall we move back and forth? How shall we cease this movement, finally, but rather hover in space? Since there is no Pablo, I only have the choice of my infallible guide: Intuition.

'no one survives the hunt: though men return
in threes or fours, their faces blank with cold,
they never quite arrive at what they seem
leaving a phrase or song from childhood
deep in the forest'
                                                                       –    Burnside

Reason will try to construct a sequence of now-this-selves. It will try to construct a necklace of them, threaded through causality: it will call it saneness, order and civilisation. Reason will say the phrase or song lost in the forest is trivial, is useless, doesn’t affect causality. It will neglect it like some infinitesimal part, as we often do in equations in our classrooms. I wonder about those phrases and songs left in the forest: do they assemble together and make something wonderful of their own, without being subject to self-doubts, without rejections of each other just because they sound a different tone?

And what will he do, without that song or phrase in the heart? He will try to fit up a part borrowed from Reason there. He can breathe, walk, drink. He can live. Even if life is bereft of song. Songs are not logical; the tendency to make one shall be explained soon. Once we have the cause and the effect, the thing itself doesn’t matter. We know why we make songs, we know what a song is made up of, we know what effect a song has and why does it have so, we know what effect the song will have on whom in what precise degree, we know what the song’s presence tells about the man who lost the song. Now, since we know all this much, we can forget the song itself. Song is data.

Like, ‘the sense I have of my place in the world becomes a static, meaningless fact’ (Burnside). So with the song.

But I shall not choose to do so. I shall always make songs. For only through prayer, only through repeated explorations of the borders between, I will rise above facts. Above duality, beyond Reason - into Intellect, to Wisdom.