A disorienting monologue

(Written sometime in feververy month of 2017. This was an expression of a different kind of literary freedom I was experiencing reading continental philosophers. Warning - I do not think this will help anyone.)

Understanding        .

Close your eyes and concentrate. Concentrate is not the right word. Rather you must try to stop thinking. That is do not allow any thought come into your mind. think it would be difficult how could one ever stop feeling the beating heart, or the breathing lungs or the ears hearing or the eyes seeing. May be what would help in the exercise would be to go in stages. That is first allow any voice in the vicinity to come to you, to be heard. Hear but don’t listen that is try to make no sense of it. Practice this till the time the question arises in your mind - why do you even think? What drives me you to think, to see, to hear, to read? Why should I be using my so precious energy which is fought over so much, which the Sun burns itself so much to produce such magnificent heat to cause electricity transfer in the neurone because electricity transfer it must be as seeing reading is a brain activity and thinking too - stored energy from the blood of the stomach to the blood of the eyes activating the dormant neurone of the eye to send a signal to optic centre of the brain and causing that minor reverberation in the surrounding environment of it something similar to what you sometime hear from the overhead real metal electric wires. Why should I be involved in this cycle of food consumption and other processes on a day to day basis. Why should I you me him her they think? To what end nature wants to accomplish through this?

Yes there is no meaning of life. These are all myths including this but its the myth propagated in the spirit of method of science to find the objective truth in wake of pragmatism known by the name of the country of liberal capitalist bolsheviks.

And yes too to jugglery of words that this is for I belong to the forgotten class of those master jugglers who could charm the snake to the extent that they wear it as a garland and soak its poison in the blue neck something in the spirit of the Derridian auto-affection and Fouccaultian neglected subjects of history - a tradition which is very pragmatically termed as obfuscation.

I know professional jammers and Hemingwayians both be very upset by the use of the word - very and now I have made the mistake twice.

So much for digression lets now continue on our path to understand the entity called nothingness so that we may make a first stride in the path of understanding a number and subsequently integer and prime and also lets try to be on the charted course.

“Ground control to the space centre” something in the spirit of Elton’s rocket man. This is not a digression - this is a song which is a part of the whole process of understanding without which and its property termed music nothing can really be said to be understood. It is something like knowing the name of the thing but not the thing itself - something which virgins and serious students of nothingness must be wary of.

I feel a bit crippled by not being able to use very but Hemingway and jamming are to be respected. Also we must keep joyce’s joy in mind for it will be needed when we will be discussing the death - that scary scary thing, Lacanian lack, Freudian unconscious, Husserl’s phenomenology’s doubleness of becoming and auto-affection of which Derrida was also a strong proponent and are not to be confused.

See this whole endeavour is to be thought in terms of Wittgenstein’s mistake and setting the course of much of the intellectual life of 20th century in the wrong direction. Now if I made a mistake and it has consequences then Wikipedia not me is to be blamed. With sufficient warning to myself and me - let us start our work, something along the lines “smoking causes cancer” - let us have cancer.

See the situation is such that if I do not literally wring your brains out and tickle your heart a bit so much so that you get tired of thinking and feeling itself - until that what I want to show you can’t be adequately shown. So in the spirit of a strict teacher of Floyd’s “stop sarcasm in the classroom” and “we don’t need no education” let us get going, get engaged in this vedic yagya or exchange of your mind and my mind, of your thinking and thought.

“jab ego tutati hai to bahut bura hota hai” a professor of psychology told a class full of students - young, bright, brilliant, scientific students. And as if I was waiting for it to happen because for me everything was experience but at the time when it happened I didn’t know well has it really happened and I continued waiting and in a way is still waiting. For ego reformulates itself it takes the shape of someone other - only this time you are aware of the process compared to the previous time when you didn’t really had a choice but still somehow you still kind of remain the same - you maintain your unity. Since you are always becoming and unbecoming - you approximate more and more towards that united ideal of you that you and only you can experience for no-one else has the privilege of the first person experience.

Maybe its because that the hand is still the same hand with which I first ate - a biologist may point out that it is not it too has gotten many subsequent changes of cells [need scientific term here] but to which I will say that marks of that bruise on the knee is still there so in a way it has maintained its structure nature but it feels so different from then to now. It no longer pains anymore that concrete knee scratching basketball court and the first sensation of real pain.

What happened in between is nothing. Sensible sense is sensed and that is where something happens, being takes place and it is the place of nothing. It is not easy to know for as soon as you believe in it - it hides itself behind your belief. You could know it only by justifying it that there must be something of its nature as when you reflect on that moment when you wanted to be one just that one and you wanted Other just that Other and you did become that one who wanted that Other but it only lasted for that moment and you started becoming some other moment after you let it go. Something killed, covered, defaced that one and something else took its place - that is what gives you your first clue of the thing - nothing. That is what happens when you move on, you are not able to hold onto something any longer.

For life - it goes on from shore to shore in a flow in a continuity with some abrupt paradigm shifts but continuous nonetheless. Phew! man that was heavy now the rabbit has just shown some signs that it may really be in the hat but if it really is it has not really shown its face. To give a bad analogy and lighten the mood a bit it is like Schrodinger cat which is dead and yet is not dead - rabbit is there and yet not there yet.

No use - the mood is still morose I know it must be because of that word - death and for the first time in your life you realise what it means to kill, to be killed, to mourn someone and when Muslims shout - “Hussain - I should have been there”, to know death.

I know the task is hopeless for how can one possibly claim to know such things as death and nothing - its simply preposterous and for somebody involved in such a endeavour the path is beset with hopelessness which Chomsky claims is the pessimistic nature of all such endeavours for they are doomed to be doomed.

But curiosity is a strange being too and the really curious ones flick away any such warnings with the determination of a kick destined for the goal. And that is the second clue and the most important tool for our endeavour - curiosity and the real curious ones and we must learn to identify the pretenders but still should applaud an honest attempt - in the spirit of the greek tradition of sportsmanship and olympics.

The real fun trivia to lighten the mood and this time I will succeed. Vishnu doesn’t blink you know why because prolonged open eyes bring tears so he must not be able to cry - must be really happy to be not able to cry ever - don’t you think!

Laughter. Ha Ha!

Have you noticed we break our words by white spaces but in speech it doesn’t happen that way and a lot of work has been done on this by linguistics, must be strange for written language and spoken language to have such difference must be related to the identification of events by early ones of us.

You somehow start to get a glimpse of the truth itself, of your oneness with nature i.e. everything around you for how can it be anything but nature and you see all the web of lies people make to make for themselves a perfect abode and still you know deep into your heart that it too is natural - rightly termed as evolution. What event in the world will bring what consequences can’t be known beforehand - how different the world could have been if the idea of that ritual, the observation of that quality, that person would have given up in his quest forever - we don’t know  but continue in our everyday adventures believing having faith in the Earth that it will not open up like a volcano and engulf everything that we so proudly call Life.

Part of my method is to create doubt in your mind about the supposed meaning and real meaning to the point you realise there is no real meaning that it too has no meaning. When confronted such you will eventually loose hope for a psychological unity of yourself and will fall back upon the physical unity which is the body. You realise that yourself reflects from nothing. So now there are three things the physical self which is reflected by nothing and the reflection which is perceived as self - even when it denies itself reasonably. Self is always becoming and has never yet become but it is always becoming over itself.

You are a different person everyday and you try to draw conclusions whether that smiling watchman that maid that colleague that school mate that college mate that teacher that professor would remember you when you are long gone when you ask for a favour unexpectedly or expectedly or when you are in a bad situation or a good situation and you try to interpret various signs give them meanings to them and to yourself they might have given from time to time indication of their love or their hate and aggregating all that up to make a consistent Wittgensteinian picture of facts so that it may make sense to you atleast and to you listener, to your reader, to your watch.

You become in that moment a poet, a philosopher, a psychologist, a businessman - that much abused word becomes beautiful too for you see it too in a different light as a transactor, an engager, a yajman of sacrifice called love. You become a prateek in the lower case for someone else comes before you. You realise for the first time what could have drove all of them to use first names in their compositions - kabira, rahima rahim, ghalib.

For you now know love in all it’s colours, you learn what a moment could do, that words have power too and you extrapolate this to find how much violence they have done so far. Why were they all fighting for what, you know all that is not love. And that too shall pass for now you know they fight for themselves they love themselves too - love could be of the other of the self too. And you see what Foucault and Dostovyesky sees in the mad fools. And you begin to understand what Derrida calls auto-affection.

You understand this is dangerous and can unleash the hounds of hell and from that moment you carry a rowling’s wand and a tolkien’s ring with you forever subtly forever ready to produce magic at any moment you wish. But Martin’s story still remains incomplete and rabbit has still not shown its head. Its the ultimate wall to bounce your proverbial balls from - that sweet nothing of velvety touch.

Yes how many pop culture references were there in the above paragraph is the name of the game and how self-conscious he is in not producing any references in this paragraph is yet another type of game. For you only play games when you make the game of gladiator greeks your starting point - you lead to more and more games with much more complexity and more subtle rules.

And ultimately that final realisation that you don’t have to play their games you can invent your own - like the variations of cricket and football the innocent children so readily invent in their street plays. And then you keep on inventing - reinventing in your constraints that is your imagination - you sometime deceive yourself that you are not really playing a game but now the play is with yourself and you are the fool, the director, the actor, the king and their modern counterparts all by yourself. You become your own and only judge and there is no-one not even you the reader to turn to for redemption.

Like I deceive myself that this and this words make one complete whole. I am not much different from those who have found respite in the words when everything else had failed.

It is a form of emancipation too for you think you can become anyone you like - in one moment you are the king of the world and in another the poorest of the poor and have you noticed that there is no list for 100 poorest people on Earth for they are insignificant - the neglected ones - the ones who are removed from the discourse of history.

The problem of the location of the nothing - well it is located somewhere in the middle of your brain in a rectangular or square plane I am not quite sure of and is rotating at different speeds at different times (for example in sleep versus wake versus awakening and also morning and evening) and as you know a rotating plane constitutes a sphere and a sphere can be dissected in infinite planes so there are differently varying different reflexivities of the plane. This is called absurdism with the adjective deliberate added to show my disposition.

Write my boy write for you are born cry your lungs out. Fernando Pessoa’s mans. My empirical evidence for my theory of nothing and now give me a medal which I will so pin to my chest like Karan pinned the armour to the chest and will roam the wide world to give it away for nothing but a few voilet words straight from the pumping machine to pumping machine. That noise in the morning which tells that the water is running and it is time to toilet.

Do you feel a hollow sometimes? well it is a hollow only nothing else don’t put too much attention to it. Oh! did I just give you a hint.

They said if you keep extending the parallel lines they meet at infinity and I followed them to find nothing. Its a bit like a girl-boy affair. Don’t know if it was of any good though I finally found nothing in all its splendid grandeur and there was one who dared to do that before Aryabhatta was his name. It was easy for him from there to take that first step next and lo and behold that one came forward.

I am loosing my edge now and must accept to stop now for the thing we seek out to find is everything and yet nothing. A final word I must say before we let the curtains take over. I am afraid I may loose it so I stick with nothing so much - a concept understood in full force guarantees the success or failure of the quest we set out for for it matters no more.

Fear is a greater force for I have discovered it so and who said it is not magical. Rushdie’s Shalimar was the clown from Kashmir that apocalyptic paradise of which we talk no more and only remember it was magic and it was real for once.

I know how I am going to end this stuff by telling you that even after reading all this you will continue your daily chores as if nothing has happened. As if you are yourself and reality is really real and thinking is thinking thought.

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Interviewers

Would you call this a work of any seriousness or is it a work of jest?

Many a true things are said in jest. Having said that I think I make myself clear enough in some paragraphs like the one on objective truth and where I explain the situation.

How do you think will people respond to the work?

With hysteria will be a understatement.

You are jesting again.

No I think I am serious and if someone seriously tries to respond to this then they must either be hysteric or becoming hysterics.

You are non-sensical and I am ending this interview now.

That is what Wittgenstein said to all the metaphysicians but that haven’t stopped people from becoming ones have they?

And why is that?

Because we have either already become one or are becoming.

What was this reaction from?

After I read something from Lacan and how incomprehensible it was and connecting with when Freud’s ideas were made known to me and understanding the fatality of understanding anything that you are just fooling yourself.

For you must have some ambition what was your ambition in writing this and that and the other?

Let me quote Pessoa here with whose personality I have been bowled over lately. “For you are a fool who think I write for you or to show you something I write for myself for there is nothing that sticks to my mind as stickly as words”. If someone has given any hopes towards rational enquiry he would be someone like Pessoa. Oh man! it feels so good to attribute something you want said to others. Now I know why those guys up at the top have spokespersons.

What kind of lineage are you leaving for the young ones by indulging in your reckless attitude?

Oh! None. None at all.

Would you like to record a message for the child of century of the 26th first of its name born in the year of 2564 on this day of Tuesday of their week of new harvest?

What is the name of the child again?

Let me check its - child number 41.

Well 41 what a unlucky one. See child you are as luckless as you could ever be so why not make a symphony out of it and play it so loud into your grandfather ear that he keeps on turning in his grave till he is dead. You may make it sound like a screech of metal or a tink will do too.