Life’s Elsewhere/Love’s Ragpicker

This post will mean anything only to my regular readers. This rambling post, I don’t know how long it will be, might turn out to be a landmark post. Okay, let me shun that pompous beginning…

I was particularly disturbed when I wrote my last one, and somehow, each of the five responses had been epiphanic to me. Epiphany lies in the state of imagination of the beholder, so you will never understand - radicalancient, jane, ritwik and particularly lou - where and how you touched it. The touch…was mine only.

For generations of a some not-so-distant future, if this blog stays and wordpress servers never crash, one might find the portrait of the psyche of a typical Bengali male, as Jane described my posts twice or so, a kind which is rapidly fading; I might safely say: here is one of the last bastion of survivors.

I.

One of the best has deleted his blog. I remember Radical Hypocrite’s swan song, where he mentioned me in my proper name (I fondly remember). Thankfully, all his posts are saved in my coffers and he said when he was going:

The tale awaits the listener for there’s midnight now, imagined or otherwise, and silence, if you will excuse the sound of dripping water, for there is always a damn tap somewhere that refuses to shut its mouth, and the nocturnal sounds of the highway, the solitary car speeding by, the whimpered stillness of buses that have concealed their sighs and bones in a blue scrappy paint …all the tired whispers of the men who have lingered in the roadside stalls, repeating to themselves the stories of their homes or the dreams they once had of coming to this big city, of making it big and all other beautiful breaths of despair and love.

…I’ve almost stopped opening my heart out to people for the simple reason it’s very difficult to explain the occasional spells of serious depressions I suffer. And I won’t do that again, not here, not anywhere, not while I live.

…How many times did I tear off the pages of my favourite books, break the earthen idols of Hindoo goddesses my mother devoutly worships, how many times did I hit myself hard against the wall, hit my face with a fist pulled hard, bit my hands and legs, all to force teardrops from my eyes? Pain in pleasure, pleasure in pain, self-mortification, as the bastard psychiatrist told me when I parted ways with the only dream I had consciously lived till now.

… I shall end at the beginning, I shall return to that privileged instant of my life, my lost, forgotten shared dream, my religion, though I am and will remain a conscious heretic…and when you were old enough to see a flock of shrieking, brightly coloured birds flying off overhead, darkening the sun, casting huge shadows, birds of your individual dreams dreaming about a collective, flying away, and having lost your Icarus wings, beyond repair, tried never to make sense of it all, you’ll never understand how difficult it becomes at times just to pretend being ‘normal’.

I don’t blame you, envy you, loathe you for not knowing all that. Each of us have had enough quantities of self-loathing sufficient to last and overwhelm our lifetimes. I thank you again for bearing with me. See my heart, mutilated by pride and once maddened with fidelity- I’ve opened it up here for you. For once, I’ve ceased to be a hypocrite to myself…

I can’t write better words…but I am not going away!

Only a Bengali, living anachronistically in this strange city of our can write such words, when a history of a bit more than a century of his race haunts his mind. It was the story of men; the women have just started to speak it out. We dreamt of a flock of shrieking, brightly coloured birds, darkening the sun, casting huge shadows…across the planet, we saw our shadows fly…

We reveled in the death of a dream, dying of loves.

II.

My last post is a disaster of a kind. For a whole day or more, I saw the third section not getting connected with the previous two, sticking out as the only truth of my face. The first one, after the prelude, mentioned three reactions to - as I said it - the trivial, the symptomatic and the horrible. Now I smile a bit when I see that I couldn’t describe the last one; my keyboard stuttered there, incidentally the most riveting of those abominations: my tryst with pain had a halt. It has reached its limits.

Yes readers, this year-long journey of blogging was a tryst with pain. Writing created a kind of rhythm, a rise and then a sudden fall into crashing pain. My sincerity towards writing, my honesty lied in the sustaining of that moment: when pain engulfed me and I curved my words out of my flesh. Because we always mourned the day the music died… (more…)

Had been going through another phase of life when you comprehend less though you introspect more and I didn’t post anything for almost two weeks. Had been pondering how to write next after a year of blogging and 125 surviving posts. My occasional foray into poetry was not poking me further; though being the index of my emotional life, this blog decided to remain silent these early weeks of May, when things were really emotionally heady.

But sometimes the lyrical dies, the novelistic fails and the quote of the day in my feedreader reminds Krishnamurti’s “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” I’m sorry I adjusted and did not scream. I regret I am, still, healthy.

I am not sharing three news items, I resist elaborating in details what has fouled my mood; they range from the trivial to the horrible, circumventing the symptomatic. I am sharing three reactions.

I.

Laurelin, one of those feminist bloggers whose writings I regularly browse, reacted against an onstage molestation by a buffoon named Johnny Vegas in the name of a comedy-show and then reacted against trolls. How I recall my similar experiences when this blog also tried to react against certain social evils! One of those symptoms of sickness: everyone has their reasons, everything has its reasons! I like the way she says: “You do not have a right to my space, no matter how smart/important/rational you may think you are”.

I was just checking out one of the blogs maintained by The Radical Ancient, a friend who is gradually arriving our WordPress, and then heard her reacting against one of the most hideous sickness performed by a woman: an ‘artist’ announcing her next installation showcasing her innumerable designed miscarriages. She says: “[Art major Aliza Shvarts'] real “crime”, if any, is that she is creating a life for the express purpose of destroying it. And THAT is the part I can neither rationalize nor condone. It’s not rational, it’s not natural, it does not serve towards anyone’s happiness. The most it will do is get her some attention, which she probably thinks will make her happy.”

Those two, in the name of performances and art. Sickening still: there are reasons against these reactions. The third is neither art nor buffoonery, it is a crime precipitated for a lifetime. I hate to summarize it. Another respected blogger also reacts: “Mr Fritzl is a man, not a monster. He’s just a man who took being father and husband to monstrous extremes. I know on one hand that doesn’t seem important or even counter intuitive, but I do think that if we reject Mr Fritzl’s humanity that we lose the chance to understand what drives some to this extreme. For good or for ill the forces that created this situation are echoed to some degree in each of us and in society at large. Or for a warped analogy, if one finds a cancerous tumour in one’s body, it’s neither helpful nor accurate to say “That evil tumour isn’t part of me.” While obviously the tumour must be excised, it can’t hurt to try and figure out what caused it in the first place.”

II.

Dear reader, did you travel the above links to enlighten yourself about the profound sickness of the world we are living in, where the president of US of A accuses my countrymen of triggering world-wide food shortages because we Indians are supposedly overfed? What do we deem more shocking, Mr Bush’s conclusions or the above three abominations? Probably neither, they are mere fodders for news. Johny Vegas will molest women live in the name of self-deprecating comedy after a volunteer says she liked it. Arts majors like Aliza Shvarts will maintain that she has all the rights to use her body as statements as long as it is her body. And daughters of the likes of Mr Fritzl will simply wither away to disappearance. Women will remain fodders to men’s news. (more…)