Nothing, not even an iota of care,
That's all I got out of a thousand years of hunt,
Learning to learn the process of love and care,
With which creation seems beset,
Playing in the realm of fantasies,
I tried to barter desire for desire,
I was out to constitute a new reality,
I was out to constitute reality,
I got nothing but fantasies,
I got nothing but desires,
I got nothing but reality.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Thursday, August 12, 2010
This is amazing. I always manage to find a way to correct my mistake; that is after I do some good with a purpose and it all seems like a mistake after it has served its purpose. That I agreed to marry was a mistake, for several reasons. But now that it has served its purpose of making my parents happy, I am going to keep postponing it and keep them happy as long as i can.
Monday, August 9, 2010
As open as close
The tip of the ‘I’ where my journey ends this day is called T-point. I am tired of forming that ‘I’, and the retreat, the unlearning day in and day out. What are my choices?
Schizophrenia where I and my ‘I’ finally lose complete touch with each other is not possible and not allowed, just as a death in which the soul may part from the body is not possible and not allowed. Power, in fact, works or is invested precisely by keeping the body and soul together, I and my 'I' together, nature and man together because power exists in the inter-subjective arena, in communication. An extreme display of repression and coercion comes after power is taken to its limit of appropriation, and left no choice but to diversify and find new ground to grow, create an illusion of alienation, for instance alienation of man and nature through natural calamity, struggle of classes through socio-economic disintegration, and death of the body and freeing of the soul through pain and punishment, alienation of body and mind through schizophrenia. That is when power is compelled to appear as a flash of colourless light, only to blind me beyond the possibility of associating imagination/fiction with reality; schizophrenia and death, which come at the extreme limits of appropriation when there is no more vitality left to create and suck its elements, are made to appear to be moments of disaggregation of body and mind/soul. In the next stage, follows the temptation to copyright the formula, make it an exclusive club, what else is the power and joy of power and joy. There is power and joy in sharing only as long as the other accepts it as an alms from the powerful whose power is beyond imagination. So that then what begins as merely an illusion of power, has to be made to appear to be the work of an external reality beyond control and knowledge. Thus begins the history of knowledge and deception.
The life of my ‘I’ is a process of continuous exclusion. His inclusion is always through a process of exclusion because he can’t be included in the discourse which decides just how he is to be included and used. He is not free when he is mad, or a prisoner, or even when he dies. That is the nature of power so successfully replicated by capitalism. Only they have imposed a copyright on this formula, which is none other than that of mystical power itself, for instance nature, by blinding the rest to it. The only possible remedy he’s told is to learn to differentiate reality from fiction. He is taught to lose touch with the zig-zag nature of existence on earth and seek the ladder that goes up and away to some centre which seems real. He looks for reality of the real in stead of the imaginary nature of reality itself which was his original quest, which fired his imagination.
This day I decide to release and diffuse him not into millions of particles in space but several defined sense organs disentangled from the body. That is the only way to enter into an engagement with these schizophrenic capitalist times which feed on dissociation and segregation infused into the human society and individuality. Since the time I watched The Beautiful Mind, I pray, wait, work for schizophrenia to come and free my conscience and desires of fantasies, my mindful utilitarianism of my beauty, my active of my passive, my love of my lust, my demand of my command. It doesn’t come. I try the impossible. I try to appropriate the ultimate tool of power.
I want to make his death a case study of power’s rule by schizophrenia. I want to present a case study of capitalism’s politics at its extreme margin where it is weakest, of that on the individual schizophrenic subject’s existence after death. I am not allowed schizophrenia. It leaves too many lived cultural spaces behind, like John Nash’s ‘beautiful mind. It’s not the same as incarcerating someone in the madhouse or the prison or even the rack. There you can isolate him, but here he will leave tell tale signs in open spaces. The space I leave behind, of my experiment of co-authoring a novel with two others, will re-present him.
The novel is to be a deconstruction of Coelho’s Zahir where the voice of the ‘other’ of the protagonist and the seeker in the original find their own voices. First they become authors and then as the readers help them commit euthanasia, their characters emerge. The novel is to come out of a dialogue between the three authors, and develop based on what I call a journalistic methodology of research. The dialogue that is veiled and contained by the solipsistic imagination of schizophrenia, I try to take out of its closure. I retreat it to the novel metamorphosed into a lived cultural space. The imagined community of JNU, reduced to meta-theory, is reborn. Alas, the dialogue fails in its commitment to engagement and my novel becomes a symptom of the problem it seeks to correct; it becomes an autobiographical meta-fiction. I need to correct that too.
So I sit myself at the head of the ‘I’ at that T-point. I remember my character in my experimental novel of the half blind Oedipus without my specs which I will not wear because it makes me look my age, but also because I want to resist reality. I decide not to let power work its politics through reality by inviting the solipsistic romantic bourgeois in me to authenticate monologic spaces in the multifarious dialogic imaginary space otherwise called reality.
Well! I am a bourgeois romantic as only a Bihari in India can be. You really need to have bought into the politics of socialist-nationalist dream to continue to become a bourgeois in these times. However, I am exposed since birth to a certain cosmopolitanism which compels me in spite of myself towards disengagement, an unbecoming, a death.
My intention is a romantic replay of the medieval rack between four horses, after a slow and tidy process of self-segregation, for which I require an accomplice. I worked towards it and tried to barter love for death, but that engagement is not allowed in this saturated cesspool where women and other such marginalised, oppressed and regionalised segments of the Indian population rehearse and theatrise workable political bonds. I looked for a role for the bourgeoise romantic in that theatre. I wanted to be the TS Eliot of post-modernism and ended up being its Charles Lamb. The sadhus and sanyasis, the communist and fascists and the centrists, the bahujanis and the Gandhians, the godly and the ungodly, the revolutionaries and the pacifists after Buddha’s Sangam dare continue their linear journey towards the research of truth.
There are a few late-nighters sitting on the curb. The early ducks are not yet out. They look at me in surprise as I sit myself in the middle of the road. My next move is crucial. I will give them just enough time to become curious, yet be swift lest they give in to their impulsive reaction before curiosity kills it. The flash of the blade is crucial; otherwise they will be forced to move and think to understand what was happening. The moment they pass from this ‘passive’-active state to that ‘active’-passive state, I will lose them. With an unhurried movement I pull out the knife and let its blade catch light from the street lamp at the curb. I let it hang there flashing like a miniature Kubla Khan sword; then very slowly I slide the tip of the sword along the bridge of the nose and into the cornea, circle it around the white till I reach the top, then with one smooth jerk I gauge it out. There are some gasps as I do so but I drown them with a long and heavy groan. The people who are on the verge of moving settle back. I see the exasperation on their faces and know instantly that they are ready for the show. I reach for the right eye next. Now every movement is being watched carefully and coupled with gasps and easy but whispered conversation as if afraid of disturbing me. They are already going for the details, I see. When I am done, it will be there for them to make something out of it, and for once they won’t be able to say that we write half-baked meaningless nonsense because it is easy to write. I can only leave here some traces lest they fall into the well-meaning trap of intentionality or originality.
I wanted to either find a role for him in the theatre or, true to romantic ideals, die to live on forever. I can not find a role for him and I do not want him to continue to become a bourgeois romantic even in death. That is why I decide to create a role, a symbolic death characteristic of romanticism, for him in the resistance to power. So I sit myself at that T-point where innumerable ‘Is’, formed by thousands everyday all along beginning from the entrance beyond which is an even bigger jungle of Is, Os, Qs, Cs and meaningless jungle of alphabets, words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, books, papers or just a jumble, converge everyday. That T-point is probably the only transparent symbol left of what Indira’s JNU became within five years of its formation. The catalyst came from Sanjay Gandhi and the final reaction took place during emergency. Communism won hands down in that battlefield of ideologies. But the transformation of Marxism to post-Marxism is not as smooth. On the contrary, in stead of the locus of communism’s subversive appropriation of post-modernism, it becomes post-modernism’s appropriation of Marxism.
I remember that walk on the ‘I’ of the ‘T’. It is a short walk to the head of the ‘I’, I take almost every morning when it is time to go to sleep. Then I dash right or left depending on whether I am in the mood for a tea or a long walk. In fact the ‘I’ I tread on painstakingly several times every day; not just here but almost everywhere in the campus. That is how I form the ‘I’. The T, you could say, forms only accidentally by aggregating all those dashes right and left. The dash to the left sometimes ends where the tail of the Q begins; often when in the mood for a long saunter I continue and complete the O, and back along the tail till I again reach the head of the ‘I’. At other times and lately mostly I dash to the right and continue along the C, at a slight angle to the ‘I’, and back along the sickle to the point where the cigarette shop and the bus stand are, and where the walk always begins. When I walk back along the ‘I’, I think I am undoing and unlearning the ‘I’ formed everyday. The morning I talk about though, the walk ends at the tip of the ‘I’; the ‘I’ I formed or the ‘I’ I unformed?
To be continued….never
Schizophrenia where I and my ‘I’ finally lose complete touch with each other is not possible and not allowed, just as a death in which the soul may part from the body is not possible and not allowed. Power, in fact, works or is invested precisely by keeping the body and soul together, I and my 'I' together, nature and man together because power exists in the inter-subjective arena, in communication. An extreme display of repression and coercion comes after power is taken to its limit of appropriation, and left no choice but to diversify and find new ground to grow, create an illusion of alienation, for instance alienation of man and nature through natural calamity, struggle of classes through socio-economic disintegration, and death of the body and freeing of the soul through pain and punishment, alienation of body and mind through schizophrenia. That is when power is compelled to appear as a flash of colourless light, only to blind me beyond the possibility of associating imagination/fiction with reality; schizophrenia and death, which come at the extreme limits of appropriation when there is no more vitality left to create and suck its elements, are made to appear to be moments of disaggregation of body and mind/soul. In the next stage, follows the temptation to copyright the formula, make it an exclusive club, what else is the power and joy of power and joy. There is power and joy in sharing only as long as the other accepts it as an alms from the powerful whose power is beyond imagination. So that then what begins as merely an illusion of power, has to be made to appear to be the work of an external reality beyond control and knowledge. Thus begins the history of knowledge and deception.
The life of my ‘I’ is a process of continuous exclusion. His inclusion is always through a process of exclusion because he can’t be included in the discourse which decides just how he is to be included and used. He is not free when he is mad, or a prisoner, or even when he dies. That is the nature of power so successfully replicated by capitalism. Only they have imposed a copyright on this formula, which is none other than that of mystical power itself, for instance nature, by blinding the rest to it. The only possible remedy he’s told is to learn to differentiate reality from fiction. He is taught to lose touch with the zig-zag nature of existence on earth and seek the ladder that goes up and away to some centre which seems real. He looks for reality of the real in stead of the imaginary nature of reality itself which was his original quest, which fired his imagination.
This day I decide to release and diffuse him not into millions of particles in space but several defined sense organs disentangled from the body. That is the only way to enter into an engagement with these schizophrenic capitalist times which feed on dissociation and segregation infused into the human society and individuality. Since the time I watched The Beautiful Mind, I pray, wait, work for schizophrenia to come and free my conscience and desires of fantasies, my mindful utilitarianism of my beauty, my active of my passive, my love of my lust, my demand of my command. It doesn’t come. I try the impossible. I try to appropriate the ultimate tool of power.
I want to make his death a case study of power’s rule by schizophrenia. I want to present a case study of capitalism’s politics at its extreme margin where it is weakest, of that on the individual schizophrenic subject’s existence after death. I am not allowed schizophrenia. It leaves too many lived cultural spaces behind, like John Nash’s ‘beautiful mind. It’s not the same as incarcerating someone in the madhouse or the prison or even the rack. There you can isolate him, but here he will leave tell tale signs in open spaces. The space I leave behind, of my experiment of co-authoring a novel with two others, will re-present him.
The novel is to be a deconstruction of Coelho’s Zahir where the voice of the ‘other’ of the protagonist and the seeker in the original find their own voices. First they become authors and then as the readers help them commit euthanasia, their characters emerge. The novel is to come out of a dialogue between the three authors, and develop based on what I call a journalistic methodology of research. The dialogue that is veiled and contained by the solipsistic imagination of schizophrenia, I try to take out of its closure. I retreat it to the novel metamorphosed into a lived cultural space. The imagined community of JNU, reduced to meta-theory, is reborn. Alas, the dialogue fails in its commitment to engagement and my novel becomes a symptom of the problem it seeks to correct; it becomes an autobiographical meta-fiction. I need to correct that too.
So I sit myself at the head of the ‘I’ at that T-point. I remember my character in my experimental novel of the half blind Oedipus without my specs which I will not wear because it makes me look my age, but also because I want to resist reality. I decide not to let power work its politics through reality by inviting the solipsistic romantic bourgeois in me to authenticate monologic spaces in the multifarious dialogic imaginary space otherwise called reality.
Well! I am a bourgeois romantic as only a Bihari in India can be. You really need to have bought into the politics of socialist-nationalist dream to continue to become a bourgeois in these times. However, I am exposed since birth to a certain cosmopolitanism which compels me in spite of myself towards disengagement, an unbecoming, a death.
My intention is a romantic replay of the medieval rack between four horses, after a slow and tidy process of self-segregation, for which I require an accomplice. I worked towards it and tried to barter love for death, but that engagement is not allowed in this saturated cesspool where women and other such marginalised, oppressed and regionalised segments of the Indian population rehearse and theatrise workable political bonds. I looked for a role for the bourgeoise romantic in that theatre. I wanted to be the TS Eliot of post-modernism and ended up being its Charles Lamb. The sadhus and sanyasis, the communist and fascists and the centrists, the bahujanis and the Gandhians, the godly and the ungodly, the revolutionaries and the pacifists after Buddha’s Sangam dare continue their linear journey towards the research of truth.
There are a few late-nighters sitting on the curb. The early ducks are not yet out. They look at me in surprise as I sit myself in the middle of the road. My next move is crucial. I will give them just enough time to become curious, yet be swift lest they give in to their impulsive reaction before curiosity kills it. The flash of the blade is crucial; otherwise they will be forced to move and think to understand what was happening. The moment they pass from this ‘passive’-active state to that ‘active’-passive state, I will lose them. With an unhurried movement I pull out the knife and let its blade catch light from the street lamp at the curb. I let it hang there flashing like a miniature Kubla Khan sword; then very slowly I slide the tip of the sword along the bridge of the nose and into the cornea, circle it around the white till I reach the top, then with one smooth jerk I gauge it out. There are some gasps as I do so but I drown them with a long and heavy groan. The people who are on the verge of moving settle back. I see the exasperation on their faces and know instantly that they are ready for the show. I reach for the right eye next. Now every movement is being watched carefully and coupled with gasps and easy but whispered conversation as if afraid of disturbing me. They are already going for the details, I see. When I am done, it will be there for them to make something out of it, and for once they won’t be able to say that we write half-baked meaningless nonsense because it is easy to write. I can only leave here some traces lest they fall into the well-meaning trap of intentionality or originality.
I wanted to either find a role for him in the theatre or, true to romantic ideals, die to live on forever. I can not find a role for him and I do not want him to continue to become a bourgeois romantic even in death. That is why I decide to create a role, a symbolic death characteristic of romanticism, for him in the resistance to power. So I sit myself at that T-point where innumerable ‘Is’, formed by thousands everyday all along beginning from the entrance beyond which is an even bigger jungle of Is, Os, Qs, Cs and meaningless jungle of alphabets, words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, books, papers or just a jumble, converge everyday. That T-point is probably the only transparent symbol left of what Indira’s JNU became within five years of its formation. The catalyst came from Sanjay Gandhi and the final reaction took place during emergency. Communism won hands down in that battlefield of ideologies. But the transformation of Marxism to post-Marxism is not as smooth. On the contrary, in stead of the locus of communism’s subversive appropriation of post-modernism, it becomes post-modernism’s appropriation of Marxism.
I remember that walk on the ‘I’ of the ‘T’. It is a short walk to the head of the ‘I’, I take almost every morning when it is time to go to sleep. Then I dash right or left depending on whether I am in the mood for a tea or a long walk. In fact the ‘I’ I tread on painstakingly several times every day; not just here but almost everywhere in the campus. That is how I form the ‘I’. The T, you could say, forms only accidentally by aggregating all those dashes right and left. The dash to the left sometimes ends where the tail of the Q begins; often when in the mood for a long saunter I continue and complete the O, and back along the tail till I again reach the head of the ‘I’. At other times and lately mostly I dash to the right and continue along the C, at a slight angle to the ‘I’, and back along the sickle to the point where the cigarette shop and the bus stand are, and where the walk always begins. When I walk back along the ‘I’, I think I am undoing and unlearning the ‘I’ formed everyday. The morning I talk about though, the walk ends at the tip of the ‘I’; the ‘I’ I formed or the ‘I’ I unformed?
To be continued….never
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Sunday, June 13, 2010
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