A Mirror in the Empty
philosophy
So who wins?
The one who is angry, despair of life, she writes,
‘Life is a mistake, it is filled with mistakes and errors, you are haunted by your past mistakes, leads you to make a bunch of new mistakes! It is horrible! All I do is wrong, I take wrong decisions, chase wrong paths, and say wrong words! I am done. I hate everything. Please cut me a slack!’
Heat cools down, attention passes on to other things, for a while, she thinks again, she sees again, she starts writing again,
‘It is like writing, you make mistakes, you write again, you learn from past mistakes, you do not repeat it in the new, because you know now, but there comes another mistake, you learn another one. It’s a process, it’s a flux, and hence it’s not a straight line. You make mistake, you learn, you may repeat it again, because it’s a long run. Who keeps the score? If anyone, it’s you. What is your existence beyond life? If you are discussed, when you are gone, if you are remembered, when you are dead, it is by life, by another lived ones. A world devoid of life, might remember you with your elements and matters: carbons and oxygens, to its atomic level, but that’s not you, that’s all, all lives possess some or the same elements, every other life possesses those atoms as in you. Life celebrates life, life of the lived, life of the dead. You do not exist beyond life. Life does not exist beyond life.’
So really, who wins?
Header-image source: IMDB, Room, 2015 movie
©Moulina Bhattacharya
The curtain parts asunder
And the curtain parts asunder! You wise sinner! You believe in larger reality! Learn but don’t drift away. Discern but don’t be consumed. Embrace the beyond but not the oblivion…
Holograph of Dreams
Dream-tropes
Dream is such a concept! It is more astounding than its regular apprehension! Once Freud stirred it real hard, not sure if anybody brought a revolution of that range ever again. Well, it is not going to be leaning on such concept or theory. But I wonder why dream has not been subjected to the mainstream episteme! Dream has impact over so many things, such as, everyday thought, emotions (dormant or active), actions (may be) and many more. There are bunch of famous or not-so-famous or even not-known-at-all people put down their everyday dreams, decode them and give them real meaning. American novelist Jack Kerouac composed his Book of Dreams after his day-to-day (or rather night-to-night) dreams. So many people do not even remember their dreams or may be simply ignore them (especially those whose actions are driven by what, is hard to track on). I am a wonderer of dreams forever. Those dreams I remember from last night or the one from long ego, suddenly popped up through a course of actions, felt like déjà vu. I stop, think and try to find out the deformed metaphor hidden in them. I have just a little familiarity with psychoanalysis and this genre fascinates me.
There are certain places or emotions, I figured, keep appearing in my dreams like recurrent themes! Among other prevalent themes like space, decadence, being chased, relieved life, meeting the desire and so on, the theme of landscape is very prominent (more like topographical dreams)! Most of the story revolves around me, discovering a mystery-place led by narrow lanes, not fully impassable but a bit risky, quite secluded from crowd and common interest, as if anyone scarcely knows of its existence! Each time it would appear in different forms, once it was a waterfall upon a small waterbody, placed like a surprise amidst a lost forest. Another time it was a cliff from where the best sun set could be seen: the perfect tint of orange, yellow ochre and burn sienna syncing in a socked paper! There would be a shadow tree, black, unidentified. I would sit there calm in stasis like nothing bad had ever happened to me, like a newborn’s clean slate, only cherishing every scoop of what my eyes could see. A few people would be there this time, but they are strange, as if they do not belong to my world or time, they would walk past me like I am invisible, some of them would carry dry branches fallen off the trees stacked on their head, they would work their own, rustic life, like of countryside. I would have mixed emotions of suspense, worry (of my unnoticed absence/escape from home/ work) yet satisfied of the ‘terrific beauty’ I was relishing (Oh! It rings a bell! Like Thomas Wilson in the island of Capri, straight from Maugham’s story? But it started even before I read the story). Feels like I have travelled the time backward, in the primitive earth when it was not crowded, either with people, or our complexities. Like the narrow labyrinthine lane is a time-tunnel separating the world of now and then. The place always feels like an ideal space for the self to soothe and erase the trampling burdens; a proper escapade. Sense of being chased by unknown danger, impeding thorn walls and fear of exposure remains, for I liked the fact that I am the only one knew the existence of the place and did not want it to be littered by others.
As per the interpretation of my dream goes, I found many aspects. My love for solitude and seclusion or taking the road ‘less travelled by’ is basically inspired by my hatred for being commanded and competed. Even in real course of actions I am at my best when I am unnoticed or away from the race. Comparison and imposed expectations are those thorn walls encumber my brain like a negative reinforcement. I have always been influenced by others’ actions, I had to, that littered my spontaneous self/ space, and I think, I could have had done far better without those mental hydraulic pressures affecting my headspace. At least that is what I think, and thought is pulled away in the Subconscious, eventually bubbles up as dreams. Talking about how dream actually intervenes real actions or emotions seems like another string to pull, but later. I have felt its effect, transitory but effective, because it is a circle, differently processed but it is to acknowledge that one’s thoughts sediment, crumple and evaporate as dreams, hence dreams are the mental projection of thoughts through processed metaphors, sometimes much complex, sometimes linear, but I believe, an analytic mind can decipher its own tricks. I have had some exquisite dreams, difficult to narrate or make them sound Hitchcock-ish, but every time they left me in awe about how our brain works, really!
Postscripts: Speaking of metaphors, even this web space works like a metaphor to me, not like a ghost-space but it is seen/read by people around the globe (especially by those whom I do not even know). Recently I was going through a social media survey by an institutional research group where they asked a very thoughtful yet factual question, to rephrase, it was quite like, whether or not my social media impressions leave tracks of my lifestyle or current status. This space might not have such serious coherence like that of the question but it does feel like the mystery-place, one might read and explore or it becomes solely mine, only this time I don’t have the fear of it being littered.
Photograph: ©Moulina Bhattacharya
Lotus Moon
Moon Blossom
Dreamy petal cocoon, stretching on the sepal. I wish you wake…
Through your petal nest, into which you have veiled your pollen chest!
Shine! Onto the sky of the earth,
Put on the Cirrus gown. Enchant the night gazers heart.
Ease your anxious frown! Don’t you remember,
Once you lulled the Lotos-Eaters’ eyes?
Relieved the war crushed brain of Odysseus! When he pulled his train
To your island of perpetual afternoon?
You are the oleander, over the cloud and the sea! Captivated the seers eye!
I can keep looking at you! Forever can be a while…
Spring atop you floret moon…
Bloom away you intrepid lune!
Moon Bloomed
The July moon, shining full! Mystic dark, dimming light,
Smiles the lantern of night… At the lotus plume!
But now with your flourished crest,
I see you drowsing death…
Feathers falling away! Your hour bell tolls!
Day is coming up, You will wane and depart!
But You will come again I know,
As another moon bud!
I’ll see your regal bloom! With my whole heart!
You will surpass my life time… Only with your half-a-day!
We bloom together and wane…
In the same nature-continuum.
Chaos Patterned…
Eternal repose of shrouded corpse
Never encumbers,
Once the string’s cut by Atropose…
Each of the countless peregrines
Travels through traverses
Since the journey begins.
Like in every level
It revamps or repels,
The journey has no end.
The apparent end
Makes it blend
Where it all started.
And..
Starts again…
From dust to dust of the urn
Even chaos follows it’s given paten!
The pattern,
That’s beyond apprehension,
It moves forward,
Seen through retrospection.
It’s woven,
Preempted or improvised
Supersedes knowledge
Emptied or sufficed.
Vastly misconstrued!
Lost or regained
It aims to forge into
Quite different
From where it all started!
Chaos to cosmos you turn
It’s there in the Creation!
The Event Horizon
Society expects conformity. And too much conformity engulfs one’s individuality. Being too good or too bad gives you identity or else you are ‘lost in space’, I mean into the abys of existence, perhaps.
‘You showed individuality’ said she to Princess Margaret, ‘and that made people panic. They don’t want individuality. The last person who showed “character” took almost the ship down.’(The Crown)
Hence it appears that conformity and individualism do not go hand in hand, but can’t they be allied? Where individuality and identity share their light, conformity is a gigantic shadow. Their coexistence could be a haze, a chaos but that’s what runs in the universe. Each planet, per se, is followed by its given trajectory, implies its conformity to its governing star having perfectly balanced individuality or rather say identity. So do the other unnumbered celestial entities, one goes supernova and slurped by a black hole. There comes the subtlest dots of existence, the humanity has its questionable outlook for the preservation of traditions, meaningless deference, rigid practices and crores of self-made labels to follow and unfollow.
The matter of fact is that the extremities collide where cohabitation sustains harmony. But is it that easy? You may say collision is the one that creates, equilibria stands still. That’s why it’s a mosaic, an admixture of each a thing altogether.
Reverie
I don’t understand that when things go smooth, success is assured, time moves relatively fast or it seems fast because it is over?
Now time is stale, or is it? The progression of life is slow, or is it? It actually is my career which is steering slow or may be I’m on the making. Questions, perplexities are having their busiest time with me. Procrastination has always been there. I would often question myself about my choices, become dubious about the decisions I have made earlier and blame myself for it could be better but I am wavering in the fringes where I am not sure whether to stick around or take a plunge. May be I did not even understand myself or recognize what I actually want. Thus the dart is still levitating before the red spot. Am I beating around the bush or standing by the right track? I know it is meaningless to analyze one’s own position and philosophizing it rather than making any attempt to improve it. But mind takes up the hallway leading toward compartments of possibilities.
Everything is possible in imagination, semi-possible in a reverie and dream would be the weird mixture of the two.
There, sometimes I am teaching a bunch of students in a college. The college would probably be made up of those walls and facades planted somewhere in my residual memory, a miscellany of the intitutions I have come across. I am confused. The faces of the students seem pleasant.
The reverie, then, would take me to an unknown ground that might have been emanated from some places I’d read about or my thoughts have culminated such a rare construction! Well so I am a trainee there, I suppose. This is ridiculous! I would rehearse those things that would ever happen. I would have bouts of conversations with those whom I wanted to meet. Some seemed as expected, some not.
I am no oneiromancer!
Yes, you may say that I am in a tug of war where career options are heavy, hence these reveries. The Covid period is working like a blackhole, near which time is getting dilated. But I am waiting. I am clueless. Wish I could reinstate the harmony, I’d move forward with it! Whatsoever, that trance gets passed I’m still in the place where I was, still struggling with plethora of complex feelings, lying in that juncture where the exit of this labyrinth might be just some steps away but I am unaware of the algorithm…
Quid quaeris? What do you seek?
Human mind is inquisitive. But who said that minds of other species are not? Do organisms have mind(s)? Is it feminine to express emotion? Is tolerance masculine then? Why then masculinity has to make treatise with dominance? Why femininity is odd when it admixes masculinity or the vise versa?
Zillions of such elementary questions had been broiled in old skulls or have been broiling up in that of newbies. Not picking that hive ad nauseam. But isn’t the basic problem sprung in the process of generalization(or overgeneralization, so to speak)? Why something has to be only that thing? Why something can not be anything? Who demarcates all these? (Oh! That question is also one of those primevals! Many a time knocked.)
Is every human mind inquisitive? Has anyone penetrated the mind of an other? Who shows to be inquisitive is s/he indeed inquisitive? Gender roles are already under scanner, it has been perpetually.
Why denigrate? Is the human race a hive of nimrods? No, of course not, if they were, why would they rerun the big bang? Why would they deplete the primordial resources and brood over its replenishment? Why would they skulk behind war machines, hoard them and sing slogans of global peace?
It is individual. Hold back the clusters and classifications. Ideologies, ethnicities, religions, genders, races et al are there but above all it is a single reaction that incites a chain of it. One entity holds caskets of ideals and perceptions. Like a genome it technically has no match of a cent percent with another. Each of us is unique, individual. Classifications are manipulated manifestations. Chaos and imperfections form the core of creation even which holds its (manipulative) name called, cosmos. Nomenclature leaves loose ends to its conception(s).
All are foolish questions before the concrete. ‘quem quaerere?‘ Or whom do you seek(to give answers)?
No, this is not a complaint.
ex nihilo…
The perception of reality appears to be concrete. But the actual reality is in ‘disappearence’. It is like the residual self image at its vanishing point, one can see but can hardly etch its real form. Eyes can barely catch the process but see the outcome. It is a causal nexus, or an enigma. Reality separates dream from itself but the irony is that both of them are amorphus. Reality hovers, but one can feel its presence in every breath. It reinforces or it purges. Before the ultimate exaltation it may rip apart into lees of sheer possibilities. Dream, on the other hand is a simulation of reality. It surrenders only one time when it renders and it never happens because it never happened. The seer is perplexed enough with her/his exit from the simulated reality and entrance to the enigmatic reality. The truth grins wide…
Words, Meaning and the Nothing 