Darkness liberating me ....

There and back again

Hi all. Well the breach has been surmounted. I am finally about to use my web log as it was originally intended to be used - as a medium for socially dysfunctional people to articulate their sentiments. The following may thus be construed as technically speaking being my first 'blog' post, the preceding matter entirely comprising of literary compositions of dubious merit.

But hold it.... The muse of literature strikes again, “This can be no personal narrative”, she thunders, “It is the curvature of the huge sand-glass of Time that directs the flow of your thoughts.”

Yes, ma’am.

This post is set temporally, in the direct, sleep-deprived, stunningly sober aftermath of the annual Godavari Hostel Night - the one pure frat night in all of IIT culture.
Spatially, for adherents of genius loci, this post is set a furlong away from the motherland, as the author lay peaceably on the waters of the Bay of Bengal off Besant Nagar Beach, below a profusely star-studded sky, at one in the morning.

It all started with a requirement for cigarettes to fuel the festivities at the aforementioned orgy. When Haddi, my companion in this adventure, was appointed the fag-Saki and presented with a bike key and injunctions to get the required commodity as soon as possible, he naturally sought me out as a companion on his perilous quest - to drive 3 kms to the main gate and get a couple of packs of cigarettes.

Of course, with us thrown together, the poor nicotine addicts were not getting their cigarettes anytime soon, were they? No sir, our first task was to get the mechanical beast some chemical nourishment. Next, fortuitously, we found Shiva and Chaitanya returning to the hostel and passed the cigarette buck to them gratefully.

Free of our chore, and any guilt at having commandeered a hapless comrade's bike, we hied for the great open spaces, with as much alacrity as a poor 100 cc engine had to offer. Where does acceleration derive its amazing fascination from? Since time immemorial, we have always commemorated speed, an essential component of natural selection in the days of tooth and claw; not that irrelevant in the world of broadband internet either. But it is a recognized physiological fact that the human sensory perception is incapable of gauging speed. The individual excitement to motion, as opposed to objective archetypal responses to measures of speed, depends entirely on the magnitude of acceleration.

Why does the body instinctively perceive and appreciate acceleration while remaining oblivious to its better known offspring - speed? The answer, one presumes, lies in an extrapolation of the Freudian Pleasure Principle, which may be credited to the good doctor himself. Away from his analysis of the conscious and its urges, Freud, in his study of dreams, unequivocally assigned connotations of sexual desire and gratification to the act of flying.

In 1996, designers at a Singapore amusement park researched roller-coaster rides around the world and concluded that the enjoyment that visitors derived therefrom was, in a very large part, due to the autonomous physiological response. This was found to correspond with the physiological response to sex. 80 years after his time, another Freudian hypothesis had found independent validation.

Which, of course, sheds a lot of light on why exactly Schumacher makes $50 million a year, why NBA basketball players are the highest paid professionals in the world, why the Hindu deity of virility, Hanuman possesses the power of flight and why one rather drunk and one rather long-bearded post-adolescent find a zip through empty Chennai streets at midnight so much fun.

So, basically, we fooled around for a bit, getting our money's worth out of the contraption and enlivening the night with, if memory serves me right, a chorused rendition of 'Break on through', a cover of 'Roadhouse Blues' by Haddi and a guitar solos included rendition of Hendrix's 'All Along the Watchtower' by yours truly. Heaven praise the sluggard constabulary of this great metropolis.

Finally, having run out of wild ideas, we made for the beach, Haddi a reluctant companion, for I explained to him that I had suddenly had this urge to bathe in the sea in my birthday suit. I think he saw jail bars and parole papers dancing before his eyes. Be that as it may, we arrived at Besant Nagar Beach at one and slunk to the shoreline undetected. Haddi then firmly declined my invitation to join in the aquatics and sat down beside my bag and slippers as I made for the primal element.

It was scary to begin with, post-midnight is high tide time at Besant Nagar and high tide is never a good time to go swimming, even if you've gone to the Delhi State Juniors. My modus operandi normally is to dive in head first as soon as I am reasonably sure I there is enough water for me to not get it stuck in the sand. Whoever heard of a sea ostrich? Ridiculous!

Partly because of the somber might of the rising tide, partly because of my anticipation of a new experience (Ah! How scarce they keep getting!), this time I chose to walk in gradually, letting the waves cover my feet, then walking in farther so the next time they lap the edge of my shorts; walk in farther ad libidum. Walking in to waist depth, in order not to aggravate the homophobic Haddi’s feelings, I stripped, tied my T-shirt and shorts together and bunched them into one hand. Onward!

It was when I first took one on the chest that the experience may actually be considered to have started. The farther in I went, the stronger the waves came, knocking me back, and fiercer still would I yell in delight and plough back farther into the sea. Thus was the status quo, until the seventh wave finally put in an appearance.

You can see it from far off, a seventh wave. In the daytime, it looks magnificent, its crests glittering green and white tongues of froth licking its crystal liquid lips. Many have given me piggy-back rides and many have engulfed me instantaneously in a murky world of aquamarine green.

But at night-time, it’s different.

Before your eyes, the horizon rises, a very murky blackness on a very murky blackness, the world tilts before your eyes as your head bobs on the water’s surface. Higher it rises, still higher, the angle rises very slowly; you feel you’re falling forward into an irrational eternity. Then it bursts over you, and it takes you deep into its womb, and it accords you the visceral warmth and softness, the primal force - throbbing with immense power, yet broodingly nurturing. Then it coughs you back out as it expends itself on the beach.

Engrossed in playing with the waves, I suddenly realized I had forgotten which way the beach lay. Of course, it was child’s play to find out, it was currently out of sight in the dark, but all waves naturally seek the shore. But I refrained from bringing my reason into play, preferring to allow my soul to absorb the immensity of this contrived beautiful situation as sincerely as possible – lost on the ocean.

So I did what sailors did when they were lost on the ocean, in the days before Marconi took the fun out of the business. I lay supine on the ocean’s swell, hands behind my head, and gazed up at the stars, which, to my extreme delight, were out in large numbers. I could not, of course, emulate the seamen in actually sleeping on the water for, it may be remembered, they do that far away from shorelines that cause waves that would wake even Rip van Winkle in a hurry.

Imagine the scene, gentle reader, a vast bowl of darkness studded with jewels of light above, cold, ethereal, immutable. Below, the warm rocking swells of the ocean, the cradle of all life, if Darwin is to be believed. And darkness withal, darkness everywhere - reason lies somnolent in the silent watches of the night.

It is a strange loneliness this, that descends on one under such unworldly conditions. I, for one, in all seriousness, seldom trust myself to venture into the ocean unattended. My friends here will tell you that that I pester them incessantly to go to the beach with me. And yet, when I go alone, I do not venture into the water.

It is not drowning that I fear; I fear that I do not fear drowning. The sea calls me on, farther, deeper – it calls irresistibly in a voice so ancient I can discern no vestige of it, and yet it tugs at every fiber of my being. I would love to follow, as long as I could, I would love to rock in my giant little cradle when I lay my head down on it for the last time. I swear it, I would love to. Hence, my little voice of reason decrees that I not go swimming in the ocean unattended.

Be it climbing up a Grade IV rock face without rappel, clips and rope, be it racing an 8 year old Maruti with a suspect suspension at 150 kmph, be it swimming across the Ganges at Rishikesh to the entertainment of the local populace, be it lying on a pebbled river bed, with just my nose sticking out, and basking drowsily in a hot summer sun, the call of life, its urgent, impatient, hot-blooded urge, is much louder in my ears than the wise, plaintive cry for its sustenance.

But faint though it is, it still impinges on my ears half an hour later, when my inchoate sea sense tells me to get out of the water which is getting rather inclement. I swim back therefore, to where I am in my depth and stand facing the waves, let them batter me and drive me back to the shore, I do not depart ungraciously, it is they who usher me out for having out-stayed my welcome. Eventually, I arrive to within knee depth and remember that I had better pull my clothes back on lest Haddi go into conniptions. On with the rags and I stumble out with the waves administering some parting shots in ill-humor.

Haddi knows better than to go into the “Look at you, you’re crazy” mode. He’s known me long enough. He merely states firmly that he will drive hereon lest some diligent police officer get some untimely business. Seeing that his breath still reeks of whisky a mile away, it is the quintessential case of the pot calling the kettle black.

But my maritime experience had rendered me introspective and so I did not contest the point and acceded to my hazardous role as pillion rider. One if the most glaring examples of lack of empathy in our world is the sad case of pillion riders. The driver, oblivious of the hair-raising travails of his passenger, guns his engine to ever-greater speeds. A case may be made out for the superior diplomatic skills of women as being a mental manifestation of having to adjust to the various demands of being pillion riders to uncouth speed-junkie oafs. Unless, of course, one happens to enjoy the thrill, the uncertainty and the looming threat of physical harm.

And this is where the adventure story per se ends. Accounts of how we returned to the hostel to find Bacchanalia reigning supreme would then eventually brush upon how I spent two hours listening to our hostel rock band play and drunken seniors telling me how to run the hostel next year on, how I spent the hours between 4 to 6 playing the blues in a dark room with the only light being the seven segment display on the guitar processor and the only sounds being my amateurish compositions, interspersed with pieces by Jimi. SRV and Clapton, and the rhythmic snoring of the room’s worthy occupant, Condom.

All of those are worthy subjects for commentary just as well, of course. Right now, however, the author has shot his bolt. It was his intention to intensively chronicle a situation-induced thought process, something he had rather stopped doing recently, insofar as the written word is concerned. It remains to you, gentle reader, to judge how satisfactory and aesthetically pleasing the endeavor has been. With this, I take your leave, for the nonce.

Damped Cogitations

Hi all, a rainy day, a bunked D slot class, a lot of late night introspection.......voila! a new post. It makes me feel very happy, a lot of things are conspiring to get me to shrug off my long depressedness and come up and feel the sun. Now, if only the NYT thing works out, I could really be sunny. Beware, damped cogitations dead ahead.

Damped Cogitations

It started raining today as I was walking back from classes in the morning. And I stopped and went up to my usual secluded haunt and welcomed the storm-clouds as they gathered from the South, arms akimbo, eyes half-shut and reverently gazing upwards and clothes, hair and beard rippling in a wind so stiff I had to fix my stance so as to not be blown off and fall 36 meters to the ground. I waited till the first cloud burst, then I climbed down and walked back to the hostel, getting absolutely soaked by the time I got here. There is a particularly beautiful passage in Jack London’s book “Call of the Wild” that goes

He was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he had drawn. He linked the past with the present, and the eternity behind him throbbed through him in a mighty rhythm to which he swayed as the tides and seasons swayed. He sat by John Thornton's fire, a broad-breasted dog, white-fanged and long-furred; but behind him were the shades of all manner of dogs, half-wolves and wild wolves, urgent and prompting, tasting the savor of the meat he ate, thirsting for the water he drank, scenting the wind with him, listening with him and telling him the sounds made by the wild life in the forest, dictating his moods, directing his actions, lying down to sleep with him when he lay down, and dreaming with him and beyond him and becoming themselves the stuff of his dreams.

And then again, in an earlier passage

Every night, regularly, at nine, at twelve, at three, they lifted a nocturnal song, a weird and eerie chant, in which it was Buck's delight to join. With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself--one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. And that he should be stirred by it marked the completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages.

As I walked in the pouring rain, face upturned and tongue lolling out, lapping up drops of rain water with an instinctive legerdemain, it wasn’t I alone that walked. I walked with my ancestors and theirs, and theirs dating back to the timeless past when bands of nomads found a river valley in the heart of a sub-continent and eked out a living at the mercy of the vagaries of the river and the rain.

I am but a link in a chain that stretches both to the past and the future. The past controls me, guides me inexorably, as the mighty current of a river guides a paper boat. And so, when I rejoice at the rain, I do so even though the days when my own family actually depended on rain water for its sustenance are beyond living memory. Today, as I walked with ghosts from the past, I was a medium of expression for their joys, their hopes, and their elation at the continuity of life.

Every day is a cornucopia of new experiences; they flow out of the glacier that is Time in an unending melody of transitions. And yet, the ones that register, the ones that remain etched in memory are so very preciously few.

My paternal grandfather is 86. He stays with us most of the time now. A couple of years ago, he was really sinking and since I happened to be at home, I was de facto nurse. Now that does not merely involve feeding, medicating, injecting, bathing, cleaning up after etc. it also involves listening to him ramble on. Tunnel vision, they call it. As the brain cells begin to die, short-term memory is lost and child-hood details become extremely vivid. Erstwhile forgotten memories of childhood are an old man’s inseparable companions.

Can it be that childhood experiences, being much more instinctive and hence not as individualistic as experiences arising of adult volition, are much more memorable because they are closer to the collective racial memory?

To take an example, I cannot remember exactly when I last lay in a pit full of squelchy mud in a pouring rain; in fact, I don’t think I’ve actually done it ever, but I can remember the sensations of softness, coldness, warmth, goose-bumps on the backs of my arms. That is a racial memory, almost as old as the mud and the rain itself.

Who does not remember experiencing a localized diffused brightness at one point or the other in one’s life, concomitant with feelings of security, happiness and contentment? Of an instant, we hark back to when we were young infants ensconced far inside the depths of a community cave, gazing through sleepy eyes at the fire that stands guard at the entrance, keeping a mysterious dark otherness at bay, ages ago when the world was young.

As children, we are all as afraid of the dark as the pitiful Neanderthal who slept in trees clutching a wooden stump, fearfully pricking his ears at the savage sounds prowling the jungle below. As children, we are all fascinated by fire, by the act of burning. Has anyone ever set a pile of paper alight and not gazed intently at the flames consuming the frail whiteness with its hypnotizing slow certitude?

What causes the universal positive emotion at the break of day, the plaudits to the beauty of the sunrise? Is it too hard to imagine the relaxing of the vigil at the break of day, as the predators of the night slink away, foiled, to their lairs, as the embers of the camp-fire are allowed to go out, having stood guard alongside their Master.

We have moved on to civilized living and our intellectual currents are increasingly directed towards the abstract and designed to assimilate nothing but an increasingly mechanized and psychotic present. We choose to ignore the fact that the psychic power of experiences, the undercurrents that hold the highest psychological value for humanity, are rooted firmly in the past, even in the pre-historic past.

The sea, does it not invoke emotions of security, angst and serenity? Looking at that vast bluish-green carpet of stormy tranquility, ‘the same to Noah as to me’, looking at the unending marches of the stars of a cold, clear December night, we see what the first fathers of men saw, a vision of immortal immutability.

“…….and because all tales must end, all music must end, all life must end, at the very end we say Khattam Shud.”
- Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Death is an intrinsic and innocuous part of natural evolution; it is merely in its crude anthropomorphic manifestation that it frightens us. Death stares at us from the last page of every book we read, the final triumphant note of every piece of music one hears, the final scene of every film that one views. Have we all not been there?

Death is a demagogue that unerringly incites the most poignant of human emotions – those of irretrievable loss and change, of the fragility of existence, the tenuousness of consciousness and its impotence in the face of Time.

It is in contrast to this, that the experiences we speak of today are different. They offer a view of an alternative, an eternal, changeless alternative. They offer us the chance to believe that ‘some things will never change’. Note the comforting ring of the phrase, though used in a cerebral context. They thus address humanity’s basic insecurity, the need to believe that life will survive, collectively, if not individually.

All these experiences are psychologically speaking, ‘womb archetypes’. The quest for the comfort and security of the womb is indelibly etched in the mammalian psyche as an unremembered, timeless, dreamlike existence before the advent of reality and confusion and pain - the tumult and trauma of birth.

It is instructive to note here, that an anthropomorphic allegory to suit this description would uncannily resemble the Semitic legend of the Garden of Eden and the Adamite Fall. It may be remembered, en passant, that the serpent has been recognized as a phallic symbol by cultures both traditional and contemporary, as a quick perusal of journals purveying feminine pulchritude would easily reveal.

The sea, the night sky, the mother’s breast, the sounds of the night, lying in the first hours of the dawn on a bed of grass bedewed, the smell of damp earth, the coziness that ensues from pulling a blanket up over the top of one’s head and constricting one’s world to a small, warm, dark little place – all these experiences contain elements of wish fulfillment, of ‘returning to the womb’, partially or completely, literally or metaphorically, of self-reassurance of the permanence of certain memories - memories almost tangible.

The presence of ‘womb archetypes’ then, is what sets certain experiences apart from others as being more memorable, timeless, precious etc. It is the author’s contention that the psychological health of a community may be measured by the profusion of womb archetypes in its mainstream culture.

This presents a far more logical explanation, than vague individual lifestyle-based formulations, for the relative paucity of psychotic disorders in agrarian cultures and a plethora of the same in all classes (but particularly the nouveau riche) in rapidly developing industrial economies, viz. Puritan Britain and modern day India. The similarities between these two societies have been remarked upon, arrived at, and explained by other parallel sociological approaches just as well.

This essay is meant to be nothing but a monologue on the void in modern psychological theory on the significance of the uncanny commonality in the relative acuity of perception and memory of events for the vast concourse of humanity. There is much that remains to be said of the validity of the theory of womb archetypes. The observations that lead to its formulation are well nigh indisputable; the actual theory is merely an intuitive juxtaposition of Freudian psychoanalysis and the Jungian ‘collective unconscious’.

Time, and the Harvard Socio-Anthropology Department, will judge the validity of this hypothesis. As for me, I am almost beatifically happy at the thought that the memory of this moment is not just my moldy T-shirt that sticks sopping wet to my torso, it is also the residuum of centuries of experience that sticks to my unconscious, guiding my volition and shaping my apperception.

My subconscious directs my conscious to glow with satisfaction and contentment as I end; with the feeling that some things won’t, that some things will last forever, in this pouring April rain.