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.