Words like you and I

Words like you and I, they are meant to console you, assure you that yes, you exist, I exist, and we are all family. The irony of their emptiness is part of their charm. See, I’m already referring to them as things, objects, people, who have qualities that distinguish them from others. Our language is a populated place, with words neatly arranging themselves in rows, or strewing themselves in pathways, there are always...things that occupy space, written space, narrative space, discursive space, physical space. In other words, in all this jostling, we (the beauty of language) are afforded with a space which we can inhabit. There are others who would uphold that words are not expressions but are spoken, enunciated in an endless system, self-perpetrating, self-sufficient. Who can dispute their position? But we, who wander in these little white spaces between this and that, that and this, climbing from word to word to climb onto more words, we, who are entirely dependent on them as a matter of distinction, find their hollowness consolatory, their lack of substance reassuring.  We find no trouble in being endlessly replicated through them, or acting as a medium through which they can be enunciated.

Systems are important. I’m not disputing that fact. Rigour is the only thing that can lead us anywhere. There are many who would say that in fact, rigour is not the means, but the end. I despair to hear suchlike. For I am naturally not given to rigour, but to ease, as if the fairy that presided over my birth conferred this little property unto me. But of course, situations have been such that they have allowed this native ease to exist, rather than attempt to evict it, but I say, yet. There is no glass into the future. If thrust into a situation that demands rigour as an alternative to dissipation, I might have to choose the former, swallowing all my personal predilections. But is it a crime to exist on ease, in ease? If situations haven’t formed me, am I not formed? Isn’t this particular combination not good enough? Not enough variety, you say, not enough resilience. Am I a plant?

These spaces allow me to be intensely polemical, intensely defensive, helping to bolster my flagging self-esteem. But how long does it last? Words, are after all shells we play with.

Favourite box

You know those days which make you feel something special is going to happen. Well, the sunlight is dazzling, bright, clear, I’m sure you know what I mean, like filtered through a diamond. It’s just not light but a clear brilliance that imbues everything with power. The blue of the sky is everywhere; on the floors, in the windows, on tabletops, on unwashed coffee mugs. It’s a weird feeling that constricts your chest ever so little, is it so light, so beautiful, is there a meaning to it after all? Everything’s multiplied; the air seems so much wider, the world bigger. The breeze through the curtains is evocative of my Enid Blyton outdoors, the entire rooms shot with blue brings me back something I worshipped as a child. My favourite box of all. 

Objects

Just the household objects that you can hold and rotate awkwardly in clasped hands, and the ones you can’t, those standing sentinel behind you, around you, above you, below you, which don’t vanish when you switch off the lights, they are what you call me, and mine. All the peels and slime that you wash off slips quietly out of sight and slides down the ladder no one uses any more, slipping, dripping, sadly out of sight. The dog that sneezes in front of your gate, what do you do with it? Do you express indignation at the lack of etiquette, or do you fondly mark its movements, as if they were part of a Disney motion picture? Day crawls from day to day, and the ultimate reprieve gets a little more used up. At a certain point, it will go from a little used up, to almost nothing left, and you would wonder where the grains flew.

All the ugly, awkward things that mesmerized you, will come back to claim their share. All the grotesque suns and the exploding Uranus’ will find a home, and the twisted expressions with inartistic gestures will thaw and melt. The feces you have longed to touch since childhood, will come to you and stand proudly, denying you the pleasure of touching them. The fatty, redolent smell will mingle with that of tuberoses that bloom no more, and rot very, very slowly. Fruit forks will double in size and remain by your plates. This is not the end.

This is.

Fruits

The effect of natural produce gone wrong, of monstrous apples and rotting grapes the size of eye-balls in a marshy, clayey land, where footprints get smudged in without remorse, is like the call of the Sirens. The sense of plenteousness and decay, of plentous decay, therefore, has an odour like a rotting carcass, which throws us off and pulls us in. Then the image of moving down the clayey slope to approach a shallow trough where dozens have left their seeds to grow, seeds the size of mango pits, but more elegantly shaped and faintly purple in hue, breathes in some measure of normalcy because of the industry involved. I’m doing something, you say to yourself, not merely ambling by the roots of mammoth trees, which are dirty and covered with cobwebs, where piles of grapes dandle on the clay, and just walking, just surveying these fruits, and getting caught up in its orbit.

The seeds, they feel waxy, and look accordingly shiny, as if the pulp has very recently been peeled away from them. Holding one in your hand, watching the scores of others laying on the ground, defying efforts to be buried, makes you want to dump it and run away. Never return to this clayey place, where the ground holds on to your feet, where fruitfulness has decayed, where nothing new grows. But still, you make a hole like one a rat would’ve made, and push the seed in, trying to cover it up with the excess clay. Before leaving the place, however, you submerge the land in water, such that the holes are filled and the seeds push up and bob up and down.

Vestal virgin

I can never really express what a budding bough means to me, for no fault of yours or mine. It’s just that some imaginings do not yield themselves up to be re-formed, re-imagined, as neatly as others seemingly do. So it is of no surprise that I can’t describe what Corinna’s May-morning suggests to me, even after all these years of its having being written, ‘shorn’ of all conflicts that it supposedly projects, and just as a beautiful invocation to go out and yield oneself up to May. The not-so-muted undertones of eroticism, instead of detracting from the peace of an innocent endeavour, slicken the feeling till it runs heavy, ponderous and slow, like nectar. The slow-moving nectar trickles from the boughs above and down the necks of the May-worshippers, matting in their hair or running down their bodies. At places, it renders the spotless white of the vestal virgins transparent. Dewdrops dry on their foreheads, and the leaves, which are in plenty, surround them in an ecstasy. Tales of keys and locks, and locks being picked, abound in the blushes of the virgins, and prepares them for what is to follow.

Paint-bottle

Trying to explain the basics of the philosophy of language to my brother, I ended up being more disillusioned than I had need to be. I couldn’t convince him that a paint-bottle was not a paint-bottle, but that we had invented both the object and the name, but that isn’t quite it, isn’t it? Now things like the sky and moon and water, we have named, things which we cannot claim to have created, things which are natural. So, going by this, arbitrary naming of natural phenomena and objects is precisely that, arbitrary naming. In other words, doing things which we had no business to do. But a paint-bottle, how does one quite explain that? A paint-bottle is something that we have created, and we have named. Does that not justify our actions? We name our children, don’t we? But we might still argue that even though we may claim to have created a paint-bottle, we cannot claim to have created it from nothing, that is, it consists of materials which already naturally existed, or which, in rare cases, we have created. But that is not quite it. No matter if it is made of materials natural or artificial, it exists, and the materials exist, in a sphere which we cannot control. Creating does not presume ownership. No, not ownership, but understanding. We claim to know the things we create, so it’s all right if we wish to assign it a name, a marker. Coming back to the original point, a name is not quite the object.

But, looking at a paint-bottle, can you think of it in any other name? Can you even acknowledge it without acknowledging the name? Then is the object reduced, distorted or worse, not even referred to when I say paint-bottle? This brings us to the next part: names are intertwined with meaning. Names are not empty shells, but they hold meaning. But that meaning itself is what we have created through names, so is it invalidated? When I’m thus holding forth on things having names, I’m implicitly imagining a blank, dark space, where objects are afloat, to be the empirical real, which has nothing to do with our empirical real. Though empirical presupposes sensory perception, my empirical real is not so. It is a blank, dark space with floating objects like space debris.

This brings me to a tacit ackowledgement of the idea of the perverse obtuseness of objects. But this imagining itself is positive, and not quite the depressing scenario which faced me while I was done explaining (if I can call it that). That objects are unknowable does not depress me quite so much, because that means (to me) that they are knowable on some other worlds, in some other sphere. But this bullshits my idea of the empirical real.