Faith

 

These flowers would not talk to us

About their previous night’s growth pain

The pain of their petals unfolding

When the stars sprinkled dust on our roof

And the night’s queen whitely bloomed.

All the while our pleasures stuck to us

There was déjà vu in the night’s smell

The left over one of the previous day

That had mixed with tar and hot sun

Which had in turn mixed with bodies.

That night was hope and some angst

While nothing ever happened , it would.

 

 

 

 

We were talking about faith, which helped fight despair in the face of a crisis. While things have always happened in a most unexpected fashion we have always believed that this thing is not going to happen to us . Yes ,other things have happened to other people but we have a long unhappening future ahead. Against all these unhappening things there are a few things which our faith prompts us to believe ,will happen.

These are the miracles which ,we have always believed ,will happen.Somehow these miracles will happen . In yet another way of speaking, I don’t believe they will not happen

 

Miracles
The leaves felt disconnected on the sudden earth
The sky was broken in parts, teasing through
Tiny leaf-spaces full of squirrel tails and red ants
For some reason all our prayers were held up
On tiled roofs and history’s banyan treetops
We squatted on the cement steps, waiting for miracles
The neighborhood thatched hut sat immobile
The gold of its last summer turning to weary grey.
The grass walks tired of several days’ soundless feet
Between us arose questions of unspoken skepticism
Our eyes shone with wet anticipation behind their lids
In the evening the rain obliterated our foot-prints
It is as though we have never existed under the sky.

It is as though these things will never happen to us.

 

The scepticism here is only a fleeting thought. Actually ,deep within us we believe that miracles do take place and to that extent we are often willing to “suspend our disbelief” . Other wise we have to grapple with this problem of continually carrying transience with us like the Buddhist monk who, when asked if he has seen a pretty princess passing by in the jungle ,has said, ” I don’t know if it was a woman or it was a princess or a human being or an animal ; I saw some bones and some flesh passing by ” .

 

We do not carry such a feeling of transience with us because that strikes at the root of our existence whose continuance is assured only by the survival instinct ingrained in us. Actually we believe, deep within ,in our own immortality .As the belief goes against the human logic which tells us in unequivocal terms that whoever is born shall die ,as has been the emprical evidence so far, we invent our own miracles which enable a temporary suspension of the logic inherent in our thinking. Actually faith is a way of insuring ourselves against uncertainty which dogs us at every step.We do not know what lies ahead and the future is filled with too many possibilities. The birth is itself a massive accident being a product of millions of possibilities and sustaining the existence is a matter of innumerable parameters .Continued existence is subject to all these parameters even a single one of which can bring about cessation of existence.The unpredictability has to be fought in our own way ,not certainly with the puny logic system we have inherited from the human race. A more comfortable survival mechanism lies in the wiping off of what we have learnt from the logic system at least for the time being .

 

 

 

 

Dream

 

Dreams

Several flimsy images are played
Behind the opaqueness
Of my heavy-lidded eyes .

I am not at the centrestage.
They are nothing,not even existence
Just fragments of a fractured reality.

Today morning I got up with a dream-the dream which has been the most cohesive of all my dreams of the recent past . The dream was nothing extraordinary in terms of what it is supposed to convey (as is believed by many people) nor was it an entirely disagreeable thing ,kicking up a storm in my mind .I believe that the dream is a kind of pastiche of several images arising out of one’s own subconscious. What has kept me thinking was the amazing logical coherence that the dream possessed as though it is a well-scripted story which followed a carefully designed structure like a real life incident. In real life there is a chronological sequence or a logical sequence of cause-and-effect governing the different activities or events in a single episode .In a dream such a sequence does not exist as disparate images fuse loosely to form a single episode. There is no beginning, middle and leading -up to the end in a dream-script .In mime or play acting we impose such a structure on the entire “plot” as it unfolds because there the script imitates life. Effectively we cannot think of a story-line in a dream because the inherent structure in a real life incident or play assumes that consequences flow out of actions in a rather predictable fasion .The plot ,if you can call that ,flows in a dream with no predictable pattern and in an entirely linear fashion unlike in a play where there is a beginning ,growth,denouement and resolution.

This dream of mine ,absurd no doubt it was, followed an amazing unity of construction as though it had all been thought up in advance. Since there is no “human” intervention in the design ,(if any), of the dream it is difficult to understand how the dream can be so logically structured . Does this mean that the same human logic governing the actions flowing through the mind during wakefulness also operates during sleep ?

Shared consciousness

There is something here about our common pool of consciousness to which we keep adding from the time of the first human onwards . This fascinating concept can be explained with an analogy which has come to my mind several times when I have tried to grapple with the subject. Imagine each spacial existence consisting of the organic lives and shared consciousness of a generation of people as a single disk and although the spacial existences which can be imagined as horizontal planes overlap they can be imagined as piling on one another ,each of them representing one layer of horizontal existence. Now to explain the overlap as well as the continuity and building up on human thought we may imagine a hole at the centre of each of these discs through which a common thread is running . The thread is better understood as time-space continuum ,that is the vertical existence of the human race which explains the vast amount of collective conscious which keeps piling up on the passing of each generation.

Looked at this way time is also space .We can imagine ourselves as existing at the intersection of two planes of existence .Imagine the x-axis as horizontal space in which we exist and the y-axis  as vertical space which represents  the height of the pile of the spacial existences of different times.On the same logic we say that nobody who is born dies because while he disappears from the horizontal space he continues to exist in vertical space as a part of the shared consciousness.Here is a poem which says the same thing :

Existence

Here a talking man is sleeping,
His arms akimbo, feet in the air.
Then were wild gesticulations,
Sweat on brow, fire in the eyes
Now vacant and unconnected.
He no longer exists in space
But he had happened in time
Whatever begins shall remain.

Pure thoughts

Sometimes you start off with a thought which has had no origin in an event or a reflection of an event.It just happens as an electrical impulse, and not derived from an actual event.It is puzzling to think how that happens ,lending credence to the theory that thoughts are not necessarily contextual.Can we call them “pure thoughts”,the nomenclature suggsting that the thoughts,per se,are not spurred on by an event or a reflection on an event. it means there is usually no provocation for the thoughts and once the process begins it takes its own course and is not bound within the confines of human logic which has its own structure comprehended easily by the normal human mind. The interesting part is the dissociation of the beginning process with actual event and the independence it takes from then on. Nowhere is this more clear than in abstract thought or in poetry.Wordsworth has defined poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions and at another place, as emotion recollected in tranquillity. We used to believe that poetry was something that is triggered by a thought or an emotion recollected .This is far from truth as we have seen in later life. Some times it is words which trigger thought and some times words are thoughts. Words begin as thoughts ,some times originating in a mysteriously random fashion and as we go along the words trigger thoughts taking the whole process forward. The logic is defined in the way words are born ,evolve and metamorphose into thoughts again.

It is funny that I when I began writing the poem given below I had’nt the faintest idea of where I would end up :

Refusal

I know you have said that enough
In the day’s heat and moon’s eclipse
In the horizon I looked far enough
And deep in the tree’s silences
The leaves rustled in the night.
What can you do again and now
Unless art has not left here as yet
And senses still matter to the mind.
In the hollow of my downy back
Your after-being remains as refusal
Senselessness hurts in my fingers
As though my senses are conscious
And are offended deeply by refusal.

Honestly the subject evolved in the interplay of thoughts and words .Words have a flourescence of their own ,independent of the underlying thoughts. As words progress the thoughts keep evolving in a manner entirely unpredictable and intriguing too. The logic of words forbids moving out of pre-determined structures imposing unwarranted control on word flow but poetry enables freedom from them.

Actually what occurs to me is that thoughts which are not event-related or are not essentially episodic can be called pure thoughts ,just like we distinguish between pure sciences and applied sciences .Thought precedes action or work or is an intention to do something and work or self-driven events are applications.Thought runs parallel to events generated by us driving action .It is normal human logic that drives thoughts running parallel to actions .Thus there is a logical coherence that could be fitted into words which also have their own logical structures. Pure thoughts do not proceed according to the same logic and abstract thought ,aided by the esotericism of words,would seem to work entirely independent of the normal logical structures.

I often wonder what decides our ideas of what God looks like. Because we cannot visualise God whom we have never seen we are compelled to imagine him as another human being .In Hinduism all gods are in human form or combinations of different creatures or living beings we often see around us.He is also a tree or a snake or a mountain or a river .Our need is to conceptualise the idea of God ,which is what we end up doing ,by exercising imagination. A very funny thing is the way different Gods are conceptualised differently at different places and by different communities. I often have wondered why Lord Jagannath has large saucer-like eyes and has very imprecisely delineated features- as though the artist has decided that since God cannot be like a human the contours of his face merge into space doing away with the imperfections of a human face.