Hair

A Serious Problem

This is a serious problem: I no longer know what I am doing!

What chain of events led me to do the thing I did? Why? I seem to hold the answers in my mouth and all I have been doing is chewing them into tiny particles to distort them into concealing things even to myself. The thing churning in the hollow of my mouth seems to have some kind of dehydrating agency and I am slowly losing consciousness.

But the human mouth is a remarkable organ; it secretes saliva before I shrivel up!

All I have been repeatedly saying is that my actions are ‘meta-acts’. They are acts (or mistakes?) Man is entitled to commit. It is Man’s nature to do so. From the epoch of time, he has been doing so, unnoticed by neither his wife nor his furtive lover(s) although the prodding Philosopher was aware of it (because he did it too). So it is of no harmful consequence if I indulge in the same acts.

Such vague ontological assumptions are valid as long as one is writing a great philosophical doctrine potent enough to change the very course of man, when the author of that doctrine takes up the responsibility for the whole of mankind. But what changes will my acts cause in the grand design of Man; how do they affect his evolution? And when I cannot take the responsibility for my own ‘commitments’, how can I afford to bear the weight of an entire civilization? To hold him responsible for whatever I do (or do not do) – is it not a kind of escapism? To blame Man for my shortcomings is to not blame myself for my own weaknesses. It is as if my actions are no longer mine (of course when the results of an act are favorable, I take full credit for the enterprise); and if action is what defines Man’s identity, then what is my identity?

I have been disintegrating inside the hollow of my mouth, being chewed politely into millions of particles that cling on to each other. An amoebic existence. And as everyone with decent table manners dining at a social gathering would know, it is quite impolite to open your mouth wide, stick your tongue out and reveal its contents. ‘‘Quite rude!’’, the one across the table would think. (He too must have bitten himself into pieces).

So you see my case is utterly hopeless. I do not remember my natural shape nor am I aware of what size I was. I am slowly churning inside my mouth, protected in its black shelter, gently moisturized by its unctuous saliva. But before long, the organ begins to tire of holding my weight and soon I must swallow myself to be digested inside my depths. What after digestion?

This is a more serious problem: Am I to be flushed down the toilet?

Of Aphelion

I am travelling alone, in the darkest corner of the universe. I am a floating piece of mass; it does not matter who I am, what I am. My thoughts are not mine but someone else’s and that someone – he is a stranger. I am not mine. I never was; perhaps a desert-gypsy’s imagination, swirling in the sandstorm. Perhaps nothing.

I am travelling on a meteor, merely the size of a raft; and on my raft I am floating aimlessly, driven by the current the universe is. Enveloped by this dark infinite sea, I am merely a tiny dust particle in a great storm. Where am I to settle in the immense blank? I hear great fires born, unite, part and die. But they are all so far away; their warmth never reaches me. Cold fires, consumed in themselves. The silence between them and me is a vast abyss, unbridgeable. My senses have been my curse. If only I did not hear those distant worlds I would not know solitude. But I just cannot abandon this empty burden. Silence and I have been companions since that someone conceived me, and to forsake that silence is unimaginable. How could I go on if I was devoid of even emptiness? What would I mean if I was stripped of that emptiness too? And so, to exist I need the silence.

The stars are everywhere, above, right, left, below. But there is no need for directions here, for there are none. The only ones that exist are my own conceptions; but what do they mean to the universe? Anyway, I create them, drawing them on this vast blank. I am free to create anything here. And there is no need to follow the rules. Rules mean nothing in emptiness. But I do make some at times. They are games I play; games that never last long. I do not let them or else each game would become life.

When did you make me, my Maker?
Am I made of earth and clay too?
What are they made of?

At times, other meteors pass by; other souls inhabit them. They too are quite lost and without direction. Purposeless. But these occasions are so rare and fleeting, that I am utterly confused when they take place. I look at them and they look at me, with expressions as blank as the dark around us. We know that we are to do something then, immediately, but it is a moment of complete paralysis. We fail to act even though we are burning with inexplicable passions within. If only one of us could decipher what the passions meant. Who are they? Why did we meet? Or are they merely reflections of me; rather am I the reflection? Who then am I?

After such moments, when the meteors move far away to be consumed once again by the dark, remorse lingers, like smoke after a devastating fire. But with time, even that remorse evaporates. Once again, the emptiness.

And so on and on, my journey is endless. I cannot remember if it was yesterday I started or has it been a thousand years already? Or perhaps I always was here; or perhaps never. I cannot remember anything. I do not even remember who I am; I have no name to begin with. I am not even ‘I’. I am completely nameless for I am alone, imprisoned within this black womb of a mother who denies me birth. What lies outside her impenetrable walls? But it is not that I am curious. How can I, who has never known anything, desire knowledge?

I am travelling alone in this anaesthetic dark, in this eternal sleep. I am merely a dream lost amongst a thousand dreams. Or maybe not even that. Perhaps I am only the void in between. But I see I am trying to explain things when I myself am hopelessly ignorant and I have been doing so since the beginning.

Of Dusk

The pallid sun turns icy grey as it slowly burns itself in the western sky. Everything comes to a standstill, waiting. The sky is a starless blank, stretched like the dead skin of an animal, over a hollow. It resounds. Down there in the streets, the growing dark perpetrates a silence lulling everyone to surrender, to confront that certain future. Only the blue wind moans as it roams the landscape in its futile search for something, it knows not what itself. The grey pine trees dance in slow movements in the heavens, whistling an old song. It is familiar.

A raven watches over from the branches of a pine tree. Its occasional shrieks shatter every surviving vestige of desire, easing the burden of ambition, the burden of life. A decrepit man stands at the brink of a vast abyss unable to turn away as he gazes into its depths. Behind him, the echoes of life are still lingering, still calling onto him. It is futile. Slowly, they too surrender to the quiet. Even the raven song is slowly silence.

Now as the sky, suffused with a quiet darkness glides over the head of this man, he sees the truth. It had always been there, obscured yet impaling him. But the love of lies had kept it out of sight; had made its presence feeble. That murky love was poison, flooding his heart with desires and purposes that grew violent with time but then with time it slowly quietened into a whisper and then it faded into the firmament. That murky love was deception. And yes it had given him pleasure and it had given him purpose for in those days he had been sheltered and he had had companions who shared such pleasures, such purposes. Life had been grand, both in misery and in happiness. He was the centre of everything; the universe churned around him, the stars and the sun revolved around him and in them all were embedded divine powers that were for him, that were him. They spun around him with such great speed and such grandeur; he lost himself in them and then in himself, never once realising that there could be something else at the end of his universe. But then all grandeur is ephemeral; his universe grew out of control; soon it had no place for its own centre. He was banished from that which was his.

In that abyss, he sees with blank eyes, perplexed, the truth behind those youthful imaginings. That truth is one and the same for all and yet no one knows it truly till the time comes. What that truth holds is unfathomable to all regions of the mind, for it is beyond the mind’s grasp; the heart is but a hindrance as long as it beats. The truth never did reside in its chambers. The mind is a vast terrain, enclosed by the highest mountains that no individual dares to climb in his lifetime. Thus as long as breath visits his breast, he will not know what lies beyond these walls. It is only in the end when he sheds everything but himself, can he rise unburdened above the tyranny of his own mind, amplified in the emptiness of the heart. Only then will he see what he must see.

This is the aphelion of the world. This is where all that we know begins to end; where hope and despair erode into mere words. Here, the powerful and the weak are the same - mortals in the mouth of a reigning oblivion. The light is most faint and it grows weaker. The old man stares into the bottomless dark; unthinking, he merely is. He is living, yet no hollow heart beats in him; no breath trespasses what is his. He is living, and yet without desire, without what we all call life. He is content merely staring into a vast nothingness, where there is neither ecstasy nor agony, there is no triumph and there is no defeat; no hope, no fear. Nothingness is beyond space and time; soon it envelops him and he becomes what he sees. This nothingness is a stillness that is certain after the turbulence of life. It is a rest and no one gets tired of true rest.

Espresso

A rendezvous
At the local cafe.
So ordinary, petite,
I can cup your porcelain frame
In my hands
To feel your amnesic warmth
This winter evening.

And in some earnest need
Your brimming lips meet mine
In public display
And the auburn taste of your seed
Lingers as we part
Melting the hardened cold
This winter evening.

In quiet dialogues
We kiss and part to kiss again.
Strange poison, you poison me
My hardened frame, now liquid
Is tributary
Gushing forth into your sea
This winter evening.