Saturday, October 25, 2008



The Butterfly that could not go beyond the glass!!

Friday, October 10, 2008

Aimlessness

Aimlessness is a passion that is rarely accepted by ordinary people. In fact I can very well say that the solitary, aching, dreaming and musing heart is the only candidate who can claim such wafting-like-smoke characteristic; since he is someone who is not ordinary and, is someone who is rare too, to this, and accepts this rare condition and blithely get lost in it.

Otherwise, why do you think that someone with myriads of activities to do will seek this aimlessness? The mind if not the visible body, in this modern world is so full of activity that in absence of something to do, one gets panicked and rushes to do something lest he is caught sitting alone and staring nowhere in particular in a park or drinking coffee and just sitting, forget about holding an open book without reading a single line and, no matter how much you stare it refuses to yield to the entire history of etymological training ….such joys!!!

Yes, joy! Because whenever I am alone and not plagued by demands of my environment and the inextricable social entanglement that comes from knowing people (though I know less people), what come in my mind most often is the abstractedly fleeting moments I have encountered while apparently doing something else. Like the lazily drifting string of soot coming out of an incense stick (which she often lights) that get disturbed shockingly in a perfectly still sunlit bedroom when I walk in to it to fetch a mundane article, or the cascading shadows of the rumbling number 1 train passing over the rickety metal bridge that I see through the double glass window pane; hot from outside with the persisting sunrays and cold from inside with the condensed water drop that evaporate from the Tulsi that she has kept on the wooden window sill. Though I have rarely wondered about why the sunny day of a winter looks different than the same sunny day of summer from inside the house, I feel that I have spent years coming to the realizing that the difference is not the temperature which I can’t feel from inside the room but the change in the suns position and hence the shadows of the things that absently keeps bothering me. Or the isolated events and places that keeps popping up in my mind anachronistically, as if by some power I am rushing through them at the speed of light!

I wish I could start an aimless day and wander on the streets or sit somewhere without pretending to do anything no matter how badly I want to do it. Or have the temerity to brush away the nagging idea that doing something like everyone else is the only way to get accepted by the suffering miserable lot, from whom I want to run away in the first place. I mean how many times when I just sit quite somewhere even in my room, I do not get perturbed by the idea that I am not doing anything and spoil the very idea of inactivity. Why don’t I just sit in an obscure cafĂ©, may be something named silver moon and enjoy the aroma of boiled bergamot orange without milk and meager amount of sugar and watch my brown brown reflection and, not think that the reflection I am watching will stay with me and not melt in the background of my thoughts? I mean even that reflection ask me question after sometime – “what am I thinking?” Even the muse gets perplexed if the artist spends more than few minutes absorbing the existence of the muse. While for me, In front of that perfect muse I would want the day to pass in the same place in front of me and I should not do anything but let it pass. Sometimes I think what if I can perceive the time as a thick mirror that slows the speed of light so that the time will pass slowly or what if I can jump in and out of those mathematically existing parallel universes, and stay at same place and keep sitting doing nothing but watching every activity in every universe. It overwhelms me, I mean the idea that I won’t get bored. Since, I am so much accustomed to the idea of this world that, I will get bored.

It’s not like that I am framing this idea of inactivity or aimlessness on myself or anybody in particular since these same habits have given me the greatest joys of my life. Someone will say that I got lucky even if he has to acknowledge that, that luck has been persistent. And that’s why I seek that aimlessness and an empty day.

So what do I do when I get confronted with this futile idea of activity even when in company of perfectly singular and subjectively personal entity?

I should do nothing.

PS: a poem " The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot that i often read when i feel like this....which has few things that i missed in this blog....here is only a portion of that....

..........And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?.............