In the City of No Faces

I wondered for how far would this go, just how far would we be able to drag each other?

Drunken men would rage along the streets, sunk

In occasional spurts & in splashes of madness;

Men on madness, and madness on men drunk

Wave about, as if to revolt against an unknown sadness

Against future’s spirits & ghosts of the past

From graves of time that emerge to avenge

The childhood laughter; neither would last

the adolescent love - half awake, but less asleep!

Though unclear who would they kill

And who do they loathe, being here or mere being

Drunken men collide still,

Not walls and barriers, but against light and air;

Reminders less of being, more of being here

With its eyes shut, it knows only a few;

An affront is this city, a city of no faces,

Of a drunk nostalgia, and blurred faces due

To be someone there and then.

Of who would be where and when!

But here, now, an instinct lays awake in the middle,

with lunges of sleep over men of patience,

Men with visions of peril, prey to acrisis optimal,

Not bad enough, yet would never revoke –

An artist’s impression of an outlandish joke!

Amid the waking hour comes the savior,

Comes to savor the half asleep horror,

A nightmare, a sleep; to wake and to creep;

May nightmares wake all, may never they keep

The woken soon falls back; falls deep!

There must be something more here

To check, to choke; something more intimate,

Perhaps even threatening, perhaps even fear.

And the day shall come, when you and I

Wouldn’t let them breathe, wouldn’t ourselves sigh,

And hammer & drag the ghosts into the city

The same that knows only a few,

Wouldn’t we purge insanity, alike vanity!

Ghosts of the night into the day; faceless!

And wait by the side, for them to join us.

By now we knew madness was something more,

More than insanity, more than vanity;

Not here by some indelicate conjunction 

Of history’s paranoia and mind’s incapacity;

But a survival instinct drunk on hope,

Or consumed by anti-hope

All it ever meant was to be.

To be in the face of being itself,

To dance forgotten, and to see

Ghosts of the past, and to allow them to see

The profanity of the city; and then wait –

Wait for them to join us!

A Quietus

“Man’s redemption lies through & in love” - Victor Frankl.

It is not only that the absence of a prospective listener dampens the voice of a thinker. Something a lot sinister can be underway beneath the superficial act of everyday human persecution. I had witnessed the death of a thought, not in an absence of empathy but in a presence of indifference.

The four walls are not enough to desecrate one’s originality, to wane one’s ambition, or to bind oneself to one’s present predicament so inescapably that the past seems impossible, and the future, at best, improbable. It is not enough! But we are capable of more. I have seen the most ruthless impulse of the human mind; I have survived it. Indifference! If struck in the right amount, at the right time, at the right victim, it can accomplish the direst of all human sins – the killing of a soul.

I have witnessed a quietus – an outrageously silent suppression of voice – outrageous in its knowledge of the suppressed & silent in its ignorance of the suppressor. The killer doesn’t know that he’s killing, & the victim doesn’t realize that he’s dying until the deed is done. The victim remains a silent spectator of his own demise, a satisfied consumer of a slow & sweet poison, stuck in a bootloop, asking the same questions over & over again, overworking & overbearing his mind, eventually wearing it out till the point it begins to give up. 

Beginning to give up is to give up beginning. And here plays a melancholy, the kind that rhymes at humanly funerals, only sadder. A soul has died. This is what death looks like in the spirit world. The body oozes out of the soul, but the weight of the soul remains unchanged. The spirit world believes that the body would travel to the indifferent world in a failed search of redemption. 

But the body is also plagued with a similar indifference now, only graver. It’s doesn’t know that it had a soul once, it doesn’t care that the priced possession is now lost. Nothing matters but survival – one day at a time. Stuck between this world and the next, only partially alive, the body fails to associate with its fellow beings. It pretends to have a soul. There are millions of them, but they all persist in isolation, in their own pretentious soul bubbles. They don’t matter anymore, not even to themselves.

A funeral is staged in the spirit world, where the soul lies motionless, speechless, paralysed, but not careless. It is not cremated or buried, for it is already beyond death. 

You see, dying in body is not the same as dying in soul. The spirit world denies death. Every soul has a purpose; and the body is a means to the purpose. While the human world in its indifference strives to kill this purpose, the spirit world is obsessed with infusing meaning into everything they see. This is the war we are unknowingly engaged in – a constant perpetual war of means & meaning, between indifference & obsession.

So, the dead souls are resurrected; another body is put onto them. And they’re lunged back into the same indifferent world. This is the spirit-world’s revenge on our world. Nobody prays for the departed body. And for this the body may never rest in peace. The soulless body is just collateral.

You, my friend, whose soul died, may never rest in peace. But remember that you’re not only a victim, you’re also more than a persecutor – you are a persecution on to the spirit world. You are an evidence of an experiment gone insanely successful. You are the proof that human world has got what it takes to kill a spirit, to murder a soul, and not even flinch during or blink after the act.

But lately, there has been a glitch in this arcane system. Some of old and new possessors of the same soul have met. They have discovered a way out, out of this war, out of the suffering of the indifference of humans & obsession of the spirits. 

They have fused both the world and rejected both at once. This is a devout communion of meaning & indifference - an internal meaning, an external indifference! 

They understand that the world doesn’t have to mean anything, and they don’t necessarily need to have a purpose towards it. They understand that to find meaning in the other is enough. 

They also understand the reverse – they may not mean something to the indifferent world. It is enough to mean something to the other. 

It is terribly easy to reach this sense of simultaneous indifference & purpose. You can see it as I speak of it. The real quest is to not let your soul die, and if it does, to find the person who has it.