The Prognosis

Nobody knew what was at stake. Perhaps there really was nothing to be won. And in that sense, there really was nothing at stake. Yet a trial was imminent – a trial of patience and resilience. A fight needed to be put up; a fight for mere survival. And so, in that sense, everything was at stake.

This idea was not really exhilarating. You cannot plan for survival. You can only put up a blind fight. This meant that the enemy would be better prepared. His moves would be planned, strategic. And although we knew this, there was nothing that we could do, but react once the battle was at our doorstep.

Meanwhile, we were all trying to fix things in our own ways. Some of us were ignorantly breaking them further. Yet, we were insuperable in our attempts, convinced that it would but hardly matter as long as we did not stop trying; that someday we will fix it all.

At first, it was almost impossible to grapple with the idea that it could be in the nature of some things to exist in pieces – to appear broken. These illusory things exist to consume their fixers. And the fixers exist to be consumed. 

A tragedy would end here, you see. But this isn’t one. All the effort simply could not be entirely meaningless. Something had to come out of it all. It did not matter of what nature. It all had to amount to something. And so, you see, these fixers being consumed are no longer people. They are products of futility, installments of ignorance, and causes of nothingness.

They have become things – things that now appear broken but aren’t; things that were once consumed – things that are now hungry themselves. This hunger is what sets us apart now. It is our strength, our identity, our madness, and our redemption. 

It is all we have left now. But then, why would we need anything else?

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.

Disoriented.

With fraudulence I had bred contempt,

And thus with the most virtuous of all vice –

With hope, a remorseful liaison, a repent,

If I may – a metaphysical demise.

I had become someone else. This person, whom I could hardly recognize let alone understand, I feared. I feared him for me, and more so for himself. 

I could see the path he was set on – it would yield nothing. Mine, at least, brought devastation. Nothing was worse than such devastation. Truly, the nothing he would become would be worse. The devil would proudly feast on me someday, and cast the angels to damnation. Even the devil shall not know to do with a soul so lost.

And although he remained convenient in his aura of nothingness, a certain hunger plagued his mind. He would seek out adventures and interactions, new and old alike. An alien impulse held him at his heart trying to purge him out of his desperation. And as often as he did expose himself to the ways and celebrations of the world, the trivialities troubled him most of all.

While others in desperation would ask ‘what did I do to deserve this’, he asked ‘what did they do to deserve this’. He chose to look for a solution, and yet the problem would persist in his face, unmoved and stubborn, convicted to trouble him just enough – just enough to stimulate his lifelessness, not enough to encourage death. Wrapped up in a surreal frenzy, he would curse his own mind, then his life, then himself and those around him, and at last me. I often asked ‘what did I do to deserve this’. He had no answer.

This path from desperation, anger, impulse, through confrontation and pain would mostly yield helplessness, and at times nothing at all. He would stare silent, not by choice but by a paralysis of thought, at the marginalities of life – marginalities not by purpose, but by reason, absolutely dumbfounded for they were no less than luxuries to him – luxuries not by grace, but by their unattainability.

Often a sudden strangeness would lure in my indulgence with these possibilities that others had. With a crushing emphasis it would bring about a confrontation with my own impossibilities. It worked like a malignant flame, a flame without light – the kind that knows only to burn but never yield any warmth.

I did not even sound like myself. My voice, I mean, appeared to originate at a distance. “Who are you?” I asked, hoping for a lost or no response at all. But I knew, he was me, and yet I wasn’t him.

Almost like a panicked firework shot into the sky, out of an old bottle, suddenly, I would become a man of the past and the future. The present disappeared. As some are only consciously in the present and sub-consciously roam in the realm of memories and dreams - in past and in the future. For me, this arrangement of mental divulsion was quite erroneous, and wicked by all means.

I would be consciously lost, and this awareness was what killed me, and made me this person, unrecognizable. This strange stranger both angry and timid, enraged and wounded, most powerful and helpless, indestructible and tired, most loved and yet alienated, condemned and redeemed too,  was everything and nothing at once. This confusion was his sole possession. Or was it? He really was confused.

I could not stand this creature, this being false by nature, and the greatest truth I had ever known – his existence. More so, I could not stand the wretchedness of the world, the decadence of people who forced him to be what he was, in essence, nothing. I also admired them, for the same mockery of world and the people in it. To be honest, I was quite amused how the process of becoming and unbecoming, of being and non-being be so sadly indistinguishable.

I could not stand, and so I ran. As I started, I knew I would run until my feet would bleed, and then run some more until the road ended, or perhaps I dissolved to become something beyond nothing. I belonged nowhere. I had never belonged anywhere. In deep introspection and in experiments with thought, came a realization that I truly was lost. Because nowhere was home, home was everywhere.

And though my will lacked tenacity, it resolved nonetheless and dissolved just the same. It the resolved again. So you know, I was not in darkness, I was the darkness. 

Then would come the occasional calm, the reassurance of a possible adaptation. For I belonged nowhere, everywhere was my home. And with all that I had left in me, I would wish that someone would touch this weary soul, like a spark that set fire to the first star, and inspire me or murder me.

But I had to be careful. I never knew what would trigger him again, and push me back into dormancy.

The Fire Within

There is no reclamation

Until all is lost,

No reincarnation

Until the end of life

To be born is to be alive

To be alive is to wait for death

To wait for death is to die

To die is to be born again

The world must see someday

Life is same as death

And must be suffered

If only it is worth the trouble

But neither is death, then

Worth a chance

If it is to be born again

To sit here and wonder

“To be, or not to be:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles”

Feed the hungry man, I say

Covered in dirt and shit

Lift his soul off its sorrow

Burn him then. Burn him tomorrow

Wish them luck, the lovers

Romanticizing their future

Wish them grandeur and might.

Burn them, then. Light up the night.

Torch the ground, I say

Flay the sky

Burn everything

Then burn the ashes.

Burn the world

Until all is smoke

You can’t burn smoke

Then burn yourself.

And be born again.

And burn again.