Let’s be honest, because treatment only follows diagnosis. I’m wasting a lot of time at present.
There, I’ve said it now.
I’m interested in trying out the Glanzfeld effect. Of course, I’m interested in a lot of things, I hear, but I don’t follow up the half of them. This course of things must change. Of course, a lot of things must change, I keep hearing myself saying, except I don’t follow up the half of them.
If only there were a way to suddenly stop being the way you have been, inevitably, all this while long, and start becoming disciplined and organized and targeted and living with intention and with appreciation for the value of time.
N, sometimes I think you shouldn’t have left.
‘I was born in the arms of imaginary friends…’
It’s that blue evening again, only it’s already past eight, and I’m listening to Enigma, so that I’m again inevitably thinking of life, and what’s outside of it. Life, this life, it seems to me to be so small and fragile against the great cold darkness of beyond, like a small fearful ball of colour floating in an unforgiving, unfeeling deep black space. It’s like a colossal wall of rock that thuds deeply when you knock against it, oblivious to your presence, unhelping, unfeeling, uncaring, oblivious also to your awe and amazement at it. Quiet, inert and majestic, and so greatly overwhelming.
Ah, Chamber, glad to be back. I missed you.
From this feeling and imagery stems my belief about life that there is a great deal of something else both before and after it, and curiously, counter to all my education and training in science so far, I tend to believe it’s not a clump of inert dead physics. And somehow I believe this with all my heart and soul and existence with a fierce justification that isn’t even clear to myself. I simply cannot bring myself to believe that all this is as dead and reducible and purely chemical as it is made out to be. There is some fundamental, gaping flaw in this logic. I must build a good argument against it. Yes, I’ve been thinking about doing it for quite some while. I remember our Geography teacher said in class a long time back in school: ‘The earth is the right distance from the sun so as to have the optimum temperature to support life. So kids, you see that we are very lucky.’ At that very moment this last statement had hit me with a blunt absurdness whose reason I couldn’t exactly point out. It took me years to figure out the source of that absurdity. Yes, the more obvious the flaw, the more difficult it is to state it. Just like you can’t really explain addition, can you?
More later, hang on.
One Life 
As an expert in Lacanian Psychoanalysis, I was amazed to discover the schizotypal conflict in your choice of words.Such depiction of “the other” bemused me.You are very young and still have much to grow in life and beyond.I think you are the next Jose Saramego. Best wishes…….
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Thank you so much for your comment. I couldn’t find much online about the Schizotypal conflict, and whatever little I found scared me.
If you’re around, could you shed some more light on what exactly was it about the choice of words?
Thanks again.
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Sankho, janish why I choose to believe in reincarnation? I say choose because I don’t actually believe any of the theories about what happens to us after we die, etc., but this is the one theory that appeals to me. That is, I’d believe in this one if I could have a choice in believing one or the other.
It’s because I’m a huge fan of Story, and the idea of reincarnation is Story Incarnate. It’s a looping narrative, same but different each time, full of randomness and chance and surprises galore, a story with a continuity of sorts and a progression of sorts to it. It appeals to my literary sensibilities, so yes, that’s how I like to think of what lies beyond and before this one life of ours.
For instance, I think I was a Bengali girl in my last lifetime, someone who died of unrequited love and TB at an early age, before she was even twenty. And the lifetime before that, I was a Tamilian. And somewhere in my many lives, once I have been a queen of a small kingdom/principality.
Yes, life and what lies outside of it is fathomless and incomprehensible, at least to our human senses and imagination. And it’s chance, it’s chaos, it really IS utterly random. And we build little walls and rooms and areas of convention, custom, kinship, identities bound by religion, language, nationality, ethnicity, political affiliations, economic and social status, etc. and try to call the byproduct of all this “life.” But once you start looking beneath the constructs, nothing much holds us up or away from the vast emptiness, does it?
So I tell (and read) stories. Stories of who I am, who I was, who I am going to be. Stories of what this life or of others means. What it’s worth. What makes it worthwhile. Stories are my lifeblood, pretty much, and it’s not really a bad way to be, non?
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At the risk of sounding super nerdy, I’ll prefer to reply to your comment a paragraph at a time.
About your first two paragraphs, I wrote a post about reincarnation a long time back, when I was a kid, sorta. Not that I believe in the same things any more.
What strikes me as odd in your third paragraph is why you would think you have always been human. The few times I used to think of my past life when I was a kid (sorta), I had this idea I was a red beetle — something like a ladybird — in a tropical rainforest, in my last life. Somehow I never thought I was human.
Your fourth paragraph reminded me of an analogy I have long felt about this. I have also long had a strange suspicion, from back when I was a kid (sorta), that Sukumar Ray meant something similar.
Thanks a lot for all your paragraphs. Comments mean I’m not just shouting through echoes in my skull.
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Heh, what about comments on the fifth para? 😛
And as for human lives, they’re recent ones. I think I may have unconsciously imbibed the “theory” of (Hindu) reincarnation where the human form is the most elevated of all the animal forms and you only get to appear as the human form after a certain billion-or-whatever-the-number-is cycles. These are stories too, you see. I think I finished reading Buddha’s Jataka tales in its entirety by the time I was about 7 or so. 🙂 So yeah, I’m sure I’ve been a red ant or a termite somewhere down the line, but prolly not in the last couple.
And na re, I like your stuff well enough. Except that for me, writing them down doesn’t appeal as much as discussions do. There’s a reason I’ve been with your sister all these years, bujhle?
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