There are times, in the real time mode, when mornings are not noons and summers are not winters. Yet, homogeneity is a latent dream that we nurture. If the only thing constant is change, then, why does the mind continues to desire the dream? Guess the desire for change is interspersed with bouts of those for the droning regularity, a hum of the bees (or of mosquitoes in more tropical regions). Someone (or, possibly every human being has got philosophical enough, at least once in his/er lifetime, to make this observation) articulated it precisely- habits are deadening. I add, now, (this is my bit of philosophical input) it is the most deadly addiction. If given a undiluted control of the mind, it becomes an up-mountain task to undo the rules of the game of life that it produces- to be an armchair critic ( I refrain from using the term uphill, since, it undermines the significance I want to attach to the task; besides authors are not liable to write meaningful stuff). This deadly addiction (but it never appears to you that it has the potency of blinking the bone-and-the-skull logo at any juncture) numbs the senses, making the reflexes unaware of variable stimuli. In English, this means it makes us as good as dead. The mind stops functioning and it sloths and slumbers and continues to say in a mangled voice: “Delhi abhi dur hai!!!”* To him, like to many of the species, concord was/is a natural alibi to calm. But what is calm if not juxtaposed with the discord of the impending storm at the horizon?! Unilateral thinking, the armchair critic and writer would say [don’t accuse me of generating opinion in favour of any (or, all) political party(/ies) though]. It is a two-dimensional diagram that draws the locus of the mind in the dubious dual coordinates of singular time (nullifying the possibility of time-transfer and time-machines sadly; I wanted to visit the Atlantis, the lost Greek city) and singular space (quantum space is still a theory hence). The dimension of the chasm in between is not considered at all!
The mind is not always functioning, neither is it idle when it is not functioning. In English this is the equivalent to the statement that nothing can be definitely defined (if that is English enough or not, I don’t know. If not, kindly help yourself). There are lapses in time when the mind is suffering from what I would call the third-person-narrator-syndrome. Like in the novels (the ones that Jane Austen and her clan wrote) the omniscient narrator is like Casper, the friendly ghost. S/he observes, though not too objectively as we presume. These observations are almost always induced by the authorial intention. In the functioning of the mind too, the author is omniscient (though Barthes proclaims otherwise). The author that is making me write all these crappy pseudo-philosophical rambling is possibly the same one that makes me choose between butter and cheese. Her name is Prejudice.
* Bahadur Shah Zafar’s observation when the British forces were approaching his fort and he was busy in shayari mehfils (Urdu poetry soiree)
Image: Original Woodcut illustration from the Just So Stories 'The Crab that played with the sea' by Rudyard Kipling
2 comments:
Enough now,
if the right and good and infinite
be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own,
with knowledge absolute,
subject to no dispute.
from fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone.
-------- Rabbi Ben Ezra
thanks for the quote :)
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