Siyaah: November 2007

I must finally start writing this story. For I have nothing left but this.

I am still in all sorts of doubts. A story is your creation, but it also creates you, for others to see. In this I am somewhat comforted by the fact that I might never have anyone read this. In any case, though I always wanted to be a writer, I stopped trying. I could never write anything that sells. One has sold oneself enough already - now how painful to sell even the story of that sale. I could never bring myself to change a single word, or edit a line. How cruel a punishment for the sin of exposing oneself, to have parts sliced off. What is then left is neither you, nor them - those who would read it. Let them read me as it is, or not at all. Perhaps not at all is so much better. For everyone.

I have nothing left. Everything that I ever wanted, never came to me. It came tantalizingly close to make one's desires and hopes reach where they could. And worse, it came close again when one had survived and moved on. To have it come back close again is to wrench out one's guts all over again. To feel the pain of the desire and the loss. And to feel the movement of time and realize that the loss was that much bigger, for nothing, not even it itself, can bring it back, once the time is gone.

But I might be excused for writing in generalities. No matter how specific the pain, it occurs to one as the most general state of one's life. Nothing is specific - one either loses it all or wins it all. The rest is just make-believe.

How easy it is to be born in this world. And yet how difficult to live. So easy to be born in fact that one makes no decision and no conscious effort about it. It just happens. Would that anyone would care to ask - here is the list of things you will have, here is how the world is and will be - would you like to be here? Although, knowing humans, one wonders if they wouldn't be foolish enough to still want it. Yet to stay alive requires so much effort - biological - to breathe every moment, to eat, to excrete, and to spend every moment making arrangements for these, or for the illnesses surrounding these. Psychological - to think about things around - the bewilderment of it all - nothing makes sense. At first, or later. Not till the end. Yet one must think and be enticed to believe there is free will and choice and freedom to act and determine our lives. What nonsense. Where did these ridiculous thoughts originate?

For we know nothing at all. And what is choice or freedom or anything, without knowledge? Any man standing up and contemplating about the thing closest to him - himself, is faced with the most basic questions for which there have never been any answers.

And so was I born, with ease, without so much as knowing about it. Yet consciousness came early - what a burden. And let the optimists charge me. The fact that they do so suggests their own insecurity in their house of cards. The more one lives, the more one suffers - and there are no two ways about it. When one ignores one's suffering, one can, in moments of intoxication, almost convince oneself that all is great, that life is wonderful. But these people are not in their senses at all. In fact, these people are not alive at all. For anyone alive, could not ignore the suffering - of one's body, every moment that it breathes and tries to survive on this planet, of one's soul that tries to fit into the body and make sense of what it is doing on this alien planet. Not to mention the continuous suffering of all others that one cannot be shielded from, for in the very act of trying to shield, one perceives and registers.

Those who teach one to write ruin one forever. For it is through avoiding all influence that one can sustain oneself, not the other way round. I have not read for long. Every word tears one apart. Not to mention the images and sounds and such. It tears one apart from oneself - snippets of this and that person and this and that life - that don't hold together, and never can. They only confuse and influence to render one meaningless. For it is only one's own story that holds together - every snippet, every little day and hour and moment - it is a complete story - yet so hard to tell. There is so much in it. So much that we avoid observing ourselves. So much that we must not know, to survive. And it is best that way, for to tell it to others makes it another snippet in someone else's life that adds to meaninglessness, and nothing more.

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A suddent burst of prose, unedited. Some might find it too dark, but that's in line with this space. This is fast becoming a place for experiments of all kinds in (re)discovering myself...but perhaps that is what a blog is about...(?)