DABBLER SCRIBBLES

       Our mind is the greatest vagabond we will ever know. It’s always on the move. One moment you are smelling roses on a meadow and the other moment you are wandering the dust laden streets of a rustic town parching in a summer. Galaxies are transited in milliseconds. But that’s not what is concerning, for wandering is but the nature of the mind. It is the use of the possessive pronoun “our or my” that we often do when the wanderings happen and we have to talk about it. When we have to say that the mind wanders, we describe its nature as a vagabond and say that “my mind is so fickle” or “my mind is always restless”. Who is this “we”? Whose mind is it? Why is it a possessive pronoun sometimes and sometimes it is identical to self as in when we say “I got lost dreaming” or “I tend to zone out”. So when the wandering happens we assume that it is identical to our self and when we get back to reality we realize that mind was just a medium. We, and whoever that “we” is for different cultures will provide us with different understanding of that “we”, are of a sort of the owner not only of the anatomical brain but also the process, the mind. A master of this piece, this wandering vagabond. But most of us are upset about not having a strong mind about something.

                             To most of us discipline and motivation comes hard. For most of the time it doesn’t at all. We are not disciplined or motivated and the reason we sight is that the mind talks us out of it or that it just cannot stick to a routine. How weary of us?! Here the discourse must be steered in the direction that there is a duality we are talking about. And to elucidate the same let me take two statements, “I have fever” and “I am ecstatic”. Now in both the case we have used the personal ego, “I” but they are not hinting to the same thing. I have a fever is a bodily issue for now I am talking about my body running a fever. But “I am ecstatic” is feeling and the body isn’t feeling it. It is the other “I”, the non-bodily one. For a piece of medicine might get me rid of the fever but the feeling of ecstasy knows no bound, could be ephemeral or lifelong (as I can be the happy prince). So it is obvious that there is some form of duality. And when we say “my mind is fickle” we are hinting at the other “I” which is in the driving seat but the mind which is wandering is just like a kid which wants to go the amusement park and is crying his lungs out about it while he should be going to school. This simple understanding about who is the owner gives us courage or I believe it does to some extent because History stands as a proof of this fact that the moment we realize that we are stronger than our colonizers we drive them away. All it needs is the belief that you are the owner, metaphorically.

                                 The important question that arises after this realization is how to do it. How to arrest the futile wanderings. There can be so many ways but a process I believe that can be employed is the Hegelian Dialectic method. That is the process of Thesis, Anti-Thesis and Synthesis. A process which Karl Marx accepted too. The philosophy is not the same but distorted. When I say we often mostly look at the Thesis part that is the part we need to learn we are often ignoring the Anti-Thesis part that is the part that we should be unlearning. The thesis part will be the discipline part and the anti-thesis will be the problematic habits. It might seem like they are complimentary that when you are in the process of learning, the unlearning happens automatically. It is the case often but not always. Because issues are not always parallel. They are if not anything radial from a point and learning one thing might just help you unlearn one branch that is oozing out of that point. There are several more and they influence indirectly the cause. So keeping an eye on the unlearning is important and when the learning and the unlearning combine, you get the synthesis of a new habit or a better self. The philosophy will be better structured. But the beauty of the method is not in the output which is natural but the process. Because after a certain period the Synthesis will become the new Thesis and there will be Anti-Thesis to deal with and working on both, a new synthesis will arrive. The process is quite endless and one may be weary of this longevity. How are we to become something if we only keep going through this process? The simple answer to this should be that perfection, discipline, stability are not destinations. They are in themselves processes. We are only better than yesterday and can be better tomorrow. There is no stagnation like the Buddhist philosophers would say that there is no “Being” but only “Becoming”. We become more and more of what we want to but never in the entirety. Hence the mind which is mentioned through a “possessive pronoun” now, will be our identity one day but the process is long and arduous and starts with the understanding that it is not on the driving seat.

                            We have to realize that the personal ego “I” is stronger and our mind wanders because we think we are in its control and watch it do its job, passively. But that is not the case. We have the reins but not the courage. We don’t feel we are part of it. Like in the Hellenistic era paintings, filled with drama, everything that is to happen is happening in the painting. If there is king waging a war or talking to the subjects, they are all in there. The viewer who sees the painting in some museum now is only a passive viewer. But art grew to encompass all and in the later period in the mosaic artwork titled “The Miracles of Loaves and Fishes” circa 520 AD, you would see Jesus standing with his apostles with bread and fish and according to the story there must have been thousands of people but in the painting there are none. Jesus and the apostles look straight out of the painting and when we go to see that painting, we feel as if he was giving us the bread. We feel to be part of the painting. That everyone who sees that painting is believing self to be among the thousand that were there when the miracle happened. This is the sense of identity that is required to understand that we are not passive pillion riders of our mental activity but we are the activity and constraining it or allowing it to flow is our discretion. The mind is not the rider, we are. So drive safe.  

  

(A Hellenistic era painting)

In this long and yet short running of life so far, it is the disproportionate mix of intentions and endeavors that had meandered me to my present situation. It is not sunny every day, rather it is hardly sunny anymore but the gloom has its own eerie beauty that is fathomable only to the conspicuously comprehending and broken. Real pain is tough to deal with but one can always entertain an idea of pain. One could always compete for tragedy (remember the last time you were in pain but someone was in deeper pain and then you felt lighter). The meager question, of course, is should one actually? I am bound to think, unlike in my stories, that everything will turn out well at the end. Call me fatalistic. Sure it is not understood what my grounds for such a faith is. Probably it is springing from the very existence and endurance of the human world despite all the odds. But sometimes I feel it is so viciously laden upon me that life to me seems scripted and I am only having revelations as I progress like the ideas of Plato. And then I think, what about endeavors? If it is to happen and if it will, then what is the point of this constant struggle with the emotional conundrums in my head and if it is not meant to be then also what is the point of this struggle? How far can you go and that too this heavy? I am probably the lightest right now without obviously appreciating it but I am quite certain that from here onwards there will only be an addition of weights to my existence. Either I will grow a muscle or break one. But I am certain I will not have a choice in the matter of embracing it. 

                       Conflicts of interest is another concern and my sensitivity and gravitas towards both the conditions of “want & want not” is a rather remorseful disposition. It angsts me to know that in doing all, I am doing nothing and in being all, I am being nobody. I am much younger in my head and that deludes me that like a newly born river gushing out of the mountains I can cut through the earth and make gorges so deep that I will touch the universe below it. But then when one sheepishly questions me seeing engrossed in zillion things, “Aren’t you serious about this pursuit?” I forge a gamut of theories, untested thesis, as to why it might just work for me only to put to silence their bothering questions, but for how long? How long before I turn into the mob myself and question self about the rationality of the decisions made and the enslavement of self to the swings of situations-of-the-mind?

                       Denying to be a mediocre, fostering the highest dreams, I am better introduced to my insecurities and flaws as a human than ever before. I probably am a weak human. Flawed. Broken and powerless. But as I write this, I realize that there are more dimensions to my inabilities than I thought. There rose more incumbent ripples when I threw a stone in the rather placid pool of ego-waters. The ripples that have now grabbed my soul by its identity and questioned its very existence. But then everything is not so chaotic. When in the midst of this gruesome drama, I turned to my identity with questioning eyes, I was silenced by the answers. I quietly listened to my inner-self whisper to those ruthless ripples, should I be perfect? Should I be flawless? Should I not have any aberrations? And when I hear myself say this, I realize I am always going to stay light. No weight can ever daunt me now. No pursuit is greater than the pursuit of self. I don’t have to be flawless. I don’t have to be perfect. Perfection is a myth. I just need to pick up the pieces of my cracked self and probably mend it together with gold and flaunt the preciousness of experience and understanding and acceptance like the “Wabi-Sabi” philosophers of East did practicing “Kintsugi”. I have to realize that it is completely okay to be flawed, broken, powerless and all those things and still go in a pursuit of this noble nature. Hiding these aberrations was making me believe that I was invincible and destined to victory. But after this inner conflict, I realized that I am equally destined to fail as I am to succeed. I am equally destined to be happy as I am to be remorseful. It is all about choices and acceptance. Accepting that I am flawed helps me to understand that I can be worked upon. That I can grow. You can never fill water in an already full bowl. So growing beyond the insecurities requires you to accept and embrace the fact that you have few. No one is free of them and today, in a manner disposed ardently to this theory, I can assure you that only they who understand that the world is flawed and everyone is as incomplete as you are will ever endure it and have the courage to pursue their dreams and be just a little less flawed than before. Not perfect but only a little less flawed. 

               “Cogito ergo sum”, which is the Magnus opus of Rene Descartes and the Latin for “I think, therefore I am” and “Esse Est Percipi”, which is the Magnus Opus of George Berkley and the Latin for “To be, is to be perceived”, are interpreted in an entirely different fashion in philosophy than in what context I am determined to use them. If I were to ruminate on the phrase “I think, therefore I am”, I would subconsciously break at the comma into two separate points, “I think” and “Therefore I am”. “I think” is an attraction. It is an open invitation to any thought that a mind is capable of fostering. “I think” is hardly consequential. There is no charm is reckoning the fact that a wandering mind can have wandering thoughts. It is petite bourgeoisie of phenomenal world issues. What is charismatic is the conjunction that follows “I think”. The phrase that adds value to it is “Therefore I am”. This is the output, the accountability. Here can the civilization pinpoint and say that this is the effect of a suddenly meticulous process “I think”. Theory of causality, which is all pervasive in every philosophy clearly says that every event must have a cause. To put it simply, every effect must be born out of a cause and nothing can come out of nothingness, “ex nihilo nihil fit”. So as long as I work around “I think”, I can positively take the liberty and let my mind entertain every thought that it can possibly pursue but the moment I see Descartes holding the other pluck card saying “Therefore I am”, I am immediately cautioned to regulate my thought process. Here it is accountable and under an indomitable channel of scrutiny. I urge you to understand the simple algebra of equality that Whatever I think = Whatever I become. Some rationalist philosophers of the West believed that we have a repository of innate ideas, that is knowledge about everything is pre-existing in our mind and we discover it over a period of time as we progress in life. The empiricist philosophers, however, believe that it is the experience that acts as the genesis of those ideas and we keep imbibing them one after another as we progress. To give you an understanding of the gravity of the situation at hand, let me ask you to assume your mind to be a Pandora’s Box with all things in it having the characteristic of Schrodinger’s cat. Then it is obvious that anything that you pull out of it will be of this form or that form with an equal probability of existence. And what could I mean by the forms? Broadly speaking it can be either positive or negative. You can pull anything out of it which could be “alive” or “dead” as far as the quality of the thought is concerned. What you pull out affects you and what you ruminate upon becomes your cause of existence. Now the obvious question here would be, if there is an equal possibility of a positive or a negative thought to emerge out of my head, then how am I to regulate the process for embracing only positivity or for that matter only negativity, for them who crave for a little spice and drama in life. This is where George Berkley wishes to speak up.

                        If I were to meet Berkley after his church time (because he was an ardent Bishop) and tell him about this crisis he would open the dialogue with “Esse est Percipi”, “to be is to be perceived”. Now again, I am borrowing this famous phrase from philosophy and using it an entirely different context than the popularly accepted interpretation. “To be, is to be perceived”, which he quoted considering the world that anything that is existing is only because I or some human being is perceiving it. And none of us are looking at anything, the Almighty from his transcendental is keeping an eye on everything. That way, the integrity and existence of substances are maintained. But if I could trespass on your generosity and urge you to stretch it further to our daily life and show you that this simple equation has an unfathomably humongous influence on our very making as humans and the subsequent societies which act as a precursor to civilizations, you would appreciate in unison its significance. “To be” can be conveniently translated to “To exist” and existence here is taken in a very broad sense. It is beyond the phenomenal or sensible world. To be precise, I am more concerned about the energy; the constructive or the destructive.

                    It is out rightly clear that “existence” according to Berkley was dependent upon perception. But when I say perception, there are two dimensions to it, of which I am only corned about one. The first one is thoughtless perception which is just a physical process where you register things without analyzing them or processing them (The kind where you stare at something lost in your thoughts. Even though you have seen something but not really have processed it to develop an understanding. To the convenience of understanding, take the example of us looking into our books and dreaming about all things interesting). The other perception is thoughtful perception. This where there are registration and analysis from where the genesis of understanding takes place. I am exactly concerned with the second category. For a more lucid understanding of this philosophy, let me ask you to assume the process of registering and analyzing as analogous to the process of watering the plants and of course the plants act as the thoughts cultivated. The existence of these plants entirely depend on the fact that they have been watered recently or not (perceived or not), ignoring the technicalities of photosynthesis and other stomata-level issues. Now let us say there is a provision for a wave that is released every hour and kills any plant that is weak because it has not been watered recently. This is exactly what happens with our thought process. The wave is our consciousness to destroy any destructive, unproductive weed but the mind often applies little discretion on watering the plants and most often ends up watering wrong ones. And when this plant turns into a mammoth it becomes a habit. Its existence, as Berkley would point out, was only possible because you chose to perceive it, not just once but again and again.

                   In a nutshell, the choice is in our hand and it is exactly what differentiates an efficient from an inefficient. Being fatalist at times might help to reduce the burden of accountability and help bring back dynamics in life but at the corner of every such lucrative fatalist quotation is a peevishly smiling asterisk which says conditions apply. And the only condition that is blatantly applicable is the law of conservation of energy and causality which very much sums up the law of karma. Whatever you do or choose to pursue at any level, stays as energy and only changes form to come back to you at times as cause and at times as effect.   

        

                                      

( The fall of man by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, Classic art)

   

      ( The Gleaners by Jean-Francois Millet, Realism)

    ( Wanderer above the sea of fog by Caspar David Friedrich, Romanticism)

   (Woman with a parasol by Claude Monet, Impressionism)

   ( Stary Nights by Vincent Van Gogh, Expressionism)

   (The scream by Edward Munch, Expressionism)

( The persistence of memory by Salvador Dali, Surrealism)

   ( Guernica by Pablo Picasso, Cubism)

  ( Pop art by Andy Warhol) 

    ( The Six, Abstract Expressionism)

                            The sheer idea of criticism runs a chill across the spine. There are few who keep an open door to criticism. Ofcourse the bitter taste of the words demeaning your work are not a treat of gluttony and you are destined to run on to the sick bed of melancholy after the stings of criticism have stung you hard. Who likes to be hit by a hammer in the face after a laborious and exhausting attempt at creating something, specifically in the field of art? Where on one side it comes as real obvious to repel the comments of the critics, on the other side there is a hidden medicine in the bitter words of criticism that we tend to ignore and label people as haters. Considering Art of any form which can range unfathomably from painting to writing to dancing to singing to origami to anything and everything, I am bound to lease out the conspicuous importance of criticism in the making of a legend or a maestro.

           Basically, in personal opinion, I strongly believe that an artist has three phases of development at large. The first phase is, of course, the “phase of discovery”, where the future artist has just discovered his art and found a newborn passion. At this stage, he is similar to a diamond hidden inside a coal. Pure pitch dark coal seeming ugly and unromantic to the eyes of the talented. If the cruel swords-of-criticism be brought out here and lashed upon brutally onto this coal, it is going to roll back into the mine and stay there obscure, undiscovered and denied of the little chance of harvesting confidence. This is the phase where the critic or the person the artist looks up to for a review, must be Hippocratic. He must blanket his errors and try to instill confidence by motivation. Allow the artist to believe that there can be a diamond inside him. It is highly possible that there would be no diamond at all and it becomes analogous to “Schrodinger’s Cat scenario of What if I critique too harsh and the artist in him dies and what if I allow him to jump off the cliff of creativity but not tell him that he does not have the wings”. Here we must employ “Selective criticism” and be as lenient as possible. We, along with him, must take a leap of faith. Initial praise will keep him moving.

        When the coal slowly moves to the second stage where a bit of the diamond’s skin shows off, the critic can employ enough harsh criticism to burst few of his bubbles. As an artist, one is bound to believe that every piece he creates is a masterpiece and endorses strong emotions and pride with each one of them. In the second stage, when the crude crystal is showing off, bring the artist out of the “fairyland of all things great” and acquaint him with the reality and talent around. Give him a reality check and show his standards with regard to the work available in the field. But there is fine point one must remember. Although the artist has invested enough confidence in his work, he still does not have an invincible faith in his work and he still can roll back into the mine. So the critic must ensure that on one side where he acquaints him with the reality, on the other side he must keep him motivated and tell him what it took for the maestros to get where they got. This is the second phase.

     When all you have is a crystal in the crude form and no piece of coal is canopying the crude diamond, bring out your “Samurai swords of criticism” and shape him and polish him to the best. Then and only then can a Pretending-Artist become an “Artist” in the true sense. The need of criticism in bringing the best of anybody is undeniably quintessential but the phases of criticism must work parallel to the phases of the artist’s development. Where hypocrisy can be employed in the initial stages, it is important that one holds on to giving brutally honest review later on. Honest criticism will lay the foundation of excellence and it is something that an artist stays indebted for life.

        

                 "To be or not to be, that is the question!" And this question is fairly old. It has haunted civilizations, let alone people in specific. The excellence of this question is in the simplicity and innocence of its terms. Whether to be or not to be, like a little child wondering whether to give the broken toy to a friend or not to give but here it is only extended to the sphere of life and death. Although this soliloquy of Shakespeare firmly deals with the issue of existence, it can, in modern times be extended to common issues of coming of the age that is Identity crises as well. The phrase Identity Crisis is in vogue. It sounds like a first world country problem while the third world countries have to still deal with issues of poverty, hunger, unemployment, ill health, illiteracy, social and political imbalance and the likes. But if you stop looking at the forest in general and care to scoot into it, you will surely find one tree which would stand for the issue of “Identity crisis” and breathing the words, “to be or not to be, that is the question” which the master of Romeo Juliet and King Lear has so brilliantly asked in Hamlet. As such it is a herculean task to deal with the “Forest” in general but if I may, I would like to shift your attention to that tree which stand for the issues of Hamlet; Personality Crisis and the freedom to be self, in the context of this discussion. Well it cannot be denied that we are all a part of a society and unless we desire to have salvation in solitude and live the life of Henry David Thoreau, we cannot absolutely amplitude ourselves from the decorum of the civilization. Our actions and thoughts will generate ripples in the little pond we live, so it won’t be wrong for the fellow humans to ask you to tailor your ripples to the norms of the pond so that your wavelength does not morally or psychologically damp somebody else’s wavelength. Often you will be asked to wear the skin of the herd. As liberal and as utopian the Roman civilization was, even it had practiced the course of “selective adaptation” where the lesser minds were killed so that the future generation will not be adulterated with less intelligence. Now the lesser minds would have asked the same question, “To be or not to be”, had Shakespeare been born before their time. So fitting people in has been the base of civilization since the beginning and it is morally right too. But when you ask few “subversives” to do so, there comes a little whisper from the corners of their minds asking, “What about individuality? What about the personality I hold? Who am I, if I separate from this herd?” in the process of fitting in are we chopping off the wings we have, or getting rid of the flamboyant hump or even trying to break the fins and walk the Sahara dunes just because the herd I think I belong to has such norms and hooves. Where it is moral for an individual to fit in, is it not a moral obligation of the society to understand his uniqueness and accept him as he is? Where else can we be ourselves? In solitude? Where can we tell our herd that we can fly, or go days long without water or even swim oceans? This world is accelerating towards poker status quo  and with such obligations of “fit in”, we are only encouraging more fakeness and killing originality and individuality and this will push each of us to the very question that has echoed timelessly in the valleys of civilization; “To be or not to be, that is the question.”            

Like the dew of the early dawn,

Slipping from the petals of orchid,

Your thoughts slip over my psyche,

Enchanting,

Bewitching and slowly,

I drown in it,

Helpless I am,

And when I hear the breeze,

Rising from your meadows,

It sings ode of your persona,

Of which I wish to be a stanza,

The one with relentless rhyme,

For when you sing your life,

Your lips must hum my name,

And when I write my life,

My pen must ink your reign,

Dear friend,

What are you?

If you are not an addiction.

Wake up from this salubrious sleep,

End this enchanting devil’s dance,

For you know the time shan’t return,

To give them another chance,

Bewitch the forlorn and afraid,

Arouse the valor with wizardry glance,

Take the poison rubbed arrows,

Foster the calm archer’s stance,

Another night, while the dragon sleeps,

Unsheathe the sword, sharp the lance,

When the ogres merry the night,

Slaughter the werewolves disguised as lambs,

Let the uproar of their deaths echo,

Along with your wizardry charms,

And then it will be time to go,

To again end an enchanting dance,

In the black mystic woods I think,

Miles away from your magical France.