Remembering Macedonia. Chapter Three. Alexander McIntyre and the Question of Life.

Alexander McIntyre was the Buddha. I never doubted it for a moment. Knew it the moment I met him - those eyes locked in the perpetual state of oneness with the whole of being. Buddha's parinirvana. Alex was what the Buddha had achieved through his death. Knowledge. Wisdom. Cosmic bliss.

Alex had read every book, every line, written or thought by man. He never read to know more. He knew everything there was to know the moment he was born. He was nestled in the womb of the cosmos and weaned at the teats of the Milky Way.
He read to ascertain; to confirm the legitimacy of the anguished self-expression of troubled humanity. Every drop of ink ever spilt were merely drops of Alex's volatile blood, blotted up in paper before they vanished, were absorbed back into this cosmos of meaning. He was the illegitimate gran'dad of all human thought.

Alex was also the happiest and most self-content soul I ever met. His ears were tuned to picking up the resonant thrills of music of a windswept rainy night or a car screeching to a crash (door-frame shattering, windscreen imploding, et al). And when you looked into his eyes, you could hear the very veritable symphony of the Universe, from the drop of a pin to the birth of a star, playing blaring out loud like a cranked up transistor. He never had reason to be bored.

All the same, despite his self-restrained calmness, the Buddha understood the unassailable logic of life.
The world is full of sorrows.
Desires are the main cause of sorrows.
Sorrows can be ended by killing desires.
Desires can be killed by unravelling the illusory nature of the cosmos by following the Eight-fold Path.
Undesiring life. Life not to be spent attaching itself to ephemeral motives working towards illusory desires. A blind man grasping for a wisp of smoke.
The only reality of life lay within yourself. The twitch of a muscle, the salty sweat on your bare chest, the blood throbbing at your temple. And the undeniable reality of pain. And the irredeemable fact that our blood is alloyed with iron, and it is all so easy to rust over.

So, Alex and I lay countless nights, on concrete drainpipes and railway sleepers, breathing in the collective stench of humanity curdling the air, as we stared out into the sky connecting the stars. We did not need to speak. He drew the lines on the dark backdrop of the deep blue night sky, and the stars danced before the our eyes inebriated with hash and cheap country liquor. The stars recognized us by face. We, too, were two hapless beings shackled down on Earth by something as vainly unseeable and untraceable as gravity. Gravity... very grave indeed.

It was through this orchestra of the night sky, where I learnt about of Rembrandt and Plato, the Summer Solstice and the tapir, that I met the brightest star in the night sky. She was called Mac, Macedonia.

Roadwards

Leaving behind the track of memories

And dry leaves blowing in the dusty road,

I step out

Head out,

Roadwards.

Penniless,

Bagless,

And soul-less.

The sweltering heat -

A sun as white as snow -

My eyes reddened

By the dust on the road;

My face, a mask of grime.

The road stretches forever.

Cutting across

Plains and palms,

Deserts and farms,

Railroads and dams,

Pains and balms,

Bhajans and psalms.

The road cuts through

Right and left,

Right and wrong,

Heaven and Earth.

The road is attempted immortality.

It never ends.

Its median lines

Never wavers.

The road is redemption.

The road was dug up

And leveled out

By eyes searching

Beyond the horizon.

And eyes, with regret,

Wanting not to look behind.

My eyes are burning

With the sweat

And heat

And a million colloidal dust particles

Peppering it

With the predictable unpredictability

Of Brownian motion.

No, they are not tears

Of sadness,

Weariness,

And worries.

No tears, no regrets

Anymore.

The cinematic silence is shuddered into the reality of dust, heat and acrid kerosene smoke as a 12-tonne truck pulls over; its brakes creaking in unison as it descends from Heaven or Hell or wherever on Earth it comes from. Its chrome grille gleams in the midday sun. Its orange face is as bright as fire.

The driver's name is Charon. He is blind. Not that it matters. The windscreen is caked with an inch of dust. All that matters is that, for a few shared cigarettes, he can drive you across to Oblivion.

Everyone makes that mistake.

Pinning spots down on maps

(Like insects to be dissected and have to be pinned down 'cause they may run away from scapels and spatulas and inquisitive human fingers.)

And pinning camp tents

And picnic baskets there

When you reach.

Jolly good holiday.

Without feeling

The dust in your eyes,

Grime on your face

And the taste of exhaust fumes

Of the thousand cars

Which never stopped.

The road is the destination.

The road is where it ends

And where it begins.

Like life itself.

There is nothing outside the road

Or beyond it.

A few threadbare memories

And dry leaves scattered by the dusty wind.

Their eyes were watching god

So says Hmmmbug.

As god was working his divine rearside off, trying to replicate his abode on earth, as he twisted clay within his hands and made out his divine image in two ungaily stickmen, those eyes didnt comment on his craftsmanship. If god was a better sculptor, we would have been living in paradise. He was the prodigious kid. He was also the prodigal son. Those eyes waited for him to falter. For him to fall on his knees, in frustration, for failing to be the promise he was born as.

God could have made a better sculpture. His fingers very nimble, dexterous. He simply chose not to. Thus was his revenge. We are collateral damage of god's self-exacted revenge on those formless eyes forcing him to form.

On a Green Meadow on a Misty Afternoon

The clear blue lake spread out in front of him. And beyond them, the distant blue hills paled until they merged and became one with the clouds and the pallid blue afternoon sky. The lake rippled in the breeze and the sunlight sparkled off the lapping waves.

He didnt know why he had to be here. Why now. He simply had that urge to escape. Run away from those thousand and five invisible hounds that all but clipped his heels. He was tired from running away. But it was even more tiresome staying where he was. And now as he left his body loose, stretched out on the bright green grass of that endless meadow, he felt like had left the lot behind, and maybe his body too. A feeling of transcendental bliss.

He sat up. Picked up that pebble lying next to him. This pebble too must have chosen to run away someday, and laid himself down by this lake until he became a fossil of his existence, he thought to himself. He felt its smooth cold texture on his palm, felt the weight of a thousand years that had polished him to compliance. He took a breath and launched the pebble towards the lake.

He wanted to see the pebble skim over the surface. Instead, the pebble plinked down to the bottom of the lake at the first bounce. Its ripples cut a swathe through the tepid waves that lapped the bank.

The anticipation of expectancy. That longing for perfection, of a perfectly smooth pebble skimming over the fragile surface of that dreamy blue lake, endlessly, until it disappeared over the horizon into the mist that shrouded the hills. It was not to be, for the pebble wished otherwise. It was an outcast like himself.

The frustration of a thousand shackling dreams, the bewildering anticipation of a thousand hopeful fingers that tore their way through the ground, pointing him the path they wanted him to take. And groping for his feet while he tried to trample over them. The thousand blades of grass all around all pointed skywards, that pinnacle of perfection.

His eyes were rooted far away in the distance. Across the lake where he had willed the pebble to go. Do the blades of grass point skywards there too?! Or may perhaps someone might send the stone skimming back from the far bank, through that veil of mist?

At the bottom of the lake, the fossil finally found solace among many more of its sort who didnt make it to the other bank.

Allegropolis. Episode One.

The city of joy.

Allegropolis is not Calcutta, please.

It just translates to "the city of joy".

I step out on the platform.

The train is delightfully late.

But from when did time ever matter.

There are no clocks here.

Those relics of wooden cuckoo clocks do survive.

So does the clock tower.

The dials do remain.

The needles which ran around, skipping from number to number,

Pointlessly,

Merely to reach back where they started.

They are no longer there.

Pointlessness can be joy,

But not when you are pointlessly in a hurry.

Contradiction One.

The Clock tower chimes.

It chimes for joy.

It chimes whenever it feels like it.

There are no birds any longer

To chime for joy any more.

The metallic song of the clock tower will have to do.

Have to do?!

So can there be happiness in compromise?

Has to do.

Contradiction Two.

Chat Discourses on PseudoMetaphysics and the Human Ontology.

silence: i can't go on like this

have lost all motivation

me: chchey!!

silence: so want a break

me: whats wrong now?!!

silence: sigh

me: yeah thats the problem with our generation

the general apathy towards life and ambitions

silence: but i am not like this

me: hehehe

so we all say

silence: usually i'm fired to do things

me: you just became postmodern

silence: now i don't feel like reading what i have to anymnore

me: yes yes

welcome to the world

silence: want to read some literature, study for NET and live somewhere else without much worries for sometime

me: hmmm

wokay wokay

do it then

silence: and it is also in my birthcard that from 21-5 of this year to 07-12, i 'll have a time of restlessness and moving away

me: hahhaha!!

then drift along a while

anyway i am off

silence: i should, but towards the better :)

me: hehehe

theres nothing is better and all anyway

its all just pretensions

make-belief

see i ll give and analogy

its just like smelling a flower while walking along a road

it smelt good

but fact is you were just breathing

and it happened to smell nice

silence: see, i was not online

so come again with the analogy

me: and you would have breathed anyway and have to breathe anyway

shit

see the good things in life

are like smelling a flower while walking along a road

it smells nice

but eventually it was just that you were taking a breath

and it happened to smell nice

and whether it smelt nice or not

you woulda taken a breath and moreover couldnta helped but take a breath

thats all

life is all about breathing

in and out

silence: ya, i believe in the cosmic connection which exists between your nose, the flower and the moment u decided/involuntarily took the breath

me: thats all there is to it

nothing of that sort

if the cosmic connection willed that you were not to smell the rose

it wouldnt make any difference at all

you prolly wouldnta even noticed there was a rose worth smelling by the road

silence: exactly

so, that is imp

me: in no way at all

if you were oblivious to the smell of the rose

the rose never existed for you

silence: then there is no rose

me: and you go on in life

silence: and how do we become oblivious?

me: breathing as you go

silence: karma, my son, karma!!

me: hehhee!!

it just depends on why we chose that path

and that might have a little to do with our past

but hardly ever

it has more to do with our future

if you think about it

coz we always choose paths to reach somewhere faster

or take our time and delay the trrp

silence: but our idea of what is fast, and how fast it will be in a life that is at the same time snail paced and blowing away in centuries, that is karmic, my son

me: we always do have the faculty of choice

but that doesnt mean we may get run over by a bus coz we did some incomprehendable mistake in our past

based on a choice

the universe is far more random and chaotic than that

if there exists an order, it is that of chaos

we wont see that in everyday events

but put everything that happens around together

and thats the picture you get

and hence no better or worse

silence: but who controls our choice? where in the oceans shall w unravel the real mystery of agency? who decides for us? the well perceiving faculty, oh, aren't they just five in an unknown zillins? or is it the time that decides for us? the time that comes to us like a srtorm or as a child's cry, as a hushed up moan oin bed, or as the silent naughty half look of a girl by the way?

me: hehehe

silence: can i copy this chat?

me: hehehe

yeah yeah

hahhaa!!

now you ve thrown me off track

yeah lemme get back to it

aah

so time...

and how we perceive and react

well when we are placed in certain social and ethical circumstances

some choices are made for us already

the choice of the system

the system that tries to find order in the whole entity of existence

hehehe

yeah

its a futile human attempt

and if time seems to decide what we want in life

that is because the systme wants us to believe that is what we want at that particular moment in time

and so the next question naturally would be

why should we look for order

silence: no no

me: then??

silence: what i said is not that we decide to suit the ytime, but the time decides for us

me: as in time brings forth events that determine our life??

silence: also

me: hmmm

that again is a futile human attempt to find order

cause time in itself is arbitrary

silence: exactly

me: and we create time in order to dispell our fear

silence: so, being a karmic, as our conversation proves, is a way of being pomo :)

me: how come?!

hehhee

silence: bcoz, both tend to be taking away metanarratives from human effort

in fact, even slightly hinting at the randomness of time

me: karma hints at anything but the randomness of time

silence: that's true

me: the only randomness of time advocated by kramonc theory is that

silence: but we wil tweak it a bit for concensus :)

me: i ll strike you but you dunno when

hehehe

wokay wokay let that be then

anyway lemme wind up

saying

we exist coz we do

we live just coz we have already breathed the next breath

silence: against ourt own fears, i'l add

me: philosophical pseudometaphorical discourses make me very hungry

metaphysical that is

i really have to go off now

lunch awaits

bye now

see you later

silence: don't call it pseudo!!!

me: hehehe!!

okay okay

will be redundant then i see!!

hhahaa!!

silence: :)

me: bye now!!

silence: bbye

Soft

I walked through the rubble
And pick up a feather.
Light, soft, fragile -
An instrument of flight dropped.
It seems misplaced.
Lying gingerly, half-willingly,
Waiting to float away
With the slightest of persuasion,
While all around it
My world lies in static destruction.
The feather is too white
In the middle of the grey
As the sun shines down on it
Painfully.
I ma standing on
Crumbled walls,
Reinforced concrete blown to powder
By explosions whiter than the sun,
Charred bricks,
Splintered window frames,
Bent girders, Twisted ambitions,
Broken dreams.
I stand atop vanity
And vainly, I hold
The vane and ponder:
How the feather stayed so light
Unburdened by longings
And desires.
How it stayed so soft
When it had been dropped behind
So ignobly, so ungratefully.
How it stayed so fragile
When around it
Metal and stone blew as dust.
Dust.
But the feather is
Lying on its back.
No dust blows into its eyes.
Its eyes are turned up,
And all it sees
Is a clear blue sky
Caressed by smooth white clouds.

Typographic error

click-click-click click-click click-click-click

dup-dup dup-dup-dup dup-dup-dup-dup

the letters appeared on screen magically as my fingers ran across the keypad. its nice to see them there. i can see the words surging from my mind down to my fingertips. i can see them, i can touch their curved-straight edges onscreen. i wish i could take them out and hold them in my hand, feel their weight, how the earth pulls them to itself.

selfish earth. takes back everything. i think the earth 'cause i feed on it. the earth is part of me much more than i am part of it. it owns me.

tied to it by unseen cords, unknown kinships. gravity pulls you down to itself. and earth finally swallows you up, to spit you out somewhere else.

i am immortal.

the words are appearing one by one.

click-click dub-dub

keys crunching. heart beating. earth waiting.

typographic error.

Fractured fractals

I am standing on a fractal. A shape so complex they mindlessly term it as being irregular. That's always the easiest way out. Anything too complex has to be irregular. Regularity is the norm. The ideal existence of things. And complexity is anything but normality. Normality is what we love 'cause it fails to perplex us.

Yeah... I am blabbering. Fractals were what we were talking about. A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric figure which can be split into parts, each of which is roughly a copy of the whole. So says Wikipedia. And they say Wikipedia knows a lot. It says a lot, for certain.

So I am standing on this crazy, trippy geometric figure. A figure broken and shattered by the very necessity of its existence. This is my world. A fractured fractal. Redundant. Like the term itself. Where each fragment is a copy of the whole. And all of them held together 'cause without even a single one of them, the figure will be incomplete and there would eventually be no figure to copy. The tense and fragile necessity to be. I am standing on one of these tiny fragments.

As I stand here, and look all around me, and see the unity in multiplicity, i ask myself the question: Which is the greater miracle - the tiny fragments that look like the whole, or the whole which is the original copy that went into the photostat machine? Which was the first fragment that formed the prototype for the rest? Maybe the fractal had existed as a whole through the whole of time. Static. Unmoving. Fragmented and fractured.

P.S. This post necessarily exists because I love images of fractals and i couldn't but help putting up one on my blog. And for all who cared to read, my apologies. hehehe....

Lotta-what?!

When we say "a lot", i don't think we mean too much. It's just more than what we expected. We are an incredible species. The only one that eats past its hunger, the only one to drink rivers dry. Maybe greed is an outgrowth of intelligence. In fact, it has to be. We would have remained static in evolution, and for sure, not have come up with the term "evolution" in any case. We would have still clung to tree like our simian ancestors, if someone was not greedy enough to have a roof above his head. It is neither necessity nor curiosity that drives human progress, its greed rather. Wait... Ayn Rand already said that.
But do we really need "progress" that bad? "Progress" is just another marketing term...

And "Lotta-what?!" A lotta shite, i tell you... Even that was just a marketing term. Sorry if you fell for that.