Digressions in the Diary of a Dionysiac

I must start smoking or something. Not that I want to die with my lungs filled with tar or anything, that would be a terrifying prospect of course, but just that the picture of myself writing with a fag between my fingers would be a very ‘picturable’ thing. Balanced between the index and the F-finger of my left hand with the ash piling up at the other end, while my right hand holds a fountain pen- not those slim, aerodynamic ones which sometimes make me wonder whether they were made to write for they seldom did, or were they made to help you throw it more accurately at someone you didn’t like, not those- you know those really old ones, fat and which leaks ink from every joint it has; resting my left hand so that the piled up ash falls onto an ash tray on the writing table on which are strewn papers, some rolled up and crushed, some lying underneath an egg shaped paper weight, some being blown away by the table top fan that sits on a high pedestal; an open ink bottle solemnly remains stationary beside these papers, on the table; sitting before a glass window through which the penetrating afternoon rays crash upon all that is in the room, illuminating them; this would be a very picturable picture, even if I were not having the cigarette in between my fingers- I am not saying that, all I am saying is it would add to the whole ambience of it. It would look even more appealing, if the pic were to have a vintage look to it, like you know black & white and all. Somehow, writing with a pen on paper seems to be what those old fashioned, weirdo, pedantic guys would do, maybe they do it just because they feel they are a part of this picturable picture, yes, that would be quite probable, I would’ve done it too, of course, if I were like so darn pedantic and all, but I am not. They are the most ostentatious, hypocrites of geeks I have seen, and I have seen many geeks, being one of them myself, but I am no pedantic. They always spoil the jokes; they come in with these correct pronunciations when we were only joking for F’s sake, man they really kill them jokes. I usually write whatever it is that I write on my laptop, MS Word helps me with my inane mistakes in English grammar, so if you find any punctuation errors or some spelling mistakes or mistakes in sentence structures, blame Microsoft for it, because I have used auto correct options everywhere in this piece and if still there are mistakes, it is because MS Word is not as efficient as they say it is, or so you could conclude. But then again picturable is something I made up. I am quite a wordsmith myself, and not only that I am quite a punner too, only my puns just seem to bounce over people’s heads, they just don’t understand. Like for example, I use euphemisms almost always, but only that I use the harsher terms when I could have used a softer one, I once had to say this vote of thanks for the teacher’s day celebration in my school and I went and said, “Thank you for wasting your time here.” Well, my English madam came to me after the vote of thanks finished (which by the way was only that line.) and swore at me so badly that I learnt a few new swear words myself from her that day. Anyways, what I wanted to say was, if I put in a laptop in that picture, it would just as much as ruin the darn thing as a cigarette would enhance it. So, now, I am in this dilemma of sorts. If I wish to be in one such picturable pic, I would have to lose my laptop, and that would like kill my writing spirit. But, for the sake of the beauty of the picture, if anyone were to take a pic with me in it exactly like that, for beauty’s sake I think I must do that, I must start writing with paper and ink so that I would have time to get habituated to writing with a pen, just so that when the time comes I don’t look as if I was posing for a picture, that would look so bloody “phony”. Now, that is something else- ‘for beauty’s sake’. How much would one do for beauty’s sake? Would one even tell what one doesn’t believe in, just because he knew his thoughts are a nasty piece of work? Well, I would. I just did.

I could even start drinking now, coming to think of it. Why stop with smoking I say? Like, I only have like a year or so to graduate from this god forsaken place of knowledge, “An institution that seeks to produce India’s finest engineers” (like hell it does), and I have still not managed to inculcate a decent bad habit. It is not that I haven’t tried, as god is my witness, I have. But, every time I smoked a puff, I would burst out into these coughing bouts, man they were embarrassing as hell, so I stopped trying to smoke. I mean, who would want smoke to come out of themselves. But in their defence I must say these guys do look quite cool when they slowly exhale a dense cloud of smoke from their mouths, and only then and at no time else. It is like something spiritual or something. You know, as the cloud of smoke seductively hovers near your mouth and then diffuses, it’s like watching the person’s being leave him or something, to gain higher places. Now, how many of you people realised that was a pun? Did you? Of course you did. Now, I wouldn’t want to be a narcissistic fool thinking I am bloody obscure, that would make me pedantic wouldn’t it? Well, those souls who are too narcissistic, to the degree they are addicted to it, drink like drunkards. It is as if, they need to lose consciousness of themselves to become more narcissistic. There was this night; it was raining suddenly, as if heavens had decided to take a leak suddenly then and there, I was waiting for this bus to take me to this place I had to go to, and I was surrounded by drunkards. Most of them were so bloody drunk, they couldn’t sit on their asses for more than a second; ok, that was a slight poetic, artistic, exaggeration, about 50 seconds let’s say. See, now, exaggeration is something we can also find in them drunkards. They blow up the tiniest of their woes by fretting on them, by adjectivising them, that they would make the ones who hadn’t had a drink even once in their lifetime, puke on themselves because of the incessant nauseating narcissistic cribbing. Somehow drunkards are able to understand drunkards better, almost similar like as women understand women better. I am not yet a drunkard, I drank only once, honey-bee brandy, one peg, dry- it tasted like sweetened vomit, though I have not had that, I guess it would have tasted like that. My friends were laughing their guts out, most puked their guts out later, but, I had a manly reason to give them when I refrained from drinking another shot, and I wasn’t making it up either, I meant it. I told them, I would like to have my sense about me when I am still alive, it is supposedly the only time when we know we exist, and I meant it. Sleep is another such thing where one seems to lose consciousness; though I sleep as if I were dead. Not that I really want to be an insomniac or anything, though I did fantasise I was turning into one, I even acted out being an insomniac- to myself of course, in front of a mirror- after watching the film “Insomnia”, the one with the Italian guy in it. Insomniacs are lucky that way. Anyways, I am no insomniac. Though I reckon it is best if we are as conscious about the fact that we are alive as along as we are “up and about” (once dead we would no longer know we were once alive would we?); sleeping would not do that would it, so I sleep when it is absolutely necessary for me to sleep, I sleep quite late, about 2 in the morning or so, but I am so tired that I never manage to get up fast, and so I end up sleeping more than others too. I must remember to sleep early, perhaps, that would put me one step closer to becoming an insomniac.

I just finished this book called “The catcher in the rye” today. Well, what do I say about it? I won’t say anything, as a matter of fact. I hate book reviews, actually. I hate reviews. How can one say whether this is good or that is bad? And even if one had all justifications, and the right, and the power, to say whether this is good and that is bad, and if he would say it, I would still hate it. I would hate it even more if I hadn’t read the book before hearing the review, or seen the film for that matter, film reviews are more ubiquitous (a pedantic term, wouldn’t you say?). But, then of course a simple, good or bad review would look like god when compared to those other reviews which gives out bits and pieces of the film. I hate trailers too; they are almost like these other type of reviews. Like, if someone says to me so-and-so film had such-and-such actors Frenching right there on the screen, then when I did go to the sleazy movie, I would be so excited to watch them make out that when at last the scene did come it would become such a banal thing that I would feel miserable for those bucks I lost to watch this unsurprising act of frenching, the point is the whole surprise would’ve been ruined. Just now, when I referred to the movie as a sleazy movie, you must have thought I was being a “phony” prude or something; but, I ain’t one. Its just that, sometimes after all those blue films have satiated my appetite of the flesh, and if I wanted to watch a covered woman for a change, I would take a Hindi picture thinking that at least there are still decent films to watch after all that “perverty”; but just as the film moves into its quarter time, I find wet t-shirt contest like rain dances; orgy like marriages, where every one is trying to make out with someone else; or plain, straightforward nudity. It’s all so “phony” that I wish I were still watching an unphony freaking porn film for F’s sake. This phonyness is something else all together. “Inspiration”, is what a few from bollywood call it; yeah, my foot it is. It all starts with formation of stereotypes, such phonyness that is. Actually, originality itself is a phony word. If something were original it would be classified, and then because it is thought to profess somekind of whatever notion, it would cease to be original. People like stereotypedness, and stereotypedness is what makes them classify everything and in that originality loses its unique identity. And once that happens, originality itself becomes a phony word. It is stereotypedness that makes one say, “Hey isn’t this piece of shit like this other piece of crap that is based on another piece of unmitigated triteness?” it shows you how one piece seems similar or dissimilar to another, and hence magnifying the banality of it. Actually, if I were as narcissistic as those drunkards, I would’ve realised that I am as good a liar as those phony laptop writers ready to do anything for beauty’s sake who are as phony as those old fashioned writers of the Pen (Pun intended). Actually, if I were as phony as those reviewers, I would’ve realised that this piece of whatever it is, is like something else which I hope to hell was an original. But, I am no phony, and so shall end it here.

THE BAG, THE UMBRELLA, AND THE GIRL

Those, who wish to get inside this college, can avail themselves of a myriad different street:
For those who always come through the front door, two head entrances gapingly greet;
For those, who wish a stealthier path- come through the back, to walk into those futile Math slots;
But, beware sloth and temptation lurks behind K-bar’s calls, for an hour of rummy, or two rum shots;
For those abject brethren majoring the engineering approach on how to watch birds rare;
For those unseen angels seeking vengeance- money is your answer, pass through the ATM’s lair;
And for those who seek none of these, but to come on the sly from the side door,
Can cut through the cemented valley that swills with water in seasons, when rains pour.

Through one of these roads, came to this college a jolly good fellow,
Who, always smiled and showed off his teeth yellow;
His heavy black bag, that he carried with him everyday,
Was given special attention on his favourite Friday;
When everything from his stinking underwear to the unwashe sweater,
It would carry all the dirty secrets that would be laundered at his home later.

On other days, with his black bag balancing his skewed shoulder,
He walked round the gallery, to the canteen, making people roll with laughter;
When one day, he saw this beautiful girl, in a pretty white dress,
And lost his self, as she waltzed past him before he regained consciousness;
As he lay on his cot, in his hostel room, he knew he had lost his slumber,
For her round face kept coming back to him- ‘Am I in love?’ he asked in wonder.

He poked around, and got to know that she, it seems, was in the college’s centre dock,
When he was, two jumps from the end, in what was called the production block;
He then saw her once, in an ice cream parlour inside the city centre ring,
And then again, by chance or fate, in a Chinese restaurant named “The Ming”;
Once more, as he saw her passing through, when he least expected her,
The shock caused this, chest congestion, and a week’s time of delirious fever.

The curly hair which crashed softly on her shoulders, was dark as the picture of outer space;
In her eyes, whose gaze his had never met, he mused, lay the dark labyrinth of love’s maze;
As he searched its convoluted paths, his mind and heart, conspired his next pretense to meet;
In the empty college corridors, he dreamt of how she would smile, and how he would greet;
He found an open door as he composed a poem, of atrocious rhyme, meter, and length;
Which he wrote sipping tea in Wimbis, finishing it before the hour reached night’s tenth.

It was when he woke up beneath the Mech-tree, his limbs fumbled for a decent step,
And as he reached the civil facility he had lost his entire faculty that slacked his pep;
He wondered, why he wrote this unmitigated piece of crap, that spewed an ersatz flame,
How, if silence were golden, and words only silver, is this going to woo the opulent dame?
But, aren’t words, he consoled himself, more beautiful than the ostentatious golden glitter;
And thus saying passed through the eternally closed library, to the gallery- perennially in litter.

‘Twas not long before, that she came out to glorify the world around him, or so he felt,
But, she swept past him, he thought later, before he had a chance to spell “Spelt.”;
He followed her, to the ends of the college, through the decrepit Chemical flank,
Manoeuvring with grace between vehicles parked, ducking beneath the moribund water tank;
To stop before the puddle of water, before the sneering façade of the production bank;
To see her profess, undying love to the guy holding a lanky blue umbrella, fit for the villain’s role;
When, our poet, slumped down and declared, “Who cares, when my heart is like a black hole!”

For beauty’s sake

The candle wax dripped silently, to its stoned state;
The drink wasted, stayed untouched in its old crate;
The stars scattered, as pearls from a broken necklace
Shone on the blood stained corridors, revealing every trace;
Of where lay the murdered hunchback, still hunched in his death;
It hinted that the oozing red was what he smelled in his last breath.

***

On a castle, atop a crooked hill,
When it was dark, and weather chill;
With demented bats serenading us with a topsy-turvy tune;
Where the food was sumptuous, and no one to prune;
We sat waiting for the hunched butler to leave us be,
So, we could start that which we whispered as our “Loving spree”।

Wolfs howled from the surrounding forest den;
Owls hooted the ominous sighs of the dreary glen;
But, in our lofty abode, oblivious of these obvious omen;
We made passionate love, amidst the billows of white linen;
Pressed against each others bosom, we heard a thud and a faint bleat;
And we felt each others fear, as concertedly our hearts skipped beat.

***

Memory, stay with me! What was it that happened next?
Did I leave you? I think I did, but, under what pretext?
I remember the wooden stairs, and a dusty handle of a creaking door,
I remember a soft breath, and then a shooting pain with a vision gore;
Blood, dazzlingly red, gushed out of my knife-corked wound;
As I crashed in that infinitesimal moment of death, I awoke and was doomed।

There I lay in pain as I realized I had a hump on me;
I found my sneering butler and you, my love, in a negligee;
It was neither you, nor me; I am my own servant, but only in a dream;
It was you, my love, who plunged that knife, I know from your eyes’ gleam;
Oh! Grant me the honour of truth as the hour ends, for pity’s sake do your duty!
Why did you kill me? - And she answered truthfully, “I did it for the sake of Beauty.”

Identity crisis: the story of a sci-fi plot

Like them banal novels inspired by those ludicrous Hollywood sci-fi movies, starting out with someone killing someone, so that the hero/ heroine can chase someone he/she wants to, only to forget as they become more and more entangled, in this “web of mystery” they never wanted to be in, that they have “loved ones” who can be killed before the climax by someone else who similarly in the end, in self absorbed narcissism having the hero/ heroine cowed down, after a prelude of thunderous laughter, starts performing an overzealous soliloquy justifying his wrong doings, vaguely resembling those Shakespearean villains, oblivious, of the hero/ heroine plotting some fantastical escape attempt, which involves frog jumping overhead muscular bodyguards and choreographed action sequences in which everyone is able to kick if not simply graze, everyone else’s ass, with consummate grace at least once, all these only to end it by a prosaic killing of a whimpering villain; let us start our story by killing someone. Only because one can do that in his story, even if one were anemic, nerdy, clumsy, five-feet something, with the only power he has being the insanely high powered spectacles for his short sight. So then, someone, in ragged clothes, having a scarred face, climbs up pipes running down decrepit buildings, into some cluttered apartment in a dingy corner of a moribund city; maneuvering himself through the convoluted mess, that could be called any thief's perfect nightmare, with such precision that he could not have been a thief; that to another, watching him through the dark blanket of night, this act of trespassing would only be natural, for no one else could have moved through that clumsily filled apartment with such ease but the one who owned it. So, after a few other lines of verbose description, we find the man in the green jacket stabbing someone still in his pajamas with stupefaction on his unscarred face, and as the murderer bows down to drag the body we find him thinking, how once in his past, he was the man he had killed.

So, now that we have satiated the appetite to play god and kill someone, we move on to the plot. Headlines of newspapers read; "Are we at War?" or "These disturbing times!" and some other, ingenious, enigmatic, puns of a title for an emergency that is because of what follows. It seems that if we take out history text books of any one of the few school going kids at the time when this story takes place, or seems to be taking place, we shall find a high quality color photo of a young woman, quite insane by the looks of it, standing beside some gigantic tin container that she calls the time machine. We would find in the same text book, articles written instead of text book chapters, giving accounts of how the reason for their combined, miserable fortune, so virulent that all the future generations including their present one will be afflicted by it, and shall never recuperate from it; is their foolish continuum counterparts in the past, whose globalised foolishness is the cause, as is alleged, of this catastrophe called the present. The condition that is reported in these articles is something like this:

Sometime before, unable to reconcile his present fate, that is not only deplorable but something that he had never expected; unable to comprehend how all of us human beings in the world were able to manage to get into this state of extreme dereliction, depravity, and even with all that money with people, the destitution, which due to its ubiquity cannot even be pitied; confounded at how our combined fates had tumbled down to such a depressing point; started brooding upon his own life. Thus, he started first by, severing his own life from the lives of others, his own fate from that of the others, which for him, and other millions like him, was the only solace to the misfortune that had crashed upon them simultaneously and overwhelmingly so. In this search for his own individual past, he revisited his lost memories which showed a youth filled with grand ideas and a contagious hope for a better future; his decisions in life; the opportunities that went past him; the people who mattered to him the most; the books he had read; the movies he had seen; the journeys he had taken; the songs he had heard; disasters that were caused by human nature and nature itself; all of these resounded in his mind's hollow corridors. Thus, shuffling between memories of his youth, childhood, and his present and that of the common memory of mankind-our history; he found dots which he could join and which on joining, to his consternation, he found a meaningful constellation. He found his own freedom restricted by the freedom of others, and that his say in his own life, even though he rebelled against his family's wishes, the government, and against everyone if only to prove his point, was also decided by the circumstances in which he lived. His own individuality in the past and in the present was so entwined with past and present of his contemporaries, he found his own life too constricting. He found himself unable to extricate himself from this ghastly predicament of being enjoined in the combined fate, and the mediocrity of it, infuriated him. He wanted to be free from his fate which, he declared to himself in a soliloquy, was his destiny. What if, he thought as he tried to plan his own destiny, if he could enlighten his past?

And thus, this war that we are in with our own pasts, started with one man named "The hero" for the sake of anonymity, seeking to enlighten his past and hence, change his present. To this end, he found that, the insane scientist woman had created for him his tool, the time machine, and so, after discussing with this scientist on the side-effects of using this machine, he took it, let's say, for a ride. He had gathered enough to understand that the woman was a raving lunatic, and that if one could go by what she murmured during her bouts of sanity (it was when she usually stuttered, as she used to do in her past), that this machine was based on the theory another inmate of the scientific asylum had propounded a decade or so back, which stated that "We are but our identities"; that even the non-living things exist as a part of our identity as a human; that the variety of what we see around us, is but the materialization of the cognition of our different identities, and we, our mass, is but the cognition of our own selves. This would, he construed, apart from explaining why one became almost delirious when affected with high fever, explain how we all fell into such a mess. We gave up on our individual identities, we classified and declassified our identities so much that we stereotyped everything that was around us, even being unique became commonplace; men who did try to become different from different, found their identities still being similar to those others who were fighting side by side with them against mediocrity and thus, resulting in an inward revolution, and so on. All these tedious metaphysical revolutions were given up at the end, and all of us, giving up our struggle to find our singular identities, joined the combined fate, and consoled each other by showing how similar each was to the other. He also learns that, though he can not change his past without causing damage to his present identity; that each, the identity in the past, and the identity that has traveled to the past, are different and are independent of each other and that the past is connected only to the future. When we once step out of time, we are no more, either a part of the future or a part of the past. Thus, to exist, he who has stepped out of time to travel in it, must continuously be traveling, or then kill either of his identities, in the past or the future and then as a result of the first law of identities, "An identity can neither be created nor destroyed, only changed from one into another."; establish his own identity instead of it. This would mean that our past and future are therefore linked as a whole, and when we step out of it, are only taking with us some from the whole; and if we don't restore back this division of the whole into two and only two, we, our past, our future, and we who have stepped out, shall remain scarred for the rest of our lives, like the insane scientist who was the first to step into that fermata called time.

Our hero, wearing his lucky green jacket, steps into time, thereby scarring his own face from the sudden redistribution of identities and does what was described in the first paragraph, to his own self. This would, as the story moves, bring back this shift of identities to harmonious division into two of the whole, completing each others past and the present. Our hero, as he leads a life as his own past tries to achieve what he must to give himself a better future, his ex-contemporaries from the future learn of this path to salvation from their state, start trying to kill their past identities to form a better one for their own future. This would go on for long, until, the super power of the then past, by their covert intelligence, learn of this rapidly emerging new underground movement, that helped, to widespread disbelief, kill themselves. When all of this becomes news in the story's present, or our hero's past, people find their hopeful selves losing hope, looking at their own despicable future. And to dispel this sick relationship, which once used to be pure hope, between their present and their future, secured the time machines which this underground movement has until now kept secretly hidden from the government, after a bloody battle. This would be necessary, so as to send their own selves (by stepping into time) as assassins to kill their future selves. Their future selves also simultaneously stepping into time and so many of them doing it concurrently, causes major redistribution of the ethereal identity, which is overlooked for the greater good of mankind on the whole; which in the end would be seen as the datum with respect to which stupidity would be graded.

Every story must end. It must end, for if it doesn't, its meaning remains incomplete; like a sentence that never ends; like a word that is never uttered; like a life that is not yet at its end. The story without an end remains obscure, obfuscated by its inherent incompleteness. So, it is also our duty to draw up an ending to the plot, before we base our story on it. An ending where all the characters learn of their meaning in the story, where they reconcile with the parts they have been given, where their combined fate is decided. A story is unlike life in the fact that these paroxysms of fate, that causes one to be a hero and another to be a side kick; one to die and another to live; is decided by one, and that one, is still unsure of what will be his decision until he himself reaches the end, concertedly with the characters he has created. The symbolisms are quite conspicuous one feels, in his story, and yet, even an avid reader misses the point. It happens, because mainly it seems, the reader is comparing the identities of each character to his own; even perhaps, as he compares the identity of the writer to his own; and thereby losing, in ones effort to find similarities, those quirky aberrations which are perhaps why the story was written in the first place. In ones quest to be different, one disappointingly finds, that he is not as different or unique as he thought he is; this would lead one to ask himself, whether he must isolate himself from the world, retreat back into solitude to hear his own voice, and be with it. But, this would only be until his memory of the world from which he has come hauntingly points to him his mediocrity, in being the same. Would it suffice, to remain as an identity with which we are at peace within? What about discontentment? How many of us are happy being discontented? Discontented with what?-life, relationships, knowledge, love. What about a story that has an ending? What about a story, that doesn't have an end? What would it be showing us, but, the continuity of life; that the meaning is in the story and not in the end.

So now, we reach that part, where we are at the crossroads, contradicting ourselves. Should we end this story, but, if such a war were to happen, would it not go on, with the future continuously trying to perfect itself; or would it end with the annihilation of the identity of a man as an individual and as a group; or worse would it end by the identity losing itself in itself. So, now that the question remains with us story writers, it is we who must decide upon the future of the identity. Or, should we, showing solidarity with our fictional counterparts, be discontented with a complete story, giving ourselves the unlimited hope of having what is better than what we have, and thereby relieving ourselves of the great joy of being the one who controls the fate of all these characters combined, or those of each single character, and passing on to each reader's imagination this responsibility? Where then, would be the horizon which identifies the reader and the writer, memory and the present, truth and the make believe?