Zark123

If there ever were any misgivings about the critical condition of the thrashing, flailing, fated art of expression, tête-à-tête, the Pre Raphaelite angst was chronologically misplaced. Looking to the Romantics for inspiration, riding on their Arthurian bandwagon steered by the prophetic John Ruskin, while Christina Rossetti rode shotgun was all very grave post 1848, but the 21st century renders the artistic escapade almost carnivalesque. Any doubt with regard to the regression of the human conveyance of thought has been secretly loaded into the caboose of messages which await us incessantly on the other side of the mirror. So, the next time someone barks out, ‘the world has become a smaller place’, dog them into substantiating whose world and how before their malfeasance goes viral.   

Of course, everyone wants to talk, it’s the human denial of nonexistence that plants an impugnable seed that makes the individual confident that his or her words have a purpose and as the perpetual motion machine is a concrete idea, semantically speaking, speech engenders purpose. But just as human speech has travelled the lonely mile, it has shared a complicitious relationship with art, music, war and in recent times, technology. The implacable plethora of devices which serve to facilitate social intercourse have unfortunately administered such an extent of communicational placebo that the carcinoma of pseudo-communication has sustained a life of its own. The mere impact of infatuation that the user possesses for standing between a looking glass and a hand glass contributes to the creation of an exponential maelstrom of the same text, the same images and the same set of theories which rebound off a platform with hardly any friction. The internet, the holy mother of resource sharing has become a blaring, incongruent pot luck of a few flagrant opinions switching many hands like a penny, travelling the world without any expense, save time. Ironically, it is this very platform which is nurturing its own critique. The development of languages in the potpourri of svelte networking has resulted in the invention of the tentative abbreviations, slapdash art and little motivation towards any advancement in any value added interchange. Whether fallow brb saved anyone enough breath to complete a cursory will before the impending cardiac arrest or whether the Machiavellian smiley ever brought anyone fractionally closer to empathizing with another person’s chemicals in heat is hardly the point; the real question is in this dastardly discounted circumcision of the language was any progress even envisioned?

Tragically, the elegy of an arsenal of cell phones, tablets, computers and other ways to ‘reconnect’ with persons of interest concludes with a dolorous volta voicing an impotency to appreciate personal company. As we’re always together through our idiosyncratic Snapchat correspondences in pet shops or our Whatsapp billets-doux sitting by Powai lake, it is an indolent misery to meet someone once in a while. Where is the thirst for the dangling conversation – we practically scaled the Andes sometime in the last month, listened to the new releases of Korpiklaani a fortnight ago and hey, we’re screen siblings, we don’t need a rendezvous. More is the plaintiveness in making conversation, what was the constant single file beauty of letters across a flat screen – uniform, equally spaced and mediated – is now the eye’s adaption to the graceless motions of a face which lacks that disciplined delivery and the troughs and trials of a touch and go voice which is only too wary of pillory piranhas. The knock-down drag-out slaughter of the embellished self is momentary, the deception as the art becomes artifice lasts well into retrospection. In the end it is our enamel perfection in the armoire of graphic porcelain which eviscerates us; our revulsion towards our imperfections is as old and as rigid as deism. Occasionally, eschewing from the verity of private chagrin, the parley is light, joyous and ample with seasonal josh, but dedicated indulgence in the voyeurism of private lives leaves the reunion a little bare in terms of surprises, absolutions and the presence of good willed jubilation. It’s like rereading or having the fifth serving of prawn puttasenca, the constituents have not altered, the craving has settled. The cornucopia of reciprocation also advocates the ‘more is less’ abstraction. While I have five different ways of reaching the average friend, my choice of media is limited by word count, pixel checks, privacy barriers, professional civility and of course their continuance on the medium of my choice. Trying to swap between all of these totems of social supremacy, I get very meagre crumbs of information across such as a chipped toenail, two lines from a David Hall poem or a mawkish aspect of my CV. The obvious argument would meander towards an inefficient usage of all these means of communication which I haven’t mustered in my 21 years of existence. Agreed, but in my defence, these chariots of noncommittal ambivalence are all too new, getting newer every day, though proficient, will I ever reach peripheral proficiency? Instead, in the twenty one years of wandering the realms of privy experience, surely the pictures, the posts, the tweets and the shares are all raindrops that wash off the banyan tree to carry a sentient flavour of their former host; they do little to recompense its essence.

It is vain inertia which arises from the assurance that our last conversation was merely a week ago, it is the origin of a slow and steady root rot which will over the years recant all that binds a faction of minds. While it may pass for societal rectitude, unlike art which survives the artist, a message cannot outwear the messenger. The thespians will not perforate the sieve and our affections will not swaddle those who repudiate their ostentatious exertions at fostering good relations. Relationships are weaned on predilection and a certain tenacity which requires the old world idea of a face to face conversation, devoid of any media except the air we share. Much like any occupation whose accolades lie in the plane of commercial satiation, emotional salvation and an overall sense of being, communication takes vigour and a steadfastness which often escapes us in the course of our academic development. The undertaking is not gargantuan to an initiate, but distinction takes just as much perspiration as one’s professional moxie. An ascetic understanding takes degrees of failure, all of which span the massive mesic strata which divides the friendly from the friend. But you reap what you sow and this cultivation of communication is no different from the annals of any heritage of accomplishment. Sure, it means an hour dropped from a Napoleonic study schedule, leaving the sales meeting before everyone else and always appreciating that everyone else’s twenty fours are no shorter than yours. Yet, years and years hence, while others chaperone memories, you, embodying Shakespeare’s articulation of all that is spent, will possess ‘that which should accompany old age, as honour, love, obedience, troops of friends.’

Time? What it is? It's over.

Time is not inherently present in the world that we live in. Time comes into being, when we come into being. Of the two scales that mankind has learned to measure by, time is the wild one, the one we cannot grasp in any measure of itself, it's the one that lasts and perpetually dies.

Following an existential approach to the question: what is time?, we begin by placing human beings at the focal point. If we are to consider the differences between plants, animals and humans, one can say (with incomplete knowledge of course; a large part of this work is hypothetical), humans are conscious of their own existence, while plants and animals function based on their natural drives. The sunflower turns towards sunshine to photosynthesize, the cat chases the alley rat, but only man sits down to  contemplate his purpose here. In this respect, man has an extra dimension to see the world through. This dimension is time.

Thus, I assert in full confidence of my notion that time is a constraint imposed by mankind upon mankind only after he / she accepts existence. Only after a consciousness is achieved of its temporality, the limited span of our lives does time seem to have any bearing on our every days. It of course elicits a different reaction from different individuals: a curse – the waning of beauty, that nemesis age; a blessing – to not suffer any longer, to seek solace in one's subsiding tortured existence; indifference – live for today, take it as it comes, etc. Yet, over the course of time (ironic, I know), time will take back this consciousness of ours that birth has lent. So how does one value it? We invented clocks.

Don't clocks measure time? In the  2007 movie The Man from Earth, John replies, 'No, they measure themselves. The objective referee of a clock is another clock'. Now, lets compare an innate unawareness of time to our human tick-tock syndrome:    
A plant which has no reflected consciousness (it can still feel pain; the senses are a different matter all together) cannot conceive the every days the same way we do. It follows a cycle of producing nutrition when the opportunity persists, and lying dormant when there is no scope for activity. Similarly, an animal hunts, rests, mates and continues its cycle of existence in the absence of time – every day might be alike, but until it thinks about what the previous day was like, or associates any form of endearment to an event that has passed before, the species will not 'experience' time. Now, the argument can be posed that it too will weaken over time, age and near its demise, but this requires a perspective: am I old as compared to yesterday? Can I not respond as quickly to stimuli as I did before? Does the opposite sex not respond in a manner I am used to because I am aging? Will these questions arise in a mental design that has no image (which in this case refers to an understanding of the self in a definite frame of time) of itself? Why do we waste time? Why do we dread time? It's because we have time – a creation unnecessary, fuelled entirely by the knowledge of ourselves. I ask you now, do you still believe life is a gift?

A depreciating frame of reference is the only thing that decreases in our lives. You don't get older if you stop counting. Now, you can argue that the solar cycle would promote the concept of time even if we tried to go our own way. At this point I tell you, why go by days and nights? Clearly, both aspects have their advantages, but humans feared darkness because their sensory apparatus was inferior to cope with a lack of light. So we swore by days and chose to live in the light and over time, with the grand use of technology, decided to artificially light the darkness through the night. Yet, if one can see night and day as a duration of time, surely one can see multiple doses of twenty four hours as a day as well? Why is a week not as popular a measure of time as a day is? Or rather a month? This is surely to do with our vital cycle which requires, nutrition, excretion and rest (and of course reproduction for the continuation of the species), but then why do we not live in hours? Minutes? Do these activities matter so little to us? Is eating a bowl of mangosteen so insignificant? Why do we live by the days? Does our consciousness not know of another unit?

Life if one is to resort to a baser definition is simply the awareness of living. You know you're alive because you are thinking of life (refer Cogito Ergo Sum), because you consider yourself getting older and because you accept that you are going to die. I suppose nothing gives life as much meaning as one's impending death.

The patterns in your life remain constant because time forms what I will refer to as the universal reference. The co existence of mankind is kept in balance by a compass that points everyone to one direction – tomorrow. Now imagine a world where time is no longer a factor – consider the animalistic way of existence if you may. You wake up and realize you must satisfy your needs at the moment. You're day will differ drastically from every other day – do you feel hungry? Thirsty? The need to fornicate? Or defecate? You will live according to your drives without any awareness of the passing second. There will be no angst – a fear of dying much before death. There will be no dissatisfaction at not fulfilling a day's wish. There will be no wish, because you have not thought of yourself an organism that has yearnings which need to be satisfied within a day, a month or a year. You will exist as a spirit of eternity, today, tomorrow and all your every days and even in death you will not realize that you have gone.

My final assertion in this essay is to do with the place of man in the ladder of life's hierarchy. We often treasure ourselves as the masters of this world – this world is ours for the taking, we can do with it as we please. We forget that that is exactly every other life force is carrying out without being aware of it of course. Our grand plans for this world have changed it no doubt, we have tried to tame all that is 'savage' in the name of 'civilization'. But when we too are replaced by the next of kin in that infinite ladder of evolution, we will realize we were never the masters of this universe – we were the only species to be cursed with the ability to believe the fable.

Today's most commonly found species is the crowd. It dominates large parts of the world from the plains of Macedonia to the forests of Aokigahara, from the mountain valleys of Kaghan to the subtropical Everglades. It has a varied physiognomy, such that no two specimens are completely alike. The crowd is always changing, always growing, always dying; achieving immortality in its totality: the crowd is always the same. The crowd is a dangerous thing.

As far back as I can recall, I remember my choice of friends had something to do with my aversion to crowds. The hollow, multi-faced tremulous typhoon of eternal suction had something going for it every day. And there's something about every day being a day of favour and fortune that put me in a certain position of unease – I stayed away from the crowd; the shadows were safer. Initially, I felt the urge to give into to the convex God's regime, to be a subject of that empire that spanned the human race; I must admit I often thought there was little hope for me outside a herd. But then I saw them, the outlanders in the reaches beyond the realm, struggling to read their self written sacred texts, following morals of their soul sounds; those who little flickering candles under streetlights to darken their resolutions of restraint. They became my object of study and I think sometime then I must have eloped with solitude in silence.

I confess, I must have seen an ethereal blaze in the lonely one. That shadowy figure, covered by his loin cloth of self defeat, ridicule and neglect, yet struggling on to find a warmer bed, a source of light, perhaps the next morsel of subsistence; their only source of inspiration being the knowledge of their continued existence. They must have known they were on the right track – they were alive, and that's proof enough to keep going. Yes, I liked the lonely one – not because they inspired me with their seemingly futile struggle, but because I was more like them than any crumb in a crowd.

There is a reason, reason escapes definition when one is placed alone. It is because there is nothing else to weigh him against, and your scale is a flaw monsieur- it doesn't exist and so you say he doesn't. Because his outlines breathe of a sentient odour which cannot be experienced by the experienced. It is new, it is real and it is all that creation has ever done for mankind. Where do you place him? The solitary stalker? The blighted brigand? The fallen soldier? The forgotten wraith? Without characterization, he does not fall into natural selection – he cannot survive, the herd is strongest only in numbers, he will die out in due time: the crowd is rather insistent. What is not atheist, agnostic, Gnostic, theist is a wild card is a pack of jokers. Not a deck of cards which are just red and black either, but wears shifting colours outside our visible spectrum. There are no numbers, just transcendental equations with eccentric anomalies – you know nothing of them; but they exist. Outside society and the planetary orbits, in the tears of a dying star we see eye to eye with the lonely one.

The years have not been wasted yet, we are not 'all'; 'all' is the death of the individual, the prescription of time to live through us as mere echoes of the ticking of clocks that bite down on a drizzle of seconds. There is no 'we', just I and the other and the starlight of dead brambles that play the lute strings of  sensibility.

The lonely one is alone, and for a time, is.