A Doll's House

Written in 1879, this is one of Henrik Ibsen’s social dramas around women’s place in home or society. The play opens with Nora, a wife and a mother (as she’s described through the play) coming home after shopping on Christmas eve, and takes place over three days and three Acts. Beginning with the warm, family evening of Christmas prep which left me feeling the couple talking as if kids playing grown-ups (and the deeper current of how he treats her or what he expects from her), it explores the repercussions of a debt that Nora had taken in times of need unknown to her husband while he was sick, and in her naivety/ innocence of commercial matters and in her devoted love agreed to terms quite unfavourable.

The play unfolds as she gets tied up more and more in trying to keep the matter hidden from Torvald, the husband, and tries to resolve the issue by herself, which, one would think, should have been resolved by them talking and working it through rather than her bearing the weight of that decision alone. But then, we wouldn’t be reading about how she eventually realises that she lives, as if, in a doll’s world.

There are a few other themes detailed in the play but the one that raises most questions in my mind is about a couple as a unit or the couple as Torvald, the husband and master of their household and Nora as a subject.

From the point of view of today’s time and age, the question bothers, grates and provokes.  But I try to remember that the play is from the times of a century and half ago.  I perhaps need to read more from that time to be able to properly compare and contextualise where Nora and Mrs Linde stand vis-a-vis other women of that time. Searching in my own understanding of history (from growing up context in India) or from my limited reading of those times, I feel that they seem to fare better in independence. Elsewhere in the world, perhaps Nora would not even have been able to buy macaroons on her own, forget taking a debt in her own name or Mrs Linde working and running an independent household. From limited contexts, I think of Isabel Archer, and her need to get married. I think of Carol Milford from Main Street of 1920s. Compared to them, I felt that Nora, when she eventually sits down to have her chat with her husband was quite ahead of her times.

So, although, reading it in 2020, one can get quickly bothered by the way Torvald Helmer seems to pin down boundaries for Nora, but I think it is not fair to colour my views on the play in that emotion.

Devoid of historical contexts, plays or stories like these, about seemingly real people in seemingly average times need some sort of extremes or stretching away from the routine behaviour or situation to bring out the reactions from its characters, and make some sort of lasting impression that 140 years away too, one can feel for Nora when she gasps for air, struggling for a room of her own equivalent when she has one of her final conversations with Torvald:

“It is perfectly true, Torvald. When I was at home with father, he told me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions; and if I differed from him I concealed the fact, because he would not have liked it. He called me his doll-child, and he played with me just as I used to play with my dolls. 

I mean that I was simply transferred from father’s hands into yours. You arranged everything according to your taste, and so I got the same tastes as you – or else I pretended to, I am not really sure which – I think sometimes the one and sometimes the other. When I look back on it, it seems to me as if I had been living here like a poor woman – just from hand to mouth. I have existed merely to perform tricks for you, Torvald. But you wanted it like that. You and father have committed a great sin against me. It is your fault that I have made nothing of my life.”

Nora speaks not only for her, but perhaps for a lot of people who, while living in relatively comfortable situations, tend to lack that space - not for the lack of means but for the lack of some sort of permission. Why should they seek permission for this space? One would think that beyond the requirements of a well-functioning family unit where members tend to subdue parts of their selves to make a home and family life enjoyable, which is perhaps a choice and offering of the members, not a demand on only one member of the unit. And because of this, if she still struggles for that space, the reason perhaps sits at the root of how families, societies are set up.

Separate from dynamics of a family and the question of physical time and space for individual pursuits, there’s the deeper question of thoughts and independence of those thoughts. With Torvald sharing views and directing thought from larger matters, such as his belief that root of all evil in people is a fault of their mothers, not something that perhaps both parents need to wonder about, to things like embroidery, where he thinks women should embroider rather than knit because it is more graceful. Although a small detail, but sometimes, philosophies are laid bare in details like these. Prejudiced thought space exists across times and places in different forms and perhaps biases can never be fully taken away – just the way we are programmed. But the freedom to stick to and hold their own independent prejudices as a partner in a unit, and not blanket buy into the ones set by the ‘head’ of the unit is a freedom that sometimes goes missing in different set-ups (be it family, societies, nations), and leads to the kind of strife and an unfulfilled sense which is what Nora seems to grapple with.

About the fault though, I try to believe that fault lies not in our stars, ‘but in ourselves, that we are underlings’. It would have been nicer to have her eventual conclusion something stronger, something other than her believing herself to be a victim of her circumstances. I feel it is somehow empowering to believe that what we make of our lives is a person’s responsibility irrespective of the boundaries that are randomly pinned around them.

**

I have not read many plays. And being new, I am brimming with observations on the genre – I realise that plays provide little buffer or softening to the author in terms of a narrator or commentary. The characters are shown live, and to help the reader contextualise them, they must carry all their prejudices, views of the world on their sleeve, and it may not be pretty at times. Plays also seem to demand a more active engagement on the part of the audience or the reader since you need to build the character sketch & historical narrative through following their conversation, and they cannot be too obvious or forthcoming, so you need to let imagination play an active role in meaning making.

Another aspect is the way the drama unfolds. In this play itself, even as one gets a little miffed with the opening conversation, you realise that your focus was drawn to one end of the stage while the author has been busy setting up and illuminating the action that unravels at the centre of the stage, just like the way illusionists and magicians work, and shuffling between the trivial and the patronising nature of that opening, you suddenly come head to head with the deep undercurrent of despair & ‘life is elsewhere’ feeling that runs at the core of this drama.  And you humbly realise that you should not judge too soon, and you begin to understand what Salman Rushdie meant while talking about Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-five, “It sees war as a tragedy so great that perhaps only the mask of comedy allows one to look it in the eye” -  the need for another emotion to lighten the load of the deeper current. 

Another thought is that sometimes, real-like people behaving in unreal ways people can strangely draw oblique mirrors to things we confront within ourselves, and soften the conversation a bit with their seeming unreality.

**

Henrik Ibsen grew up in Norway. His father’s bankruptcy when he was a child and the related growing up hardships and the neglect of the relatively richer relatives informed his social dramas. In the intro note on the author, we are told that “The ground was thus prepared for the future writer who was to castigate the false respectability and complacency of the middle classes.”  and that “Life had to wound his soul till it bled before his writing could proceed from bitter need, from an inner strife which demanded dramatic expression.”

It seems that the very poor seem to treat the realities around them differently than the middle classes, which, once settled and anchored with their small worlds, mediocre possessions, find themselves too invested in their little kingdoms to risk or toss it all for any kind of movement away from their limited/ non-extreme worldviews towards any kind of majorly radical idea. I read somewhere that when it is too easy, the will weakens – not just at a personal level, but whole societies can fall ill. Abundance being harder for us to handle than scarcity. (Something to perhaps think of as we consider the larger discussion on universal basic income, and the invigorating power of the ‘want’ rather than the ‘have’.)

Where complacency or comfort tends to dull us and induces solipsistic thinking, change or movement, from one extreme to another, or times of flux or chaos or the unsettled and uncertain nature of things seems to make the moments of passing so much richer - deepening and stretching the same moments, livening & layering them with imagined certainties buzzing around the uncertainties. Same moments which seem to blink by when things get comfortable can be unimaginable gifts of experience and thought.

And yet, the way we seem to have set up this world and our lives, the middle, the mediocre, the centre, the average becomes the end and the bind. Perhaps it should not be.

And yet again, how to live and what is the objective is a much larger question to think about and handled easier by working out from an individual level. Whether to seek stability, peace in the middle, or the flux and richness and intensity of moments - which objective function to maximise is a problem with the constants themselves colored in variables of individual preferences over time. Trying to get to a society level answer is pretty complicated.

**

I try to turn the question to myself. And with all these general realisations, comes crashing the personal realisation that sometimes things are easier said than done. With all the knowledge and wisdom, which we all seem to have access to and loads of, the commitment to action on that derived, personal wisdom is still so difficult to consistently live upto. One still automatically seeks peace. Chaos, flux and uncertainties can be lived with as if passing through a tunnel, but it doesn’t come naturally - this seeking of the flux.

So, after all this journey of reading and then writing about it, one just comes home to a more nuanced understanding of one’s own motives, desires and eventual actions. What more can one ask for?

The Obverse of the Sublime

I read a beautiful essay by Italo Calvino yesterday, called the 'Obverse of the sublime'. The essay is about him visiting the Imperial Palace in Japan in a guided tour group. It begins by describing an autumn tree in Japan.

“But it is not with an act of outrageous chromatic arrogance that the maples impose themselves on one’s view: if the eye is drawn towards them as though lured by a musical motif, it is because of the lightness of their starry leaves. Which seem suspended around their thin branches, the leaves all horizontal, without depth, yearning to expand and at the same time not to clutter the transparency of the air.”

I was floored at the ‘yearning to expand and at the same time not to clutter the transparency of the air’. How can one think and write like that and pass on that joy to the reader? It amazes me, fascinates me.  He not only brings what he sees alive for you, but draws you deeper in his contemplation and worldview. Literally opening up a treasure chest of ways of seeing for you.

This essay leading me, I read through his travelogues from Japan. And the combination of Calvino’s ways of seeing and Japan’s ways of being is quite otherworldly.

“New to the country, I am still at the stage where everything I see has a value precisely because I don’t know what value to give it. When everything finds an order and a place in my mind then I will start not to find anything worthy of note, not to see any more what I am seeing. Because seeing means perceiving differences, and as soon as differences all become uniform in what is predictable and everyday, our gaze simply runs over a smooth surface devoid of anything to catch hold of.  Travelling does not help us much in understanding but it does serve to reactivate for a second the use of our eyes, the visual reading of the world.”

From what he says about travel, one can perhaps extend to unravel the riches in the ordinary, or the familiar. The way we seem to perceive reality is quite a patchwork of memory and observation. At times, by playing around with space and time - by stepping away, by changing the vantage point or by focusing on another aspect of the observed, we can ruffle the memory a bit to reconfigure itself and in turn, reactivate ourselves for a better ‘visual reading of the world’. Every act of looking anew changes the observed.

Reading him, it seems that richness of feeling, of observing, of living a fuller, deeper, more felt life does not require a lot. It sometimes just needs an openness to feel, and a patience and malleability to let things appear in a form unknown to you, and to be able to play around with the ideas, and then, a simple thing as leaves falling from a gingko tree can hold the keys to a deep meditative state, where one thought can lead to another, and before you know it, you unravel deep secrets of your own which you didn’t even know existed.

A simple thing, this art of seeing in a new way, but, powers so magical – we go seeking out in the world for riches, for more and more, and here, he shows you this new power, where your whole world gets upgraded instantly to a new level.

**

Here, just some water,
There amidst the trees
The sea!

The gardens, designed by poet-architects, are made to be experienced and evoke epiphanies like this haiku here. I haven’t really seen any Japanese gardens as such, or read a lot about them, but under his gaze, the gardens and all their reflected poetry seems to come alive.

“The construction of a nature that can be mastered by the mind so that the mind can in turn receive a sense of rhythm and proportion from nature: that is how once could define the intention that has led to the layout of these gardens. Everything here has to seem spontaneous and for that very reason everything is calculated.”

“Hillocks, rocks, slopes, multiply the landscape. […] The Japanese passion for the small that provides the illusion of the big comes out also in the composition of the landscape.”

On the pools of water in Japanese gardens,

“There are usually two of them, one of flowing water, the other a still pool, which create two different landscapes, to tone in with two different states of mind.” 

And just by reading his take on these pools, I seem to stumble on some sort of solution for my own internal struggles – those of width vs depth, the look out vs the look in, action vs contemplation. These pools a visual to solve for those complex inner battles. Two lakes. One for each state of mind. Beautiful.

**

His curious, observing, reflecting gaze falls on Japanese houses, palaces, the aesthetic of unobtrusive, ‘the bare and the unadorned’, and he wonders whether this ideal “was achievable only at the peak of authority and wealth, and whether it presupposed other houses chock-full of people and tools and junk and rubbish, with the smell of frying, sweat, sleep, houses full of bad moods, people rushing, places where shelled peas, sliced fish, darned socks, washed sheets, emptied bed-pans.”

It makes you think about yourself, and wonder at what he calls, “the heavy weight of existences that materializes in our furnishings and impregnates all our Western rooms.” When you begin to think about it, you realize that one cannot exclude everything. The normal life must carry the weight of the living, “the smell of the frying”, etc, but how much of the life the task of living should occupy – this arriving at essentials through exclusion requires a going through and is a matter of discernment, and perhaps, that is the question to be lived through.

Very soon, this chain of observation on housing and its aesthetics leads him to reflect on the cost of culture itself. He has this conversation with a fellow student tourist:

 ‘Do you like all this?’ asked my student. ‘I cannot help thinking that this perfection and harmony cost so much misery to millions of people over the centuries.’

‘But isn’t the cost of culture always this?’ I object. Creating a space and time for reflection and imagination and study presupposes an accumulation of wealth, and behind every accumulation of wealth there are obscure lives subject to labour and sacrifices and oppression without any hope. Every project or image that allows us to reach out towards another way of being outside the injustice that surrounds us carries the mark of the injustice without which it could not have been conceived.

This understanding and acknowledgement of the cost of culture, which many of us in a bid to explain the world around fair narratives often choose to ignore or overlook or push away from the view, because it is not pretty and sullies the landscape a bit. But having that understanding of the cost helps, makes one conscious of the privilege and hopefully, mindful enough to not squander it, since it carries not only the weight of one person’s life and thoughts, but the weight of history, of all the lives that went before to be able to provide us with that “different space and time, a proof that the total domination of sound and fury can be challenged…”  Another paradoxical, non-linear way of seeing things. And we need more people who can show us things like that - in few words, carrying a weight of years of reflection and consideration. Things which perhaps need to enter the common ways and currencies of thinking.

It did make me realise the position of privilege that I have, to be able to spend an afternoon ruminating over one essay from Calvino’s collection of sand, when rest of the world struggles with what seems like the defining moment of this decade, the way wars were for the last century.

**

I can keep quoting from those essays on Japan. His essays laid out like the Japanese gardens he writes about. The writing rich in meditations, observations, digressions, which can both serve as a trigger and a trainer to one’s thinking and seeing.

“It is by limiting the number of things around us that one prepares oneself for accepting the idea of a world that is infinitely larger than ours. The universe is an equilibrium of solids and voids. The words and gestures that accompany the pouring of the foaming tea must have space and silence around them, but also a sense of inner meditation, a limit.”

**

Elsewhere, he talks about the moon.

“Love for the moon often has its double in love for its reflection, as if to stress a vocation for mirror games in that reflected light.”

And the way life works sometimes, this morning, I woke up to a beautiful sight as if directly from Calvino’s Collection of sand - the moon and the stars, reflected in the pool.

The depths of the sky so calmly and so beautifully reflected in the shallow pool. I couldn’t see the moon from the window when I looked out, was too high in the sky, but saw it down below, unexpectedly, looking up to me from the pool.

Interestingly, I haven’t seen anything like this ever. I have seen moon reflected in a lake, and often in the ocean, but that’s not the same. Those waters are moving often, never this calm, so calm, that if someone disoriented you, you wouldn’t know whether you were looking up to the sky or down to the pool.

The unruffled calmness can make a shallow pool of water hold the sky. And I seem to understand Calvino’s essay a little better.

The Cost of Living

I am new to Deborah Levy’s writing. British author, born in South Africa (her mum identified with Doris Lessing's Martha Quest), she has written several novels, poems and plays. I haven't read anything else yet, but this book is a memoir, so, in a way, a good place to begin to get to know the author a little.

This memoir was written as she was moving out of her marriage and into a new identity. Everything around her is disintegrating, and she seeks a new composition. Her life, in that state of flux, partly in the past which seemed to vanish in ruins, and partly in the future, which she’s trying to compose with us. And as tends to be the nature of transitions and flux, the 'gift' of the troubles, the time and space proximate to the churn and chaos can be a rich source of memories, thoughts and feelings, life aground, thrown asunder while the person, gasping for air, helpless, seeking a grip, or an anchor, if not a float, digging, searching everywhere, shallow, deep in that accumulated debris of living.

And as readers, we are the ones rewarded with those feelings encapsulated in a slim volume that one can read through over an evening, and mull over for a month.

Through this memoir, as an outsider to herself, she tries to observe her own past selves at different stages of her life, and bit by bit, reclaims her own 'self', giving permissions not sought previously, and laying out new, extended boundaries for that 'self'- composing herself anew in that disintegration.

Her life revolves around writing: 

“At this uncertain time, writing was one of the few activities in which I could handle the anxiety of uncertainty, of not knowing what was going to happen next.”

And her grief, her spring of ideas. As an analogue to her situation, she offers the following from Proust,

"Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart."

Her prose at times, perhaps in an unintended way, exposes her vulnerability, her fragile state and yet her humility, faith and openness to life. Struggling to make ends meet, living in a small apartment, seeking a room of her own, she finds a guardian angel of sorts, who gives her the shed to write in and lets her that much needed space, the solitude and a desk – “to be valued and respected in this way, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, was a new experience.”

Like Camus, she says, she has an invincible summer inside of her. And amidst all the chaos, and holding together of self and life, she finds her joy in writing, 

“An idea presented itself, came my way, perhaps hatched from a grief, but I did not know if it would survive my free-floating attention, never mind my more focused attention. To unfold any number of ideas through all the dimensions of time is the greatest adventure of the writing life.”

**

The rewards of reading such a memoir are in the contemplation of parallels and intersections. Laying bare their lived, raw moments, closely examining them for the reader, the author, subtly coaxing you, as a reader, to reflect and go on that journey into the interior yourself, drawing out meanings and questions from the author's deep-in-the-chaos narrative. At times then, one agrees with the author, and at other times, views diverge significantly. Not only it allows you to know the author a little more, it lets you know yourself a little more.

She struggles with several questions - of having it all, of minor and major characters in an equal relationship, of femininity and of masks, of how to be in a new context uprooted from a life built over twenty years, and when everything’s up for the taking, what do you take.

“It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them.”

I find the following thoughts that she shares on her mother beautifully summing up the struggle she tries to live through, of finding the self while playing the role.

“There is a photograph I have kept of my mother in her late twenties. She is sitting on a rock at a picnic with friends. Her hair is wet because she’s just had a swim.  There is a kind of introspection in her expression that I now relate to the very best of her. I can see that she is close to herself in this random moment. I’m not sure that I thought  introspection was the best of her when as a child and teenager. What do we need dreamy mothers for? We do not want mothers who gaze beyond us, longing to be elsewhere. We need her to be of this world, lively, capable, entirely present to our needs.   

Did I mock the dreamer in my mother and then insult her for having no dreams?”

It sums up the struggle so nicely. Yet the inherent certainty of the statement – "we do not want mothers who gaze beyond us…” somehow ends up distressing me.  I strongly feel that by giving such words a sense of certainty, even in the context of recounting the past, and not letting them breathe in doubt or even a ‘perhaps’,  we draw firm boundaries that the author might have questioned, but seemingly accepted. I feel that one needs to let such seeming 'certainties' stand in a fog of doubt, to let them some space to shift.

Just the way I feel about 'certainties' like these floating around everywhere in all kinds of media.

A little later, she portrays the complicated world of women wishing to have it all – “When our father does the things he needs to do in the world, we understand it is his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us. It is a miracle she survives our mixed messages, written in society’s most poisoned ink. It is enough to drive her mad.” 

Maybe it is so, maybe not. The way most world seems to currently approach this situation of women wishing to have a fuller life. I feel that perhaps the questioning needs to happen at the level of the mother bothered by the mixed messages and the poisoned ink - why does she need to be so bothered? Can we do something about that? Perhaps if we begin looking at that question, and ponder on that, we might find a way out of the difficulty of even calling it a ‘having it all'. 

A difficult question. Easy to frame it for others, but the moment one begins to look inside, and ‘live’ the question the way Rilke asks us to, we get to grasp the difficulty and enormity of the work needed, the internal work. 

**

An interesting read. Will hopefully read more from the author soon.

VALIS by Philip K. Dick

First word – joy. This SF marks my third completed book of the year. Glad to have come across it. Held me for an evening, and then left me with some 100 things to look up and understand further and has been living in my head since, fusing the story with all the other things I stumble on because of it.

This book, like other books from the substance abused period of 60s and 70s (?), at the plot level, talks about rationality, insanity, mental hospitals, substances, related depression, suicide, and the general downward spiral of life which has lost its anchor and doesn’t really know what and where to call home.

But, at the idea level, it explores the nature of reality as an illusion.  VALIS is an acronym of Vast Active Living Intelligence System – a perturbation in the reality field, caused by something not of our world. The protagonist (PKD, the author with another name) witnesses it, and tries to make sense of it.

What PKD does for us is takes this theme of questioning the perceived reality, trying to fathom the unknowable which many sci-fi books explore in their own ways, at times by imagining potential futures, and at other times through alternate scenarios or displaced realities, but often, a lot of sci-fi books fail to reach escape velocity, and end back in the same human drama that they try to transcend in the first place.

I guess in the case of VALIS, the fiction was never the point. The framing of the book seems to be the introduction of the relatively obscure thoughts in his Exegesis. And then the author trying to put in some sort of fictional narrative to explore what happens to him in his perceived reality. Making sense of VALIS being the key driver and illusory nature of reality the key idea.

In his real world, he believed that “God or someone calling himself God, had fired precious information”.  To give us an understanding of how he feels about it, he quotes from an aria by Handel, ‘Deeper, and deeper still’ to give us an opposite reference point to consider:

“Total eclipse! No sun, no moon,
All dark amidst the blaze of noon!
Oh, glorious light! No cheering ray
To glad my eyes with welcome day!
Why this deprived Thy prime decree?
Sun, moon and stars are dark to me!”, 

And in his case, he is on the diagonally opposite end of this darkness in the blaze of noon – he was illuminated by some otherworldly light.  And rest of his life becomes an exercise in making sense of and making peace with that event.

After that peak of an experience, trying to live through routine life’s much blander days, in his despair, he says “They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep him.” And one can almost feel his seemingly infinite loss.

In his fictional world – “The exegesis [...] an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense of the inscrutable.” After comparing it to borderline mental illness, he says, not only just that, but  “you ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize.”

To put his thoughts in recognizable forms, he borrows from, reflects on and quotes from a wide range of thoughts, philosophies to set the context and background to what he wishes to say.

On the illusory nature of reality, he gives us – ‘that our world is only seeming’; it is only “Obvious structure” which is under the mastery of an unseen “latent structure”, and he quotes Heraclitus, “The nature of the things is in the habit of concealing itself.”

Here’s him borrowing from Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, to explore reality, as if, it were a maze

“There is no route out of this maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.
PARSIFAL: I move only a little, yet already I seem to have gone far.
GURNEMANZ: You see, my son, here time turns into space.”

**

The Exegesis which VALIS keeps referring to is 8,000 pages of notes left behind by PKD to explore the events of 1974. The printed book, The Exegesis of Philip K Dick is 900 pages long. One can feel the anguish of the author, seeking to rediscover and pin down his experience – revising, reframing, thinking afresh, trying every which way to fathom the elusive, his remaining life becoming a meditation on that single event. Little we know as to how some of these things work. The human brain is still one of the darker, underexplored secrets of science, consciousness, reality. The author believed his experience was real, and that is good enough at times. Reality itself is a function of so many variables – the observed, the limited equipment that we have for observing, and our lived background where we project the observed to arrive at ‘reality’. Everyone’s reality can be pretty unique. PKD tried to explain it to himself, and because life gifted him with something otherworldly to consume and be consumed by, he, through his thoughts, leaves us with so many new/ old thoughts in a reframed way – real or not, they are quite unique – a very non-routine thing in this routine existence.  And just for that, it is a book worth reading.

Perhaps my only gripe with the idea is around some of the clunkiness it roots itself in on one end. It believes that anything prior to 1974 was a sort of implanted memories for entire world and the world was living around 100 AD in 1974. This seems quite complicated. And quite random. The beauty of this universe is in its simplicity, the elegance of the construct, in its use of really nothing to create this elaborate, vivid, brilliant manifestation – and hence, something about it, the arbitrary nature of 1974 feels a bit random and sticks out. On the other end, the clunkiness roots in the belief that there needs to be a saviour to bring back the golden days, and the book eventually turns to a search for that potential saviour – all interesting but seems to turn the book back into one of those ending on a little disappointing note kind of SF, finding hurried solutions in escapist arguments – externalising salvation. (I set myself for disappointment by seeking too much from SF)

Despite this, about the core idea, I can keep talking about and thinking about it for hours. At some level and in certain moods, I try to ascribe to similar ways of considering the universe – as an illusion, maya, call it with whatever name, and this is where some of the fundamental thoughts about considering the universe converge in the past, in different cultures, in different schools of thoughts, in different thought chains that have been handed down to us, the finest ones tend to regard this ‘reality’ as illusory, and world as ‘seeming’. And the amazing thing is that now, when we do understand a little bit more scientifically, it all seems to converge to a similar illusory reality.

On the fundamental units and particles that seem to form us, this is what Michio Kaku says in Parallel Worlds:

“But according to string theory, if we had a supermicroscope that could peer into the heart of an electron, we would see that it was not a point particle at all but a tiny vibrating string. It only appeared to be a point particle because our instruments were too crude.

This tiny string, in turn, vibrates at different frequencies and resonances. If we were to pluck this vibrating string, it would change mode and become another subatomic particle, such as a quark. Pluck it again, and it turns into a neutrino. In this way, we can explain the blizzard of subatomic particles as nothing but different musical notes of the string. We can now replace the hundreds of subatomic particles seen in the laboratory with a single object, the string.”

Isn't this convergence beautiful?

Seemingly, we are an arrangement, a form, not really the content. But this form takes on all our meaning for us.

**

Highly recommended to anyone interested. Like any good book, opens so many doors.

Narratives

Yesterday was the leap day. March begins today. Soon, people all around the world will start talking about International Women's Day and all the oft-repeated arguments and questions around fairness that every such token day brings.

I think any kind of unfairness begins in the mind. We may hold a belief that world should be a certain way, and then it turns out to be a little tilted, leaning some other way. The belief of fairness is perhaps rooted in our deepest desire as human beings to be regarded as a human being, as any human being, but this world, with all the centuries of narrative silt settled on its already jaded thinking has decided to segregate human beings into different adjective classes, and it talks but moves little and moves slow to change the larger narrative arc.

The way people are raised, the narrative background helps form thought chains which then bind them, root them, hinder them, restrict them - at times, without their even noticing or relenting that these are chains - to a given, inculcated worldview.  You keep telling little girls that they are made of sugar and spice, and all things nice, and keep repeating such rhymes, you raise women wishing to live upto that narrative. (And here, even I don't know how many thought chains I'm bound with).

Words and thoughts take shape, lend permission and conjure boundaries. By spelling them out, a possibility field is created, allowing, and then bounding behaviour. Not explicitly, but implicitly, taking life from and lending weight to societal judgement.

Ideally, people, being rational beings, rise above and question these narratives and make fresh judgement and think for themselves. But fresh thought requires courage and energy. And our modern lives leave little energy for purity of thought or questioning of the basics that form us. And the way current media works, questioning human thought fights a long, tiring and possibly losing battle, because it takes a lot to keep fighting off established narratives which are deepened further every passing day with each new post, tweet, song and movie.  Eventually, it  pushes you out of your depth (which you never get a chance to gauge well), tires you, making you fall back on the handy float of instilled and reinforced narratives - new 'propaganda' with a lovelier name.

The other traitor in the camp is the paradoxical way human mind works - where we tend to see reinforcements of what we wish to see, and the what-we-wish-to-see is actively being shaped through this battle, as if, our pawn, with each new step changes shade and by the end of the crawl becomes the opposite queen.

In such cases, perhaps, the way to bring about any change is by straightening the narrative, by nudging it gently in the direction of fairness, which ultimately means letting people be their own people in all their brilliant glory and unbrilliant folly without needing to seek permission to just be rather than operate as adjectived human beings. (as long as they are not a nuisance to society - and there again, the definition of nuisance is similarly loaded).

So, since this is March, and since I feel like it, sharing this poem by Ogden Nash - nice fun poem for anyone who feels bound by invisible thought chains (and they may not just be little girls and boys and their parents singing rhymes of sugar and spice, but all those people who find themselves in the little camp against bigger narratives).

Adventures Of Isabel (Poem by Ogden Nash)

Isabel met an enormous bear,
Isabel, Isabel, didn't care;
The bear was hungry, the bear was ravenous,
The bear's big mouth was cruel and cavernous.
The bear said, Isabel, glad to meet you,
How do, Isabel, now I'll eat you!
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry.
Isabel didn't scream or scurry.
She washed her hands and she straightened her hair up,
Then Isabel quietly ate the bear up.

Once in a night as black as pitch
Isabel met a wicked old witch.
the witch's face was cross and wrinkled,
The witch's gums with teeth were sprinkled.
Ho, ho, Isabel! the old witch crowed,
I'll turn you into an ugly toad!
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry,
Isabel didn't scream or scurry,
She showed no rage and she showed no rancor,
But she turned the witch into milk and drank her.

Isabel met a hideous giant,
Isabel continued self reliant.
The giant was hairy, the giant was horrid,
He had one eye in the middle of his forehead.
Good morning, Isabel, the giant said,
I'll grind your bones to make my bread.
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry,
Isabel didn't scream or scurry.
She nibbled the zwieback that she always fed off,
And when it was gone, she cut the giant's head off.

Isabel met a troublesome doctor,
He punched and he poked till he really shocked her.
The doctor's talk was of coughs and chills
And the doctor's satchel bulged with pills.
The doctor said unto Isabel,
Swallow this, it will make you well.
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry,
Isabel didn't scream or scurry.
She took those pills from the pill concocter,
And Isabel calmly cured the doctor.

Personally for me, the takeaway is this - it is this, this ability to say 'bring it on' to anything that life in its beautiful mesmerisation of randomness throws at you, the 'bring it on' allows you to live fully and truly as a human being, and gives a more open and malleable mental make-up to take on the new, and to live the way Shakespeare suggests -  above all to thine ownself be true, etc.