I ask you...

Have you ever been haunted by an ineffable unrest in the evening, when the shadows lengthen and you see around you visions of alternative worlds? Worlds that might have been had you chosen differently, or had the eyes to see. Do you ever fear that you are blind and you do not even know the particular variety of blindness that affects you, so that you will go through your life not having known what you have missed, oblivious to whole universes that are just a touch away? Have you heard the exquisite lament of worlds that have gone to dust because you failed to look up; worlds that live and die in glances and whispers; worlds that are made and unmade by the dust that rises when the wind blows; the world of rhythm and purpose beyond your own making, intersecting and mingling with your own interpretation of reality, the connections waxing and waning, like the phases of the moon, in rhyme with the beating of your heart?

Street art in Singapore

Unknown artist. Medium: coloured chalk on stone pavement.

Morbid outpourings: aaaaarghhhh

Discovered an entry in my diary, written last year during an unhappy period in my love-life. Am reproducing it here verbatim. Its vehemence surprises me now. Mellower me smiles.

"The problem with two dissimilar people deciding to spend their lives together is that they kill each other off over time. Each is unable to appreciate the other’s spontaneous joys and therefore poisons them with his own incapacity to participate in them; this induces guilt and desolation, throttles the unpremeditated happiness that characterizes true life and reinforces the sense of loneliness with which every human being is born, for which, ironically, lifetime companionship is seen as a remedy. The way out is an acceptance of the fact that people are different. To mould someone in your own image is to destroy what you loved and replace it with an idol for self-love; a kind of lifetime project to substitute, in gradual degrees, the object of your affection with an image of yourself, so that in the end what remains is just you and your reflection in the mirror you built. The one with the stronger will succeeds in this endeavour of transformation. Love therefore reduces to an exercise of predation for the partner with the stronger will, and an act of unconscious self-cannibalism for the one with the weaker will. If the wills are evenly matched, the result is mutually assured destruction of the true bonds of understanding, resulting in an utter and complete withdrawal from each other."

Dilemmas while constructing ideals: a fly

There has been a fly in my apartment since yesterday. It has been buzzing around, alighting on food and on the tip of my nose at times, getting in the way of my perambulations and has generally been a pain even in the absence of the proverbial ointment.

It is afternoon and after my siesta, the time is ripe for visions. Watching the spent tea leaves being churned in the sink with an almost cosmic grace, beatific thoughts brings tears to my eyes. I envision the world and human nature as it should be. Without fear, and with knowledge and enlightenment; without war and famine and with cool, sunny days throughout the year; without hatred and fur coats; a mass of humanity at peace with nature and harbouring love towards all living things. A world where everyman retains an acute sense of reality without losing his finer instincts of constructive dreaminess. Love and peace; sugar, spice and everything nice. With one exception. The fly has to go. The fly has no place in my scheme of love and good things. I look around for the cleaner-spray: sticky, and toxic to tiny, spontaneous beings who spend their while droning in single-minded celebration of life.

The fly is gone now and my vision for the betterment of the world is well on its way to being fulfilled.