Of Reality, words and us.
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour...”
- Auguries of Innocence,William Blake
“…It’s a Saturday afternoon and my room is filled with a post rain sun. The only noise is the crows on the branches outside, and so there is nothing to be done for an eternity, but to sit and watch the cold curtains in my bedroom warming up as an applaud to the sun.
The word ‘threaten’ is a good way to describe what the sky is starting to do with occasional sounds of gurgling clouds. So there is not much time for a siesta. They are going to hover over anytime now, and the curtains will be cold again.
When I was little rain to me was a dirty thing. The rain was actually the soiled detergent water pouring down the earth used by the gods to wash their dirty grey sheets that looked like clouds to us from far below. If a morning had grey clouds, I knew it’s god’s laundry day because their sheets were dirty and needed cleaning. But this also meant that they were all going to be busy and not keep a check on the human kind for a while, which was my window to do things my parents taught me were banned by god.
The sun always appeared after god’s washing rendezvous so the clean sheets could dry under bright sun. But bright sun also meant attentive gods…”
A life as how we understand it seems to be a pastiche of things we have seen, read or heard, and nothing close to what it really is. Because we can’t really see it, and there isn’t a spectator sitting in a theatre with popcorn shouting life advises to our stories.
And so I often conclude that we’re the only alibi of our lives then, constantly knitting our past with our present in an hectic attempt to make sense of ourselves in this life.
And so our minds and phones are filled with incomplete lines and stories that we pick up from the books we read and the movies we watch, like the monologue above, or the words “cold froth.”
And a cold froth fills my spine every time I think of all the stories I could have written with them. Like the catch phrase ‘Hectic spots of red flushed through his cheeks’ or “the majestic tragedy of a loveless day”- I can’t see an image in my mind when I read these words, even If I try very hard, an image or two will flash in front of my eyes but it quickly disappears like grey smoke and leaves a blank sky with floating clouds of words pouring down on my skin and engraving my mind forever with the bold meanings they convey.
I am getting older, and I know that the sky doesn't belong to the gods or their sheets (Nietzsche was right, but it took me a while) and no one is watching us. It’s just us, and this vast world of reality that we only know how to explain through words.
But the reality of these lives we live always seem bigger than the words which we chose to shape it and so it overflows silently through the corners spilling away silently without any marks or sound, leaving us empty with shallow metaphors that pretend to grasp the behemoth of life that is us.
When I was a child I had unruly hair that flew with the wind and lived a life of their own. My mother would tame them and braid them into a neat braid and it made me that this life is like that. It’s made up of a lot of strands and is very unruly, but maybe if I braided it right, it would fall in place.
So I read heavy philosophy in college to hide my raging naivety behind clever words and mature beliefs. I rented a house of my own when I was 19 and washed my own clothes. I wore leather jackets to bar gigs and drank gin cocktails with not lemon but tangerine- and it seemed enough to fool life into thinking it should spare me the pain of being rough to me because I know how to braid it right.
But then love came along — I fell in love like kids play in grounds: I went out too much, playing all day long, coming back home only when my skin burnt under the sun. I fell in love with the innocence of a child that I was but it felt necessary to hide it behind half smiles and incomplete confessions I had seen the older ladies do in movies. All this so I can pass off as someone who had lived all these loves and knew that the sweetest of things collapse with no sound, and so nothing goes out and the memories remain inside, churning wildly every time they hear a new knock on the door.
I did it because I was afraid of life watching. I couldn’t let it know that I am in wonderment of its infinite beauty still. That’s what happens when you read too much and live too little.
And that’s when I put a stop to reading philosophy for a while.
I also love the words “watching your life pass by like a river by the mountains”. William blake once wrote about time and described it like the sand you can hold in your hand but only watch slip through. Life, unlike time, feels more intangible, because time I can measure, but without time, Icannot make sense of life even though it continues to exist nonetheless.
And so I feel I never really understand my life, and try to grab it with words and phrases that make themselves known to me. It’s like throwing fish nets over my life and catching whatever little fluttering pieces of meat that I can, only to find these stories dying before I can shape them through my words. But I shape them nonetheless.
So what is a life then, but a museum of words? As I walk through it I see sculptures I have shaped with my own hands, using the dust of times that I have lived, mixed with words, and that lets me shape this dust in whatever form I like. And so everything I say, feels like a shape I imagine, and not life itself. Because life seems to be only a feeling, and I am just a sculpture with words in my hand, and all I can do, is write:
To see a world in a museum of words
and life in the eyes of a lover
hold infinity in a pen in my palms
exploring eternity as I hover
