Saturday, March 16, 2013

The beaker, the dots, and other things...


Just trying to clear my head with a little bit of writing. These words are like random spouts of water that cleans up clogged drains. A spurt here, a spurt there, and then the drain is all set to take up the dirt again. That’s how my mind has become. Clogged. Cluttered. Full of junk. Like the residue at the end of a science experiment. The one left behind in the beaker. The one they ask you to analyze a little bit, and then throw away. Only in my case, the baby and the bath water have got mixed up somewhere. The beakers look all the same. Don’t know what to throw, what to keep, what to write about, what to crib about. Don’t even know if the experiment went as planned. All I saw was some smoke and some changes of colors. Maybe that was the purpose of this. But what if it was not?

How long will I stare at the blank pages, waiting for answers to form? Waiting for some miracle, for the ship to touch the shore. For the dust to settle. For the fog to clear. For the beaker to reveal itself?

They say a part of us dies when we tell a lie. Some part. I don’t know which. More importantly, what happens to the parts that are left behind? Do they remain the same? Or are they tainted too? And if all our lives every day we have been lying to ourselves and to the world around us, then what exactly are we carrying forward every day? Which remnant it is that is sustaining us? Or again, have we blurred the lines so much that we cannot distinguish between what’s gone and what’s left behind? We held on to something. Too late to find out if we were clutching at the wrong straws?

The time had come, to talk of many things. Of cabbages and kings, and whether pigs have wings. Maybe that’s the problem. That the world seen through the looking glass seems more comforting and realistic than what goes on around us. Out of the two sides of the rabbit hole, which one are we really living in? Which of these is actually the make-believe world? The beaker with the dark sediment? Or the beaker that seems to have clear water?

But what if there were only no rabbit hole. What if there were not two of anything? There was no dust, no  fog, no nothing. And no experiment either. Just a beaker waiting to be observed. Nothing more, nothing less. Maybe there was no need to burn all those fires and try and connect the dots. We assumed that there were multiple dots.

But what if it there was only one?