On Solitude

I have had unparalleled opportunity to be alone with myself and meditate, both upon my life and upon my subjects, and (I regret to say) after making a very promising start 3 months ago I rather tired of my quiet isolation and yearned for the company of old friends and the comfort of old haunts, the warmth of home and the careless lethargy of an unambitious life. The splendid solitude of the earnest savant that I so relished at the outset of this journey became a burden and slowly I wandered from the path of learning, maintaining enough of a hold to keep track but not enough to delight in it. As I have so many times before, I saw the light and somehow, I forgot. I have been competent all this semester, but there was the opportunity to be exceptional, to be inspired, and I squandered it in my indolence, my mind clouded by false concerns and intellectual diversions just engaging enough to hide the damage being done.

Just this afternoon while I mused upon life, I identified "a willingness to be alone" as the factor that separates the definitively ordinary from the potentially great. I then realized that in this semester, that was exactly where I was found wanting. I could, after a point, no longer sustain the mental focus that forms the basis of productive meditative solitude, and it became all too easy to find ways to be entertained and thus not have to think. Being alone induces a state of honesty and introspection that many people find abhorrent, and I - having conquered the daemons of self deceit - threw away for no reason the purity of mind earned over weeks of silent work and thought. I reached the very edge of genius and turned back, unable to maintain order and peace when they were most important.

Genius is a state of mind, and it is earned through sustained meditative work. If I dont get there in the next year or two, I will never get there. There is a definite window of opportunity, I know the path, I have but to walk it, my mind at peace and my voices silent.

In a beautiful country of chocolates, cobbled streets, waffles, civilized rivers and quaint buildings I sit in a room and feel time flow past me. I loose myself in the current, letting the past wash over me, knowing that its over and done with. I let visions of the future, multitudinous and fantastic stalk me enticingly, knowing full well how short lived, weak and pathetic they are ! The present ? the present is nothing ! it is a point where there is only awareness of its existence. Everything else is in the past or the future - unreal, immaterial, impotent. They are the imaginary winds of our creation, we unfurl imaginary sails and set forth on fantastic journeys, borne hither and thither by gusts from our pasts and our future. Pull the sails down, and not only does the wind disappear but also the sea. All one is left with is consciousness. The present. The one point, the only point at which we know we exist.

Lies

A word which describes everything. What we accept as the truth is only what we want to believe and what follows (through meaningless sophistry also of our choice) from what we believe. The basis as well as the structure of all arguments and discussions about people, ideas and the 'real' world are fairy tales which we seem unable to escape. Even the most trivial, unnecessary statements are falsifications, very often deliberate. Every thought we think about anything external to our minds is a gross simplification which has no connection to anything that 'actually is' and is designed to fit in with all the other mental illusions and constructions we have already manufactured in the past. And so we painstakingly build our castles of delusion, walls and rooms and halls and corridors infused with joy and loss and pride and tears and jealousy and faith and laughter and everything we ever felt, with the power of our agile minds we place stone upon carefully fashioned (unreal and arbitrary) stone, join and reinforce them with the mortar of our (imagined) relationships and satisfy ourselves that we have lived.

I'm still around - struggling, thinking, searching, happy, miserable, ill, worried, looking for peace, for reassurance form a world that's built to disappoint, getting things done, keeping it afloat, excited sometimes, bored mostly, appalled that the universe is unkind enough to exploit every weakness, every anomaly, every mistake one ever made and extract the market price. That is the only universal law I've experienced. No one gets away with anything. You been a bad boy ? Whether you knew it or not, whether you accept it or not, you will suffer. So will I.

We pay for the things we defile and degrade - including ourselves - and we pay for believing too much and we pay for believing too little. A price is extracted for every happy moment experienced, every good day, every piece of fortune, every favour taken, every minute spent wallowing in self pity, every dark thought, every task postponed and every promise broken.

To appreciate beauty in peace and languor without losing vigour and valour, to feel free without having to rebel, to be happy without self deceit, to face a just universe and see oneself reflected in it with a steady, unflinching, critical and honest gaze . . . . . . . .

One for Buzz Aldrin.

Along with le Tour de France, two very different but inextricably entwined stories will come to their conclusions on the 24th of July 2005.

One the story of an average man overcoming great adversity, and rising to dominate his profession to an extent unprecedented in history. The story of a man who is as revered as he is disliked all over the world. His successful fight against debilitating and mortal illness inspires devotion, and his impersonal, machine like and extended domination of his sport fuels discontent. There are two kinds of people in this world - those who love Lance Armstrong, and those who despise him. The other story is strikingly different. It consists mostly of frustration, criticism and bad luck. Don’t get me wrong, Jan Ullrich is a great cyclist and a very successful man by any standards, but with 5 second places (3 of them to Armstrong) after being one of the youngest winners of the tour in 1997, a tendency to come into the season slightly overweight, and consistent failure to do justice to his talent, History will judge him harshly.

But then, History is a bitch.
It is she who has decreed that the difference between being 'there' and being 'almost there' is the same as the difference between immortality and oblivion. She bestows her favours upon those who court her. The 'big' people. People who say the things that she considers right, people who fight and win enough battles that she considers to be important, people who manage to put upon themselves a veneer of goodness and invincibility. She cares nothing for the rest.

If Armstrong wins his 7th tour on the trot, he might deserve every accolade and every superlative bestowed upon him, but that will cause everything else, the daily heroism of so many men on the tour, the brave, the resilient, the stoic, to not only be forgotten, but under the ubiquitous shadow of that celebrated achievement, also belittled. In the frantic celebrations that will follow, with everyone scrambling to outdo everyone else in congratulating the champion, inventing new words, spending millions of dollars on congratulatory advertisements, who will have the time or the inclination to remember the brave Erik Dekker at the fag end of his career on a long breakaway, refusing to give in, refusing even to look back at the chasing peloton led by the sprinter's teams, the young Nicholas Portal, from a different team, weak and exhausted but helping Dekker all he can, doing his time at the front to give Dekker some rest, sticking to the task for no reason other than character and pride, the spectacular ride of Mike Rassmusen who rode 167 km all alone on a average mountain stage and won it, the resilience of Christophe Moreau and Jens Voigt as they tried to chase him down, the spirit that caused Moreau to stop when Voigt had a puncture, and the countless, countless other examples of all that is good in man that the Tour throws up with such breathtaking regularity ?

People will talk about how dominant Armstrong was even on his last tour, passing his main rival Jan Ullrich in the time trial on the first day after starting with a one minute deficit, and not a thought will be spared for the pain, anguish and despair of a proud man with his last chance to make amends and pull something back, as he saw himself being overtaken and left behind.

A win for Jan Ullrich, on the other hand, will force history to look at the other men who rode with Armstrong, it will add a huge amount to what will otherwise degenerate into a long paean to the praise and glory of one man at the cost of all others. It will be a demonstration that not always will the favourite win and the mighty triumph. It will be reassuring to see the beleaguered and fallible triumph against the perfect. It is the same fight that you and me face everyday, the fight to overcome our faults, to justify our talent, to fulfil what we consider to be our destiny. It will add balance to scales that are tipped overwhelmingly towards those with success and power, and that strange blinkered vision that causes a man to achieve impossible things. It will bring a ray of hope to so many of us, who battle against overwhelming odds and stifling systems, against our own record of indolence and failure, against the unfair and cruel manner in which the world determines who deserves to be respected and who does not.

When Jan Ullrich rides out on to the Alps tomorrow, he rides not just against Armstrong, but against History. He rides not just for himself, but for all those of us who have had too much to do with the words 'imperfect', 'incomplete' and 'unfulfilled'.

One for Bertie.

Note that a lot of what is said below, applies to itself.

Implicit in maintaining a blog, is the wish/expectation that it be read. It may help the writer organize his thoughts, yes. It may help the writer write better, yes. But a blog is primarily meant to be read. Otherwise, one would write in word, and make a folder on the pc, and not take the pain (not that there is much of that) to put it all on a website.

To verbalize what is felt, seen and thought is an extremely uninteresting thing if done for itself. Writing, being much more involved a process than speaking, (atleast for beginners like me) the motivation for it can only be found if one wants to be heard.

There are several different reasons why one would want people to receive any thoughts/ideas that one may scatter round. Some of these being -
1> The need to be understood/appreciated/be shown sympathy. (selfishness)
2> The feeling that one has something so important to say, that it might be in people's interest to read it. (altruism)
3> The feeling that change can be brought about in the world by ideas expressed through writing.

The first is weakness, the second presumptuous and the third naive.

How much we presume !

We think that the simple act of criticism puts us on a higher plane. We think that we can escape responsibility for the state of affairs by dissecting it. The more bitter and verbose our critique, the better we feel about it. We let off steam and frustration by tearing apart that which we ought to fix. Trying to hide impotence by ranting against fertility clinics. We fool ourself into thinking that we know, because we have not the strength to face the infinite complexity of our issues, the deceit and darkness inherent in the multidimentional character of our people, and the terrible contradictions underlying our nation. We choose our opinions and jump to one side of the wall, because to sit on the fence, to reserve judgement, would be to be able to see both ways, and our sanity would not survive that. We are mortally afraid. Afraid that we might find that Gandhi, Godse and Laden are all wrong. Or even worse, that they are all right. Where would that leave us, and our selfrighteous, indignant, verbose rantings ? Where would we put all our literary references and quotes then ?

We presume too much.

"Behold we know not anything,
I can but hope that good shall fall,
At last far off, At last to all,
And every winter change to spring."

Said some guy. Nice thought, but its not going to happen. This is the way things are, and this is the way they are always going to be, so we could shut our sensitive eyes, cover our snobbish noses and daintily try to pick our way through life (saying clever things all the while), or we could stride along, taking in the sights and smells of our world, willing to administer a firm tap on the jaw as well as lend a helping hand, right in the thick of things, lost but comfortable, minute but measureable, helpless but happy.

And if I see one more flower because I kept my eyes open among the dungheaps, I'll consider it a square deal.

"As long as she swims, I will cook !"

If time is not flowing in the smooth, mellow and scenic way that one would want it to, if the whole idea of continuing in the same way has begun to seem dull and uninteresting, if one more obstacle in the way threatens to end the journey, if one is enmeshed in a web of spoiled relationships that threaten to slip carelessly away, if hollow, insecure, bitter, petty aims and feelings threaten to take over one's mind, it is time to dig deep, make a stand, show some fiber, scavenge some defiance from those ruins, summon some pride, find that courage, and after having done all that, with the comfort of having arrayed all that you have around you, show some restraint.

For it is not always doing what one can and saying what one might, that add to a man. Often it is not doing what one could have, leaving clever words unsaid, that remove bitterness and add peace. Any random obnoxious fool can call a spade a spade, but it is a wise man who will leave it alone, give it the benefit of the doubt, and save himself the anguish that invariably goes with trying to say things as they are, because all too often, they are not.

The title, intended to signify dogged defiance and adherence to personal beliefs in circumstances of great adversity, comes from a brilliant passage from Joseph Conrad's "The Nigger of the Narcissus". The ship has half overturned in a terrible gale, and has somehow stabilized in that position. The sailors are all lashed to the deck. The winds are icy cold and the rain continuous, and the men have been that position for days. They are dying from the exposure. The cook, an extremely eccentric religious man, suddenly lets go of his support, and precariously begins to make his way to the galley. The bewildered sailors are shocked, hoarse and weak voices ask him just what the hell does he think he is doing. With a strange light in his eye, his ragged clothes flapping in the wind, he cries out "As long as she swims I will cook !" Unbelieving men say that he is mad, "I will get ye some coffee" says he "Till she swims, I will cook !” A weak and pitiful cheer goes round the desperate company, "Cook ye are a gent!" cry hard men with tears in their long suffering eyes, "Till she swims I will cook !" he cries again and disappears with a bound.

The situation loses a lot in my rendering of it. I had tears in my eyes when I read the book.

"As long as she swims, I will cook !”

The way ahead....

The light at the end of the tunnel..a mere speck though it may be, gives man access to reserves of hope and optimism that he did not know he possessed.

Give a man the chance he never had, and he'll take it.

Give a man hope and he will go on.

Give a man the spark that he had lost, and watch the trail blaze.

There is no hole so deep, no problem so big, and no man so lost that he may not one day climb out, overcome, and find his way home.

.......and lo !

The conditions of conquest are always easy. We have but to toil awhile, endure awhile, believe always, and never turn back.
-Markus Annaeus Seneca