Thursday, January 03, 2013

Fragile


Disclaimer: This piece is really a rant, and unlike my other attempts, I have not tried to close the start and the end into a single theme, as a logical whole. It is just a flow of thought, unhindered, undirected and whimsically indulgent in its chaos.

I've read once somewhere as to how there is no definite moment of death. It is not that the previous moment, you were alive and then the very infinitesimal next instant, you were gone. Death is really a continuous process where the domino of cards that we are, kinda degrade and our interdependent systems topple little by little into an increasingly irreversible state, as different portions of you fail and cease to function at varying times.

Perhaps there was no such thing as life itself. There were really just points in the continuum of existence, where as you moved further down, the plots in the graph got darker. You could all be plotted as a point somewhere on that line. Sometimes when you are alive too, you feel weak, as if you are displaced a tad bit downwards the continuum, fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, not quite irreversibly.

Indulging further in the pointlessness of arriving at conclusions without consequence, I have also occasionally wondered why we identified the 'heart' as the organ that feels pain and love. I guess, it is a very physical feeling - to feel the blood rush with excitement one time, and when in pain and you gasp, the lungs would long desperately to take in more of the wind, and maybe you mistake that feeling in your chest to be a pain in your heart. When you were the most fragile, you thought the heart could stop. Well, it all doesn't matter what we think! About, the physical and biological manifestations of pain and love. They just exist.

Let's digress a bit! Or perhaps I was only digressing until now. It does not matter. In a rant with no central coherent topic, everything was a digression. And, nothing was.

I wanted to indulge further obsessively as I'd take liberty to compare myself to a most magnificent object - the mirror. Having no face of my own, and with no objectivity to measure myself against, other than with relation to the people I face, I'd just be that - a dim lit mirror with no light, no face and character, when all by myself. But when the objects stayed afore, I reflected. They'd talk and I too would. I reflected their smiles, and their pains, and often it was as if, I had nothing of my own, and one look at the mirror would make you believe, their smiles and pains belonged to me too. And rightly so, for those moments, I lived those also. In their absence, I was a mercury coated sheet with no expression of my own, existing outside the continuum of life, and time, like God, or rather, just like an immortal piece of stone. If you'd try to plot me in the graph above, against the existence continuum, you cannot. I'd be imaginary, non-existent, and not renderable on the life-plot. There was no 'walk of life' for the mirror. It was not a point. It was just that. Pointless. Never came a day when, I'd be the first to smile, the first to express anger or sadness, or wake up in tears or any inexplicable sense of joy. I'd wake up in the morning as a clean slate, but for any scratches and scars left behind by the imperfections of time. An empty and dull piece of metal. Then, it would begin. The restless exercise of reflection, until all the lights go off in the night. What others were, made sense. Whatever they were, whatever they did. And, I could miraculously blend in. Their hollow conversations, obsessive likes and dislikes, instincts, emotions, fear, jealousy, racist hatred, anything be the case, I could connect, empathize, and I'd reflect and participate. This was not just a mirror, but had to be a miracle rather!

Is it a coincidence that mirrors were fragile? It perhaps requires some sort of intricate design, like the domino of cards, to be able to reflect and not absorb the beauty, the smiles, tears, the errors and imperfections onto oneself. Or, does it truly reflect everything with no trace of what happened left behind in memories? Did a mirror have a memory of its own? Did it not absorb a bit of the joy and the pain too? And, in the process, acquire a face? Maybe, it wanted to everyday, but it never would. Life revolved around reflections of others in the forefront. Folks would come and bounce themselves off the thing, to hear themselves out, or merely to find a bit of reciprocation in a world that is so direly short of that.

But, occasionally, they'd clean the rust off my surfaces and polish me, to make me look bright and clean in whatever little ways, so that I can continue my job with more perfection for much longer. And for what it is worth, I am grateful for that little thing they did to me.