The Picture of a Timeless Young Man

I spent an evening in the drawing room and this is what I realized. You cannot insulate yourself from who you are for way too long. Despite your efforts to deceive yourself, the real ‘you’ remains unscathed. I chanced upon the eyes of hell and what did I see- a dark blue book that has a picture of a retiring gentleman who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally. There was a sense of mystery when I looked at that book. It filled me with profound thrill so much so that I could not articulate what it was, that threw me in a state of wicked frenzy. To this day when I examine myself, I am all the more certain that this dark moment marks the turning point of a dangerous kind of innocence. It is unknown and unheard off. It is revealed only to those who wish to reject the tree of good and evil and discover the tree of life. 

The Picture of Dorian Gray is in the mirror. It is sufficient to open your eyes to the mental sensation. There is no need to visualize the descriptions of the passages in the novel. Wilde is not quite at home with his sensitivity because he feels that the world is not ready for the poetry of warm emotions. Yet he cannot deny them. How does he bear this conflict? His novel is testimony to how the split occurs. Does it occur in one’s psyche or is there a conscious sense of disparity in one’s being? How would acceptance follow? His only novel undresses the binaries that human beings have come to sublimate. It is more than what Wilde could be because ‘’mystery is in the visible and not in the invisible”.   If you cannot see, you do not know what is there. If you can conceive of that which you cannot see, then it exists devoid of enigma as an idea in print. If you can see an image and would like to understand it, you would like to judge it all the same. It is enigmatic and hence arrests your curiosity. 

In ‘’The Picture of Dorian Gray”, Lord Henry is a hypnotic cynic who speaks to the young male reader. His words are at once flippant, witty and petulantly profound. He mocks at the tendency to worship virtues that are simply practices of convenience. This work is relevant even today when old dogmas are replaced by new ones. What was considered noble, is now barbaric; what was once considered romantic is now perceived to be a sign of weakness but one gets the feeling that beneath the tough exterior of the machine age, there is a craving for the natural processes that keeps us warm devoid of the alienation that we have hitherto come to experience. 

Hypocrisy in contemporary times lies in denying this craving for personal reunion and holding in high esteem professional supremacy. The smart phones, social networking sites and instant messages have substituted personal interaction by promoting technology-enabled extroversion. We live thus in monumental stereotypes groping in the evanescence of trends worshiped and fashioned by the dictates of commerce. In so doing, we lose all vitality and synthesize our appetites. Thinking has taken a back seat and the new age iconoclast is a human being of quaint tastes inexorably socialistic. Such has come to define the times we live in. We do not know what anti-hypocrisy is because we never fully understood hypocrisy. A nice individual is considered to be a confidence trickster. Hypocrisy has merely assumed different forms. These forms are more complicated than ever. Duality of Victorian England that Wilde reveals is just fundamental to the complexities governing our existence. They multiply with experience till sincerity becomes elusive. As Wilde himself says, “Little sincerity is a dangerous thing; too much sincerity would prove fatal.” Every time I read this novel, my perspectives only increase because there is in it a thought much larger than what a message can convey. It is inconsistent and inconstant, which is why it cannot be brought down to a terrible moral that Wilde said would be revealed not to the puritan but only to those who are pure at heart. It is the picture of a timeless young man.

Adieu

Oscar Wilde helped me sail through every experience

while other philosophers were busy splitting hair over words and reason.

It's not the thesis but the theatricality behind his words

which proved to me that 'Truth' can never be found in human reason.

Wilde did to me what neither the mystic Shankara nor the analytic Russell could do.

Even though I live in pieces I know eventually I will die peacefully.

Adieu!

To Grief- Remedy I Don't Want You

A flower grows out of nowhere
To offer you a remedy
Once you withdraw from a projection
Where your identity can never find its place
A shadow remains still;
When colors refuse to change
The only flower that withers is time
There is no dimension more benevolent
Than an open landscape without limits.

Do Words Disappear?

As I can see, great many individuals read under competitive pressure. There is a tendency to associate reading with learning. For every word that you read, the imagination has escaped your mind. You see the words in every line of of every page. But where do they go? Do they disappear? I am tempted to say that these words are not ideas by themselves. I refrain from saying that only because as a reader, I am in mind the only one. What about you? Do you find yourself in your mind or do you cease to exist by becoming a reader. You may be curious to know if the thoughts and phantoms of the author fill your vessel. Your vessel is never really empty.
Your vessel can never really be full.

The brain is not an organ when you are alive. It is devoid of any value or significance when you receive the thought, character and essence of the author. As the words pass you by, you do not see the meanings in a vacuum. You sense the thought that eventually completes itself at a point of disambiguation. A point where no camouflage is possible. But what do you understand? What do you let pass by? A meaning so insanely incoherent that your soul does not let in, finds its way into your brain  now filled with insolence. You read but you do not reflect. You remember but you do not absorb. You quote but you never truly understand. Whenever you quote you are always misquoting the author, if you cannot appreciate the cognitive convulsions of the author. Do words disappear? Have you killed them for the brand of your intellect? If you surrender meekly to the demands of the eyes of trend and horror, what you have only done is to deplete in vain every pulse of your self esteem. In so doing, you adorn the unreal pride of readership at the expense of clarity of the author's thought and character. Words have disappeared indeed!

You may read a book a day. You are merely replacing one author with another...one book with another. The authenticity of your mind is doomed if there is no absorption. You have no place for the author in you...the author who is you and you have a lot left to unlearn my dear friend.

 

The Pathological Controversy of Super Sanity

It has been a challenge to define sanity. The reasons arise out of the impulse to be guided by a range of what the prevailing era considers normal. While the range is broad it may still not be broad enough. The question then arises as to how much is broad enough. This question is answered conveniently on many occasions. The convenience in contention is largely determined by certain accepted norms so that the definition of sanity becomes somewhat truncated. At this point a circle is drawn which acts almost like a forcefield preventing strong deviations from accepted patterns of behavior from entering the designation of acceptance and hence they are not considered sane.

Although sanity is a drawn range, it seems to grow depending on a notion of collective- acceptance. When one talks about sanity one cannot help delving into the realm of perspectivism. This means that we may have different perspectives and act according to those perspectives but they are accepted as long as they do not cross the circle of normalcy or the broad range of sanity. It would then imply that what was not normal at one point may become normal if the circle expands and the range broadens. While this is convenient and makes life simple for the ones who fit into the circle it can be limiting as collective acceptance is still subject to evolution. You cannot determine with convenience clearly if the range has fully evolved.

One then embarks on the possibility of super sanity which is a layer where there are only visual fields and no sensational impacts on the person who is super-sane. One often discovers that there is no more anything to be cured and one is dropped in the well of motivational despair. When this happens one becomes a subject of what is called the pathological controversy of super-sanity. It becomes impossible to 'cure' or 'correct' any thought-process that is considered incorrect by virtue of the fact that it is only 'considered' abnormal but not abnormal for certain, in the absolute sene. You may start coining jargons, labels and phrases that may have a medical significance but not necessarily absolute significance. If this is the case then the whole circle is blown outside its field of relevance absorbing even the labeller into the well of motivational despair. Just imagine when there are only visual fields or perspectives that have no absolute relevance, what would happen to your inbuilt schema of what you consider as normal? Then the therapist is cured by his client on account of his condition or state of super sanity.

  

There is a Cold Feeling

There is a cold feeling in the air

Even in summers of rut and scare,

No temperature so much as outside

can compare with what your body hides.

Like a drop of honey texture can change

the human mind of uncertain range,

For you can convert what's outside inside like

and change the world to suit your psyche.

When will this feeling change for good

When you've not really understood

the difference between the body and mind

is to be trifled with by the one inclined.

There is a cold feeling in the air,

of which you must be aware

Warmth shall come in evening soon

Becoming of the wayward moon.

Abducted by the Concord of Sweet Sounds

If a song can have power over you

Enough to control the rhythm of your heart

What may one say of the composer?

Who when immersed in the art

Commands the spirits to closure

Is he real enough to feel

The power when awake?

Is he deceptive enough to conceal

The grip of a bygone state?

Revel in the magic till it lasts

Before you realize it maybe too late!