The Romantic Editor

Standards are many
Subjective and cranky
Yet accuracy is expected
In the name of logic.

Language is abused
Punctuation overused
Just to protect a profession
called copyediting.

Apply your mind
the supervisors say
Command of the language
is of no assistance,
Vocabulary is of no relevance
Too distracted for copyediting
and too analytical for copywriting.

The romantic editor needs a place
even if he is a misfit in disgrace;
With emphasis on call to duty
Perishes linguistic beauty.

Solitude in Loneliness is Like a Lotus in a Fortress

Lotus in a Fortress is a collection of poems. There are poems in classical forms and poems in free verse. The title hints at a contradiction in form and at the same time, its coexistence in substance. It is possible to be free inside a structure if the so called structure is aesthetic and reasonably shapeless. If the structure is utterly well defined with no scope for fluidity then the substance takes the shape of the structure. As a result 'the contained' has no identity of its own.

If the container blends with the contained then harmony is obtained. Form and structure constitute aesthetics. The poems in "Lotus in a Fortress" are insights from experience. The beauty of classical structure in verse lies in its rhythm and metre. Writing in classical forms gives an intellectual thrill to the poet and the fulfilment that follows, needless to say, knows no bounds!

It is said that poetry leads to multiple interpretations. The poet may wish to convey only one meaning and that is perhaps the only objective of the poet. For instance, in the title, the poet represents solitude through lotus and loneliness through fortress. It is possible to be alone and seek solitude because you are made lonely on account of being excluded from the group. You are said to be alone in a group and as a result you seek solitude for being happy with yourself. The dark fortress is the state of being estranged. You are amidst people but you are all alone. Therefore you need to be alone outside in order to be at peace with yourself. If you are not accepted by people then you may go to a place where there is nobody so that you are accepted by the environment. People do not necessarily make a place; solitude can.

The construction of a structure is preserved more by the thought that goes behind its making. The insight is preserved by the delicate usage of words. How well the words are strung together determine the efficacy of their delivery. The rhythm is sustained by the dramatic element of the verse. Words by themselves do not make a poem. Even the overall meaning does not. It is nothing but the musical element. It gives the poem power. The dramatic element is the soul of poetry.
Poetry is about harmonizing opposing forces in a continuum that provides the platform to do so.

Own freedom and structure in verse. Purchase your copy. Lotus in a Fortress is available online as an eBook. https://notionpress.com/read/lotus-in-a-fortress

The Agnosiac- Inability to feel Knowledge

Knowledge is not restricted to reality. You can also know that which is imaginary. It is processed by your senses in a way that touches you so intensely that you express it by giving it form and shape.

The idea then becomes real even if it was once upon a time imaginary. 'Real' is what is made real. If you wish to see God, you do not see him; you see the idea. If you wish to discover, you notice a pattern. It is the emotion that drives the intelligence. What comes out is the making of a complex mind.

I would like to sketch the outline of an experience to explain what it is like to not know what you know and to not know if you can know anything at all.

Agnosia is not like agnosticism. It's not an intellectual choice, but a zone you just find yourself in.
The spinal cord does away with the intellect. Thought becomes an action and feeling breathes in every word. It's not Biology or Chemistry but inspiration that makes you alive.
 

Adults As Plastic Toys (A Scream Through the Tunnel)

Plastic toys have very little value to adults. Just because they adorn the showcase does not mean that a human being values them. A child tends to play with toys and live a situation for them making them experience an event. Or that is how they create this situation for themselves. Just imagine what it would be like for a human being to be played as a toy. The difference of course is that a human being experiences the game as real and not ‘as though’ it is real. A human being is a bundle of contradictions but it is probably this contradiction that is most daunting and gives the essence of an experience. Without this contradiction there would be no experience. Take the case of someone who with great difficulty buys a Japanese dish and brings it home. But just when he tries to open it he drops it and becomes angst at the outcome of the care and effort that he took to buy it. Here the contradiction is that although he took great care he lost his favourite dish. This is experience. Someone who gives a lecture on life usually does not know what he is talking about. This boy who bought the dish could well look upon himself as a toy played by a heartless spirit.

If a mind-set is a choice, then who gave him this choice? -No one. What we call experience gives us the illusion that either the universe is perfect or the universe is imperfect. The person who decides to pursue one of the two courses as his mind-set is usually taking himself as a toy played by a heartless spirit. If life goes well for him then he thinks that the so called spirit is compassionate and if it does not go all that well he feels victimised whether or not he calls the spirit heartless. The person however, who gives a lecture on how to live life is removed from this zone and is rarely in touch with it. This is a secure zone trying to persuade the victim to adopt a mind-set that the spirit is compassionate. This is just one of the two binary illusions.

Take another instance when a boy is going with his friends to an amusement park and on the way they have to cross a track. While crossing the boy suddenly decides not to cross the track because he had heard of someone who got killed while crossing the track as the signal did not work. He is justified in not trusting signals and he is justified in not trusting his destiny. If we leave ourselves to chance then we are toys and if we do not leave ourselves to chance we are also toys because we are still victims. What one calls life is the result of two opposing forces trying to outdo each other and as they cannot do away with each other they give rise to the product of plastic toys that we are.

An Introvert on the Prejudices of Psychologists

Introverts are the most misunderstood category of people. It is supposed that an introvert does not talk. Such a person keeps to oneself and does not seek company. Many go to the extent of considering an introvert to be arrogant. In schools, introverted children give a favorable impression to teachers. They think that if a child is quiet, he/she is well behaved and more likely to be studious. This is an automatic assumption and a psychological one. This assumption can be dramatically different if the teacher insists on team work. If the child is uncomfortable working with other children then they tend to think that there is significant discomfort and goading is the need of the hour. If a child is active and cannot sit still in class, teachers tend to view that as an aberration. It can get to a point where parents take their children to psychologists and they are often diagnosed with attention deficiency hyperactive disorder. It does not occur to teachers and parents that children have a certain natural tendency and to force them to behave in a manner that is incongruent with their natural inclinations is hazardous to their well being. There are ways of nurturing them. It takes time and children are not nurtured in a day. This applies to adults as well. If the education system is such that time is of the essence and teachers are under pressure to complete the syllabus within a time frame, then quite obviously the system is flawed. 

Introverts are viewed differently in different cultures. In some countries, introvert is seen as socially underdeveloped and in some they are seen as being more focused and stable than extroverts. There is also a gender bias involved. In so called liberal countries and also countries that are midway, introversion in men is not considered desirable. In women, it is considered by such societies as more acceptable. The reason is that men were always considered to be dominant on account of primordial instincts and it would interest the readers to know that this belief is also entertained by developed nations with or without their knowledge. With blind dating and the capitalistic idea of free press, the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity have reached an all time high and intellectual acumen has hit an all time low.  

An introvert is reflective and derives strength from within. There is a stronger need for solitude and it is in silence that an introvert recovers from the vicissitudes of life. To conclude that such people do not want friends is a mistaken notion. There are introverts who seek like-minded company. They may not participate in interactions with people but they can be unusually observant. Those who engage in interactions do not have the distance to notice subtle variations in people. This distance proves to be a natural advantage for individuals who would much rather watch a social game than play it. 

Psychologists, parents, teachers and peers harp on the need to have self-confidence. If there is a word or phrase in the English language, I do not like, it is self-confidence. Confidence does not refer to anything specific. There is only a context against which it is measured. Usually glamour obsessed people judge someone as confident by looking at their mannerisms and body language. This does not make someone confident. In fact it tends to amount to stupidity. What people see is a reflection of who they are. What they can see is a reflection of what they want to see. 

Psychologists and personality developers especially in India tend to lay greater emphasis on the importance of such projections without delving into details. You can only be confident about what you know. To be confident about what you do not know is a sign of insecurity. There is a tendency among people of fashionable dispositions to pitch style over substance. This is detrimental to the development of their psyche and the collective psyche of the masses unless the latter is beyond the influence of the former. 

Psychologists have yet to understand the nature of their own misplaced sense of moderation. They swear by the idiom that anything in excess is bad. This is limiting as a masterpiece is always borne out of the excesses of a vibrant intellect. People with moderate constitutions have never produced a work of art of any significance. Masterpieces have been produced only by minds in frenzy. Take any artist as an example and recoil in horror.

To define is to limit and psychologists have made professions out of defining human behaviour. They have to be rejected if the potential of your being has to blossom.

‘’Be as you are” is not just a book by David Godman. It is necessary to understand yourself better and realize your full potential. History is full of theories but no theory has survived history.      

The Mistake of Intelligent Design

It is generally supposed that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. If he was omnipotent he should have the ability to correct the flaws in the universe. I personally do not see him doing any of those corrections. The distinction between good and evil is at least in a profound sense blurred. It is difficult to say for sure if you can rest trust on any one individual including your ‘self’. The self is constantly changing and so are the emotions that accompany it. The Hindu thinker says that if there is one aspect that never changes, it is the ‘self’. We will weigh this statement a little later. But now if you take into account the experiences that you go through in life you cannot be impervious to the fact that there are so many flaws in the world around you. One part of the world is well off with high life expectancies and the other part is the exact opposite. Animals get killed by carnivorous animals. No one can blame them because it is not in their design to find alternate sources of nourishment. If they are not to blame then there is only one person and that is nature or maybe even God.

It may even be a fallacy to suppose that there is a God because there are so many logical contradictions in the possibility for the existence of God. For one it is difficult to conceive of a perfect being creating an imperfect world/ universe. The other argument which is a bigger contradiction lends itself to a question, “what did God do before he created the universe?” We can see around us that the living beings and even inanimate matter change through a process of conflict and struggle. The process as observed is self-sufficient. There seems to be no need for any intervention. 

The fact of the matter is that the cosmic force is impervious to the destruction as a result of the conflict which is all pervasive. So God as a being full of compassion is a matter of doubt. Is God omnipresent? If he was then the universe may as well worship itself. God would have been the other to man and man the other to him. There seems to be here a duality that challenges creationism.

Observations tell man that what happens around him is unjustifiable. You take for granted your existence as the self to the other and you observe the universe as a phenomenon of duality. You cannot observe otherwise because it is as much impossible to deny yourself as it is to deny experience or sensation. The only time when sensation is denied is when you are not conscious.

The state of nothingness so to say only exists as a concept. This in itself is a flaw in ontology. You exist as a self and you exist as the other to the other self and what you have to justify existence is a circular argument. Existence is an a priori phenomenon as a result of sensation. The mistake in intelligent design, if at all there is an intelligent designer is to create life out of contradictions. A life out of contradictions can only produce ethics out of contradictions and the duality is itself the dwelling centre for the impasse called infinite regress.

On ‘the Search for Happiness’

One emotion that unfortunately does not have a clear meaning is happiness. Although it is considered a desirable state to be in no one is able to explain without ambiguity what happiness really is. Some say it is a state of mind; others say that it is a euphemism in some sense for the word ‘pleasure’ which is normally a word used in the context of human or animal instincts and there are those who say that happiness in the ideal sense is an illusion. But whatever be the specific meanings that people ascribe to it, it remains a word of the heavens. By ‘word of the heavens’ I mean something that does not have an earthly place as it is not a plain emotion. Yet people are searching for it hoping that they will find it sooner or later. In the struggles of their situations some may give up the hope of finding happiness and be content with their predicament. This is a rather unusual state to be in because on one hand they have not found the state of mind that they are looking for and on the other they give up the search accepting what little they have and they find it! But there is a pathetic fallacy associated with the search for happiness and it is that one usually does not know to what extent happiness is possible and how to preserve it till the end; yet one wants it quite desperately. 

From time to time it has been observed that we go through happy moments now and then. If they are outcomes of the dreadful word ‘success’ then you can be quite sure that it is subject to insecurity. Preservation of a success induced joyful state is by no means happiness. Happiness is a joyful state which is experienced for its own sake or when you are involved in an activity that you like without any intentions of benefiting from it in the future. Happiness from this angle never exists in the future. Attempts to discover happiness only leads to creating techniques that will have to be applied to be able to find it. But application is a process which has nothing to do with the end result, which in this case is happiness. There have been people who write about happiness; psychologists who research on the subject and find only their own perspectives of it. Whatever be the attempts to find the heavenly state and preserve it till kingdom come, you should be spared the vanity of associating it with success or priggish talks. It must be noted that one who experiences anxiety does not want to be unhappy but is desperately trying to find this heavenly state of mind. One who is anxious is not just tired but is terrified at the thought of consequences of not finishing the line or entering mainstream. He is anxious and not unhappy. 

The only person who really is unhappy is one who is able to see that nothing in life can ever bring him happiness. If nothing can bring me happiness even from within then I would not want to keep searching for it as it is a waste of intrapersonal effort. If I am unhappy then I may consider not looking for happiness at all and this unhappy mind does away with itself. It has let go of my unreasonable search of that which I cannot describe. If I cannot describe it and have no idea of what it is then it does not exist in my being. If someone else finds it in common pursuits then I can be quite sure that that is not my concept of happiness because I cannot find it. Happiness is simply a myth.