“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
Oscar Wilde
We are living through strange times, unreal times. On the face of it, things appear to be normal, but a little scratching bares the venomous fangs which are hidden behind blankets of laborious makeup and conditioning. Not long ago, it was all different. Things were more like what they appeared to be. One did not gather the feeling of something gravely amiss in what one saw or felt. It all came across in real colours. It was real.
No more. It is seldom that one encounters the real these days. Everything is put on display wearing loads of pretence and artificiality. It is like there are tonnes of grime which need to be hidden from human sight. It is a different matter that, in reality, it cannot be kept away for long as it appears in countless shades and forms, each more pungent than the other.
It is a strange phenomenon. Something that we thought was our strength soon begins to strangulate our being as we feel our breath deserting us, our life drifting away from us. It is only a short while ago that we believed ourselves to be indestructible. We thought nothing could dent our invincibility. And here we are, just a while later, lying with no clue of what is happening to us and what may yet be in store
How did we come to this pass? When did we start wearing this artificial garb to hide the real from the world, and why did we have to do this? Even more importantly, where is this leading us? These are important questions and the reasons for a systematic and unceasing decay may be hidden in their answers. But getting these answers is not a simple matter as the ones who need to hide them find the ways to do so also.
Over time, the layers of deception continue to pile up till a time may come when the effort to dig the truth would become impossible and may even be treated as travesty. Yet, the depths of regression that we may have reached will never cease to unravel. In this journey, new pits will be discovered to fall deeper into the embrace of monstrous forces of morbidity.
It is because of the insatiable lust of the human kind to accumulate that we are so gruesomely strangled in a grip that is tightening further by the day. It is like we are overcome by demonic forces unleashed by the greed that breeds inside, which we are unwilling to contain. It is as if these currents have begun to take us away from ourselves. We are no longer the people we used to be. We are no longer the people who would be eager to take off these covers that we are hidden behind, and breathe in fresh air. We have become accustomed to living in a world of artificiality which is plunging us deeper into the abyss in fulfilment of our desire to hide within the walls of protection which we constructed with the very loot that we piled up over years of degradation. It is like we are lost in a labyrinth unable to find a way out to salvation. It is like we are enveloped in fog which is thickening rapidly, taking away even the occasional traces of light which were filtering through. It is certain that we shall be enveloped in total and impenetrable dark which shall seep through to our soul. This is T. S. Eliot in ‘East Coker’:
“O dark, dark, dark. They all go into the dark.
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha,
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.”
This plunge is part of an unceasing tyranny which mind plays over mind and heart plays with heart. This consumption with lust is a plague that wraps us in its folds which only tighten with time to constrict our breathing and, ultimately, take our life away. We are dead, stark dead, but we may not even know this because we had come to believe that we are indestructible, our accumulations are our security and our guard against the gospel of death. We would begin to think that we are beyond these things that only happen to others, not to us. We are safe and secured behind the piles of our plunder, behind heaps of our refuse.
But what we don’t know is that we are not any of that. We are neither safe, nor secured. We are just as vulnerable before the forces of change as anyone else who may not have the protections which we believe we have, and which we gathered over time spent in the company of crime and criminals. It is the same time that has dug gaping holes into our person which we are afraid of, which we want to run away from. But we cannot. We are trapped. Here is Eliot again describing ‘The Hollow Men’:
“The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms”
The mystery of avowed greatness is laid bare in the ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’:
“I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.”
Fear, fear, why art thou here? But fear is not disappearing. It is one’s eternal companion. It lives every breath that we breathe, it lives in every sinew that moves within our bodies and it shakes every thought that may dawn upon us. It does not engage in an open battle. It works its way around us through what may be in our mind, or unravel through our ill deeds. It is lurking about us, it resides within us. It is visible, but not so visible. It comes wearing myriad apparels. But, in reality, it is our own creation. It is the creation of our desires and our deeds. It comes in the shape of piles of pelf that we have gathered around us which, in fact, never belonged to us. It was someone else’s right which we usurped. It is this injustice which assumes the shape of fear and engulfs us within the dark it weaves around us as we drop deeper and deeper into its fathomless expanse. We are a captive there. We have no way to escape.
It is a strange phenomenon. Something that we thought was our strength soon begins to strangulate our being as we feel our breath deserting us, our life drifting away from us. It is only a short while ago that we believed ourselves to be indestructible. We thought nothing could dent our invincibility. And here we are, just a while later, lying with no clue of what is happening to us and what may yet be in store. The real times were not the ones that we had so arrogantly created. The real times are now which are all around us as we gaze clueless into the holes that contained the eyes, not so long ago:
“And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away –
Or as, when the underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.”
The gaping silence of the far beyond is deafening!
