Home- Sweet home

In Photo: Anurag | Chitkul, India. 2002

Home- Sweet home | 24 May 2024

Who lives in a home forever? Where does one go when they leave their home for good? What leaves home, yet finds it anywhere, closing their eyes and momentarily forgetting about the world? A hyperreality. I opened my eyes again to the south road, which would eventually lead to the city terminal, then to the seas, and finally to a dirt road to home. Site of a caught-up constellation. I will stay awkward and resist getting pulled in. I have walked out before and I can do it again. Home disappears when one leaves it with such intent. Gravity becomes the only force keeping one tethered to the everyday. That’s the daily home, and it could appear anywhere. It’s just bodies carrying reckless minds. Memory is not interactive, neither do the worlds it bears ever talk to each other. A Mandelbrot fractal. Going anywhere is an illusion, let alone Home. Yet a familiarity here and there. People perish, conditions prevail. A forever home away from home. What ether keeps bodies and minds afloat? What glues substances?

The mind is attached to the body in a different temporality. It has nonlinear, incidental ways of knowing and regressing. It can escape the regular timeline and frolic around like a child or a madman, though it must stop when the body stops. The body, on the other hand, bears the brunt not only of the world outside but also of the mind it carries. A mad thing to be filled and emptied every day. A shell attached to another shell. Yet one interacts with its environment differently than the other. The body bears the mind. Events mark the body and then the mind, yet they record, compensate, and recover differently.

Bodily trauma endured in childhood needs a context to get to one’s head. A slap on the face is more a grotesque gesture of rejection than the physical pain it causes. It is important to be accepted, more so when your world is so small. Pants-down is sometimes part of a deal, and so is getting slapped often. We are raised on love and hate. Yet the body meant the plate armour which needed the first incision to get to someone’s head.

English as a language was introduced to us in sixth grade at government-run schools. My father, a visionary, had solved the game long ago and put everything into becoming a school teacher. He was our English teacher. For the first six months of training with the British residue of pedagogy, I kept capitalising the words at the start of every new line break, confusing it with ‘new sentences’ as we were told to do in our native tongue. “Every new ‘Line’ (ooops!) shall start with a capital letter." I learned the word ‘sentence’ in grade eight and spent the earlier two years capitalising every new word at a line break. I would have taken another two years if not for the fact that bodily invasion speeds up a whole lot of stuff. Birching on the back of bare cold-blue hands every day. It just initiates the pain, a dilemma follows.Now the other hand, kindly! That would break any heart, lest not all have one. To willfully offer the other hand. Every day! Body took it all right. Years passed, hands are okay and so am I, or so to speak. There’s a broken child right there, one cannot fix. A forced mutation.

The village chief chosen by people has some special power over them, not all. Elders then have some special power over young ones which the chief doesn’t have. Children end up all the way down, which explains why they often get abused by their immediate caretaker, friends of the caretaker, neighbour and order of elders, and often by the chief or someone who associates with either the chief or any of the above. My life got so much better after the knowledge of this kind. Now I could focus more on writing dirty poems.

Of course, the story invites an empathetic look at those conditions but also a different calibration of virtuosity. One has to adapt to cost-effective ways of raising bodies. The body could always be negated within its expanded equation.

Body takes the first fall and makes it damn hard for ‘things’ to invade the mind. Yet most of my traumas come not from bodily beating, but from someone getting to my head without putting in any bodily effort. Slapping a child would cause some physical discomfort, yet the mental assault would stick and grow with them. Unless one considers that the mind also drinks from the same pond, a neurological perspective. A little slap can trigger a tsunami of threatened virtuosity, something awarded to that child as an assurance of inclusion. A threat of exile. Why bother slapping around looking like a fool? Spare the body, come the other way around.

A strange need of a child to be loved by, and protected against the same group of people. Such has been my world. It then became a matter of vicinity, that I found sins and virtues of a different kind, a long way from home. Art offered an upgrade in a sanitised beauty, and Foucault; a resolve in understanding the importance of historic conditions.

I tried hard, to the level of worship. Body was playful, it recovered fast, held no grudges but marks. Some of us were known sluts and others, bright. Chiefs and elders had to be right. Some indeed were sluts and others not at all. We had thieves and thugs, givers and ever-takers, abusers and victims, all shades of rights and wrongs. The world was difficult to understand, yet with a learning curve, possible to navigate. How hard is it then, to imagine what kind of ship we are aboard and where we are headed?

Body must be protected against such invasions. ‘Bodies’ still are pushed around but there’s a gate at the shove level. Body, is the vessel. There will be nothing to pour in if there is no vessel. Bodies worth pouring must heal. 

How to begin a life being a child whom a smirk can break? Bones break, yet the body stays. A nascent mind breaks and heals differently. A constant spark, a chain reaction of adaptive normativity. An overpowering assimilation. There cannot be a flip-side to it, except it never happens.

I come from a culture of pure invasiveness. From rituals to bodies. A homogeneous mix of being invaded and being the invader within one’s bubble, an inbreeding of a kind. Cities spoke against the savages. Bodily assault was an integral part of our being, as the body would receive the first cut, to invade a mind. Half the school was punished for having assaulted someone and often sexually, the other half being the assaulted. My siblings and I were too privileged to have something like that having happened to us, though we always skimmed the rim. Yet orbiting within the shells of a nuclear family produced the effect of invasion of different kinds.

A child is not oriented to its world in a manner an adult is. “Grown-ups'' adopt ways of making ‘mental’ boxes and assigning them a priority. Some would never open, others glanced over or internalised. Long story. No one can see the beast now, as it has shifted its weight to different sets of limbs. We cancelled ourselves in our own disappointment in ourselves. Citalopram could help if one still gets visions. There’s no hell outside of an artist’s depiction of a ‘lived or imagined’.

Then came cities. Nostalgia will linger but eventually lose the bell to it. Down all these years, I realised that bodily invasions of my time were too direct and visual. Such normativities weren’t first institutionalised, then turned into a state or a corporation on account of better management of multiplicity of ‘a people’.

City looks happy. One doesn’t need to dream to find themselves amidst bustling Toronto. Dreams walk here young and old. An explosion of constant anxiety with a permanent smile and the urge to put something in mouth. City as ‘one-organism’ in a  Priapismic state, inhaling from the left lane and exhaling from the right. A restless chime hung from the top of a cradle. Nothing is hidden in this beauty of being in a dream. God  save the delusional. It’s a fairly big city. Most can spare ‘a day’ for a ride such wonderful at the price of six days of absence.

This is a solved game for an old dog like myself. An imagined ‘lone way’ to a unilateral binary, yet directional way ‘forward’. A few days you ‘give it’ and some days you ‘have it’. History of Art is full of such fun stuff. There’s nothing new yet less worthy of the erotic value of  ‘Flying to a Fall’. Ones who failed to unite in self proclaimed love shall honour the mall full of happy bodies in a quasi collective. A revenge upon our personal histories, a well staged last good laugh. Cities are my childhood in a composure I never had. To pretend with a smile, that agony is a fallacy. The eternal spirit shall come to one’s rescue and bulldoze it all to a fine powder of a universal reason.

Cities are built on bodies at the expense of body. Body, now becomes an efficient link of an infinite chain of something we do not have a name for yet. Probably a ‘first found’ God of our kind. The site of extraction shifts to “bodies” from an older and singular agency; a token would do fine. It’s harder to put a finger on something immediate as there’s no immediate but a reference to it. Body now matters as a ‘non-body’ entity being referred to. Invisible and expendable, yet announced only in its eternal spirit.

What has turned man into this infinite fractal? A biological entity defeated first by a projection into an image, then the duplicity of the same image in a thousand fragment reflections. For those who desired ‘an event’ has this new event, “A constant zoom into something irretrievable”. Meet the new ‘the absent omnipotent’ in the image of its creator. A broken-down God, now available in deity-size. Plug-and-play modules without any particular sequence or consequence. Plug|:Cultural  :|:political:|:Social :|:historical :|:phenomenological:|:absurdist. A gazillion possible combinations of input-output routes. 

Two decades out and away from my village where the dread still must lurk until one learns to master it, here I raise my hand to grab something between my fingers. Nothing! Yet when I take a look around, an invisible force seems to bend us in an awkward way. Something only known to a collective- bodies. A Foucalden shift. I cannot look at my hands anymore without locating myself in bodies. Body and mind are solved in this new level-up. Past is one defeated incumbent, a madman making a mountain of a mole. A self-defeating inquiry. In my head my village has burnt itself to the ground and in my sight, my high-rise is crumbling in fear. “Raise your hand and feel the goo between your fingers' ', I asked of myself.

.There’s a difference between how I ‘see’, and how I perceive myself ‘seen’. A phenomenal gap; which appears to split everything into two. A cartesian necessary-evil. An old habit. In defence of such, I believe it holds the merit in problematizing ‘philosophy’ across a wide interdisciplinary spectrum. A crack thus opened upon the mind, then shattering the view into a million possibilities. Truths about the Truth, which then spreads out to its thinnest, then to an invisibility. To become just a reference to a hypothetical possibility of something not yet known. 

How to conjure memory anymore, and what to make of its object? Once there was a home, made-up of-and-by unsuspecting things which spun around it. A place where nuclear and peripheral forces competed and negotiated the will of everything in between. We were born weightless in its unending thunderstorm; “sway sway my fairies”. It coerced and moulded us with continuous collisions to the last grain of look-alikes, yet unique in their memory and storytelling. Then cities pulled us in, saving us from collapsing into the old ruin. 

Cities pull differently. Cities work with the ‘number’ of ‘condos and hands. Multiplier holds the value on behalf of a featureless human being. Feel the thin air between your fingers. Maybe rub them and listen to the bumps. Maybe count them just by listening to the rustling.

An infight turned outside, towards the other. What are we reading wrong in us? Or reading it right, that it is a wrong thing. The squinty man peeps through the keyhole and wonders, what is that ‘other’ thing? Who are these people? Neither their bodies nor minds? Where does the dial locate the  pants-down-Ubermensch’? This high-hill sits perfectly well above the cave I come from, just the difference of licks and bites. Once we were our own bodies and each of us mattered in the negotiation of forces we thought were external to us. We surrendered to and fought back with the external; man in his own image in a Cartesian realm so vibrant, it could send cracks deeper into all disciplinary domains. A world projected onto itself. A man, shown a man in ‘the other’. 

I wonder who owns people, if owning oneself never materialised.

⧫ END (All copyrights reserved 2024@ Mrityunjay Awasthy)