Not on my Watch
(All copyrights reserved.)
End of whatever
I am not leaving | ਜਾਓ! ਅਸੀਂ ਨਹੀਂ ਮਰਦੇ
ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਚ ਲਿਖਣੋ ਦੁੱਖ ਆਉਂਦਾ ਏ, ਪਰ ਆਪ ਨਾਲ਼ ਏਨਾਂ ਕੁ ਧੱਕਾ ਕਰ ਵੇਖ ਲੈਂਦਾਂ। ਵਧੇਗਾ ਤਾਂ ਏਥੋਂ ਵੀ ਹਟਣਾ ਪੈਣਾ। ਜਦੋਂ ਤਾਈਂ ਦਿਮਾਗ ਚ ਚੁੱਪ-ਚਪੀਤੇ ਲੋਟ-ਸਪੀਕਰ ਵਜਦਾ ਏ, ਸੁਗਮ-ਸੰਗੀਤ ਏ। ਭੁਕਾਈ ਵੀ ਆਪਣੇ ਬੋਝੇ ਪਈ ਮਿਠਾਈ ਹੀ ਹੁੰਦੀ, ਕਿਉਂ ਨਾ ਖਾਹਵੀਏ। ਭਾਵੇਂ ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਸਾਹਿਤ ਹੁਣ ਕਿਸੇ ਰਕਬੇ-ਖ਼ਾਸ ਦਾ tinder ਏ , ਮੇਰੇ ਚੇਤੇ ਚ ਇਹ ਮੇਰੀ ਥਾਓਂ ਏ। ਜੇ ਕੋਈ ਜੰਮੇ ਹੀ ਹੀਰਾ ਮੰਡੀ ਚ ਤਾਂ ਉਦ੍ਹਾ ਮੋਹ ਮਾੜ੍ਹਾ ਨਹੀਂ। ‘‘ਇਕ ਵੀਰ ਦੇਵੀਂ ਵੇ ਰੱਬਾ ਸਹੁੰ ਖਾਣ ਨੂੰ ਬੜ੍ਹਾ ਚਿੱਤ ਕਰਦਾ’ ‘ਦੀ ਦਸ਼ਾ ਸਮਝੀਏ|
ਜਾਓ! ਅਸੀਂ ਨਹੀਂ ਮਰਦੇ
ਜੋਗੀ ਦੀ ਪਰਦੱਖਣਾ। ਹਰ ਛਮਾਂਹੀ ਟੀਲੇ ਤੋਂ ਉਤਰ ਆਉਣਾ ਤੇ ਬਿਨ੍ਹਾਂ ਕੁਝ ਆਖੇ ਸੱਥ ਚ ਪੱਤਾ ਖੇਡਦਿਆਂ ਕੰਨੀ ਬਹਿ ਜਾਣਾ। ਫਿਰ ਉਠ ਖੜੋਣਾ, ਹਲਾ! ਆਖ ਟੀਲੇ ਨੂੰ ਟੁਰ ਪੈਣਾ। ਟੀਸੀ ਪਰ ਬਹਿ ਹਾਕਾਂ ਮਾਰਨੀਆਂ, “ਦੱਸ ਰਹਿਵਾਂ ਜਾਂ ਜਾਵਾਂ! ਬੋਲਦਾ ਨਹੀਂ?”
ਹੋਣੀ ਦੀ ਅੰਨੇਰੀ ਚ ਕੁਝ ਨਵਾਂ ਨਹੀਂ ਥੀਂਦਾ। ਅੱਧੀਆਂ-ਪਚੱਧੀਆਂ ਸ਼ੈਆਂ ਉਡਦੀਆਂ ਹਵਾ ਚ ਕੁਝ ਪਲ ਕੋਈ ਜਾਣਿਆ-ਪਛਾਣਿਆ ਆਕਾਰ ਜਿਹਾ ਬਣਾਉਂਦੀਆਂ ਨੇ, ਫਿਰ ਆਪ ਹੀ ਠਹਾਕਾ ਮਾਰ ਕੇ ਢਾਹ ਸੁਟਦੀਆਂ ਨੇ। ਸ਼ੈਤਾਨੀ। ਜਾਂ ਅੰਝ ਜਾਣੋ ਜਿਉਂ ਦਵਾਸੱਟ ਨਸਦੀ ਰੇਲ਼ ਦੀ ਖੁੱਲੀ ਬਾਰੀ ਚੋਂ ਸਭ ਕੁਝ ਕੋਈ ਉਡਦਾ ਪੂੰਝਾ ਲਗਦਾ ਏ। ਕੋਈ ਟੇਸ਼ਨ ਨਹੀਂ। ਬਸ ਛੁਕ-ਛੁਕ-ਮੁਕ-ਮੁਕ ਹੂ-ਹੂ! ਸੌਂ ਲਓ, ਹਿੱਲ ਲਓ, ਅੰਦਰੋ-ਅੰਦਰ ਘੁੰਮ ਲਓ। ਗੱਡੀ ਚ ਬੈਠਾ ਬੰਦਾ ਆਪ ਗੱਡੀ ਹੋ ਜਾਂਦਾ ਤੇ ਬਾਹਰ ਲਹਿਰਾਉਂਦੀ ਸਾੜੀ ਵੱਲ ਵੇਖਦਾ। ਫਾਟਕ ਤੇ ਕੁੜੀ ਹੋਣੀ, ਸੂਹੇ ਰੰਗ ਦੀ ਬੁਣਤਰ ਉਕਰੀ ਏ ਤੇ ਅਗਲੇ ਪਲ਼ ਇਹ ਅੱਟੀ ਵੀ ਮੁੱਕ ਜਾਂਦੀ ਏ। ਰੰਗ ਹੈ ਨੇ, ਆਕਾਰ ਕੋਈ ਨਾ। ਡਲੂਜ਼ ਦਾ ਸੁਝਾਇਆ; ਬਹਾਅ (Flux)। ਨਾ ਅੱਖ ਕੋਈ ਪਿੰਡਾ ਭੇਦਦੀ, ਤੇ ਨਾ ਕੋਈ ਸ਼ੈਅ ਅੱਖ ਵੀ ਮੱਲਦੀ। ਜਦੋਂ ਤੱਕ ਇਹ ਗੱਡੀ ਨੱਸ ਰਹੀ ਏ ਬਾਹਰ ਸਿਰਫ ਰੰਗੀਨ ਹਵਾ ਉਡਦੀ ਏ, ਲੋਕ ਕੋਈ ਨਾ। ਲੋਕ ਹੈਨ ਨਹੀਂ। ਇਹ-ਦੌੜ ਸਵਾਰੀ-ਤੋੜ ਬਾਹਰ ਖਲੋਤਿਆਂ ਵਾਸਤੇ ਵੀ ਨੱਸਦੀਆਂ ਰੰਗੀਨ ਡੱਬੀਆ ਦਾ ਨਜ਼ਾਰਾ ਹੁੰਦੀ, ਲੋਕ ਕੋਈ ਨਾ। ਲੋਕ ਹੈ ਨ ਪਰ ਹੈ ਕੋਈ ਨਾ।
Cyclic journey down and back to the mountains with intervals in resignation. Constant infight, to be or not to be. To stay or to go. Events lose their charm in the blur of speed, recurrence, and sameness as do stations where no train stops. A short-lived echoed clang, then again the constant hum of the rattling boogie, inducing a hypnotic inertia. As if, the mind becomes the helplessly running train and looks outside for a familiar in the permanent speed blur. Perhaps there is no external which should matter other than a time when this ride stops. Then such cyclicity isn’t the condition of man but a part of its conditions. Perhaps we tend to internalize so much, that the difference between us from our condition seems to have blurred. The sense of loss of the familiar weighs so much on us, that mind becomes the signifier. I have my primitive ways of coping. I am going to pinch my hand.
I called an old friend about things new and old. Apparently, he was my fellow passenger on this spectacularly monotonous ride.
“ਜਿਸ ਗੱਲ ਦਾ ਫ਼ਾਇਦਾ ਹੀ ਨਹੀਂ, ਓਹ ਗੱਲ ਕਰਨ ਦਾ ਕਿ ਫ਼ਾਇਦਾ” (In my native tongue, Punjabi)- What’s the point of talking about something so pointless, he murmured. A piercing silence followed, which he broke with possibly pinching himself too, “What a terrible thing to say!.” I was sitting still, looking at the same view from my window. Of course, such despair wasn’t about any catastrophic event but about a ‘loss of a context’. The point is not just the pointlessness of any event, but also the banal reading of it. Yet there’s this compulsion to formulate. The point has flattened to a plateau, my friend. How to read a blur, a constant ending?
“To what end?” he asks.
End of what though? Have we invested ourselves so much in ‘eventuality’, that its collapse also will be ours too? Have we not been mowing the lawn in our head and staying minor? or have we become what we are seeing?
The crisis, I believe, is dual in its nature. On one hand, it’s the scene, while on the other- a crisis of deciphering the scene. Are we pushing the boogie we’re riding? Or are we inside a balloon, so it inflates and deflates merely by our act of breathing awkwardly? Yet we push it, albeit from inside. What else could explain its infinite inflation?
Nothing ends, but immediate possibilities- Culminating into a ‘THIS’. Whatever happens, happens within it. There will be a dead cat for every cat found, and yet a cat still alive will be the only cat one can have. Pinch your hand.
The problem of the world outside of the intellectual bubble is separate and of a different kind. There are events affecting everyone in its vicinity, and there is a struggle of an on-looker to find a perspective that holds a clue to what he is looking at and what to make of it. What appears to end, is Familiarity. A genuine challenge of framing anxiety. So, at a time when we need the right word the most, language gives us nothing, but a contingent Cartesian riddle where a 𝙮 can only be known with a 𝔁’s reference.
If never-ending; must be hell.
No one has seen the hell but pictured it and this; explains it about right.
What is it like to be in hell, if it only can be captured in an imaginative, yet never given direct access to?
What’s the point of even bothering to imagine?
Why there has to be a point at all?
Ouroboros. We have become our own appetite!
Some ways of thinking ought to be non-conciliatory in their argument, as they meet all criteria of a valid argument, yet sit awkwardly with their surroundings. Rhizomes running amok! Derrida has been one such chameleon (I wanted to say a lemur but that wouldn’t make sense. Lol). An elusive animal whose tail one cannot stomp, as it could be at more than one place at a time. What is blue anyway but only what a blue is and all others not. Derrida is a sort of contingent in philosophy who does not seem to have a point to make of his own but if you pay close attention, his point is; that we aren’t making a point at all. A constant motion doesn’t permit a rest. Derrida and many of his contemporaries are deservingly hated as Judas of Philosophy. Impersonator! Rhizomatic. Enigmatic. The idea of Übermensch sounds like a lucrative culmination of an ambition of philosophy when no one took into account the first hurdle of ‘reason’ not making any sense.
Does then not the hue and cry about the “end of” anything seem more like a nihilistic high? The thrill of a surrender. Aphasia, amidst the podiums and theatricals of pedagogy in a new-found oasis of institutionalized epistemology. To choose between fluxing six feet under the forest in some Russoian heaven, or becoming another Foucauldean arboreality. To discover a half-alive- half-dead cat or be worthy of an infinite number of cats by never opening the box, at all.
Meet saint Friedrich Nietzsche. He climbs down the high hill now and then to live amongst the folk. Yet he finds the Surface so crumbly, that he either returns to his high cave or crawls under the surface where forests sprawl eternally. The arboreal ‘other’ is a mess. Don’t get me wrong. All these saints are my lovers, yet we are all separated by a surface. A muslin between all disciplines, else there wouldn’t be a discipline. ‘The other’ is felt, not seen. In such a Cartesian split, there’s nothing more vulgar than the claim of Humanity. All the flux flows and dies inside such pods and Humanity is a feeling. Of my saints and sinners, one takes the high road to eternal will, and the other lives beneath everything like a ghost. Yet nothing pierces the surface but demons.
Will you stay a little longer this time, my stranger? Live amongst us in Savanna? Share the bread and the long tales? But the Cartesian plane cuts everything in two. What is 𝙮 if 𝔁 ≄ Determinable?
Then follows the start of ends of ifs and buts and thens and thus’s for the convenience of a rhyme. What a cynical thing to say. A shriek for a shriek, an unending crescendo! ‘Nothing’ is, where the party is. A standing wave. A continuous transmission that needs no record or storage. A ‘run-forever’-gif, a world without difference. One thing, a single frequency. One maddening mandatory syllable, ॐ. A world measuring its own fixation. Now a low tide followed by a high tide yet captured and framed in still-motion. A dial cranked up to zero. Pinch your hand.
Time makes the known disappear and ‘the new’ is our weight. It is jarring to keep the view of gone-by while also locating oneself in the flow. To attach oneself to things in a kiss-n-go manner. The spectacle of it. Saints and sinners who fled the city do not have to be a witness to it. This is a hue and cry of those who forgot to pack their bags in time. As the old masters close their doors, these are people yet singing their blues uninformed of their own arrival.
One can fairly see the back of their head where things once were. Nothing in its making can be absorbed yet but be looked at as a spectacle. Had anything perished and so its essence, there should have been neither knowledge nor experience of it, never mind a concern. The only way forward I see, is to pose one question asking two things. Perhaps seemingly so, as the ‘set’ of philosophy is also inside what is ‘outside of philosophy’. Some people feel the need to philosophize. Vorhanden, Vorhandenheit, and what the fuck is going on. How to philosophize the crisis of a World in which there’s no distinction between which encompasses which one? What has ended, and what does it mean to say so?
Change rides a potential difference that can only be accounted for with the facilitation of hindsight. What could end the past, but an inability to refer to anything local? What then is absent in the local? Change of condition? What could be more ‘in-flow’ than the vile conditions of today? What Neanderthal could smell the smoke this quickly? We have become alarmist, as the conditions demand of us. We are validated in our perception of dread, nothing ends.
As concerning the crisis of my world appears to be; I am afraid it could be a symptom of a problem way more multifaceted. Many things appear as one- an overwhelming sight! Yet the spoils of unifying one’s troubles under the rug of a label here and a label there. The situation shouldn’t take less than a God to fight a demon of such a multitude. ‘The Lord’ in the image of God, is at best a symptom of Cartesian if|then way out. A mammoth task of discovering new tools to dismantle one’s own doing. History 101.
To steer forward when the familiar fades behind? A loss so colossal that we will not see anything from now on? Who discovers the first fire with a reason alone? What, in our finest theories is counted right, yet doesn’t add up? Perhaps a theory is blind to the local. A hands-on local, where action takes place amidst the bewilderment. Where bodies assert themselves on the space they occupy. Theoretical differences resist such collision. The veil now runs ever thin and we find ourselves rubbing against ‘the other’ of all kinds. Starving artists put themselves to sleep singing a Spinozian lullaby, and a philosopher sounds like a poet on a deathbed wishing a last good fuck.. Maybe in times as desperate as these, many such kinds come forth with the best alliance in an offensive. Many would become many things, albeit the frightful morphosis. A timely re-emergence of ‘madman’, both paranoid and schizophrenic at the same time.
My history ends slowly every day while I sit defeated on my worn-out couch hypnotized by the ever-evaporating meaning. It’s hard to imagine in a world where one has to witness it all going down the dumps. History resists new. It is the ‘minor’ riding the margins that must not get dizzy of motion. This is the new not yet known ‘New’. Let’s grieve the martyr and welcome the new hermit in the town. We all will be subjects of the other’s history. For that reason alone, I am not leaving and nothing ends on my watch.
