Ponderous Pause

Pursuing the drive to create gets even more daunting when you already have something of your own to beat. A new project means opening out to new adventures and experiences. Adventures in particular are daunting as you get on in years. You get to places you wanted to visit and learn that they have changed from the time when you first became acquainted with their existence. The passage of time of is not so much the problem as much as the decay it brings upon you. Also, freshness means you have to be sturdier in body and spirit if you are to process the entire experience positively. A more casual traveller would be able to experience it in a manner that can be described as fleeting or perhaps ephemeral. They are the lucky ones, because that truly is the nature of existence. All manner of worldly experience need only be experienced in an ephemeral manner as the Matter and Elements that come together are constantly transitioning. The present is only fleeting and that’s how it’s meant to be lived. We must not dwell on the present for too long that we wish to carry it with us into the future as well. This is easier said than done unless you are blessed with a frail and sketchy memory.

I aspire to be that way.  I do not wish to recall in minute detail how the grass felt under my feet as I walked on the front-yard of a friend’s home the evening we returned from the crematorium after consigning her body to flames. Nor do I wish to recall the look of unbearable grief on the faces of her parents and the helplessness I felt within me as I knew there was no consolation I could offer. It will always be easier to run away to the mountains and live a life of obscurity. Renunciation, as arduous as it looks, is far easier than its alternate- commitment. To commit to Life, become its subject, secede the desire to master and control consequences of action; is not for the faint hearted. Even as I aspire to feel less, the raw reality of it all is that we are not built that way. If there is meaning to life, then it is that we are supposed to experience the entire gamut of emotions of which humankind is capable. To have lived and felt little, is not to have lived well.

As I pause to ponder upon what my next piece can peer into, there is an uneasy query that I must answer before I can forge ahead to the unknown. The more we uncover, the more we must resolve. I was happy not writing for a year or more. I was happy believing that I would never be visited upon the need to confess feeling a certain way. More specifically, not feeling a certain way that was not solely limited to me, but in ways that were likely to resonate with others outside my cozy little study as well. This is what spurs me to write. The hope that I may connect with someone on the outside. This is not a selfish drive- like a mating call. It’s a more primal need- a need for community despite the love of solitude.

Solitude, in its essence, is a sense of stillness where we feel our worlds- within and without- have merged to become one allowing us to see more clearly our lived experience. At times we avoid tapping into our deeper reservoirs. Is this self-preservation or self-denial? This reservoir is the well of all creativity. In making our way to the well, we bring ourselves to the gateway of the collective human consciousness. Behind these gates lay the eternal facility that has been churning every lived experience, of every individual since Man evolved as a sentient being. We are more than mere mammals. We cannot escape that fact. To say that we are like every other life form on this planet is a grave injustice to the immense responsibility we have toward other life forms. We may be physically inferior to many other wondrous creatures, but we are so much more in our ability to have tangible impact on the physical reality of other life forms.

Ever so often I look up images of the rock art of Cueva de las Manos. When I am not looking it up, I find myself thinking about that one person in that cave, eons ago, who thought of the idea to paint their hands on the walls of their dwelling place. It is the original masterpiece. Before Mona Lisa, before Sistine Chapel, the Pyramids of Giza, the temple of Ellora and the many other man-made wonders that boggle the mind of the modern man. I think of that person and imagine the sheer magnitude of creative inspiration that flowed through him to make that effort to create an expression of his Self in a time that predates all form of technology that we have at our disposal today. How did he work? What tools did he use? How did he respond to the incredulous queries of his fellow people who kept asking him why he chose to do what he did? Why did he choose to spend hours of precious sunlight to pick out herbs (or grass or whatever it is that he used) to manufacture the ink and tools used for the artwork? He obviously worked frenetically and passionately, because it seems that other people later decided to become part of his endeavour. It cannot be assigned to a random impulse. The choice of subject- hands, is proof enough that there was immense contemplation of what needed to go up on that wall. 

Human hands are the primal muse of all artistic endeavour and there is no exaggeration in that statement. In her novel, “To the Lighthouse”, Virgina Woolf describes the philosophical Mr. Ramsay to, more than once, be engaged in the act of contemplating his hand. I have caught this strange behaviour in my own father who had the tendency to stare long and hard at his own hand during his moments of quiet. The inlay card of Bryan Adams’ 2000 anthology, “The Best of Me”, had a series of photographs that Mr. Adams had clicked which featured amongst others, a black and white photograph of his fingers holding a guitar pick. There is no need for me to look so far into history, in my every day, my hands and fingers are essential tools that not merely assist but also facilitate the operation of my creative process. Holding my fingers in a particular mudra, sometimes help me think clearer and frame my thoughts better.

Oh bosh! But what was it that I was trying to say when I got about writing this bit? I knew it was something sombre and seemingly profound. I believe it was something about the weariness of having to feel so immensely that we become compelled to convey the emotion into an extraneous form. I believe that we create because the beauty of the human experience is such that if lived truly, it deserves to be preserved in a form that ensures posterity. I believe it is about how the arduous nature of the creative process can change us intrinsically and have us thinking that we will never have to create again. And just as you become willing to embrace obscurity and irrelevance you are pushed out of your comfort zone into a new way of being and you find yourself creating as you have never created before. The person in that cave seven millennia ago woke to the realisation that we cannot be without beauty in our homes. That food and water aside, we needed to relive certain moments time and again as this was what gave us hope. It is by reliving our past that we learn perseverance and resilience. Perseverance to vanquish our present demons and resilience to remain unaffected by memories of all the defeats that lead to eventual victory. That person in the cave felt it important to devise a way to record how they had all been together in the same place and found means to come together to create something more than a meal. That unknown maestro found a way to remind his people (we are all his people) how they once lived in oneness, and it was a thing worth reliving many times over.

Now that I scroll up to see the paths that I have meandered, I see an attempt to share my silence with you. It’s frustrating, having to say much but having little coherence. I looked in a few uncommon corners for answers and words that would help me patch myself together and an answer came to when I was precisely engaged in doing nothing notable. Somewhere within, the stirring continued without my conscious supervision and it churned out a proposition about science and art being one and the same thing. Each involves engaging with our curious Self and differ only in how it finds expression. In science, we engage our faculties of reason, and the entire process of research and discovery is fuelled by the desire to know if an imagined possibility can be manifest into physical reality. In art, we are guided by our sensitivity. We are prone to feeling a particular way and we are hampered by the knowledge there is nothing out there that fully captures the nature of this feeling, which for all purposes seems a passing ephemeral sensation. Yet we wish to capture it, give it some form of physical expression so that we may share with the world a thread of connection that keeps us tethered to that eternal ether of existence. In our endeavour to find that perfect expression we inspire creation through the questions we ask to our selves and those we presume would know better. We unravel ways of thinking that we would otherwise never have contemplated and so establish new patterns. That we have come to think of science and art as two entities that represent opposing dimensions has been a crippling blow to our development as individuals and as society at large.

Now, the boulder on my chest hasn’t gotten any lighter, but I do have a pretty good idea on how to grapple with it. Someday, I will write about how I finally heaved it off me.

_V.

23/02/2025