I'm sitting in my
own living room for what feels like the first time in a millennium. It’s only
been a year, actually, but it feels like I've aged six. Coming back home has
been such a trip; the past and present seem to coexist in some fluid dance, as
the person I've become strains against an image of the environment constructed
by the person I used to be, giving way as I lean in and push through, beginning
to see familiar sights as resonant with new potential.
It's been fucking
exhilarating.
I didn't realize how
much I miss this place - and the people in it - until I actually came back.
Going back to Dubai is gonna be harder than ever; that place really is a pale
imitation of this one. I think home is
actually beginning to make sense.
At the close of the Age of Fire, all lands meet at
the end of the earth.
Great kingdoms and anaemic townships will be one and
the same.
The great tide of human enterprise, all for naught.
That's why I'm so taken by this grand sight.
This must be what it's like to be a god.
Take the plunge. You won't die.
There
are very few things that make as much visceral sense as the notion of home. Even the most profoundly nihilistic
person will admit that, at the very least, the word has gravitas. With it comes
the notion of belonging, yet another
gut-wrenching word, and yet another word that the nihilist dismisses as an
impossibility, voice quivering.
Scratch a cynic and you'll find a disappointed
idealist.
Writing
hasn’t been coming to me as easily as it used to. It feels like something's
drying up, yet paradoxically I've been getting overcome with the urge to put
some words to paper. Or screen. You get the idea.
It’s a
lot easier when life is down in the dumps I suppose, because then there's
adequate fuel for the fire. But what about when things are just okay? I mean,
life's pretty good at the moment, all things considered. I'm thankful for the
fact that I have family and friends I'd gladly give my life for; a good job
that fills the day with meaning and a sense of progress, replacing the
stagnancy that once stood in its stead; plenty of disposable income, been
sticking to an exercise routine (and smashed through my deadlift PR, fuck
yeah). Which begs the question: why the urge to write at all? I'm not entirely
sure, and half the time even when I do write something, I don't feel satisfied.
Maybe
the apathy's kicking in again.
It does
get lonely here. Thoughts come and go and even the best ones, no matter how
startling, go unspoken. Which is weird honestly because it's not like I
actually have the time to meet people outside of the weekends. It's odd. I want things to go back to the way
they were, but some part of me knows that those days are long gone. I'm now
quite convinced that never again will mum, dad, appu and myself ever live under
the same roof like we used to. Life's gotten in the way, and I'm not sure how
long it will be before circumstances permit it again.
That's
probably it, to be honest. Working life and the breakup have forced a good deal
of growing up. It's a stark thing to realize that life can change so goddamn
quickly, especially it seems like the universe itself is frozen when you're
going through those monotonous periods. And then all too soon you wake up, the
car's stopped and it's time to step outside. The destination's ahead and it's
not quite what you expected.
Sometimes
I think everyone's just stumbling in the dark, frantically grasping at whatever
promises a modicum of meaning, anything really to distract them from the fact
that life is changing and that nothing
ever stays the same. Paradoxically, it's this frailty that grants beauty; a
lone lily at the end of a glacier looking over the edge of the world. How cruel
it is that the best things in life end, while the dark times seem to linger on
and on, that we are almost biologically programmed to view happiness as the
default, and so begin to view the world itself as terrible?
I'm
rambling again, forgive me. The ice splits the mountain, cutting a path through
time older than time; groans unheard, icy behemoths stand tall, and somewhere,
someone takes in the view.
That’s
about the closest anyone has ever come to articulating the complexities of
everyday existence. Sure, some folks more talented with words are able to
somehow approximate the intuitive complexity of our lives with words that
reverberate like echoes not quite heard, yet somehow encapsulate emotions that
seem to dance shimmering between antonyms. But I’m not quite one of those
people, not yet.
I
just got through The Misbehavior of Markets by
Benoit Mandelbrot; this great man essentially realized that self-similar
patterns form an important basis for understanding naturally-occurring
phenomena and stock market behavior alike; the notion of self-similarity and
congruence persisting throughout different scales of interpretation is
something particularly striking, something as miraculous as the Intermediate
Value Theorem popping out of metric space theory as a consequence of
separability. It’s one of those things that has no reason to be true or even
make sense, but somehow it does, and it’s beautiful.
Jordan
Peterson would make the same argument about the philosophical underpinnings of
Christianity; reconciling it with science is easy, he claims, since literalist
interpretations are garbage almost by definition. Religion is the science of
value judgements, while science simply inquires as to what is, without
determining an optimal route through the noise. Got me thinking: does religious
philosophy really provide a useful heuristic by which to conduct one’s life?
Did they really figure out something that, yet again, has no reason to be true,
yet somehow is, and is beautiful for it? Peterson would say so, and I hope to
God (no pun intended) that he’s right. Life after college seems a little
meaningless.
My
depression’s coming back, my relationship is falling apart (and might already
have gone beyond the point of salvaging), and so a big anchor in my life has
now been cut and I’ve been set adrift. It’s hard to find something else to
replace that as a guiding principle. It’s just as hard to avoid staying bitter
and resentful of the pain that’s been sent my way by someone I love so much.
Yes, despite all the nonsense and the emotions, I still care about her. Lord
knows it’d be easier if I didn’t, but I do, and such is my burden.
One
a positive note, I deadlifted by bodyweight recently. The feeling of power that
comes with being able to lift heavy is quite intoxicating; a key that opens a
door to let in the ocean.
The ocean serves as a bulwark of the eldritch Truth.
It’s
hard to know what to do when guiding reflexes both internal and external seem
to fail you all at once. Peterson mentions how the one positive conclusion he’s
managed to draw from psychology is that the sense of meaning you obtain when
performing a task is an orienting reflex. I hope that’s true, because it’ll
give me something to strive towards.
But
at the same time I’m rather scared of that idea, because I don’t find many
things meaningful anymore. Things seem plastic, surface-level, tangential,
irrelevant. Nothing’s touched those
deep, profound parts of my heart or mind in a very long time. Time just seems
to slip by, with no meaning or consequence. I’m flying to Greece this weekend,
and am more excited about getting away from work than I am about visiting a new
country. Which is weird, since I don’t hate my job; I actually quite enjoy it.
I’m just starved for companionship I suppose. Friends seem far away, family
seems to be drifting away, and here I am, sitting in my head again.
Chester Bennington
died this week. Suicide, by hanging.
This is honestly the
first time that a 'celebrity' death has hit me this hard, and that's because
quite frankly, Chester Bennington was no mere celebrity. Linkin Park is the band responsible for getting me into heavy
music. The first ever proper rock song I heard was In the End back in 2000. I
was in Malacca with my family, waiting to check into a hotel, and a song came
on the radio. I was transfixed from the first piano chords; I just stood there,
wide-eyed, and listened. My parents finished checking in about halfway through
the song so I had to go, but for the first time, I felt urgency after listening to a piece of music. I had to know what that song was, and I had to listen
to it again.
After we got back
from the trip I booted up Windows Media Player and went searching through
random peoples' playlists, hoping to find that song. I found it, listened to it
until I could repeat every lyric, and fell asleep feeling like I had
accomplished something. Then I discovered YouTube, and remember that my first
thought was feeling so happy that I could watch the Points of Authority video
whenever I wanted to.
My neighbor Aditya
and I bonded over Linkin Park, Sum 41, Blink 182, Bowling for Soup, Good
Charlotte, Simple Plan, Korn, and basically every other 'heavy' band on the
radio at the time. But Linkin Park was something special; he had Meteora on
cassette, and would play it every single time
we got into his car to go somewhere. We must've listened to that album about 30
times before his parents got sick of it and insisted on listening to something
else. Pretty sure we wore out the cassette tape too.
Meteora was, for a
long, long time, my idea of a perfect record. Every single song straddled that
delicious boundary between aggression and melody, and I breathed it all in.
Somewhere I Belong, From the Inside, Lying From You, Figure.09, Nobody's
Listening, and Session. These were my jams.
My life revolved around those songs, around scenes of Chester Bennington
hunching over his scrawny little body and letting out a voice that was more
powerful than any I had ever imagined, straddling the chasm between chaos and
beauty effortlessly.
Take everything from the inside,
And throw it all away,
Cuz I swear for the last time,
I will trust myself with you.
I will waste myself on you.
I discovered Hybrid
Theory after already having fallen in love with Meteora, and I loved it as more
of the same. Reanimation, however, was a different beast; I grew to love that
album cerebrally; from the dark, haunting bassline of Frgt/10 to the Points of
Authority remake that was somehow even heavier
than the original. I remember how My December brought a lump to my
throat the first time I heard it; I was sitting in my school bus heading back
home, and it played on the radio; I had to run to the back of the bus and try
to hold back tears.
I was even lucky enough to see them in concert, when they went on tour to
support Minutes to Midnight. The standout moment of that was when they played
The Little Things Give You Away, a song I hadn't heard until then. And they
fuckin nailed it. Everything, from the
syncopated drumbeat to Chester's effortlessly floating vocals towards the end
of the song.
The inescapable
solipsism of our existence is something that puzzles me at times. It's so, so
easy to surround oneself with this shell that just refuses anyone in past a
certain point, usually demarcating the place where one goes to wrestle with
one's demons away from prying eyes. Here was a man who gave a fat little Indian
boy with crippling self-esteem issues a voice and instilled a love for music
that continues to this day, and yet, it seems like there was no one able to do
the same for him. No matter how many people he touched, no matter how many
times he went past that line and dragged them out back into the light, I guess
no one could do it for him. And that's the saddest goddamn thing.
By all accounts he
was a beautiful man, both inside and out. Someone who had been dealt a shit
hand in life, but bore his burden (eventually) with grace, who used his demons
to make art and help others rather than hurt them. I don't think many people
can lay claim to that, being able to take a profoundly horrible situation and
turning it into a vessel for meaning for others. It's the epitome of what it
means to conduct yourself properly in
the world. And sure enough, he was loved, adored. It’s just so fucking sad that
at the end of the day, none of it was enough. At the end of the day, there was
no one around to walk past that line, and drag him back into the light.
I sometimes think
that depression has its parallels with heroin addiction, especially if the
depression is intense enough. Avoiding episodes requires constant vigilance,
and it sometimes feels like the only reward for that, for engaging in therapy
and for committing to the recovery process is… drudgery. As dark as it sounds,
a depressive episode gives one a sense of meaning if only in the moment,
because some part of your brain is aware that this is a titanic struggle. That
awareness lets you spectate as two sides of your personality, one ophidian and
one ragged, fight like caged dogs inside your own head. Amidst all that lies
the potential, at least, for meaning; after emerging from the other side, you
can feel good about the fact it's over, and that you're a decently functioning
human being despite the fact that something feels broken inside you.
I can understand why
people choose to off themselves, or why people relapse into addiction; it's
never a climax of some sequence of events, but rather an anticlimax - the
culmination of a recovery process that requires intense effort and commitment,
yet rewards one only with normalcy. For some people, that isn't enough, and
quite understandably so. I just try not to think about it too much.
Can't help but think
about how, just a few days before his suicide, Crawling sounded so cringy and
edgy. Now, it sounds raw, and is honestly hard to listen to.
Rest in peace,
Chester Bennington. The world is a little darker now that you're gone.
Hold on, the weight of the world will give you the
strength to go.
I am not your broken wheels, I am the highway. I am not your carpet ride, I am the sky. I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning. I am not your autumn moon; I am the night.
Rest in peace, Chris Cornell. The world is a little darker now that you're gone.
It takes a
special kind of tune to stick with you, even as you descend into the seething blackness
of your own mind, to give you strength as you look in the mirror each morning
and beg for… something. What it is, I don’t know. Nothing about it makes any
sense, yet it visits on me at times that I have this pit, this yawning, gaping hole somewhere in my psyche that hardly
anyone knows about. And why should they? I never open easily to people, and
when I do, it’s calculated. Not out of a want to manipulate, you understand, I just
can’t have every semi-personal conversation I have devolve into my fantasies of
catching stray bullets, of being run over by uncaring drivers, of simply
ceasing to be. So I give them just a little bit, am genuine until a certain
point. After that point, no one wants to be near it. Oh, they don’t know it,
but they don’t. No matter how much they claim they want to be.
Like I said,
it takes a special kind of someone to stand knee-deep in your filth with you.
And the others? Well I’m not sure they want to know, or need to know. Probably
better that way.
Stay away from this kid, he’s pretty
fucked in the head.
Let me try
to describe what it feels like.
It’s like walking
in sunshine for just a second, before something slithers out of the morass that
suddenly opens in front of your feet, and drags you down past
all sense of logic or rationale, past loving, past caring, past anger, past
sadness, past emotion, past everything you once knew and loved, and all you can
do is ride it out and pray that the eventual grey that settles parts to let the
sun in again. Friends, loved ones, even those most dear become nothing more than
cardboard cutouts, veiled, nothing visible save features rustling under grey
cloth, bones barely visible under a shroud. Northern lights over a graveyard.
The
transience of these feelings does nothing to relieve the vice grasping my mind
as I’m dragged down, down, down; the promise of an end, as inevitable as the
onset, does nothing. Nothing does anything.
The fuck am I
even saying?
It seeps
into everything. Into the way you talk to people, the way you act around them,
the things you start prioritizing, the way you conduct your day. The things you
value end up owning you, and when you value the sanity of others far more than
you do your own, you become a slave to others, devoted to sparing them of the
agony you feel. I no longer know where the line between sacrifice and
self-flagellation is, and I’m afraid I’ve gone past the point of caring. Who
really cares if something happens to me, anyway?
Okay not
strictly true, I know many people would be devastated if I was to go. Not
arrogance, just simple facts. And I’m not dramatic enough to pretend that my
life is all that difficult, or that I’m somehow placed in the midst of
insurmountable circumstances. I’m not. Life is alright, and it goes on. I somehow
find the strength to keep going, even if living feels more like a habit formed
over the years than an act in and of itself. But therein lies the seductive,
deadly appeal of this corrupted form of mental martyrdom; I enjoy it. It’s the same feeling that drives me to stay up till
obscene hours late at night, probing the darkest corners of my mind for
judgement material. Why bother with reality TV when you’ve got a character you
know more intimately than anything else, whose flaws are glaring, and who has
no capacity to fight back?
Cruelty and
pain are two sides of the same coin. Funny, how those who would never inflict
it on others are so quick to turn the full weight of their malice upon
themselves. I am a hateful, hateful man.
My Lord Redeemer, I shall deny you
entry into my mind.
The past few weeks have been interesting, to say the least.
Interesting, of course, in a purely objective, clinical sort of way. Best to
distance emotion when giving an account of events, no?
There’s nothing quite as refreshing as being humbled, I don’t
think; there’s just something about being grabbed by the neck and dragged
through the mud that does away with a lot of clutter in one’s head. Things that
are no longer important but still hang around like a rank miasma get left
behind, almost startling in their departure, like music that was playing in the
background that is noticed only when it gets muted. The things that stay get
thrown into relief; theories and beliefs get abraded away, and one is left with
nothing more than things are they are,
unclouded by thoughts of ought and should. And they start to fill the void
that is now suddenly there.
The shattering of illusions
is always painful. The mirror cracks and shatters, and each shard reflects a
different view of the same scene, catching the light and reflecting each other
as they hurtle down, finding freedom from a collective impression in the seconds
before they end their journey, swept up and discarded. Oops, another mistake.
It’s interesting putting faces to the voices in your head,
but disconcerting to realize that they are but variations of your own. And
every voice has its own dramatis personae, its own monologues, its own voice. Its own story. On stages within
stages within stages, these voices act out their parts, oblivious to empty seats
and darkened theaters, because who the fuck has time anymore?
I started playing Dark Souls again, retextured and adapted
for the PC. The atmosphere of that game has always enthralled me; there’s
something so fascinating about the sense of decayed magnificence, once-lost
beauty struggling to hold on, of illusions that mean so much to some that they become reality, granting purpose to Gods
and Men alike. It’s like the story of our lives, encased in a world at once
familiar and distant, with battles against giants and monsters mirrored in our
own minds, against demons of self-loathing, anger, negativity. And, like the protagonist,
we offer our humanity and souls to the fire, and push on. Because that is all we know how to do.
Maybe Darwin was right; the greatest deeds are the ones done
from instinct.
Had an interesting thought the other day. Lucifer’s name and
his position among the angels is startlingly constant in its depiction; the
Bringer of Light was always the greatest, the most magnificent, filled with
light. Maybe that’s why he was sent to shoulder the burden of Hell, of dealing
with the most depraved, the insane, the hollow; because he was the only one who could. Maybe his act of rebellion
was not willful disobedience, but the first Sacrifice, the first
act-made-sacred, the first instance of a being setting himself aside for the
good of his brethren, shouldering a burden and damning himself because he knew
that the others could not bear the burden.
How does he not break?
I’m beginning to realize that as people grow older, they
grow more defined; necessarily, they grow apart, and begin to feel the
void-that-needs-filling. I don’t think anyone’s actually able to fill that
void; it’s just a matter of dealing with it in a way that doesn’t ruin you or
the people around you. The end is inevitable, the decline imminent, but the manner of the movement is all that
counts. That’s what separates the people you remember from the people you don’t.
I close my eyes and
sink within myself/Relive the gift of precious memories/In need of a fix called
innocence.
