Thoughts are like fire that leaps from tree to tree in a forest. I can’t seem to find a way to start it. I can’t get hold of two necessary stones and if by chance I find them somewhere I can’t ignite a spark. So I let it be and wait looking hopefully up at the sky for nature to light up the forest through its own instruments. Sometimes the clouds gather but there is only a sprinkle and the miserly wombs of blessing float away. If believed that all the ideas and feelings are a result of chemical bodily processes and that thought is to brain what urine is to kidneys, I might be suffering from intellectual anuria. What do you call a condition when you fear you might be hypochondriac? I think hypochondria covers that too, like the heart supplying blood to itself through coronaries. But that is not so, I do not think chemical reactions result in thoughts, noble or ignominious. Your absence is like the sky, its everywhere. I do not count the days that we spend apart in calculating my actual age and you know by that standard I will be two decades younger if we count from my actual birth. For such days are spent in limbo, an empty pocket in the sequence of time and space, non-being. My mind is in suspension until we win the war. I have been thinking about rationalizations of human affections, especially love. Sometime ago, as I remember telling you, I had tried to define love as if for some dictionary. Defining such concepts naturally confines them to the words used. I understand that any such effort of containing spiritual and metaphysical concepts within the limits of articulations is bound to fail but what else can mortals do? Haven’t we all given meanings to concepts based on our mutual consensus. Money won’t be money if enough of us stop believing it is. We must creep for meanings, look into every nook and corner for an idea. We must imagine keyholes to peek into all the mysteries of such an apparently symmetrical world. So here is a litmus test of love: when its there, there is a deep sense of loss on imagining the absence of the subject. I hear you exclaiming: Subject? how scientific! I am not claiming that I love you by this definition only. While I can say that I love you because of this and that but it’s your existence I love you for, mainly. Beyond you, if I ever think beyond you, I find myself carrying a heavy burden. Why is it that we find ourselves under an obligation to ourselves to do something, to make something out of our numbered days? Meaningfulness. That is what every sensible young person thinks her life must have. There are as many interpretations of this concept as there are sensible young persons (I hear you saying, ‘there aren’t many). But if I reconsider for a moment, would anything be different if I did not carry my burden? Meaninglessness. Could that not be an entertain-able idea in young persons’ minds. My thoughts are not unique in fact they might even be clichés but yet I find in them an advice to see life with a loving eye and not a predatory one. They tell me that I am not obliged to be a hero. I hear you laughing and that makes me smile it is some of this and that which I love you for. The pen I am writing to you with goes dry every time I begin to put my love in words for you. It could be a coincidence but I see it as a testimony to my earlier claim that to contain some important concepts in a language is a task abhorrent to natural forces. I hear what you just said, yes, the poets do just that but they are a mad lot. I am obsessed with indivisible units of existence these days. Genes, atoms, bits. Your eyes, indivisible units of love.
Thank you, hoonvarn laai.
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Sights Insights 