Meditations in an Emergency
I wish I could pour myself into something completely
It is a quiet afternoon of mid February but it already feels like summer. Bright sunlight licks the pale walls of the houses standing shoulder to shoulder, feverishly, and I am getting a little hot seated on the sofa in the balcony. There is a pigeon with its crooked wing jutting at an odd angle, walking on the ledge of the empty house in front of me. On the roof above, a crow is perched on the water tank nipping at its wings with its beak. A cat is wending its way through an assortment of plants and shrubs, growing in the garden below, where flowers, red, white and green, bob their heads like tiny spectacular fish. I used to dream about this sort of thing: To sit quietly with a book on a balcony, looking around, not knowing the day of the week; or to dawdle into a market across the city on a whim, just gaping here and there. Not compartmentalizing hours, and life. I have all this — I could do anything — and still a dissatisfaction gnaws at me.
First, I think, over decades, social conditioning has turned on a meter, tracking progress in terms of advancement in education and career, promotions and salaries, perks and placements — a moving train rolling forward from station to station (though forward seemed circular to me on a grand scale when I was aboard). Of course, I am jaded enough to know that that train moves through a wasteland, still something ticks me off as I am clocking two years now out of a regular job. I don’t know what it is. The meter has stopped. And I keep pondering the questions: Should I be doing something different? Should I be more driven? It feels like such wasted potential — that I could be so much more and I have amounted to so little with all the time and resources I have. ‘Amounting’ is a theme that I wrestle with, which is a sort of conditioning itself. Is there a manifest destiny? If there is, shouldn’t it be manifesting itself effortlessly? Unless — And this is scariest of all — I am getting in my own way with all the self doubt and plain laziness?
Second, over the last two years, I have seen my mind bite itself, chew itself, and tongue the sores to agonize itself. It has always been agitated, an old radio humming in the background, but over the two years during which it found itself with no paucity of time and no fulness of extraneous all-consuming work, it has become monstrous. Add to that, I suffered crushing trauma in a personal relationship right as I was taking the leap into the proverbial unknown, and the subsequent catastrophe — a series of absurdities really — cleaved my sanity in half. My peeved mind rearranges pieces and reruns scenarios all the time to set the past right — psychiatrists call it ‘bargaining with the past’ — but it can’t. I have sought refuge in Philosophy (Camus on Absurdism, Buddhism/Taoism on non-duality and choiceless awareness) and recently in Neurobiology (the ‘Huberman Lab’ podcast on recovering from trauma and resetting the neural pathways) to help my mind find an equilibrium and heal, but it hasn’t. Every second is a panic, every moment an emergency. Every chance, the last lifeboat out of a sinking Titanic. I should reiterate though, since I have spilled a lot of ink journaling the glorious and obscene crests and troughs of my capricious mind over many years, this is not new, but the fixation with ‘solving life’, ‘erasing mistakes’, and ‘not fucking up’ is jarring, amplified and pronounced this time. My God! I have no control over this part of my mind. In fact, if I were not writing right now, I would absolutely be ruminating in ways described above. Of course, I know, when I know, that there is no real emergency. But I am creating one, or a part of me is. Huberman has a couple of episodes describing such mental behavior which I still have to listen to. Absurd as it is, if I had an utterly numbing job, I would not be thinking of any of this. I am almost wishing I had one.
A few days back, I was thinking of this essay that I wrote about regret, which made me think about ‘Mad Men’, which in turn made me think about the book of poetry that Don Draper, the protagonist of the series, is seen reading in one of the scenes: ‘Meditations in an Emergency’ by Frank O’Hara. I have read this book before, but I gravitated to it once again, hypnotized by its title, given all the thoughts spinning in my head. And this time I actually read it cover to cover. I love reading poetry, except I don’t often stumble upon poetry which strikes like an axe the frozen sea inside me (borrowing the expression from Kafka) which I believe good poetry should do.
And this book did that.
I wanted to be sure to reach you,
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
....
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
(To the Harbormaster)Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth. Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change? I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love. .... My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. .... Ive got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. (Meditations in an Emergency)
and finally, perhaps one of the most beautiful poems I have ever read.
Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again. (Mayakovsky)
One should seek beauty even in the midst of ugliness. I always strive for that even though I might be a source of a lot of ugliness myself. I fear the passage of time. I fear the faces from the past that I have left behind swimming like ghosts before my eyes; I shall get older and I won’t be able to reach them because the gulf of time and space will have become unbridgeable. I see the wizening faces of my parents and feel the ground underneath my feet slipping. How much time is there? How long can we go on lumbering past each other without saying one meaningful sentence? Everything is fraught with panic and anxiety and dread and stench of death. Does one hold on to one’s attachments? Things, times and people we loved. Memories and traumas. Fixes we tried, fucks we made instead. All is in a flux. Where can you go? What can you do? May be O’Hara was speaking of a response to life itself to be a ‘Meditations in an Emergency’.
There is a memory in my mind. It is the happiest memory I have. It is a memory of a summer day at college in Goa. The door to my room is open. The sun is shining brightly outside on the badminton court at the center of the lawn. I can hear the shouts and chatters emanating from the neighboring rooms. There is nothing to be done. I sit inside my small room on a wooden chair next to the table fixed to the wall. From the window beside me I can see the red soil of the football ground and the Zuari river at a far distance. And I feel so happy. The warm summer air blows across me and makes me feel alive. The day is open like the radiant blue sky. I shall probably eat, then watch some movies. Then may be I shall walk around the hostel and talk to friends and acquaintances. May be go to the library. Or just have lunch and sleep afterwards. I am not counting the days or months or years. It is a sort of a lock of fate. I am here and I am here fully. Time is not slipping and death is not coming. Everything is bright and young and promising and joyous and funny and weightless and in sharp contrast, and nothing is wrong.