The Call Of Existence

To look into the screen of a phone which stares blankly back at you with an almost mockingly deadpan "Insert SIM card" is to look into the eyes of Death itself. I know so because I have gazed into the eyes of Death myself, in a five ton vehicle traveling down a rocky road on an island which has less reception than a badly organized company function.

It plays out almost like a real-to-life adaptation of Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief.

First comes the Denial.

Your rub your eyes in attempt to awaken your consciousness, and perhaps realign your retinas in such a way as to read the dreaded text as something more favorable. This can't be happening to me, 7-11 is obviously the most reputable proprietor of phones! You then proceed to remove and reinsert your SIM card and battery repeatedly, while making a considerable racket tapping and smacking your phone; because we all know that if an electronic appliance fails to work, the best thing to do is to give it a few hard knocks to "shake the machinery into place".

Next comes the Anger.

How could this happen to me! It's not fair, I've been such a responsible text messenger, never using abbreviations and alternating caps locks! You then escalate the phone-tapping and phone-smacking into something which approaches the eventual evisceration of your phone, all the while hurling abuse at the maternal parent of nobody in particular.

Then comes Bargaining.

Oh please let me phone work, I promise I'll stop wasting money on pithy one-liners to the mainland. If you start working, I promise I won't swap you for a htc snap the moment I get back!

Depression then sets in.

You leave your phone in particularly precarious positions, just to watch it clatter to the ground, a twisted, macabre sort of punishment for refusing to work for you. Your head hangs heavy and you reply to questions of "How's your phone?" with guttural grumbles. You make obvious signs of resignation, and retreat into the gloomy swing of a pendulum neck.

In time, you arrive at Acceptance.

You keep your phone in a permanent powered-off state and cease even attempting to detect signs of life from the fallen appliance. Your thoughts get redirected at more pressing concerns, such as the state of the weather and the flight trajectories of wounded butterflies. You eventually accept that your phone is indeed indisputably, irrevocably, very much dead.

But whatever rosy connotations might germinate from acceptance at this stage are but half-truths, for true acceptance only comes about much later. One must first contend with something much more existential in nature: what happens to someone who loses his primary means of communication with the world.

To know that we exist, we merely need to wonder about whether we do, for that, as Descartes maintains, is proof enough. To feel our existence though, is a totally different matter altogether. For to feel that we exist, we need in the least two things.

To feel that we are a member of the club that is our world, we would first be required to absorb its essence, to know its innermost parts. We would need to consume data, collect information and map out its realities. We would need to understand the lay of the land and its residents, so as to be understood in turn. We pore through newspapers and magazines, our senses ever-receptive to the signs of our time, our airwaves always open for the sentiment of the masses. We know that to belong, you have criteria to which you have to conform. To gain membership, to be a part of the whole, you must be acceptable. To be acceptable, you must adapt. To adapt, you must do your research.

Secondly, we need observable signs, roadside indicators which tell us that our presence on this earth has indeed had some sort of effect on the world which would not have happened had we not first occurred. The outward rippling of influence, with ourselves being the epicenter, is one of the most fundamental for feeling as if we exist. That is why we as humans are all obsessed with cause and effect. That is why self-confessed artists decorate trains with coats of color. That is why children build toy towers, only to knock them down moments after. That is why deluded souls send the apexes of aviation nose-first into the crowning glories of construction. We crave the extension of ourselves. We desire the sense of power that gives us. But more importantly, we require that others know we exist.

Interestingly, a close metaphor of our desire to feel existence as humans is the processes of the human body itself. The body first consumes food and drink as sustenance to survive. The nutrients provide it with the means to survive. The waste of the body is then passed out as excrement, a biological catharsis if you will, leaving a distinct, lingering, presence. The creatures of the animal kingdom know this well, and in what is curiously crudely symbolic of the innate desire to make one's presence felt, urinate to mark their territory. And to think we insist our superiority over 'lesser' mammals, when we ourselves carry as base a habit, only now translated into some modern form of social convention.

It really distills down to this dictum:

To feel existence, is to seek to know and be known.

With the loss of the enabler that is your phone, you lose that capability--what more, when you're stuck on an island off the mainland. You lose that connection to the life you had back there. You lose the updates of the state of the going-ons, and the going-ons of the state. You forfeit your influence on that world, and you fear that in your absence, hearts might not grow fonder, but rather, cold as they forget the slowly fading shadow of your presence.

At this juncture, you might perhaps dismiss this as exaggerated romanticism of a purely material issue, where the loss of a phone simply implies the loss of convenience and a tool of efficiency. There is some truth in that. And yet, one cannot deny that chill down your spine you get when you realize that your phone is not on your person.

Steve Jobs is a smart man, for he knows how extremely difficult it is for us to divorce the 'i' from the 'phone'. Consider it an abstract extension of ourselves, where connection with any society is made easy (as Facebook would have it), and where posting our opinions and the minutiae of our day is twit-easy (or, Tweet, as some would spell it).

Somehow or rather, we all possess the ineffable desire to feel our existence.

In the final analysis,

it really distills down to this dictum:

To feel existence, is to seek to know and be known.

Clearing The Air

The act of declaring 'reading' as one of your hobbies is not very unlike that of a crazed Spaniard running through a particularly long stretch of bovine pastures with a sheet of red c loth. For what better way is there to attract criticism and condescension than by acting the unwitting charlatan? To make the declaration is to invite questions as to the texts you have read that led to your current literary sentiment. And more often than not, the people behind these questions belong to something of a group of self-professed literary critics, high and haughty in their towers of esotericism. A community which huddles in hushed tones around titles with terms more unpronounceable than the names of certain volcanoes. Whispers of 'post-colonialism', 'deconstructivist' ideas and 'canonical texts' float around like thick London fog, and each utterance is followed by such sense of satisfaction and pomp that you could all but feel the words vibrating in their italics. It is at the perimeters of this fog that your literary likes are trialed and tested, their acceptance and legitimacy hanging in the air as they are buffeted back and forth by gusts of smoke from within the fog. Your penchant for novels involving teenage nocturnals is met with toothy grins and mocking smirks, while your tales of wands and wizards are swept away by the very brooms that they floated in on. One by one they drift to the ground in a state of broken defeat.

You harbor silent resentment as you sift silently through the pieces and the density of your disillusionment. And yet, as you stoop to pick up the fragments, you notice a certain clarity in the air. A clear, unobstructed view presents itself, both beneath and around the thickness of the fog, and the irony of exclusivity never seemed as apparent. Those within the fog reveal themselves to be ultimately myopic, their cloud of condescension not simply excluding those deemed unfit for entry, but also excluding themselves from the vastness of knowledge the world outside provides. Vision into the far horizon is rendered impossible as they prove themselves unable to see beyond the very gates that they have built to restrict access. When it comes down to the appreciation of the written word, it really is for us to decide if we will let the fog obscure our vision.

The time has come to open our eyes.

The time has come to clear the air.

Stirred, But Not Shaken

Rejection is a painful affair.

Larger Fires

When we find in ourselves attributes which we feel incompatible with the vision which we have for ourselves, we develop a little bitter taste. What tends to follow is a nagging sense of insecurity, and the sense that the attribute in question inevitably pulls us down and holds us back from reaching the potential which we see ourselves otherwise being able to attain. But we humans are adaptable creatures, and, over time, we develop some form of a self-defence mechanism in the denial of our failings.

At best, even if we are not in denial, we construct an alternative remedy through focusing on our merits, all the while purposefully and conveniently ignoring our failings. A curious irony follows; in avoiding our insecurities and playing on our strengths, we inadvertently develop little kingdoms of pride. Saplings of complacency begin to emerge, not in place of our insecurities, but as an alternative which overshadows. Like deviant foresters we ignite our own roaring inferno, extinguishing the burning house by drawing on the oxygen it feeds on. The result is but a pyrrhic victory; we succeed in concealing our weakness, but we unwittingly fetter ourselves with the heavy manacles of pride.

As much as we’d like to believe in the far-reaching nature of our self-awareness, such conceit usually remains hidden under the radar of our self-critique. Its advantage is innocuous, and stems largely from how conveniently justifiable it is. We tend to believe that it stands to reason that, ultimately, our primary motive was the extinguishing of the burning house, and that the larger fire we started was merely means to an end. Our line of thought might travel as such:

“How can I be considered arrogant, if I admit so readily to my deficiencies and failings? Surely my humility is displayed in the concern I have for these negative aspects of myself!”

In using insecurity as a form of justification for a proud spirit, we believe, rather erroneously, that we have somehow come up with a clever little way of escaping weakness, while yet making a good show of strength. Consider it akin to a balloon gorilla. The balloon gorilla thumps its chest with much bravado, in a very visible display of his might, all the while completely unaware that what lies within is but a giant cavern of air, a hollow emptiness housing a sorry lack of substance. Interestingly, not only does the balloon gorilla fail to address his failings, but he also loses credibility in the areas he professes his capability in.

Confidence as a means of distraction and misdirection is easily shaken, for ultimately, we are not at peace with our whole person; we have not come to terms with our weaknesses. We all know of the well-worn phrase ‘fighting fire with fire’, and perhaps the time has finally come for us to radically rethink the real value of just that.

Close For Comfort

Continuity. A vast river which, while unceasing in its flow, exists indefinitely as geography does; constantly in motion, and yet never moving, an entity which embodies all of what was, is, and is to come. But before blue hippie aliens start to rejoice in what appears to be some form of new-age neo-pagan eco-worship, let us shelve such titanic thoughts for later reference--this is but the tip of today's iceberg.

Every day, a PC user somewhere contemplates the meaning of life. Whilst doing so, he also contemplates whether he should really be using a Mac instead. His likely subsequent decision to remain of the Windows persuasion could probably be attributed less to his aversion to fruit (and perhaps, original sin), and more to his idiosyncratic resistance to change. Yet, let us hesitate to condemn this PC user to the luddite pile. Instead, let us celebrate his sterling defence of consistency, for much comfort can be found in consistency.

After all, some form of pleasure could be derived from the knowledge that you can head home every day to a house that actually doesn't look like it had been thrown into a geological blender while you were out. In a similar manner, the toddler carts around his favourite soft toy wherever he goes--a piece of portable stability if you will--for the child knows that while the people around him have moods which can swing to any colour of the spectrum, he has his teddy. A physical, holdable, huggable reminder that amidst a world of newness, randomness and chaos, some things don't change.

As we grow older however, we'd also like to imagine that we have, in some way or another, grown more sophisticated. (As quirky as you might think it be to bring teddy along for your board room meetings, your bosses might not quite appreciate that comedic character allusion which you'd thought yourself rather original for) And what could possibly get more sophisticated than abstract ideas! Ideas and concepts such as the bulwark of Tradition float up, like wisps of smoke curling away from sticks of incense lit for the elders.

It is in the stage of Tradition's conception that we find beliefs, superstitions, habits, and practices--tiny individual actions which, when operating in tandem, create an immutable, timeless form.

Tradition provides an easy fall-back, a common ground for the masses to agree on. If something has been so, it must have had its reasons for being so, and thus should continue to stay as such.

No doubt, one could say that the Shepherdsons and Grangerfords were foolish in their feudalistic struggles, but we are equally led to realize the bond that each of these families shared within their clans, and the sense of internal stability that it brought. A state of being at peace with going to war perhaps. (Oh, the irony!) And yet, in this irony lies a testament to the grounding effect of Tradition--the overwhelming calm that comes with being anchored to an idea as the world gets tossed about the storms of reality.

Is it any wonder then that we so earnestly seek consistency and the continuity that it creates? One who is able to hold his ground and maintain his state of mind as the squall rages is deemed to possess a certain amount of control. You might not be able to harness the storm, but as long as you have your constants, you are safe. You might grow taller, you might grow older, your house might shift, your friends might change; but your teddy is your teddy, and that fact never will change. That shiny red packet will always pocket dollar notes, and that pine tree will always bear the fruit of gifts.

Like kids on a carousel we carefully pick our mounts, as we await the ride of our lives. The machinery kicks in, and we lurch forward. Our world begins to spin, slowly, at first, then gradually picks up in pace. Soon all will be a blur, as lights flash and faces whiz by. Confident of our steeds we whoop and yell.

On and on we go, galloping powerfully in inevitable circles

Constantly in motion, and yet never moving