Senses Engulfed

I wrote thus as a mark of sorrow when Rohit Vemula’s death gathered news columns.

“Some felt sympathetically robbed of their own. Others felt purged of refuse to come into their own.
He took his own to the unknown.
And each living side finds their moment of lifeless renown.
In such illusion, postures that leave us disunited, all at once alone”

What was remarkably different about the note Rohit is said to have left behind, was ‘never mind’; as in the words of Leonard Cohen. “I had to leave, My life behind, I dug some graves, You’ll never find.”

Further still, the swoop of opinion vultures upon his mother, outdid the depths from which his decision to take his own life stunned many a soul.  To quote Cohen further, he may have written a nearer truth than many an analyst may provide, no matter what facts are on hand.  

“The story’s told
With facts and lies
I had a name
But never mind

Never mind
Never mind
The war was lost
The treaty signed

There’s truth that lives
And truth that dies
I don’t know which
So never mind...”

The speed with which media reports is a known tendency. What is lesser reflected is the effect it has on our attention span. We are deflected from one event to another, with a cumulative feeling of external reality. No more than an elemental sigh or a passing eulogy for social approval hardens the essence in us. Then as the lights fade out of the incident, the case is lost from our empathetic radars. 

The antenna swivels towards the next flare, the next dare or scare, if you will. In this fearful world of insecurity conditioning, almost every place on earth would be in a state of perpetual vigil, with more controls over human freedoms, and less love and affect for fellow humans.

In mindless adulation of ideologies, people die at the altar of ideologues. In uncritical examination of our apathy, we live dead to the world’s issues, with voices hushed in an unrealistic hope of succor. Even titular heads of non-governmental organisations, community leaders and neighbors strike uncalibrated harmony with demagogues of their choosing, as if their time has arrived in dominion over others. Unwilling to tune in to their own inner voice, they pretend reality in an untenable myth of peace.

While the symptoms of unproductive desire are on homicide trails and the like, our uncritical thinking leads us astray from reality in many another spheres. Public good is lost to private gain in the economy, in the guise of free markets and liberal political values. Citizens numbed in consumerist appetites never have enough, for their wants exceed their needs. They surrender their truer wealth in the bargain. Lakes disappear for high-rise buildings in some places, while forests disappear for other dreams in other places. The sea entertains more plastic as it ejects its whales and dolphins with increasing regularity to the shores. 

While clarity of thinking helps name and frame problems affecting us as a species; it is not arrived at in logically facile ways. Indeed, the heart must move in acceptance of the issues at hand. And that is a space only inner knowing can see. For as Cohen has entrapped in poetic brilliance, the nature of the human dimension of our times, there is a palpable loss of reason in form, substance and spirit.

“Our law of peace
Which understands
A husband leads
A wife commands

And all of this
Expressions of
The Sweet Indifference
Some call Love

The High Indifference
Some call Fate
But we had Names
More intimate

Names so deep and
Names so true
They’re blood to me
They’re dust to you

There is no need
That this survive
There’s truth that lives
And truth that dies”

And while abject surrender is a release from the burdens of insanity, it paradoxically enables connection. In abject retreat however, silence is but an illusion of escape at the altar of the power of fears.  This paradoxically fuels disconnection. And we don’t see it because the next event to engulf your senses is only a few moments from this line, in alternate diminishing space, of directionless gory.