A Holiday from Myself – A Walk into the Wilderness

Even before I wake up

I am already someone

Some I want to be, most I don’t

I am a father, a brother, a son

A wife, sister, mother

Roles I was born with

Promotion I didn't demand

Doctor, Architect, Lawyer

Banker, florist, cabdriver

A character in a drama

A drama I didn’t consent to play

A script I didn’t write

But time keeps turning the pages

And the story continues

Roles I am forced to play

Even when I resist and refuse

All I do

Crawl into another story

The plot again is already set

Little change I can bring

Not just the plot of the dramas I play

But the master plot, the mother of all plots

The plot of the story itself

It is tiring to play these roles

Enact all these parts

Scripts to voice

Rituals to play

Practices to perform

Tiring, exhausting, all-consuming

I need out, I need a holiday

I need a place to recuperate

But if I am the parts I play

And the roles I perform

Even if the parts and roles exhaust

How do I escape and run

I need a holiday from myself

From all parts and roles

Stories that give significance

Narratives that provide meaning

But how can that be?

How can one flee from oneself?

Even death does not provide a way of escape

As long as the story continues and the drama plays

I live on and continue to perform

Even after death in the memory of time

If even death cannot set free

How else can I fly?

Move past the constraints

Placed by the characters

Roles I am forced to play

Into the wilderness I must go

Into the wilderness I must disappear

The blackhole of narratives

The death of the story

The oblivion of meaning

I yearn for the wilderness

To strengthen, to refresh

To help me understand

To be beyond me

In order to be me

Epistemology in a mid-Summer Night of 2008

I don’t want to sing this song to you

I don’t want to sit and hold your hand

I don’t want to dress up to take you out

I don’t want to whisper sweet goodbyes into your ears

The above chorus lines of an unfinished song seem to lament a relationship gone sour. It seems to convey a background picture of an angry defiant lover, sitting alone, who emphatically declares his lack of love and affection for the one he once loved. It does not kindle any special emotions within us except probably reinforce anger and echo similar feelings especially if we are found to be in a similar relationship status as the one that seems to be described above.

Let me change the background picture for you – here is a man dressed smart, holding the hand of his beloved, singing this song and whispering goodbyes into the ears of his dead lover who is waiting to be taken into the funeral carriage for the last ride of her life.

As I re-read the lines of the song again, my heart is now filled with a completely different set of emotions and I gasp and turn my eyes away. If I linger long enough over the words and try to imagine the scene created by the song writer, it reduces me to tears and creates an ache in the heart that does not want to go away. My heart reaches out for the young man and the life he is going to live without his loved one. For him to sing this song with such pathos, inversely reflects on the great love and affection they must have shared. The beautiful moments of togetherness, sweet whispers and boldly expressed emotions must have been the theme of their love. Even as he bemoans the end of this celebration of love, inwardly we join in with his cries and shed silent tears for bygone good times.

Suddenly my eyes flit back to the song lines and I stop: the intent of the writer suddenly seems clear, and my heart leaps up as revelation seems to hit me. It is not only not an angry burst over a broken relationship, it seems that it is also not really bemoaning wonderful yester-days and the beauty of celebrated love that has now been cruelly brought to an end with his death. It actually seems to be an expression of deep grief over the present task that the lover has to do – to take one’s loved one to the grave. Here she is being asked to play a most dreadful role asked of any lover – to be the one to take her lover to the grave. She dreads this and weeps over this task of walking with the love of her life for the last time and say final goodbyes and hence the words of this pitiful song spill slowly out of her mouth.

I can’t but help look above to read the song lines yet again. My mind wanders – could it actually be the first and last expression of a never-expressed love that was just too late and now with her death could only be expressed with words such as these? I see him just another face, one in the huge crowd that made up the funeral procession. Maybe she did not even know about his love for her. Or maybe there was just no death at all? Or maybe these are just lazy words of a song writer who is stringing words to fit a tune-recently-composed with an eye on the charts and the dollars that it may bring!

I forcefully put an end to my wandering thoughts. What do these lines mean, what do they 'really' mean? Or do they 'really' have to have a 'real' meaning!! And even if they did have a 'real' meaning, would I ever know?

Brainerd Prince

Before writing the section on Epistemology and Methodology

11:10 p.m. 28 July 2008

Tears

Have you cried lately

And allowed the tears

To stream by

It feels there is

A pressure

In the chest

Only tears can let fly

It is not a pain of grief

Nor one of loss

It is the facing of the

Unexpected

That brought forth

Tears, unexpected

A pleasant surprise

A need fulfilled

A wish granted

A glimmer of hope

Against all odds

From unexpected quarters

Unexpected

Memory does its bit

Digs out

Resonant experiences

The event takes

A Grand scale

Behold

The hand of God

At work

Mysterium magnum

Everywhere

Meaning making begins

Cultural narratives kick in

To God be the glory

Hare Rama Hare Krishna

Subhan’allah

Maybe even

Gan Xie Zhu

Slava bogu

Kyrie eleison

The tears keep streaming

Gently down the cheeks