Finifugality

“So therefore I dedicate myself to myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger – because I cannot dedicate myself to any human being” – Jack Kerouac

It’s finally gotten quiet up in my head. I cannot help but welcome such silence supplemented by acceptance. My mind no longer seems to be racing to meet some crazy summit of success and I feel that I can finally shed the weight of needing to be my very own self-fulfilling prophecy. I am loving this particular adjective: ‘Finifugal’ means ‘hating endings’…of someone who tries to avoid or prolong the final moments of a story, relationship or some other journey.  It’s taken a while too, I got on to this colossal segue of needing to be ‘anybody else’ nearly eight months ago but I finally seem to be settling into myself again. The fact that my ‘self’ may have altered dramatically, is largely encouraging. My 30-year-long diagonal swamp finally seems to be deviating into a learning curve of some sort. Besides, it’s just too hot to try anything… let alone something as exhaustively all-encompassing as a personality overhaul.

Oddly enough, the oozing summer laziness is somewhat soothing this year around. I realise this feeling will pass in a week or so, which is why I am trying to revel in it while I still can. While I can still appreciate silly, subtle idiosyncrasies like 2-hours of running air-conditioner, iced-mangoes and black and white Shammi Kapoor films watched on my laptop over the weekend when the afternoons are too sticky and salient to warrant any sort of initiative. I can’t yet jump on the bandwagon of all the load-shedding woes and summer bashing that I know is part of my lot in the near future. I think I still have a week or so left in me to relish the fact that I am broiling among a den of like-tempered misfits rather than mentally suffocating in a year’s compound of silent treatment in a cool flat in Copenhagen.  I am perfectly content in taking my happiness piecemeal – in the form of a dubious, daily tablet of bliss pocketed beneath the minutes where the water pressure in the shower is at full; when I get an extra hour of electricity in the morning; the fact that I have finally learnt to cut up a tarbooz all on my own and that I am simultaneously writing and painting again.

Then of course there are off moments. Sitting on my bed alone and listening to Rafi can prompt an un-invigilated minute where one catches oneself thinking ‘Well, wouldn’t it be nice if there was someone sitting here beside me, sharing my thoughts and anticipating all my needs and desires’. It passes quickly enough, once I remind myself that all that would ‘really’ mean would be my having to share my mango; put on some shorts and probably even have to shave my legs. Screw that. I am presently determined to spend my time accentuating the idea that I am more than enough for myself to deal with coupled with the illusion that I do it well. That said, I am hoping that this whole reactionary ‘fresh divorcee’ phase of my life will be over soon because I cringe every time I have to laugh at my latest fuck up in passing.

I am presently in search of a word that encapsulates people who prefer to live amid the glory of their own destruction. Ones’ who are defined by a constant lack of definition; have lives that are far too dramatic to be treated with anything but derision, self-deprecation and humour and people who relish their own nihilistic mythology more than the sum of their attributes. Sadly, I would have to factor in the fact that such individuals are by no means self-reliant and that their entire self-sufficiency only operates in the presence of an audience. Self-reliance is such an odd, post-modern, post-feminist, post-human precept, isn’t it? The idea that our constant demands to be regarded as individuals need to be supplemented by a sense of alone-ness is such a reductionist view and yet I suppose I must now buy into it wholesale based on the life I have chosen.

A few days ago, I met a childhood friend and while detailing my last year she remarked “But you’ve always been brave about this stuff.” It’s somehow more jarring to hear that from someone who has observed your most candid ‘Before’ and ‘After’ selves. I experienced an odd minute where I wanted to pick up a baseball bat and break windows, vent, cry and…dramatize to my heart’s content because it suddenly occurred to me that I had always just laughed at it all simply because I couldn’t decide on a politically correct, socially acceptable alternative that would still allow me to vent. It seems that a dramatic life cannot afford to be played by a dramatic lead. One must always choose between either content and characters when writing out the life one wants to lead while coping with the life they happen to have. I suppose in some measure I must be grateful for my pesky persistence to shovel my way deeper into my mind each time I feel the need to laugh at myself.

“You need to stop over-bloody analysing everything. And this whole wordy, philosophising, numinizing thing…it doesn’t dispel reality, it doesn’t delay it either. Why do you stick with it? Is it because you think it makes you interesting to people?” N once asked me. 

“No. It’s because it makes me interesting to myself. Tolerable, at the very least,” I recall saying. 

I certainly wasn’t lying. I have always felt cursed by that odd, ever present sense of self-loathing that is only matched by the fact that I perhaps feel a greater loathing for nearly everything else in the privacy of my thoughts. In the final settled sum, I suppose I still come out enjoying my own company better because I always seek to improve it and because there is less guilt associated with judging oneself than others. The latter involves a not-so-merry-go-round of cynical syntax.  First judgement about something another person says/ does/ tries/ wants; followed by judgement for being judgmental about someone I hardly know and concluded by judging whether I am even qualified to hold court over anyone else’s actions given the cowardice that confines my own. 

I have discovered that the want for more does not make a mind. My mind, in spite of all the self-deprecation and farcical caricaturising, seems to be failing at the one thing it’s good at: pretence. Funny, how when I finally want to cry I no longer appear capable of it. I am no longer laughing at my circumstances for survival. I’m doing it out of habit and on some level I wish I was beyond that. That said, I suppose there are worse things to be cursed with than a fool-proof coping mechanism that ensures you will almost never break down in the face of piling personal crises. 

 

I am trying to puzzle myself out these days. I’m not sure any more if I am trying to define myself, redefine myself or free myself from definition altogether. Logically speaking, it cannot be all three… much as I wish it. My ‘Qualia’ hinges on whether my sense of self comes from my life, my mind or my making. I want to be normal now…ordinary even. Riddled with silly, girl problems; taking them as they come and not needing to tweak them. The philosophical qualia is relegated to concepts that occur in vocabulary and practise but require perception for final framing. It helps cut out the physical from the metaphysical and see which comes first. The noumena association is meant to come naturally but I am not there yet. I am not at that juncture where what I am corresponds with who I am. Perhaps I never will be but it is irksome to have identified this gap and have no bridge to cross it. It is even more jarring that the disconnect revealed itself when I was contemplating sex. Qualia is a fitting philosophical allegory, I feel, because it resonates with real physical realities being held hostage to the representation of what is impressed upon the senses. The concept implies that the latter stage, noumena allows us some agency and that if we were aware of our perceptions, we might ration them differently. Meaning that my loathing for my tangible physical self could somehow mesh with my tolerance for my subliminal self. Where sex is concerned, I could finally stop worrying about what I am thinking/feeling/saying/doing and actually follow course on the thought/word/action/emotion. 

I’m not getting my hopes up.

My latest self-destruction is helping me deal with this slightly. I suppose not being conscious of my actions for even the few minutes that I can muster is a relief of some sort. It is respite sought in stupidity and I am finding it oddly satisfying even as I recognise that it cannot last. I am seriously contemplating shifting from the Pakistani equivalent of the Arizona-Native Papago tradition where girls never spoke to men so as to be able to decipher a mate when they felt a compulsion to the Natchez variety of women amassing dowries composing presents from all their lovers when they came of age and still choosing to remain single. It’s a strangely tempting notion, and divorce somewhat propels a woman in this country into a world where the pressure to ‘prove something’ is off. Relationships no longer need to have tags or goals attached to them. The expiry date of self and relationships is somewhat less relevant and they can finally just be about the people in them. 

Cohen once categorised love as the fire that burns everyone and disfigures everyone. “It is the world’s excuse for being ugly,” he said. Even then, I know I am still talking about dating more than contemplating it seriously. I am still more comfortable with the idea of substances than actual substance. 

I am not sure which is uglier.

Hiraeth and the Hosteen Coyote

“It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way” – Rollo May

I find myself in a frenzy that I cannot forgive away at present. My mouth tastes like bile, my face is numb and the whimsical wi-fi signals adorning my apartment walls are oddly amplified in this perversely self-affirming instant. And so I write, to preserve a sense of sanity and sanctity in a moment utterly devoid of both. My thoughts are switching trajectories at a moment’s pace: I marvel at my ability to put one foot in front of another even at the most inopportune moments; I relish the idea of finally beginning to enjoy the company of women, who earlier seemed to shrink even my sizable mass into parochial protoplasm in their intimidating circumference. I find I might even make female friends, which should prove to be an interesting adventure. I have identified that I am attempting to redefine myself in the light of anticipation and conversation…granted, it is odd realizing ones’ own reflection in another and hearing our opinions pour out for the first time in reaction to someone else's. It is a nefarious beginning, although not entirely unpleasant. I find that I intensely dislike the color pink, I had always withheld judgment on colors but at this present precipice, I can observe my complexion and I must pronounce -Pink is most definitely not the new ‘black’.

I believe the elders have identified this stasis as somewhere between a state of absolute euphoria and acrid panic. ‘Hiraeth’ is Welsh, for a homesickness that pertains to a home to which one cannot return, one that perhaps never was. It alludes to the nostalgia and yearning, for a grief reserved for the lost places of a past one tries to recover but never can. Hiraeth is a unicorn, only it is black. The kind one clearly remembers meeting and having ridden even, but one that can never be spotted again. Tonight, Hiraeth is a series of disjointed misnomers…it is Islamabad’s oddly poignant nonchalance towards the entire enterprise of existing; it is a bitter-half frozen glass of coca cola; it is the smell of the last wisps of Imperial Leather soap and the sounds of Amitabh Bachan singing ‘Khaike Paan’ still slapping around in my head. It is the summer afternoons that I know will come, where the only thing to rescue me from hyper-awareness regarding each individual stream of sweat running down my back will be a Sindhri Aam fished out from a steel tub of dry ice. Hiraeth is watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the afternoon, to the sound of an old air-conditioner that still needs a knob to be turned to #4 on Auto-cool and it is repeated trips to Audio City with penciled lists of songs that will someday grow up to be a cassette that I pay Rs200 for.  There is a sequence in North and South, where Gaskell has Margaret finally acknowledge the loss of home “No matter how we were, no matter how much we wish it, we cannot go back”. I suppose this is my Margaret moment.  I feel as if I must finally give up my search for Mitchell’s bon-bons, Country Pine-cool and that long-lost reviewing of the Tiny Toons finale, because even if I find them I recognize that they won’t taste the same.

This is an odd, lilting loop I presently find myself trapped in, almost as if I am constructing myself in retrospect. There is an odd god-liness about this motion that I find simultaneously liberating and licentious. In some manner I am beginning to view the latent Sanskrit warning Koyaa Rusqatri as a positive tangential for endless possibility carved in layers of spite. The Koyaa Rusqatri, literally refers to the ‘balance of a life out of balance’. The notion alludes to those off-shoot individuals who are incurable, un-fixable and irredeemable in their essence. It offers up a platitude for all the plebian bandits and social banshees of the world - alienated and alliterated by their personal conundrums to a point where they no longer seek redemption but rather respite from the expectation of being every idle relative’s concerned after-thought. The collective ‘Oh, Him’s/Oh, Her’s’ finally looking to live a life beyond the ‘But what will become of …’ that shadows their very presence and just BE. The Rusqatri was devised as a caveat from expectation and exultation alike. It is the lost-soul’s life raft that does not seek any sort of shore. It allows un-balance as a legitimate life-style choice and I fear I may be very close to admitting into it.

These days, I am longing for the comforts of home and my city, while simultaneously adjusting to the idea that remaining here and battling my demons may be a worthwile venture in the long run.  There isn’t much I find redeeming about this city except, mayhaps, the Jacaranda trees that currently line my street. These trees bear a stunning purple blossom that may just be pretty enough to keep me invested in the idea of my own individuality born of independence. If they were Cherry Blossoms, the struggle may well have been considered moot. I wish I could just settle the matter of myself and be done with it once and for all but I seem to relish the challenge of a life that perpetually resists perfection.

In Native American mythology, there is a spirit animal reserved for the self-defeating savant. A creature that caters to the glamour of self-destruction that appeals to those of us who savor the art of self-combustion and consider ourselves more poignant, just for pragmatically snipping away at ourselves piece-by-piece. The most infamous trickster in Native American lore is the Hosteen Coyote, some consider the coyote an anagram for Prometheus in Greek mythology, as he too brought fire to his people. Others liken him to the Norse god Loki in temperament and constitution. The Hosteen holds nothing sacred and thereby everything is equally important and simultaneously recyclable to him. The Hopi hold that, to be granted a wish by the Hosteen, is at best dubious but immediately self-serving. It is said that each granted wish follows an exclusion clause that guarantees that it will not be granted in the manner of one’s choosing. The legends of the coyote, Loki and Mercury circle around myths of cunning and do not operate at an intellectual but on a purely instinctual level. They are the unconscious will. And yet, in every legend, where the Hosteen has appeared to the Hopi or the Pueblo, no one has been known to have resisted it.  I seem to be running with the Hosteen at present and for the first time I comprehend the charms of surrender more than self. It is an odd conglomerate of values operating in reverse. I am my own Saint Teresa, and I myself am begging to be rid of all my saving graces. It is oddly liberating.

And yet, there is a junction where this liberation becomes suffocating. I find that my moral monitors are all the more stifling because I was the one who oh-so laboriously erected them and now find myself tearing them down. I suppose this is the down-side of constructing one’s ethics outside of a God and thereby taking responsibility for every thought and action as it is cemented in habit. I am presently struggling with my multiple choices. I suppose this is better framed as the steady decomposition of the construction, production and definition of my thoughts.  I catch myself playing with Molyneux here, who asked Locke whether a blind man restored to sight, would be able to distinguish between a cube and globe that his blindness had conditioned him to identify. In the epistemological sense, I see myself sympathizing with Ibn Tufail’s Hayy ibn Yaqdhan , as he consorts with colours rather than shapes in this regard. How do I quantify my person here… as what I am? What I was? What I want to be? Or is it who I am becoming as I am becoming her? Molyneux further leads me to Agrippa and his Münchhausen Trilemma, where all truths are essentially impossible to prove, even by the likes of logic. Trilemma denotes that circular reasoning, infinite regress and unproven axioms counteract any real value in moral rectitude and thereby the idea is a hopeless endeavor from the onset. Even if it does offer me hope. Is my person a product of what my mind wishes it to be or of my neurology and physicality? I suppose, loathe as I am to acknowledge it, I must carry my carcass around with me for the rest of my journey. I finally rest with Sorites, where I can make some sense of my selfishness as well as my self-loathing. The heap-paradox rests in deterioration giving rise to liberation…from definitions. What is a person? Am I a whole, or a conglomerate or an assembly line of features and facets, which if split up and taken away one by one, will free me from the burden of being the me that binds me. The bale of hay that depletes straw by straw until it isn’t a bale of hay. 
Can the same be true of a person? 
And if so, what needs diminishing?

Where do I start to deconstruct and detonate?

When can I finally dissolve into the person I think I could be?

 “Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.”

-                                                                                                                                     - Women, Charles Bukowski