It's no good trying to
get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at
times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for
the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then
accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to
come. You can't force them.”
-DH Lawrence, Lady
Chatterley’s Lover
I find myself flummoxed by life at present. It is an odd place to find oneself in, especially seeing as it’s November and this has traditionally been my month to wind down, consume inordinate amounts of coffee and listen to disproportionate dealings of Dylan. I reserve my annual existential crises for this particular season but my personal and professional clocks seem to have miscalculated my gestation period this year. There is just way too much to do and this means that my self-prescribed procrastination must be held at bay and I am making do with small snippets of existential angst as I drive to work each morning.
Mind
you, I am not depressed. I have never thrown about that word as casually as
most people do, whenever things fail to go their way. Having battled with
genuine depression, I can generally distinguish between melodrama, the odd funk
and full blown-out doldrums. I suppose this current state is best categorized as
a rather portent blend of aggressive ennui. I am finding that ennui makes me pretentious. It
has got me listening to Opera again. And, for those of you who haven’t tried
it, it is a particularly nocuous negotiation listening to Puccini or Beethoven
in Pakistan. The magnanimity of the score coupled with the surreal gritty
road-side-miseries somehow render poverty poignant without meaning to. It is the most
uncomfortable mingling of opposites that I can think of and that is perhaps why
I find it all heartbreakingly beautiful.
My
current playlist includes Massinet’s Meditations;
the more robust Ode to Joy and when I
am feeling particularly vindictive…Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Wagner, in particular, should come with a warning label
and an R-rating. Beware: Contents are liable to cause overflow of latent
phobias and passive-aggressive angst. I can trace all this back to four days ago, as I casually sifted through my mail to stumble upon my
divorce papers. Ordinarily, I should be glad seeing as I have hardly given my
misnomer-of-a-marriage much thought over the past few months, devoting most of
my energies towards overcoming it with politically-incorrect pizzazz. Still,
there is an odd power to a piece of paper, formally drafted in a language you
cannot comprehend announcing your freedom from your biggest mistake. I spent the
first two hours pretending I hadn’t seen the papers; another two hours
rejoicing over them and the next few days trapped in a miasma of ‘what ifs’.
Not about the decision to get divorced so much as the repercussions of having
put my emotions on the line and realizing that I should have stuck with my
original instincts and kept to my own company.
A
friend recently visited my house and upon seeing my room whimsically remarked “Wow, your room seems really
well-inhabited”. It was one of those odd, offhand, too-precisely observed
comments that one cannot help but deflect with humor in the moment. My room has
–for the most part- been my periphery planet. When I was ten, it was another
room with ten years of being locked from the outside. The last ten years have
meant a perverse sort of decadent independence but it didn’t change the fact
that I still located my life within a room, this one locked from the
inside. I suppose, it all boils down to a Stockholm
Syndrome conflation of being imprisoned and eventually learning to enjoy it.
Both prisons lead to a locked door regardless of whether or not it is of ones
own choosing. That is the odd place I find myself in right now, negotiating
between being a person I wish I was –one that I now find I am rather good at
affecting – and the person that I am. The former has friends and the latter resides
in a cocoon of literature, music, films and sonnets composed to a conglomerate
of fictions that require no justification. I have always been one of those
people who lacks balance. I can ‘act’ balanced better than most people I know
purely because I am all too aware of how vulnerable my innards are on this
score.
That
is perhaps, why, my new job may just end up saving me. For the first time, I am
bound by contract to interact with other people… in droves. And while, people
are still not my primary choice of company, they are no longer the last on the
list either. Armed with self-deprecation, I think I can deflect any
particularly pointed judgments thrown my way. My pathological fear of people is
amplified a thousand-fold as a teacher, especially as I recall how my friends
and I used to mock our own teachers. Setting them apart as a different
species, flawed, formidable and frivolous - infuriatingly peppered with the
presumptuousness that they were capable of ‘teaching’ us anything. So I hope
that laughing my way through two hours and overt obsequiousness will make my
students ‘not-hate’ me. And then there is also the charm of being on a campus
again. University campuses provide an odd moratorium on both life and reality.
Places where learning is contagious and there is no warranty on the watershed
of ideas. I wish I could tell my students that this is the only time in life
that they will get to do this, have
big ideas and not have them belittled; think big thoughts and believe them to
be big enough; make friends and keep them. I have recently taken to walking on
campus after wrapping up my classes with my headphones plugged in and listening
to the closing act of Swan Lake. Now THAT
is November at its best, coupled with the occasional chili prawns from the
cafeteria soaked in just the right consistency of unpalatable grease; grading
that unicorn-ian brilliant essay
plopped onto a cushion in my office, toes basking in my uggs with a steaming cup of
coffee.
That
is how I stumbled upon Mozart’s Cosi fan
tutte, K588 day before yesterday. The
Italian opera buffa literally means ‘Thus Do They all’ (or The School for Lovers)
with the latter libretto penned by
Lorenzo Da Ponte. Technically, the title means ‘Thus do all Women” and the
music was scored to try and capture the duality of women, sung by men who could
never comprehend them. I’ve been listening to it on loop and while my mind has
trouble agreeing with the intonation of all the silly things women are meant to
symbolize, my heart cannot help but melt at Mozart’s rendering. Especially
given the fact that the man in question generally fell far below the standards of what anyone would
consider a gentleman. It is almost as if a Lost Boy, perhaps even Pan himself,
composed a song for a girl and lacked the courage to play it. I can relate,
especially, because I am finally meeting and mingling with women and
ironically, not loathing the experience. As someone, who has generally found it
difficult to cultivate friendships with my own sex, it is a relief to scratch
some very brittle surfaces only to discover kindred souls struggling with the
same emotional see-saws. I have been
trying to incorporate these people in my life on a semi-regular basis and it
has proven to be a fruitful but formidable task. This is perhaps the best of
any worlds I have ever experienced. I hesitate to call it so, but it is almost
a state of grace: Aloneness…with options.
While
I am enjoying the company immensely, I know myself well enough to recognise that I
will never enjoy it enough to submerse myself in it completely. I have and
always will be one of those ‘periphery-friends’. You know, the ones people
remember as an afterthought
‘Whatever happened to her?
Where is she these days?”
I
will never be someone’s somebody
because I can’t reciprocate that need. That isn’t to say I don’t ever feel such
a need. It is an appealing thought, this theory of having ‘your person’ in the
world: pro-choice, at your beck and call to complete your sentences, thoughts
and blanks. My failing lies in a fatuous self-love cloaked (or cloaking / have
never been able to really figure out which) as self-loathing. I somewhat relish the romantic table scraps of being that girl who is hard to forget but even
harder to remember.
