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.