Wednesday, May 01, 2013

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

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