azad

"Anything that doesn't kill you only makes you stranger", says The Joker in The Dark Knight. The quote, obviously a riff on Nietzche's more famous stronger line, was apparently misheard by Nolan but he felt it fitted The Joker's character better so left it at that. I think the Freudian slip not only turned the line more vivid but more instructive too. We do turn more estranged from the world the longer we live, it is just an inevitable byproduct of becoming an ever-larger bundle of contingencies, of carrying memories and habits of a past that gets further and further from the present. 

When I wake up in the middle of the night, especially if I've been dreaming, and suddenly feel harked back to reality as I stand in the middle of the hall trying to switch the light on, disoriented, refusing to let go off the slipping dream-reality, there comes a moment when I feel more here than there, feel the rigid materiality of my real-reality refusing to budge, insisting on my presence, and I finally let go off the images swirling in my head and as I wait for the-here-and-the-now to load itself into a higher resolution, my mind sends a little gif to my internal monitor where I can see myself standing in the hall, bathed in the flourescent white light, completely alone. Its a brief moment that gives me a little shudder and it is almost inevitably followed by an little scene I associate with intense loneliness- That of David Foster Wallace's body hanging in his garage, his dogs circling at his feet, waiting for his partner to walk in and see him like that. 

I have other images associated with people I know feeling lonely (somehow they're always sitting or standing in the middle of the hall post-midnight, bearing all the intense burden of all their life choices that led them to standing there and then; alone) but somehow DFW's suicide epitomises the feeling like nothing else. Perhaps because unlike others Wallace decided he couldn't go on anymore, felt so incapable of connecting with another human that checking out felt like the better option. It was not just the presence of despair but the absence of any hope. 

I recently read somewhere that constant self-reflection and self-pop-psychoanalysis aren't very effective, even detrimental, to our well-being because you can spend a long time picking and choosing, shaping and turning the finite, albeit numerous, incidents and feelings of your life without gaining any deeper insights into your human condition. If a kaliedoscope with its few parts and simple arrangements can keep us so enamoured and occupied for such a long time, I can imagine the effect of tripping (and I use that word pointedly) on your memories and grievances considering you're the protagonist there- alarmingly addictive.

For the longest time I judged people who in instances when overcome by emotion refused to indulge in it and sought distraction. Feelings like melancholy, ennui, existential angst. Speficially because I've always derived an intense masturbatory pleasure in wallowing in those feelings. Now I understand better. While part of it is motivated by the fear of confronting and questioning your comforting assumptions, and another part by the view that people who do go on about it are simply seeking attention (connection, if I were to be charitable), there seems to be the realisation/ belief that retreating from the world, ofcourse with all its cheap thrills (I'm loathe to use the word fake here and I can't really explain to myself why), is futile and self-defeating. It will only make us feel lonelier, bitterer, more confused, more untethered.

The answers, even assuming there are any such ultimate ones, may not be found inside. What we see on the inside, the bundle of images and micro-narratives that we cherish and celebrate and hold dear as our personality, inalienable and alienating, is sometimes better be seen as a series of random events that only seem to hold patterns because we've been privy only to them. What binds them together has got less to do with whatever is immanent to them and more to do with the fact that they are the entire universe (oh how flippantly I use that rich, powerful word) of sensations we've collected, and so we can do nothing better than make convenient narratives out of them. 

What we seem to crave, even in moments of ecstatic individuation, is a connection. Maybe not always with other people but with something else that will still turn our gaze away from the inside. After all isn't one way to annihilate the ego also to become so porous that it is hard to distinguish the inside from the outside. There is still a choice to be made though: do I become one with the mob or one with humanity? 

There is nothing on the other side of that feeling of loneliness; We have to come back to people. 

--

With special thanks, among many others, to Venkat Rao's jaw-droppingly, envy-inducingly brilliant writings over the years, Prof. Subbarao Kambhampati's interview on The Gradient, and Prof. Sean Carroll's interview with Prof. William Egginton's on The Rigor of Angels.