Rain Messenger's Diary 3...The Singular in the Plural

Inspiration, they say, is a spark, a sudden unwarned entity that comes on you stealthily and claims its prey when you least expect it, which is totally unfair in itself, as I feel proper warning should precede such an inspiring bout. Creativity is equally uncooperative, even though it is said to be at its sublime best when you are close to nature reverent in its majestic power, it rarely comes at the moment when you want it to fill you. Both, however share a deep bond, its useless to have just one of them (maybe you can still work with neither as I have seen and heard many do) I, inevitably, find it beyond me to catch the both of them in what most heroes in thrillers could do in “one elegant fluid motion” . I am left “slipping and sliding” and looking for uncertain footholds in trying to express what I see or maybe, what I don’t see and rather would have seen.

I am writing this sitting on a lonely beach at night. It’s new moon’s night. I looked into the infinite darkness over the sea. It seemed there was nothing beyond except a huge void waiting to draw me in…of which I knew nothing. The absolute blackness was jarring…it seemed obscene, the perfection of the black envelope almost intruded on my senses it was almost as if it was a personal insult. It reminded me of the incorrigible sea of ‘humanity’…teeming millions yet unworthy of notice…unforgivable in its mediocrity…its forgettable convictions and its sickening desire to do with whatever is given to them as leftovers of someone’s charity.

Contrary, to what you maybe thinking now I am not bitter towards them neither do I feel pity…its just an observation of a statement like the sun rises in the east (forgive the cliché…somehow all of us come up with this only one example when talking of absolute truths in this relative world)…and in the irrevocable truth of the statement I also find a resigned acceptance of fate. I do not feel or dream to be the avenging crusader who will change the order of things. I merely, observe and sadly, comply with the mass trying to be “as honest as you can make of a dishonest thing”…as in spite of it all we are nothing else but an assimilation of masks and unabashed liars---human liabilities.

Call it weakness or cowardice but somehow I do not think the Howard Roarks (or maybe you cannot refer to them in the plural they are unique in their singularity) are real in today’s world. Is it really possible to hold on to one’s belief…one’s idea of ‘right’ in this world? In this world where truth is merely what the majority believes…Is it possible to hold out against all the scavengers of the hypocritical civilization with just one’s perception of the ultimate beauty as the sole weapon?

The strength comes from the acceptance of numbers and no matter how indifferent we are to their ignorance …it pulls us down. It is something like what we learnt in Physics called ‘group velocity’…you may have a very high velocity of your own but you are still moving at the group velocity.

However, this does not mean I believe in bending over or changing myself according to the whims of the mass, which sadly is more unstable than the Indian Bureaucratic system. It is just that I feel in order to make a small difference in the system you have to be part of the system. If you are out of it, then you are just an insignificant nonsense caught between the infinite void of the universe and the infinite void of the mass’ mind. We have to be singular in the plural.

It is surprising how people change in groups, how one’s perception of beauty with what other so-called experts say is beautiful. No one will ever say he disliked a piece by Rembrandt, because then people would question his sense and brand him naïve and hence, we blindly comply, we fall in, and march on to oblivion.

As long as it is complicated enough, or seemingly complicated enough to appear incomprehensible respect comes naturally to us, it is like the truant who respects all his textbooks but never touches them. How is it that one sees or recognizes perfection? It is again not advisable to talk of perfection in a world that believes in “self”-lessness…that believes in the greatest lie ever formulated---“working for the greater good” and “work without expecting results.

We are all egotists or rather we should really want to be egotists, to take pride in what we do and not crib and go crawling on our knees for approval, looking for redemption begging for pardon as for the sacrilege we have committed for doing something just because that defines us, makes us stand apart…ugly yet beautiful in its blatant refusal to be the textbook hero and ride into the sunset.

The greatest egotist is maybe Nature. Its insolent indifference to all the adulation and appreciation heaped on it by mankind and yet its absolute ignorance of the apparent insolence that it exhibits towards humanity, makes it so loveable to all of us and yet its distant beauty is never touched, seldom understood and rarely remembered but the Nature goes on. Its motive itself and herein lies its success. We are all lonely but how many find it in us to be indifferent to it?