Waiting for Lethe

As I lay stricken, the evening sun streamed through the window, the only source of light in my swiftly darkening room. The light fell upon a pile of dirty clothes. Nature itself was bent on showing me my ineptitude, it seemed.

I glanced around in the gloom. I could see the layers of dust lying on my bookshelf, proof of weeks of neglect. My books, my most worthy possessions, even they were not exempt from my neglect, from my laziness. If I could not find time for even them, what purpose did I serve by living? I had no friends. I was not made for friendship. And those few that possessed the tolerance to cure me of my solitude, I had successfully managed to repel and repulse with my impossible expectations. I constantly demanded perfection of them while maintaining that I owed them nothing in return. It was only now -    lying crippled as I was with no hope of recovery – that I realized that I did not want friends. Indeed, quite the opposite. I wanted mirrors. Everywhere I sought after what I already had within myself. I wished to see myself reflected back to me. And those that did it best, I called my friends.

Tell me, is there any purer form of self love?

I snorted in disgust at myself. There is no easier way to change a stubborn man’s opinion than to place him on his own deathbed and to leave him in solitary contemplation. The death bed is a curious entity. It somehow encapsulates both a space and a fragment of time. Once in that capsule, no matter how pliant or rigid his beliefs heretofore, the death bed renders man’s mind a clean slate. Every single value he has held as worthy will come under the most severe scrutiny in his final moments. It is no surprise that man oft wishes for a swift and unexpected death. It is not, as is commonly believed, because man is afraid of the pain he will face. Oh, no, no. Mankind has a much higher tolerance for pain than he himself wants to believe. But it is this questioning of beliefs that he wants to avoid. Every man subconsciously knows that he cannot be one hundred percent sure of the righteousness of his beliefs. He may have stood sturdy as a pillar, immovable in his faith in that ideal, but in those final moments, he cannot help but think, “What if I am wrong?” All activities he carries out before his death are a desperate attempt to conceal this doubt.

Well, this phenomena happens to the best of men. What chance did I stand?

Every noble cause I had propagated, every high morality I had preached, seemed hollow and superficial to me now. Only one prospect loomed large, towering over every other concept, dwarfing every other thought in profundity, whether physical or metaphysical. The prospect of final annihilation.

When man travels along the edge of the precipice of the abyss, when he sees nothing before him but a vast, unconquerable, insurmountable, impenetrable darkness -  when he is struck by the knowledge that he will inevitably topple over and descend into that horrific unknown  - how is he expected not to spend every moment preceding that in mortal dread of exactly that occurrence? It is the greatest feat of our subconscious that we are allowed to live our lives more or less ignorant of the magnitude of the fear that really resides within all of us. But at the very end of the journey, just when we need it the most, our subconscious gives way. It succumbs to the overpowering torrent of fear that reawakens at the sight of the abyss. And the torrent, building in pressure over a whole lifetime, sweeps all other emotions before it and deposits them unceremoniously into the dark recesses of our mind. They become the flotsam and jetsam of the mind, the unwanted residue that takes up space and pollutes the waters. Our mind is working overtime at this point, trying to fathom what it cannot. Trying to grasp what is not tangible. A person is the wisest he has ever been right before he dies.

Such was my state. Even as the final rays of the sun flickered out and my room was shrouded in darkness, I felt a chill creep up my spine. I stared at the dark shadow of the door, half expecting to see Death walk in through the gloom. I was ready, that’s for sure, as ready as I would ever be. I had stagnated, and I counted myself amongst the lucky one’s who did not have to see themselves degenerate into mediocrity, but who would perish pretty much at their peak.

However, my mind refused to lie still. It sensed, just as I did, that its time was up. But it did not choose the path of “dignified repose” as I had often dreamt it would during my morbid musings about my own end. On the contrary, it seemed determined to cram in a lifetime of thinking within these last few moments.

It flitted instantaneously back to my childhood, my incredibly pampered upbringing. It dragged from the dregs of my memory the image of the young, innocent, scared little boy whose whole universe was his family and who neither dreamt nor wished to dream of anything outside the realm of his relatives. Those same relatives who today did not know of his whereabouts or his state. The same family that had become estranged and had not spoken or indeed attempted to speak to him in years.

It highlighted, much to my discomfort, the irony that it was my own family that had pushed me to grow wings of my own. Where I would have been happy to lie safe in the nest for the rest of my life, my parents and siblings decided that it would not do, I needed to grow up, I needed to be responsible, I needed to be a man. Well, once shunted down that path, I can at least say to my credit that the job was well done. Too well done, it seems. Now, at the end, I look back and find no one to weep for me.

In the words of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein:
The path to my departure is free. There are none to lament my annihilation.

 Glorious independence indeed!

Night has fallen, and still I wait,
I wait patiently for Death,
For the waters of Lethe to satiate
My heart, to let my brain forget
The woeful tale that life narrates
From birth until my dying breath

As the darkness grew absolute and I seemed to exist in nothingness, my mind took the opportunity to jump to more profound topics. What, for instance, is the best way to go about life? Should one be fearless, Hedonistic, Hellenistic, Moralistic, Amoralistic, Nihilistic or – and I shuddered at the prospect -  is ignorance the path to a happy life? What if the philosopher on the ivory tower, searching the skies for any hint of treasures, misses out precisely because his eyes are turned upwards? Those lowlies whose eyes, and indeed whose beings are forever in the filth, may one day while frolicking about happen upon the treasure that lay concealed beneath the filth.

I chided myself for allowing my mind to wander into such dangerous areas. This line of thought threatened to invert my whole sphere of existence. And normally I used to place myself at the head of the sphere, at the top. If I were wrong, and if it were in fact inverted, then that would mean…

No. It would not do to think this way.

What was the time? How long had I been lying here? Why was I still living? Would Life wait till I had completely exhausted every possible outcome of every possible question before it finally left me? Is that what Death is, the exhaustion of all possible thoughts from the human mind? Does that make reality solely dependent on the functioning of the collective consciousness?

What did these musings have to do with me? Nothing and everything, it seemed. The beauty of universal questions had struck me many times in my lifetime, however their downside was only just beginning to make itself known. Universal questions, as the name suggested, applied to everyone, but because of that very reason, also applied to no one. There was no way to make a universal question an individual one without perverting its meaning. And this close to the end, I had neither the patience nor the inclination to consider the fate of anyone else in existence but myself.

The dogs howl outside my window in a ferocious lament. They know what is coming as well as I, those wonderfully instinctive creatures! How my heart craves to howl with them, How I wish to give vent, to share my final thoughts with the world, so that I may leave some semblance of my existence in the memory of people. The frightful tower looms before me again, it seems doubled in size and menace. The prospect of my annihilation now took on a more terrifying form. It dawned on me that my solitude had allowed my every trace to be removed. I spoke to no one, and so no one would remember me. When I died, my death would be reported, recorded, investigated, dismissed, filed, classified and put away in a drawer. My whole life would be reduced to a label on a file that would never be opened again. In short, oblivion.

I weep. Breaking every promise I had made myself all my life, I weep. What is man’s will in the face of such unquestionable challenges? Some may possess the strength, though I personally doubt it, however I say without any shame whatsoever, that I have been reduced to a quivering mass of flesh. Death scares me. Oblivion scares me. Nothingness scares me. It seems to me that even the Biblical hell would be a relief to me now. At least I would exist! If not anyone else in the Universe, at least I would have myself to speak to, to feel for, to pity!

Bah! Look at me. The man who did not believe in God, who did not believe in the existence of a soul, here I lie, retching, vomiting, wishing for hell, fulfilling my own prophetic self comparisons to Faustus to a degree which I myself would never have expected.

The shadow of the door, lost long since to the darkness, suddenly becomes slightly discernible again. My eyes blink, doubtfully, searching through the dark to get its bearings. It is the door indeed. What can this mean?

A cock crows. Dawn is come!

As the light slowly fills the room, bringing to life one by one objects that I had bid farewell to for all eternity, my heart is overcome. It is overladen with horror, fear, misery and bitterness.

Dawn! A new day! Death had not arrived. Accursed wretch! To condemn me to another day of existence! What sins had I committed to warrant such a fate? Why must I be consigned to live and relive my whole life in my mind over and over again? Was one lifetime not enough?

As always, when a soul cried out in profound grief, the Gods remained silent.

I would have to live through another day. Another day of torment, lying in wait. Waiting for Lethe.

Aeternum Bellum

Over the ages, over the course of history, over the course of life on this planet, there has been only one constant. War. It began at the minutest level, on a cellular level. The first single celled organism, finding nothing else to wage war against, turned upon itself and tore itself into two. Today, we call it reproduction. It was merely, in fact, the cell obeying the eternal law. If you live, you war.

As life evolved, so did the forms of war. Life came into contact with life. Both were subject to the same laws, both must war. And so it was inevitable, in fact, it is surprising that it took as long as it did, for life to begin its war against its counterparts. There developed a different kind of organism. One that needed another’s life to be sacrificed in order to keep on living. This branching off had seismic repercussions. We may trace our Warring instincts’ lineage directly through the ravages of time all the way to this crucial point. From this organism developed the herbivore, then the carnivore, and at last, the all-consuming omnivore. Everything that lived was eventually locked into an eternal chain of predator-prey, predator-prey. This dynamic shaped not only the direction of the organism’s evolution, but along with it shaped the very landscape of this planet. The world as we know it would not exist if this unquenchable drive for war was not omnipresent in all of existence.

But here, Life pulled out a wonderful weapon. It turned this very instinct to its advantage. It had bided its time, waiting for exactly the right moment to stage its ambush, and when the moment arrived, what a marvel it was to behold! A coup that Napoleon or Hannibal or even Genghis Khan would have been proud to claim as his own. Life used War for progress. It turned the instinct for war into a disinfectant. It used War to weed out the weak, to cleanse the species of its freaks. It had discovered “natural selection.” Where War strove for destruction, it found it was only strengthening Life. The strong, now freed from the burden of the weak, bounded ever faster and higher, dodging death nimble footed wherever they went. The species accelerated their evolution, and Life flourished. A masterstroke executed to perfection.

The Warring instinct found itself at war. It had met a worthy foe at last. It was at war with Life. A war that, as yet, shows neither indication nor inclination of ending. Aeternum Bellum.

Up until now, the whole of war was based upon two base instincts, sustenance and reproduction. Even up until man was yet a caveman, in the Palaeolithic era, it was still these same two drives that did the donkey work for the Warring instinct. But here, a novelty made its appearance. Life sensed its own position of dominance and sought to finish off the Warring instinct. And thus, Life produced Reason.

At its inception, it still served merely as a tool to ease the acquisition of sustenance and to achieve reproduction. It was not an open threat to the warring instinct. Life observed gleefully as Reason slowly but surely worked its magic over our species. We began using tools, building shelters, forming clans, developing social systems, languages, identities. We started transcending bestial behavior. Within no time at all, or so it seemed, we had risen so far above the rest of evolution that we had managed to banish the insecurity that was the root cause and loyal agent of both manifestations of the Warring instinct. Man had almost completely removed the risk involved in his obtaining food. He had escaped the fatal dual dynamic of predator-prey. And man had also developed his social system to a point where a feud over a female did not always result in a physical confrontation. Indeed all forms of physical confrontations came to be branded as evil. And War being the most sublime forms of confrontations, it was by default viewed as the most sublime form of evil. Life had thus dealt a double blow. It had kicked War while it was down, and dealt it what some may call overkill.

One may at this point be wondering just why War sat quietly gazing on while Life leaped from strength to strength, developing and perfecting its techniques over millions of years. One may even assume that Life had broken the Warring spirit. Life had triumphed after all. If you thought that, you certainly were not alone. Life itself shared your view, and flourished and multiplied with all the pomp of a new King spraying the contents of his treasury to his peasants.

Nay, you do dishonor to the immortality(and also, immorality) of War if you so blindly narrow its scope. War was not dead. War cannot be, as long as Life exists.

What Life had in exuberance and gusto, it lacked in experience. What Life failed to realize is it was at war with War. It was playing at a game that it was not suited for. It may have won some battles and put up a respectable show, but it was up against a veteran, an expert. One whose entire existence centered around this interplay of predator and prey.

War managed to execute an inversion of such exactitude that the phenomena would pretty much define the concept of poetic justice for the rest of eternity.

It watched, reservedly, as Reason blunted its two most potent weapons, hunger and lust. It suffered the ignominy of being branded as impotent by Life, and it still held its silence. If Life had not by now been bloated with arrogance, it would have found the silence of its opponent disconcerting. What weapon did War possess that allowed it to stand almost nonchalant in the face of Life’s burgeoning display?

It had foresight.

Mankind, spurred on by the ideal of Life and Reason, forgot one key fact. War was a big reason it had reached this point in the first place. Life itself could not flourish without War. When Reason elevated itself to the point where it exiled War from its domain, it unwittingly removed its antibody. Life had lost its disinfectant.

At first, Life exploded with all the jubilance of an animal freed from a cage. Everywhere, progress, no longer hampered by destruction, accelerated to an almost almighty pace. Technology overtook everything and transported man into a world which he himself could not have imagined a mere century ago. New cultures, new ideologies, new beliefs, new philosophies sprang up all over the place. Mankind had conquered the Earth.

But Man was not ready for these heights. He was an untimely occupant of the throne and his stomach was not strong enough. When Man was under the influence of the Warring instinct, he was by necessity hardened, strong, weather beaten, almost invincible. Since the banishment or, to use a religious term, the exodus of the Warring instinct, Man had lost his skill for self preservation. He had gone soft. The body, rid of its antibodies, was now vulnerable to any form of disease.

Disease and stagnation indeed struck Man, and with an almighty blow at that. The origin of Reason was at core a reaction against the Warring instinct. As such, its essence consisted of an ideology that was antithetical to War. The only philosophy that could possibly emanate from that core was the idea of everybody having a “right to life”.

This, then was the masterful inversion that War pulled off. Life had used the Warring instinct to make War work to Life’s benefit, using it to clean away the weak or the flawed while Life itself went from strength to strength. Now War, by removing itself completely, and indeed encouraging Life on its path, set in motion a sequence of events that we are still living out now.

What War foresaw was this:

Life, even at its best, produces a mass of herd consciences, or undermen, and only a smattering of leaders, or Overmen. By preventing War from culling the worst of the undermen, indeed, by preserving and enhancing the breed of the undermen under the guise of charity, Life had tipped the scale completely over to the undermen’s side. They now ran free, larger in number and louder in voice than all of the Overmen.  Formerly, it was the Overmen, guided by the light of Reason, who had successfully kept War at bay. The intricate balance that exists between freedom and prudence was maintained with much difficulty and force of will. However, with the onslaught of undermen in ever rising tides, the Overmen had eventually to give way. This epoch was called Democracy.

How War cackled in glee when he heard this term!

Democracy was the victory of decay, of diminishment, of the process of becoming mediocre and of the loss of values. And it was celebrated as the pinnacle of civilization! Ah, the irony!

Before long the suicidal path that Life had set itself on, hand in hand with Reason, began to show its true colors. The undermen claimed equality with the Overmen. And since the undermen were greater in number, this essentially put the Overmen out of commission in every Democracy.

The herd.

One does not give them the name lightly. Their behavior indeed indicated a form of atavism. The herd mentality aped the bestial behavior that Reason had labored so long to transcend. They had reverted to type. They had become animals again.

This, War foresaw, and this was what it was waiting for. When all of mankind was degenerate enough, when the morality and ideology of mankind had become so disease ridden that it could no longer muster up a spirited resistance, War revealed itself in a new avatar, and stepped back into the arena.

Hunger and lust had failed War. It now took up new minions. Where its predecessors had succeeded due to the element of necessity (both food and reproduction are essential pillars of existence), the new minions of War achieved unprecedented amounts of success with possibly the simplest method of all: Overwhelming the opposition with numbers.

War, the wily General, identified the Overmen as the greatest threat to its cause, and directed the will of the undermen to oppose them. Wherever, on Earth, an Overman arose, he was countered by multitudes, literally droves of undermen bent on nothing else but to quell his glory. Overmen were being singled out and destroyed, picked apart by the ruthless, thoughtless mob. Life teetered on the brink of the abyss. War watched on impassively, the hint of a smirk on its face.

But then one of those queer incidents took place that, though insignificant in themselves, and by no means unique, end up influencing the entire course of history.

In a country where the herd instinct had found its true home, the whole populace of which identified themselves with the “virtues” of discipline and obedience, there existed an Overman. In physique and in health, he was far from superior; however his intellect towered not only above the herd, but even the other Overmen, whether in history or posterity. This Overman, grimacing in disgust at being forced to witness the degeneration of mankind from a civilized species, back into an anarchic beast, encountered a force that had remained hidden from the battlefield of War and Life. The force had only been discovered at all because of the invention of Reason. A force that neither War nor Life had reckoned with, and consequently, neither knew the potential of. The Overman met Idea.

Influenced, almost compelled by this new force, the Overman gave shape to the idea. The Idea that was invisible to all but him till now, was suddenly accessible to the whole world.

The profundity, the elevated nature, and sheer brilliance of the Idea shook War out of its stupor. Dismayed at the force of will of this new opponent, it bent all its energies into destroying the source. It turned upon that greatest of Overmen. The herds gnashed their teeth and stamped their hooves and champed at the bit. They railed and protested and picketed and rioted. They ostracized, stigmatized, terrorized, falsified, calumnized. Not even the Overman could withstand such a relentless torrent. His intellect, stubborn in the face of this unstoppable force, finally broke, and the Overman spent his last years in an asylum. Nietzsche had been overcome.

But what’s this? The Idea still remains? The mob, spurred on by the accumulated confidence of their successes, unites as one to wipe Idea off the face of the Earth, but try as they might, they cannot lay a hand on it. They have nothing to swing their swords at, nothing to set their torches to. Nothing tangible. The Idea was a concept in the mental sphere. The herd by definition had no inclination towards mental exercises. It was a foreign and inaccessible land, and they stood there, helpless.

War bellowed with rage, it turned man upon man, herd upon herd, culture upon culture, community upon community. Everywhere mankind turned, he was engaged in a battle of some form. Destruction and chaos reigns. Out of the blue, Nature, the spectator aeternum, finally weighed in. With one fell swoop, all of Creation was brought down to its knees. The Earth, tilted on its axis, almost as a head bowed in reverent shame. A lesson learnt. Life slunk away back to the depths of the oceans and the recluse of hidden caves. War stood supreme, serene, surveying the landscape, or what was left of it.
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Amongst the rubble, a single boy stirred. He gazed, dumbfounded, at the spectacle he beheld. His whole world, the only world he knew of, had ceased to exist. All that remained were haunting remnants and morbid memories. Weeping with grief, he scoured the landscape that spelled only oblivion.

Why had he survived? What was his purpose? Was there even any such thing as purpose? Was not everything that mankind had ever worked for taken away by their own stupidity? Was mankind’s biggest mistake the fact that they assumed life had a meaning?

He collapsed onto the dusty marble floor, the remnant of some grandiose structure no doubt. Leaning his back against a crumbling wall, he quaked in fear and remorse. Fear of losing his sense of existence and identity, and remorse for the lunacy of his species. Of such vastness was the emotion he felt.

And there, right before him, it lay. Covered in soot, hardly recognizable and obscured even further by his streaming tears, lay the book. Slowly, almost mechanically, he picked it up and swept the dust off its cover.

The title read, "Freidrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil"

He opened the book and began to read. And thus in the boy of fifteen, the Idea was brought alive again.

The Voodoo Doll

Was the Deius first personified
Or a man first made a Deity
Did I have to know that mankind lied?
Just as all seemed fine and I'm pain free
Jab another pin, jab another pin in me

Is love the sole aim of our lives
The goal of all humanity
Is it just I to whom this seems contrived?
Just as all seemed fine and I'm pain free
Jab another pin, jab another pin in me

What happens once a man lies perished
What proof exists of the soul's divinity
Why must I outgrow everything I've cherished?
Just as all seemed fine and I'm pain free
Jab another pin, jab another pin in me

Who flies with me those airy heights
Where none but the strongest eyes can see
Must there be a passenger to every flight?
Just as all seemed fine and I'm pain free
Jab another pin, jab another pin in me

They tell us of man's fall from grace
When he ate off the Forbidden tree;
What? Ignorance to take honour's place?
Just as all seemed fine and I'm pain free
Jab another pin, jab another pin in me

Give me the serpent, give me the fruit
Give me wisdom, Give me the tree
What care I if you don't follow suit?
Hark, human! I am the picture of serenity
Do your pins the honour, jab another one in me

Rukhsheen

Paradise is lost, t’is oft claimed

Morality withered and honor maimed

The tree of life, once stately and proud

Now wears its morbid blackened shroud




As far as my tired eye can see,

There lies evidence of humanity

Naught strikes my view but desolation

Fiery, fiendish, fatal conflagration




But hark! Amongst this desert bare

I hear a voice, “Halt! Who goes there?

What voice lilts thus above the din?

Show yourself, Sorcerer, whatever guise you’re in.”




Behold! The darkness, where has it gone

Whence comes this light, riding swift upon

That chariot of Heavenly light that brings

Fair countenance to the most foul of things




Sand and dust, under her brief toil

Is transformed into the most fertile soil

And the seeds that are planted therin

Rival Eden, indeed the two worlds are akin




T’was not so, how then, it comes to be

That from the very brink of insanity

A fair hand pulls me back into the light

And makes a fool of this Faustian erudite?




I bow to thee, fair muse, contrite

I prithee, by thine divine light

Guide this fool as thou hath often done

Chase away the night, be my sun




The world seems like a less scary place

When I see you and your smiling face

Man and Cockroach

A man was once unduly accosted
By some cockroaches in human form
His words had their cool shell defrosted
And they rose together, in an angry swarm

A flood of words and outrage reigned
"How dare this human wield his Truth!"
Their countenance withered, expression pained
They railed against his injustice, forsooth!

"T'is true we survived the meteor
But we are yet roaches, let us be
Truth brings out our very deepest fear
Strike us not with thine minstrelsy"

But humans are eternally proud creatures
Condescension is their forte
Bovarism reigns supreme amongst their features
And elegant, witty repartee

"Should I let them crawl," thought he
"They are, after all, just roaches
Nay, I'll turn my wrath upon thee
Look, roach! Day of judgement approaches!

I am the court, the Justice Supreme
I will hold the Spanish Inquisition
Blink not, this is no evil dream
This is your demolition

Write, if you can, words this fair
Or else speak not of originality
Crawl back to your sewers in despair
I am a poet, and this is poetry

The Telepathy of Two Lovelorn Souls

It all began with one of those curious coincidences. The kind that make you believe that there is no such thing as a coincidence.

Usman ascended the stairs to his college, just like any other day of the week, brimming with confidence. This was his domain. This was where he shone. In this arena, he was King.

A Dr. Faustus not yet damned to hell, that was how he viewed himself. And not even the Marlovian hero could match the sense of self importance that inflated Usman’s chest as he surveyed all those around him with the smug smirk of superiority.

He had just given a presentation. A presentation on a novel he detested. A novel he considered so beneath him, he hadn’t honoured it with more than a cursory read-over. And his presentation touched levels of sublimity that astounded even his professor. Thus, pride boosted ever higher, Usman strode with all the pomp of Napoleon marching into Italy’s capital just fifteen days after the invasion had commenced.

“Usman…”

He stumbled. He knew that voice. He would know it anywhere. It was her, it was Amin. The most delicate tinkle of Chopin’s piano would sound jarring to his ears after the tenderness he experienced in that one word. That one, halting, faltering utterance by which she beckoned to him. It sounded as if it came from the most perfect chord ever struck on the harp of Angel Gabriel in the ninth heaven. Even hours later, the melody that was her voice resonated in his ears, which had begun to burn a fiery red.

 His proud gait crumpled instantaneously, his smirk vanished and suddenly each of his limbs behaved as a foreign object each with a mind of its own. This was most certainly not his domain. In the arena of love, he was very much the lowly peasant.

  He gazed around reluctantly, his brain furiously searching for the appropriate facial expression to arrange his face into. But try as it might, his face remained rigid, dumbstruck, Bambi like.

“Yes?”, he asked breathlessly.

And then came the moment. Her reply. One of those moments that lovers of literature have learnt only to expect when reading the high poetry of Shakespeare and have learnt never to expect from life. One of those moments when a simple human speech takes flight and soars to such dizzying heights that the bystander is left questioning his own sanity and the authenticity of what he has just experienced.

O! Misery! As if her voice were not sweet enough, as if his heart did not choke with an overflow of honey at the very hint of the trembling voice her feminine lungs forced forth. As if it was not ordeal enough for him to rein in his passion, his overpowering, overbearing, overwhelming lust for her at the sound of her voice alone. But now the voice that so ruthlessly marauded his heart came back with reinforcements. It arrived with heavy artillery to back it up. It arrived with poetry.

Sweet poetry, as thou burst forth from Amin’s angelic lips
Did’st thou spare a thought for this weakling heart
Whose world thou hast set alight in terrible eclipse
Whose sinews of reality thou hast rent apart?

Such power in words he had not heard, not in the learned attacks of Nietzsche, nor in the passionate discourses of Adolf Hitler. They were words darker than the observations of Oscar Wilde. Be it the unrequited love of Faiz, the dark and disturbed wit of Ghalib, the passionate overflow of Beethoven’s anger or the morbid serenity in the gnossiennes of Erik Satie, none could match the depth and fervour of her words. And yet, they were not fancy words. Not in a language tough to decipher in the manner of Spinoza or a Darwin. They were not words so removed from reality that they remained irrelevant like the words of Lao Tse. They were not words that travelled in circles, round and round until they made you dizzy like the evasive arguments of Socrates or Plato. They were words so beautiful and so apt, that he would not have been surprised if the universe’s entire existence up until then had been staged solely to set up this particular situation so that these particular words could be said at this particular moment.

“Could you explain the meaning of proliferate?”, she asked, gazing at him, “Actually, could you explain this whole chapter to me? I’m having a little trouble with my Cultural Studies paper.”

Usman stood frozen, stricken by the beauty of the words, their glorious interplay and hidden meanings. The delicious suggestive subtext. Was there nothing this Temptress could not do? Nay, she is not Amin. Aphrodite reincarnate, that is her true guise.

Neither Da Vinci’s portrait’s mystery
Nor Mozart’s operatic hell
Nor Geoffrey Tempest’s Demonic spree
Nor Black Sabbath’s satanic bell
Can compare for a moment, to Sweet Amin
They are but minions to her, the Glorious Queen

He was afraid, mortally afraid, to meet her eyes. The same fear a zebra feels when it crosses a river. Knowing that crocodiles lurk beneath, but knowing it has no other choice but to cross anyway. His eyes met hers, and he felt the shivers travel all the way down his spine. Even the immortal lines of the Beatles describing one “getting the thrill through the fingertips” seemed slightly underwhelming. What wells of despair, what rivers of melancholy she withheld behind that hardened external cornea?


I see the depth of her love for me within her pining eyes
And its glint that reminds one of long forgotten tears
I see her quivering lip and the silent plea that on it dies
And her countenance struggle to contain long repressed fears 

All this he saw and his heart burst asunder. What grave injustice when an angel, too, is forced to live without the one person who gives meaning to her life. The one shining light in her dark and despairing existence. He could see within those endless depths that were her eyes, remnant memories of the long and innumerable nights that she spent weeping over the fact that she had lost him. Her flight to salvation had arrived to save her, but she had overslept.

He had always had a sympathetic heart. When it came to love, his will was always weak. He could not see her this way. Silently, he reached for her notes and then clasped them, dearly, tenderly, to his chest.
Signifying to her that no matter if she be delicate as a paper leaf, he would always be her stapler.

The message was not lost in translation. Immediately, a beautiful radiant flush began to creep up her cheeks, reminiscent of sunrise on a summer retreat in a mountain resort. He could almost hear her heart go aflutter when his finger brushed against hers while taking hold of her notes. Her breathing, usually more imperceptible than calcium deficiency spots on an albino, suddenly began to grow raspy and short. She lowered her gaze immediately and, to his eyes at least, in the same manner as Helen of Troy must have when she first came upon Paris.

But suddenly a terrible thought took hold of his brain. Perceiving the extreme effects his presence was having on her, seeing her in such an excitable state, hearing the rhythm of her heart upset itself, stutter and start over again, he feared for her. The angel was in love, but she possessed not the strength for it. Her heart was weak.

Learned creature of God that hath captured my soul
I prithee, descend not from thine Olympian altar
Stay thee elevated, and keep the heart that thou hath stole
Lest much intimacy betwixt us cause thine own heart to falter

No. It would not do. He would not have the death of such a noble and beautiful creature attached to his being. It would be a scar, a dark, brutal blemish that no future feats or even miracles would conceal.
He spoke as if in a trance. Ignoring the irony that he was teaching a Bhutanese student the need for cultural studies, he pressed on, mechanical in his discourses. However, try as he might to kill the emotion in him, some must have escaped through, for he could see she was not yet rid of the bedazzlement she had fallen under, though she tried to conceal it very well. Her heaving bosom was the only hint of the inward chaos that his presence had wreaked within her. In other respects, she remained chaste as the mother of Jesus.

He had reached the end of the chapter. His eyes made their treacherous journey back to look into her eyes one last time, and when they met, he slipped for just a second.  One second was all it needed. In that one second, the almost feral passion that resided within him gushed forth and inundated his gaze with its intensity.

Nay! Friends, chide him not for his frailty. He, too, is human. He possesses his own set of weaknesses. And such a test as this proved to be one step too far for his heart. It was but a droplet from the ocean of his passion that broke through his defences and entered his eyes, but a grain of sand in the deserts of Egypt, but a leaf in the vast Amazon. Just one fragment, and she was overwhelmed.

Her look, O! Would that Homer were present to witness her expression, a thousand Odysseys would he have sacrificed for the Honor of describing that divine vision. Imperceptibly, she nodded at him, whispering the words loaded with emotion, “Thank you, I understand now.”

And lo, he was at peace. She knew! She had witnessed the abyss that resides within him from whence the molten lava that was his love for her streamed forth. She saw the fire of his emotion, spitting and crackling with the fury of Mars and carrying within them the very flames of hell. Tolkien’s Mount Doom would be put to shame by the splendour that resided within him. Dante would be forced to redefine the term inferno if he were present to witness this spectacle. He knew she had witnessed it, because he could see the reflection of his fiery flames reflected off the sweet moistness that touched her glistening lips.

O! Dread! For those words she spake
That snapped her heart in twain
O! Dread! That for this mortal’s sake
An Angel cries in pain

“Goodbye,” she said.

Usman’s heart raged, roaring in anguish at the prospect of separation. It sent out an animalistic scream that split the very fabric of the atmosphere in two, a primitive cry almost in defiance of every Divine creature from Zeus to Hades, just challenging them to bring a single tear to those incarnations of unfathomable perfection that were Amin’s cheeks.

But that same heart knew that it was necessary to leave, for love’s own sake. He was the forbidden tree in her garden of Eden. She could not possess him without losing herself. And he could not bear to be the reason of her downfall. One original sin was quite enough for a lifetime.

And so it was over.

The greatest flame of love that every burned bright
Was doused before it could even be set alight

Of the Purpose of Friendship

Today, our planet is miniscule to us. Two things have contributed to this, our knowledge of the size of the universe and our planet’s size relative to it, and the advancement of communication technology.

In earlier, more innocent, or one may argue, more ignorant times, we imagined that this planet was immense, the entirety of the universe maybe.  Now, with the internet becoming a necessity rather than a luxury, no corner of the world is out of reach for us. The planet lies at our fingertips.

While this has its obvious advantages, which I will not get into here, it brings along with it certain complexities that did not previously exist to this degree. I speak of human interaction.

A comic strip I recently read stated that “Happiness is your family staying at least one expensive plane ride away.” The point it made was valid, almost profound. It is too easy for everyone to reach everyone today. Distance is no longer a barrier to contact. And so clarity in dealings with fellow sophisticated primates becomes all the more crucial. One must know what one is doing when maintaining a bond of any kind with one’s fellow beings.
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Social existence was conceived by man, evolutionarily, to improve his chances of survival against nature. We may safely say he succeeded. The fact that his survival is now threatened by these very same social contemporaries does not take away from its success. He has managed to at least alleviate some degree of danger from predators and natural calamities, though it will never be completely alleviated.

 Having banished that problem, the use of relationships evolved. A study of history will reveal that the greatest benefit mans social nature has granted us is the sharing of knowledge. We have, through the cooperation of man with man and the magic of communication, been able to erect monuments, philosophies, technologies and ideologies, not a single one of which could have been created without the platform provided by the men before us. A child in today’s world has access to information that has been in existence and is being collected since as long back as 3000 BC. Before the age of 25, he can acquire information that on his own would not be knowable to him in a million lifetimes. Relationships provide one with the benefit of tackling many different problems at the same time, or tackling the same problem in many different ways. No two men are alike, and therefore, their method of approach must also necessarily be different, the slightness in the degree of deviation is irrelevant. The repeated and ruthless testing of facts by the men of science ensure that we do not rest our research on shaky foundations. They have built us a platform of reinforced titanium. From here the only direction we can go is upward.

So, relationships are then to lead us to a higher form of existence. I speak of higher forms not in the supernatural or religious sense, but in the worldly sense. They are to help make us what we could not be on our own. That is their true purpose.


In each friendship, there is the host (the individual) and the guest (the friend). A friendship may occur when the will or spirit of the host comes into contact with that of the guest. As to what form of friendship results from the meeting, is decided by the nature of their respective wills.

The friend is here referred to as the guest because he requires admittance from the host. In some cases the admittance is given reluctantly, but nevertheless, a “friendship” cannot occur without the host allowing it. The host is breaching the defenses of his self in order to allow the guest in, so that he (the host) may experience and learn things that would not be possible on his own. However, this pre-assumes the admittance was voluntary.

Where the host’s will is much weaker

Abusive: In some cases, the will or spirit of the guest is so overpowering, so overwhelming, so all encompassing in comparison to the host’s own, that the admittance is acquired by sheer force rather than by willful consent. These circumstances, where the host has little or no force of will in comparison to the guest’s, are the ones that give rise to all forms of abusive friendships. The host is, in this case, a helpless pawn. The guest may do with him as he pleases, use him as a tool and then toss him aside when he is no longer useful. No control resides with the host, he is now a passenger. In milder cases, the superior will remains with the inferior just so as to have a constant reminder of his own superiority. It is a perpetual ego boost, if you will. In more extreme cases, there is financial, mental, emotional or physical exploitation. This only takes place when there is a massive difference in force of wills.

Other forms of abusive friendships start off as normal friendships, with the host consenting to admit the guest and a mutual benefit occurring. However, in due course of time, the superiority of the one (the guests’s) becomes apparent over the other(the host’s). The guest, becoming aware of the advantage he possesses, begins to wield his power, testing his limits, taking it further and further, until he has absolute control over the host.

In both forms of abusive relationships, the host is unable to break it off of his own volition. Subconsciously, his will recognizes it is in contact with a higher form, and it craves it and is loathe to break it off. Consciously, this may take the form of fear, reluctance, love, procrastination, or any emotion that will put off the thought of breaking off the friendship from his mind. In these cases, the host remains bound to the guest by choice despite suffering abuse at his hands.

This does not include the cases where there is actual physical intimidation from the guests preventing the host from breaking it off.

Non Abusive: A variation of non abusive relationships that results from this type of meeting of wills is that of the dependant host. This occurs when an inferior host will meets a superior, non malicious guest will. The host, consciously recognizing the superiority of the guest, feels indebted to the guest merely for maintaining the bond. What results is the gradual disintegration of the self esteem, morale and confidence of the host. How long it takes for the process to be complete depends on whether the guest acts to impede the process or help it along. But there is no way to put a stop to the process outside of ending the relationship.

Another type, probably the best possible under the circumstances, is that of the imitator. This occurs when the inferior host meets the non malicious, superior guest and spends the entirety of their relationship in an attempt to bring his inferior will up to the level of the superior. This form of friendship is most beneficial to the host, while not so much for the guest. The host has a living model to replicate, he may observe, study, question, practice all the traits of the superior. He lifts his own self to a height he has never been able to scale before. For a weaker will, this is the only form of friendship with a stronger will that is beneficial and true to its purpose. It is the only form that takes him upward and not downwards.



Where the host’s will is much stronger

A Hollywood movie (Revolver) famously proclaimed that, “The first rule of any game is that you can only get smarter by playing a smarter opponent.”

Occasionally, even Hollywood happens upon the truth.

When the will of the host is stronger than the guest’s and yet the guest is let in nonetheless, there can be many precipitating causes. However, outside of boosting one’s self image and reinforcing one’s comfort in one’s own superiority, no relationship of this form yields any true benefit for the host. There may be naïve positives pointed out under the guise of phrases like, “they teach me the beauty of simplicity” or “every man is special in his own way”, but these are empty phrases created to pacify the hearts of those who are vain enough to believe them. One who believes there to be truth in these phrases would also soon believe that Marxism does actually create a classless, sustainable society and environment for the world to live in. And once you have gone down that path, you are lost to logic.

The truth is, when allowing a weaker willed guest, you are diluting your energies. This form of friendship mainly takes place in two scenarios.

The Egotist Friend: This host does not wish to climb higher. His purpose is not elevation. His purpose is impression. He wishes to be considered elevated and achieves his purpose through comparison. He surrounds himself with people who are no equal of his in any way. Instead of striving to achieve a higher existence, he strives instead to feel higher by mingling with the minions. This may achieve the desired result as far as he is concerned. Within his circle, he may be considered with a certain amount of respect, admiration and maybe even awe. However, for our purposes, as far as the true purpose of friendship is concerned, he has achieved nothing. In the best possible outcome, he will have stagnated. In the worst outcome, he will have degraded himself to the point where he no longer deserves the tag of the “superior”, no matter what he is perceived to be. In short, he will have received credit for something that he is not. And how commonly we perceive this tragic phenomenon!

The Charitable Friend: The second scenario takes place when the host, knowing it is stronger, better placed or higher, call it what you will, condescends to befriend the lowly guests, not out of a feeling of self aggrandizement, not out of egotistical ulterior motives, but out of a belief that because it resides on a higher plane, it is somehow duty bound to help others get to that plane as well. The age old dogma that man owes a debt to mankind and must do everything he can to help his fellow beings even at the cost of himself. The motives behind this form of friendship may be noble (If they are genuine at all), however, that does not make them correct. Not in the least. Whenever a will is concentrated downwards, whether for positive or negative reasons, the outcome is always negative on the whole.
Yes, its condescension may have lifted a few paltry guest wills to a slightly better plane, but the duty of the higher will resides in forging a new path, so that the rest may follow more easily. Not in personally carrying the incapable on one’s back and being bogged down by their crippledness. This form of friendship is the most dangerous to the higher will and to humankind at large, because it is regarded as nobility, humility, charitability. In short, it is praised. And thus reinforces the downward course of the higher will.

It is worth considering that this kind of action may be so highly praised because the mob subconsciously always strives to discourage individuals from rising alone too far above the pack, and in this way they cover their malice and insecurity in a cloak of admiration.

When the host is equal to the guest

Neutral wills: This is one of the most commonly found forms of friendship amongst humankind. And unsurprisingly, it is one that does not involve much thought. All the other forms mentioned above and that will be mentioned below, whatever their positives or negatives, had at least this to their credit, that they had a logical thought process behind them. Whether the thought was conscious or subconscious, malicious or gratuitous is immaterial. The thinking was existent and so it lent itself to some purpose. This form of friendship, however, is a thoughtless one. Instinctual, comfortable, easy. One could almost say natural, if only its outcome was not completely counter natural. When a host meets a guest whose will is exactly its equal, but the host derives no effect nor produces any upon the guest, but the both of them merely coexist exactly as they are, that is what is known as the Neutral Will friendship. It is an anesthetic, a zombie mode, if you will. There is no purpose served by this except to while away time, alleviate loneliness, distract one from the harshness of realities. Maybe have a shoulder to cry on. One may even argue that is all one needs from friendship. But again, standing above the narrow, naïve short termed perspective, one must recognize the error in this thinking and guard oneself into falling into this rut. No form of stagnation can ever be productive. And when one is not moving forward, one is always falling behind.

Binary Star
In space, binary stars are two stars that have attached themselves to each other through a common centre of mass. They neither collide with each other, nor do they move apart, but are eternally bonded with each other through their respective gravitational pulls and as a result spend eternity spiraling through space, ever locked in an almighty embrace with each other.

I can find no better analogy to explain the last two forms of friendships, and possibly the two most important ones.

Downward Binaries: Herein lies the most dangerous form of friendship. When two wills of equal might collide, and the host cannot overpower the guest nor allow itself to be overpowered, then two situations may arise. This is the first of them, and the deadliest of all the forms. In the Downward Binary scenario, the host and the guest attach themselves to each other, and from then on ensues what are commonly known as mutually destructive relationships. One complements the other perfectly, but only the negative sides. Neither will is able to bring forth its positive side, and on the other hand, the negative traits of both wills are reinforced. Friendships of this kind are capable of bringing down the highest of wills, and in each case it results in a double tragedy, because not one, but two will spiral down to their annihilation in unison. They each find justification for their actions in the support of the other, and they in turn dispel any doubts that the other may have about the course their lives are taking. They walk hand in hand and willfully traipse towards oblivion, and barring divine intervention, very few forced on earth can stop them.

Upward Binaries: Herein lies the treasure, the arkenstone of friendships. This form is rare, one is lucky if one encounters it even once in a lifetime. Multiple occurrences are almost unheard of. An Upward Binary is a friendship that results when the host admits a guest of equal might, and the two lock themselves in the binary girp. However their spiral goes not down, but up. From the beginning to the very end, this form of friendship serves no purpose but to spur both host and guest on to immeasurable heights. Neither will would be capable of scaling half as high on its own, however every time one falters, the other is there to spur him on, and so on and so forth to eternity. The binary stars may be dissimilar or identical, complementary or clone like, the medium of elevation differs. However, what does not differ is the result. The result leaves both spellbound. And very often leaves something behind them that holds the whole world enthralled. Separating the two is just as improbable as in the case of the Downward Binaries. And truly, to take the analogy further, the binary system is only broken when the stars perish. And usually, when one persishes, the other is not long behind. This bond is more sacred than love, than honor, than loyalty, even dignity. This bond is the only one that succeeds completely in achieving what is, in the end, the true purpose of friendship.