The Book of Disquiet ("I am Someone Else's Dream")

We, humans, are people who by and large live and behave conforming to our social identities. A waiter who looks and behaves truly as a waiter; a priest, truly as a priest; a manager, truly as a manager; and so on. You can often see a Brahmin, whose appearances, behaviour, habits and the symbols he is wearing gives an unmistakable look of a Brahmin. So does a Muslim, and so does many others. Barring the social identities, which we conform to, what are we? Merely humans? I don't know if I can say that. But I always feel I have to assume an identity externally to fit into situations, social expectations and my profession, although internally I feel differently. Yet, how others look at me, the identity they assume in me, which may be expressed in their occasional, unsolicited feedbacks, suggestions or remarks, is still something entirely different. This difference between what I internally feel what I am, what I have to assume and show externally, and what others assume about me, this suffocating rift between different identities of mine, is, what I think, Fernando Pessoa's writings try to express. Maybe, Pessoa is much more complex than this; maybe he is much more different. But I am talking about what I could capture from his writings.

What I feel internally is not very coherent. It always drifts freely. I feel differently at different times. I have altogether different and often conflicting thoughts at different times. For that matter, none of my identities are the same. None of them are coherent. I have no integral identity. This lack of integrity is confusing and the root of a lot of existential anxieties. Normally, people may not take it seriously. Many may not even be aware of this. Some might be aware feebly, but would not have thought about it. What if I take it very seriously? What if I try to analyze myself and my identities so seriously? Then I will become Pessoa! Can I say that?

Pessoa identified his different kinds of thoughts and he realized they were even different types of thought processes. He was crazy, he gave different identities to them, inventing different names and biographies for each of them. He allowed each of them to write poetry, creating varieties of poems. Each expressed different philosophies, different themes. He called his different identities 'hetronyms'. 

'The Book of Disquiet' was written by Bernando Soares, one of Pessoa's many hetronyms, and this book is perhaps the only prose Pessoa has written. Written as a series of daily journals, the book expresses the core of Pessoa's inability to conform to an identity, or his lack of identities. If no identity is assumed, I feel myself only as a consciousness through which thoughts, dreams, imaginations are flowing incessantly, incoherently, discontinuously. What can I make of them? What do I perceive as the center of my thoughts? The thoughts and dreams are not part of any identity. So, I may feel they lie outside me. Everything I see, sense, perceive is me. I am in the clouds, in the horizon, in the wind. My life just pass through and my experience of it is quite detached from me. This detachedness can be sensed in every line in the book. Moreover, when I write it assuming an identity – Bernando Soares – what do Soares feel? He does not have a body for himself nor any sensory organs. What he sees, hears, experiences, are all through Pessoa's body. This makes Soares feel more detached from the experience than he should be. And that makes the writing more abstract and beautiful. For example, Soares feel he is imprisoned inside an infinitely large prison, which, because is infinite and hence is as large as the world, cannot be escaped. His inexpressible desire, which is repeated throughout the book, is not to have been existed. He does not desire to exist nor cease to exist, for both for him are meaningless. He desire not to have existed, to have been saved from the emptiness that he is experiencing. He is very keen in observing everything, living and non-living, around him. Perhaps, he is helpless in that he can't help observing all that happens, even the minute and insignificant experiences and sensations. A sight of the sunset, clouds, rain or the blue sky creates uncontrollable flow of thoughts in him. Thus he feels connected to the world around him. He is so alone yet connected to everything around. That makes his loneliness more suffering. “Whether I like it or not, in the confused depths of my fatal sensibility, I am all these things,” he writes somewhere. He also writes, “I look for myself, but finds no one.” And he is disturbingly aware that he doesn't really exist but his whole experience comes through some one else's body. Thus he writes, “I do not know if I exist, it seems possible to me that I might be someone else's dream.”

All the dreams, imaginations, thoughts, all uncontrollable, makes Soare's mind always noisy. This disquiet is what the name of the book implies. The Book of Disquiet. I am only half-way through the book. It is abstract, disturbing yet addictive.

Sandeep

Bangalore

17-Sep-2015

On Music

When I have nothing to hold on to,
I hold on to music,
Which helps me to be unaware of
The abyss of existential absurdities.

Lost Speech of the Nature

I love closeness of the nature. I always thought the nature taught me something. I always thought the nature spoke to me. I always thought I could hear the nature's speech.

When the cool breeze caressed my face, I listened to it, to understand what it was saying to me. When I saw a lone white cloud in a large empty blue sky, I thought the cloud was smiling at me, rejoicing in its own solitude.

I realize. A new knowledge comes to me. I decipher, from the silence of nature itself.

It was an illusion. Nature is just dumb. It teaches me nothing. It does not have its own speech.

It is I who learns from the nature. It is I who speaks to me as if nature speaks. It was my speech that I was hearing all the time. Nature thus lost its speech in front of me.

I am relieved. No more outside speech I have to listen to. It is my speech; it is my own responsibility.

It is my own radical responsibility.

Sandeep, 
Chennai, 
2-July-2015.

My New Tumblr Blog for Excerpts from My Readings

I have just created a new writing space for me. Here I'll keep posting interesting excerpts from things I read, which will include books, websites, papers, etc., and topics can be general to engineering to psycho-analysis. It can be Malayalam or English. Keep tuned if you think you'd be interested.

Link : http://sandeeppalakkal.tumblr.com/

-Sandeep

Evening At Kotturpuram Tree Park

I have lived in Bangalore a couple of years back. It was my lonely days. I loved Bangalore mainly for its small parks in some nooks and corners. After work, while I return to my room, I used to go to some park and spend some time there. People come there for evening walks. I go there with a book and read it. Those were some serene moments in my life. I remember reading Kafka, Sartre, etc. in parks in Bangalore. That was an exciting feeling. Exciting times too.

Chennai has less parks. But there are a few. There's one near my apartment in Kotturpuram: The Kotturpuram Tree park. The place was a waste yard a couple of years back and an organization, Nizhal, in collaboration with the Chennai Metro Corporation built this amazing park by planting trees and nurturing them systematically. Now it has a lot of trees and walkways for morning or evening walks. You can go and sit there and forget that you are in Chennai. The breeze coming from the nearby Adyar river cools down your body as soon as you enter the park.

I go there in the evenings for a walk or just to sit and look at the river to ponder upon the existential aspect of everyday life. There will be boats in the river rowed by people. Possibly they are from the Adyar boat club. Sometimes, I take some book with me to read. I'm reminded by those Bangalore days. Today, while I was reading, I took an occasional glance at the river. I felt that the top edge of the wall between me and the river was moving. Was it some kind of an optical illusion? I looked again. There you are! A snake slowly advancing along the net tied above the wall. My immediate reaction was, naturally, fear! Now I am not a child, but a grownup adult. I said to myself, calm down, it is just a snake and sits a few meters away from me. Instinctively, I looked around me, on the stone chair I was sitting and under it, to check whether there was a snake lurking around near me. Because I was so lost in my reading!

https://plus.google.com/103900313920820487498/about?gl=in&hl=en

http://www.nizhaltn.org/

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/Tree-park-to-come-up-in-Kotturpuram/articleshow/6389482.cms

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-downtown/tree-park-draws-community-participation/article3822768.ece

Trauma of Knowledge

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety!"

--W. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra 

This is what I feel about knowledge. The more you know, the more unsatisfied you become. You want more and more knowledge. You want to learn everything about everything. There is no particular motivation for learning. Learning itself is the motivation. The desire to learn is a fire within you, which you cannot quell in any manner. 

Perhaps, this very inability to disengage myself from learning, the very fire within me that torment me all the time, this unquenchable thirst for knowledge, to master new and advanced knowledge, the guilt that arise within me when I am aware that I have not learnt enough yet..... Perhaps, this is my psychological trauma, the chaos within me. 

But I am powerless. I give up the struggle to be stable, sane and calm. I submit myself to the fire within me. I imagine that I am a machine, a learning machine. I am a machine that continuously learns. Only limit is the limit of my brain, intellectual capacity and ability to imagine and remember.

Oh, my non-existent god!** Please watch over me and save me from being eaten by wolves.

(**"Oh, my non-existent god!" is my copyrighted phrase. Don't copy without prior permission. You will be executed prosecuted.)

Who Am I? The Modern Answer:

I am what the neural network in my brain feels what I am [Period]

Philosophy Out of Nowhere

I am not a pervert. What I meant is I am not religious and I don't care a damn about god (Why don't the god care for me instead?). I love those cognitive psychologists and neuro-scientists who declare that the Self (or rather the sense of having a Self) depends just on how the way the neural network in your brain has evolved. The most mysterious fact about neural network (at least the artificial neural network) is that we don't know how it works, but damn! it works! That is, I think, materialism at its best. In a way that is the Kantian materialism (transcendental idealism), which says one cannot ever know what is the essence of things, but only the physical, empirical phenomena that one can experience through ones own senses. It justifies the attitude that I enjoy even though I don't understand [it]. That is how I do engineering. I don't understand any of it, nonetheless I am good at it (Ain't I?). But at the end, I think, it turns out that pure materialism such as neuro-science is boring. Things get more interesting when we interpret them. In neuro-science, there is no interpretation (I don't know, but I am just shooting. Isn't it worth a shot?). Only psychoanalysis interprets and it does it so beautifully. Why should we care if the interpretation is true or not? Why should we care if it represents the true essence? I don't care. I enjoy the interpretation in spite of my ignorance about its true nature. Pure materialism is dis-interesting. I am not a nihilist, but one who traversed his own nihilism. So I like fiction. Fiction adds meaning to empty materialist life. In a way, our thoughts constitute a form of narration. It narrates our own story to ourselves. That is why we feel life is meaningful. If you feel that your life is meaningless, then you must understand that meaninglessness is the narrative trick your mind uses to find meaning in meaninglessness.

That is all for now. Good bye!!!

-Sandeep

A View of the Sky

A view of the open sky is so cold, empty and meaningless.
The sky gets meaning, when seen through the gaps between interwoven twigs and leaves.
That is what I think.

Black Widow 1987: The Psychic Anatomy of a Secret Agent

It is interesting why a secret agent is a recurrent character in movies. Hitchcock himself has almost all his movies full of officers in charge of investigations. Perhaps what is exciting about a secret agent is the need to assume multiple false identities at different point of time and search for some elusive truth within the complex framework of reality. Again, reality is different from different perspectives and this makes the job of a secret agent all the more difficult. Isn't it that every man's life is like that? Aren't we playing the game of the secret agents in our own lives to create a sense of reality or meaning from the incomplete knowledge we have about our surroundings and affairs? In this sense, the story of a secret agent is the story of the every-man!

Black Widow Poster

Black Widow (no relation with the Black Widow character in Avengers, etc.) is an exciting movie with a thrilling plot, directed by Bob Rafelson in 1987. It is a story of a female secret agent, Debra Winger, who is so much engrossed in her own shitty job despite that she hates the job itself, the work environment and the bureaucracy. Her attachment to her job is pathologically obsessive. There is an interesting scene in the beginning of the movie in which her personality starts unveiling. The guy who works along with her and helps her get information she needs has a crush on her. Perhaps, he knows that she is so much obsessed with her job that he is very reluctant in expressing his crush. So, as if he is joking, he invites her for dinner. She coldly declines the invitation and says with him it will not be proper. With this, she indirectly acknowledges his crush. Understanding this, he asks if it is because of the company policy (Many companies and authorities explicitly prohibits their employees to date each other), and she says yes. Her yes is not really convincing. It appears that she just wants to avoid the discussion. The guy jokingly replies that to date her he is ready to quit the job and then no policy will come in between. The girl, who was so cold till then, gets obviously upset and pleads not to resign because he is her right arm! The guy is obviously frustrated by her serious response to his joke. Evidently, the girl is so much obsessed with her job and is unable to look at her colleague anything other than as a colleague. He does not enter her mind as a human being, or a friend, or a lover, but only as a useful co-worker. I want to argue that it is her job that has made her so much obsessive towards itself, alienating her from being a normal human being, who can feel crush on a guy.

The case she is recently obsessed with is that of a series of deaths of middle-aged millionaires, who die almost in the same manner (a peaceful death while sleeping). After their deaths, the millionaires'  wealth goes to their young wives. The problem is that in all the cases the wives were much younger than the millionaires and were very recently married to them. The secret agent suspects that these wives are the same woman assuming multiple identities. Indeed, she is right: it is a smart, cunning, young woman, Theresa Russel, who romantically and sexually seduces her victims, gets married to them and then kills them with a poison. Even though Winger's suspicions are true, the manner in which she is obsessed with Russel and the murders she commits is pathological. Winger's behaviour almost suggests that she is in fact jealous of Russel, her sexuality, seduction abilities and smartness. For example, she tells her boss that she knows Russel's character very well because she [Winger] herself was abused as a child by her own father brutally and therefore keeps some kind of hatred against middle-aged men. She says Russel also must be the same kind of a woman, abused in the childhood by some middle-aged man and obsessed with taking revenge against middle-aged men whenever possible. The boss believes this and shows sympathy. But she immediately laughs and says she was joking. The boss was relieved, but what if she was not joking? What if the story she said about her own childhood was, in fact, true? If yes, it is she, Winger, who keeps a grudge against middle-aged men. Perhaps, she is unable to express it freely, but instead projects her own grudge on Russel, who is anyway a murderer. Which explains the reason behind her obsession with this case. She wants to prevent her own fantasy (of taking revenge against middle-aged men) from becoming real. Having known about Russel and her murders, the only way to prevent her fantasy becoming real is by preventing Russel from killing more men. So she decides to chase Russel by assuming a different identity.

Russel is not an idiot. She senses somehow that Winger is the woman officer who is investigating her case. She decides to play a seduction game in front of Winger by introducing Winger to Russel's new victim, who is another wealthy millionaire. Russel allows Winger to develop some attraction towards this man. It is evident  from a single scene that Winger buys it and gets herself victimized. There is a scene in which Russel romantically talks to the man knowing that Winger is watching them from a distance. The camera then goes to Winger's point of view. Winger innocently stares at the distant scene, as if she is watching a movie or fantasizing the scene itself. The very quality of fantasy is this: it allows one to imagine ones own desire getting fulfilled, staying at a safe distance, without really getting involved in it. This scene shows that Winger is seduced by Russel, her beauty, her charm and her vice.

There are scenes in which two women come in close contact, in beach, under the water, in the bed room, and so on. In those scenes with explicit sexual overtones, I found my own desire yearning to be projected on the scene: my own desire to see both beautiful women kissing each other! I am not ashamed to admit it, but to see two women kissing, I think, some sort of sexual fantasy every man keeps under his conscious mind. The kiss ultimately happens but not with the sexual overtones, but with the overtones of revenge.

Russel finally manages to kill the man and able to synthesize evidence against Winger, who gets arrested. At this point, one cannot but sympathize with Winger. Her own obsession and search to find the truth lead her to the snare masterminded by Russel. Russel can ultimately inherit the wealth of the dead man. However, his will stipulated some charitable donations to some cause, which Russel overturns, saying that her husband had "reservations" against the charitable trust, which is a lie. 

We see a successful Russel coming to the prison to meet Winger. There she encounters her dead husband alive! Now it turns out that it was Russel who was actually caught in the snare designed by Winger. Winger knew how Russel was going to commit the murder and was able to prevent it. Russel's attempt to overturn the charitable donations in her husband's will makes the husband, who is actually alive, to realize her betrayal. Having realized that she is found out, Russel peacefully surrenders herself to the police officer, who was waiting. 

To prevent the murder, fake it, take responsibility and turn herself in to the police! Admittedly, Winger went too far to prove her case and create evidence against Russel. However, nowhere in the movie, Russel was shown from suffering from psychic disorder. Of course, when she finds out that she has been followed by Winger, a law officer, she overtly expresses her frustration. But, to my eyes, it did not appear as anything unusual. She is, maybe, just a clever minded criminal. But the steps taken by Winger, the secret agent, shows how pathologically obsessive she is. The plot shows how the murderer is just a criminal, while the investigating officer can be pathologically ill.

Men In Black

After maybe ten or fifteen years, I recently watched Men in Black (MIB) again. It was interesting. In The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Zizek says,

"If something gets too traumatic, too violent, even too filled with enjoyment, it shatters the coordinates of our reality. We have to fictionalise it. The first key to horror films is to say, “Let’s imagine the same story but without the horror element.” This gives us, I think, the background."

MIB is not really a horror movie. But it has this something, which is too traumatic, exotic and excessive an element, in it: the aliens. The weird looking aliens, who have come to the earth and made some kind of a pact with the scientists and authorities and are living along with humans on the earth.  By and large, they are nice "people" but occasionally, they can go wrong. Which is why there is a secret investigative department (of MIB) to investigate alien criminal activity on the earth. Nobody other than those with the MIB (and possibly a few scientists and those in the government) is aware of the aliens' presence and activities on the earth. In case someone sees the aliens or comes in contact with them, the MIB uses some kind of neuralyzers on them and thus they immediately forget what they have seen or experienced. Tommy Lee Jones works as an MIB agent, and Will Smith is a police officer, who has no clue about the aliens and their presence on the earth, and whom Jones tries to and later succeeds to recruit to his department, eventually to replace Jones' own position. Jones wants to retire. While retiring, the MIB agents use neuralyzers on themselves to forget their career and everything about the presence of aliens on the earth. Jones wants to retire because, he says, he has seen enough of vulgar things and wants to lead a normal life for the rest of his life. He wants to forget what he has seen and done during his career as an MIB agent. What he actually dreams of is that he can simply forget his boring career, unburden himself of his responsibilities and memories, go back to his actual life and have a reunion with the woman he loved once. 

Alien Adjusting The Human Body It Intruded

If we remove the seemingly excessive narrative about the aliens from this story, what we get is the story of a secret agent, who has been doing all the dirty work for those in power. He is self-disgusted and bored of his own job and career. He believes that his boredom is not because of his job but because of some kind of sacrifice he made for the benefit of humanity. He does not know that he actually hates his job. That is why he cannot simply resign and go without handing over his responsibilities to a new recruit. He believes what he does is very important for the society and even without his presence, the society and his job should go on without troubles. Though he is old, the woman he left before is young in his imagination, and he truly believes he will have a happy reunion with her. One can immediately see through his illusion! Anyway, to really see if he had a happy reunion with his woman, I will have to watch MIB2. By reading the short summary on MIB2, it appears that Jones' character was not left free for himself and to lead his whatever life, but called back again to be an MIB agent to fulfil his social responsibilities. 

Neuralizer

There is actually a point in the movie when Jones' thoughts are revealed to the audience. When Will Smith was called for the tests before he can join MIB, he did not know why precisely he was there. While he questions the examiner, the examiner in turn asks another candidate something like "Why exactly he was present there." The candidate stands in attention almost with the naivete of a school boy and replies that because he was the best of the best or some bull shit like that. Smith immediately laughs this off and says the kid does not even know what he is saying. Jones is also such a kid, who believes in the greatness of the MIB work. But Jones also secretly knows that it is all just bull shit. We can read it in the faint smile that Jones gives as he secretly observes Smith replying to the examiner. Smith knows the other candidate's belief is an illusion, but is still curious about MIB and would want to join. He knows the futility but denies it. In simple terms, he is a pervert who despite knowing an illusion as illusion, nonetheless, denies it is an illusion and wants to affirm it as his true belief. Perhaps, that is why Jones recruited him. Smith grooms to be a good agent, who, instead of dreaming a woman outside MIB, finds a woman and her makes her join MIB and starts screwing her. After all, perverts always prove to be fighters par excellence for the [whatever] cause they believe in!

Perhaps, a job in this capitalist world is psychically experienced as so traumatic and violent that, even though it brings money and means and enjoyments with it, one cannot imagine a happy, peaceful life without inventing some sort of weird narratives, e.g., about aliens, to justify his/her taking up the job. By imagining ones job as a social responsibility, one believes one can avoid any feelings of guilt, but in fact another kind of guilt follows for the rest of the life.