Beep Beep Beep

Beep, tring, blink. My phone lately has started beating its heart way too much. Its constantly running, doing laps tirelessly, singing what sounds like a never ending opera. And I know the reason. Everyone I know and love is far away. Everyone for whom I want to make the effort of passing a cursory smile has packed up and gone. Technology connects, but it also makes me realise how I've left people behind or how they've moved on. Necessary evil. A thorn, prickling and painfully reminding me of things I've let go off. Come home, now. Everyone. Let's kick technology's pretentious ass someday, for a few hours, and let's connect souls and ideas. Face-to-face. Heart-to-heart. Brain-to-brain.

The Ant

As I sit alone in my dimly lit room, watching an ant taking the last crumb of biscuit that I ate a few hours ago, I realised how alone we all are. Someone is dying alone in this moment, someone is being pushed out in this world, only to be raised in the harsh reality of loneliness. We are born alone, we die even lonelier. What happens in the middle is confusion. Our coming to terms with the fact that we in fact are never meant to be together. With other loners. Because that is not the dynamics we were thrown into. The earth itself is alone. Shunted by other planets. A freak.

And we fight. We kill. We manipulate. We try to deceive the truth with lies. I try to deceive truth with the lies. I fight with loneliness. Just to crawl back into its arms in those unique moments of dawn. When I realise that I cannot fight the nature of existence. The only reason this earth is still alive is because its wrapped in a bubble, isolated from the fog of reality.

It's the loneliness that makes "us" survive. But there is no us, there is just existence of us. Because "we" all are alone. That's why we survive. Our individualities. Our own personal breathing space. My own little room with a dim lamp and an ant crawling across the floor with the last piece of biscuit that I ate a few hours ago.

We Are Such Stuff Dreams Are Made On

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. 
We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life
is rounded with a sleep.


~ William Shakespeare (Prospero in The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1)

Scene III Ends

What is it about leaving your home forever and starting a new life?

Nostalgia? Detachment? Grief? Relief? Excitement? Happiness?

It's a cruel realisation of an unclaimed childhood. Where did all those years ago, when I was supposed to be a just another kid on the block?

It's a baffled mind, amazed that there is no sense of loss. No sense of longing.

In the end, it's just plain relief. Relief of a much-awaited exit.

Scene III ends. Exits from left.

Break, Crush, Line

Illusions. All illusions.

I took the pill. Crushed it carelessly. Made a line. Took it in. One, two, three.

You are the worst drug I've ever pulled. Kaleidoscopic nightmare. You blow out the lights I used to make crop circled patterns out of. You make the hazy, monochromatic vibrations in the background fall down with a whimper. As I rise, you pull me down. Clip my wings. Tug on my ankles. You make me black and grey from orange and red.

There is no rehab. There is no way out of the spirals of time.

You are the worst drug I've ever pulled.

What's in a name?

What's in a name?, they ask. Everything, I say. It's the first hem of your soul that you lift for another soul. It's what your parents matter of factly called you when you were born. It's what you sign off your unpublished, sometimes pathetic and sometimes beautifully filled with grief, poems. It's that combination of letters that is printed in your brain and is more important than the combination of letters of your lover's name.

And yet, they aren't unique. Those few letters that make you aren't personal to you. The pieces of your name are snatched and clawed at by thousands, maybe millions of other name hungry souls. Look at the audacity with which we grin at another soul who has stolen your name. "Namesakes" they call them. Thieves in my view.

Another Pooja in Manikaran, Himachal

In Himachal, however, the scale of this name theft is breaking the radar. Ask any beggar girl between the ages of 9 and 12 her name and she will have only one answer. Pooja. Its always the same. P, O, J & A are always arranged in the similar pattern and repeated shamelessly. Has it something to do with the piousness that the word carries with itself or with the goons running that begging racket? Whatever it is, it is heartbreaking to see those intelligent, sometimes unnervingly beautiful girls have the same name.

What's in a name? Maybe, nothing after all.

Never Ride A Bike With the Brakes On

Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else. Try to live without resort to perseverance. But writing is all about perseverance. You've got to stick at it. In my 30s I used to go to the gym even though I hated it. The purpose of going to the gym was to postpone the day when I would stop going. That's what writing is to me: a way of ­postponing the day when I won't do it any more, the day when I will sink into a depression so profound it will be indistinguishable from perfect bliss.

~ GEOFF DYER