If one stands on the site of human suffering and listens very closely,one can identify the soft insidious groaning silence that cloaks the entire space of suffering,like morning dew. There is immutability to this silence,it has a kind of resistance to time,to change,and when our site of suffering is nothing other than our very own,very private mind, the silence that enamors around us is nothing else,but our own exile. I have always strongly believed that in our lives, we meet a woman, who has such a profound impact on our life that she divides the continuum of our life into a prefix and a suffix. I call this woman, The Woman of our life. A few classic things immediately follow from how we have defined The Woman, such as I, the author has given her the prerogative over the continuum of my life,and that her presence is not guaranteed to be continuous. It’s not necessary that we do end up spending the rest of our life with the woman,or even get to love this woman as much as we want to. However, what we do get to do and we actually do it in this essay is examine the suffix of our life, post The Woman. In what follows, my version of The Woman will be called Irene.
The night Irene left,it was a lengthy Saturday night,with no dawn in sight. I’ve known for a while,that Irene was going to leave at some point,and that point was on some Saturday night in late Indian August. When one stands in front of a firing squad,with absolute knowledge of his demise,he is in some paradoxical way,afraid of the time that passes in-between sound of the gunshot,and penetration of the bullet. He is afraid of possibilities,of chances that he lives,because what will follow,might be worse. Certain events in our lives hammer us down into rubble, and no one is around to break our fall,and Irene leaving, was no different. Even with absolute knowledge of her exit from my life,I was not ready to accept, or even acknowledge her exit. There is a long passage,a self has to undergo between knowledge and realization/acknowledgement,and no one makes this journey within hours,or even years. One suffers through a spectrum of rapidly deteriorating emotions when a person like Irene exits from their life,out of which,the loss of identity is the most interesting bit to me. You see,when someone gives a person,the prerogative over the continuum of their life,their identity becomes a locus,a shadow. Irene wasn’t some external entity of my life,Irene was how I experienced life itself. So,with her exit,my very existence was torpedoed into questioning. I have recovered some semblance of meaning and installed a makeshift identity into my life,but as the pillars of my existence fell down on that lonesome night in August,I have been in an exile from my own life.
Exile in it’s very sharp and blatant ordinariness,carries with itself an unbearable character of persistence. There is no exit,and I don’t remember how I got here in the first place. Kundera’s idea of glorious return comes to a standstill on the very foothills of my existence. There is no concept of return in an Exile and there is an abundance of memories. One must move onward and forward,one must learn to love his favorite memories a little less,one must slowly learn to forget the first song his mother sang to him,or the taste of raw mangoes from his hometown, it is slow,preordained murder and the corpse is what we become, it is our evolution from who we arrived as. The idea of a return is not completely lost on us,it’s just that with each passing day our metamorphosis in this exile molds us into a prisoner to our own device. It’s our very own form of wicked salvation,as our memories of the event slowly transform us into the event itself. There’s no witness to Irene’s exit,but what exists between my flesh and bones. I am Irene’s exit. My existence is what defines what is missing from my life.
As one measures himself against his idea of his own identity,he maps the boundaries of what he is capable of and what he is allowed. It’s a cruel moment,but an important one when one realizes that his identity is exactly what stands between himself and his idea of who he wants to become. It’s a feeling of acute helplessness,and it is no different tonight as I write this. It’s a bold undertaking to forsake the suffix,the future of one’s life,if it doesn’t cradle into one’s understanding of the suffix,it’s a bold undertaking to be unmistakably stubborn,and that’s exactly the port where all the ships packed with aesthetes and romantics arrive at,with their broken axis of being and the very recognizable discontinuity in their selfhood. The only treacherous undertaking they could possibly enact,is motivated out of sheer selflessness.
And so,we stagger.
Along the linings of our exile,we confront what it means to be irrevocably broken, and that if someone gets too close to us,they might end up on the other side of us. There’s a bleakness in the line of thought where hope is considered to be a bad thing,but let’s consider for a moment that hope walks hand in hand along with our stay. What is hope,but poison where there is no concept of return? We manifest hope out of our hunger and greed to be tethered to the idea of suffering without The Woman,hope is nothing but a tool we punish ourselves with,in a place where there is no concept of return. The cruel underpinning of an exile with well laid foundations,is that hope walks hand in hand,chained to our ankles, the hope of glorious return. One of the most cruel forms that hope takes,is the idea of bounded suffering,where one thinks that some suffering with an arbitrary limit,is the path to glorious return,it’s just one of the many tricks an isolated, fractured self likes to play on itself. Our choice of sanctuary from the torment of a suffix that we didn’t like,ends up being a form of torment in itself. Our idea that a bad event is not continuous is wrong,it is very much so, and in fact the suffering we go through,builds on itself,like a clever architect.
Giving someone the prerogative over the spectrum of your life is a bad idea,but I think there is a very primal need to be completely vulnerable to the person we love in all of us. We share our most mundane and out of shape secrets,the past that once weighed unbearably heavy with it’s in-communicability,becomes a babbling brook in Irene’s presence. We come undone as we are,naked and depraved. Our intimacy becomes a shared experience of our mundanity,and Irene threads herself through every nook and crevice of our existence. We go through a deliberate metamorphosis,where the very nature of our existence is changed,and we have essentially split the spectrum of our life into two,Pre-Irene and with-Irene.
The real tragedy is not the exit of Irene, but the knowledge of it. When one becomes aware of the irrevocable exit,he is thrown into a involuntary exile from his own regularity which has become a phantom evidence of Irene’s existence. It’s perhaps more insidious than decay,how once mere ordinary routines becomes the foundations on which Irene’s exit thrives,the weight of these activities grows by the second as life moves on,not out of resilience but out of inertia. The banal becomes the sacred, not because it holds some intrinsic value,but because it is shaped by Irene’s exit. I guess,what I am trying to say is that we need to reinvent our minute habits and drag ourselves around the axis of our existence,to escape the tyranny of memory of Irene. We have to let go of Irene,and in essence,let go of our own selves too. This is our prison,not the exit but the knowledge of it,not the loss,but the process of it. Living becomes an act of surrender.
Irene’s exit is followed by an almost sacred silence,only broken by our fall. The wake of the void within us,is consecrated space, something both untouchable and oppressive,where even grief itself feels like an intrusion into the sanctity of that emptiness. Irene’s exit is the very foundation over which we rebuild,a foundation where one gets caught red handed having emotions of a human nature. It’s important to understand that the space left in wake of Irene’s exit is fundamental to who we are post Irene,and any efforts to remove it,or fill it is going against the very foundation upon which we rest. Once we are broken in a certain manner,we can’t really undo that anymore,we are condemned to be broken. We become the museum of irrevocable loss.
When one builds on poor foundations,one suffers from the fear of vertigo,and no romantic is exempted from it,as they rebuild their life on the absence of Irene. It is the absence that defines the shape of their life to come. Unlike a labyrinth,when such a life disintegrates,it’s stuck in a limbo of a free fall,and that is where I write from tonight. Absence of Irene is not passive, it is structural,and like all structures, this one decays. I am condemned to be erased,as this structure decays over time.