How 'bout Using This Pen?

1.

Your mind is a principle. A theory of waves.

Your last thoughts rippled onto my fingernails. Leaving scars. The pattern was always oddly recognizable. Some say the scar had the same unmistakable marks that were always to be found in your tears. The characteristic stain. Now, invading my fingernails too. If I let them grow, the scar shall become never-ending. But you’d miss the clue, inescapably. You don’t look at my fingers no more.

You don’t look in a straight line. Your sight follows a trajectory path. A half eclipse. Uncertain of its target. Until it ends up falling on to something. There are times, however, when it reaches no target at all. The uncertain trajectory disseminates into a speed of light through fields, airs, darkness and the various absences of it. Propagating into a million small waves. Breaking into a medium restricted for sound vibrations alone. You do often end up looking at a voice.

2.

Transmutation. Physics has a knack of defining things that alchemy defines as indefinite. On winter nights, all alchemists are believed to share an elementary dream thread. Their unconscious concentrated to set ablaze a multitude of base metals. Transforming them to gold. But of course, they don’t know much about radioactivity. Or how elements have a life of their own in which they search for greater stability. Or that you’ve power enough to misconfigure to disfigure an atom and its further constituents by stepping inside the atom itself. Alchemy will never accept that man will make a kingdom inside an atom one day and become the king, queen, peasant, horses and coaches inside it at the same time. Alchemy will never accept that man will become a kingdom one day. And an island too.

You are not preoccupied with such ignorance. You are the light of knowledge. You know transmutation is not synonymous to transmogrification. You know it’s not just the spelling. Alphabets shall always do that. Come in different batches. Flock in different orders. Create more colorful confusions. And then, like breaking into a yawn, spread into one thousand dictionaries – to universalize the confusion. Alphabets have always been a part of the great conspiracies of simplification of the diverse. Of making all differences so uniform that distinction itself becomes a recurring pattern. Perpetual. Made into a loop.

But if there were no coinages, you say, we’d neither be able to simplify nor multiply our dictionaries. We’re afraid of that stagnancy.

We must have trends.

3.

There would always be people who wouldn’t recognize their home because the aging tree on the right side of their house has been brought down. Becoming destitute, thus.

They often live with us.

You’re always in awe of people who are lost. Saying that their mind is a canvas. You say that not finding your home is caused by a plagiarization of mental images. Law doesn’t recognize that which ain’t represented as art. Nor prosecute a distortion of such.

Lately, our house is brimming with people with shrunken faces. They have their breakfast, early in the morning and disappear into the mist outside. They wander off searching their respective homes. Returning only late at night.

Someday, someone might decide to change something about the outer walls of our house too. And the people, you say, might never be able to return again. I think, that day, you’d become a destitute too.

After all, your mind’s just a principle. A theory of waves.

4.

Division is primarily, if not mathematically, just a form of multiplication. Divide one nation into two, three, four and you keep multiplying the number of countries that have been. Divide the houses by their shapes and you multiply the ways you can categorize them into. Divide the people by the color of their tears and you multiply emotions.

They don’t hear you whispering. Murmuring.

You say we have enough resources. That economics is an advertisement of scarcity. A make-believe propaganda. You say economics is a legal function that would let you hide away all your diamonds so that you may create exclusivity, although diamonds, there’d be enough to cover each finger of every woman in this world; although there’d be more money than you can push inside a cart; although there’d be a beggar sitting on the pavements waiting for one of those coins to slip off the cart. Economics don’t hear him whispering. Murmuring.

You say we shouldn’t blame nobody. For if the total energy is constant, we may only multiply by division.

5.

This summer isn’t meant to take you away. From the streets. Or the different places where you are found. Always. Unusually.

You keep living simultaneously in each of these places as if you are not one but many. As if your existence is a continuity that passes through all the places at once, like time. And you always love wearing different faces. New one each time. But your skin’s never enough to hide you. You spill beyond and flow right to my senses.

Lately the places have started disappearing. As if that’s the only way to dilute you. After all you are like time and cannot exist independent of place. And therefore, they’ve decided to take the places away. Pull away the earth beneath your feet. They know you’re nothing without the connection.

All these years I’ve never believed you when you told me about the advent of anti-particles. Your papers still theorize the phenomena of antimatter exceeding the growth of matter itself. So that they may not mutually annihilate. You had speculated a world made of antiparticles alone.

You had speculated too that we’d never be able to foresee an underworld researching on political physics. A manipulated physical universe made to administer the individual political theories of a nation.

This summer isn’t meant to take you away. Or the streets. And the places. But they’re all drowning within themselves.

Last night when the people with shrunken faces returned, we counted and there was one less.

6.

Your mind is a principle. A theory of waves.

And you’ve sprinkled yourself into their hearts. Long after the sound of their heartbeats shall dissolve into the city din, there will be the fragrance of a land that had once been. The one whose name they will no longer be able to recollect.

That’s where the few of us left shall stay. Never to be found again.

Our mind could have been a place too. We could have stayed. But for all our theories. We’ve generalized all that we call life. Categorized ourselves into tiny herds. Groups, sects, parties, taskforces. We’ve become members of it all. But ourselves.

But I’m safe. I lay reclined on your mind. And your mind is still a principle. A theory of waves. In the evenings, when the slanting sunrays fall on the waves, they glow and disseminate into a variation of colors. That’s how I remember seeing your mind forever. Successive, perpetual and temporary. Nothing stays on its walls forever. You cannot remember beyond a few moments.

You must reinvent me every day and I must start off as a stranger every morning as I wait for you to recognize me as someone. It no longer matters who that someone might be. For I’m not one but many when I’m with you. And all you do is just choose between a multitude of selves that I have to offer you.

The few of us left shall stay here forever. They shall not find us. Nor capture us within their encyclopedia of theories.

We’re so much better off being lost.

7.

So, how about using this pen? Or that?

The quality of ink changes nothing about the way we are. We are madmen and madwomen.

We are mad. We don’t belong to the civilization.

We are mad. We don’t belong to the mental asylum too. To be applicable to find yourself a space in such a place, you must either be a threat to yourself or that to others.

You see, it’s very important these days to become a threat to live anywhere at all. We are not threats. Neither to ourselves, nor our kin; neither to our neighbors, nor to our nation; neither for our friends, nor for our enemies. And therefore, we are nobody.

And how much ink have they put inside this pen? I’ve been writing for so long. Shall the ink never end? Shall we never stop? I take a glimpse into the page in which you’ve been writing all this while. And I find to my utter astonishment that you’ve recreated word for word all that I’ve been writing. Yes, including that last sentence. And this one too.

And I know that it’s wrong to be surprised. It wasn’t like I had found myself in a place where I shouldn’t have. As a matter of fact, it was absolutely contrary. I find myself, or rather ourselves, and by which I mean we, the authors of madness, in the exact place where we have always been. The only place where they could never harm us. How could I ever forget the fact so much as to be astonished to find ourselves here? And let God punish me if I ever forget this again.

We exist only in papers.

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