In thinking about my distant past I'm frequently surprised by the clarity with which certain small details, quite insignificant in the normal scheme of things, rush through the haze of at least 2 decades. It has the same effect of staring down into a valley on a particularly foggy day. Backgrounded by a blurry, vague mist the bushes in the foreground glisten and sparkle with an astounding detail that is completely missed in the mayhem that is the inevitable concomitant of clarity. Similarly my past, so nebulous, so amorphous like a long exposure shot of a waterfall in which water looks more like a continuous fabric than a collection of long quantum streaks, provides a canvas of such assorted medley that the resultant is a whitish, palish sheet of paper on which arise the geometrical flashpoints of my life. My life, in hindsight, conveniently expressed, summarily summarized by the relative perspicuity of periodic insignificance!
How else would I explain the lucid taste of Calcite which still clouds the tongue everytime I take a piece of chalk in my hands; the memory arising from my taking a bite out of a classroom piece at a time in my past that is as lost to my mind as the complete repository of my Bio knowledge. How else would I explain the exactitude with which the parabolic trajectory of the six, which was the result of two and a half paces of dance down the wicket and a mighty heave on the onside, is affixed in the jumble of my mind? How else would I explain the vivid memory of the primordial bliss that engulfed a child of 6 in the company of his mother who is chattering away on a clear spring afternoon under a bright yellow sun on a white concrete roof of a dilapidated signature middle class society building with moisture induced black algae on the outside walls that is punctuated with small mottled glass windows and frank, public private balconies? In comparison, all the important landmarks, examinations, birthdays, marriages, trips etc. appear as if from behind a rain spattered glass window. They are there alright but as their own ghosts; they are all there in the realm of the fuzzy no-man's land between the conscious and the subconscious. Like the indefinite transmogrification of reality in its caricatured alter-ego that resides within the boundaries of somnolence. And I'm never sure that upon trying to extract a particular portion of that gooey mixture, what I'm ending up with is actually a slice of my life or just a phantasmagorical remnant of a confused mind.
I suppose this problem is uniquely my own. Imagination tries to fill in the gaps left by a memory that has been a shameless bum with regards to its own work. I have, without a shred of doubt, the most incompetent, most vacillating of long term memories among all those I've met. But then I don't remember most of them :).
How else would I explain the lucid taste of Calcite which still clouds the tongue everytime I take a piece of chalk in my hands; the memory arising from my taking a bite out of a classroom piece at a time in my past that is as lost to my mind as the complete repository of my Bio knowledge. How else would I explain the exactitude with which the parabolic trajectory of the six, which was the result of two and a half paces of dance down the wicket and a mighty heave on the onside, is affixed in the jumble of my mind? How else would I explain the vivid memory of the primordial bliss that engulfed a child of 6 in the company of his mother who is chattering away on a clear spring afternoon under a bright yellow sun on a white concrete roof of a dilapidated signature middle class society building with moisture induced black algae on the outside walls that is punctuated with small mottled glass windows and frank, public private balconies? In comparison, all the important landmarks, examinations, birthdays, marriages, trips etc. appear as if from behind a rain spattered glass window. They are there alright but as their own ghosts; they are all there in the realm of the fuzzy no-man's land between the conscious and the subconscious. Like the indefinite transmogrification of reality in its caricatured alter-ego that resides within the boundaries of somnolence. And I'm never sure that upon trying to extract a particular portion of that gooey mixture, what I'm ending up with is actually a slice of my life or just a phantasmagorical remnant of a confused mind.
I suppose this problem is uniquely my own. Imagination tries to fill in the gaps left by a memory that has been a shameless bum with regards to its own work. I have, without a shred of doubt, the most incompetent, most vacillating of long term memories among all those I've met. But then I don't remember most of them :).
2 comments:
you're not alone. :)
boss! long time no hear :). hope you are doing fine with all those concerts and plays in Mumbai?
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