It’s a fantastically complex emotion…like sitting on a mountain of time, where each layer, each rock is made of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge…millions of pages of literature, millions of research papers, testaments of a million year old history of a people, and to realize that this is a mountain of snow, slowly melting away…
But as Rumi says, like snow, one has to wash oneself of one’s own self…
It’s that feeling of melting down, of washing oneself of one’s own self, when one starts to explore one’s own end…all that’s important, all that’s been the most fundamental all the way, all that lasts, flashes before one’s eyes…
It’s an issue, built on that complex emotion…
Of course, 2012 is not the year of an apocalypse, of course we are nowhere close to an end, but we are, and have been so for quite some time now, at the brink of a need for an urgent introspection, when we should try to sieve through the grains of time and history and try to collect the essence of all that remains…all that lasts.
It has been a deeply personal exercise, for each one of us writing for this issue, and yet, the fruits of our thought are as universal as can be.
The philosophy that lasts – Marxism, “the only philosophy, when actualized at it’s culmination desires to whither away…” the faith that lasts – Sufism – “When this material world ends, and we grapple with ourselves in the city of mirrors, amongst our million splintered selves the Sufi would neither say desist or resist…but would say – persist”…the last profile picture – that of a tree, “Between ecosystem and mythology, between foliage and human folly, between traditions and apocalypse, a tree is an assertion of both culture and carbon dioxide”…the last fairytale – Rip Van Winkle, “Sometimes you need to see the world upside down to make sense of it all”,… the last lyrics of a song, “While the pipelines lay in rust/ And the museums gather dust/ I see a mirror and comprehend/ We were our means and our end”…the last bastions of obscurity, “Shrilal Shukla died as anonymously and simply in Lucknow recently, as his humble life had been. Perhaps, with a spoofy smile. Not even a picture of his lovely smile was published in the papers.” …We traverse through many such lasting impressions of life till the last question, “Can we start all over again”?
Neruda, somewhere in his memoirs, writes about chahual, (Puya chilensis), the flower worshipped by the Araucanians. So, when he sees this flower blossoming, long after the ancient Arauco is no more, he writes, “When I see its flowers come up again, over centuries of obscure dead, over layers of blood-stained forgetfulness, I believe that the earth’s past blooms in spite of what we are, in spite of what we have become. Only the earth goes on being, preserving its own nature.
Here’s wishing you a happy new year and fields of blooming chahuals…
