A clock without a craftsman

Curiosity can be devastating on the pocket. Curiosity without complete awareness has the likelihood of turning fatal.

At first, for example, there was nothing. Then, there was a book called The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Vol. 3) (Rs. 214) in class XII. Then, there was great interest centered on the man named Richard Feynman, and so, another book followed: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Rs. 346) By the time I'd finished reading it, I was introduced to that argumentative British coot named David Hume, whose Selected Essays (Rs. 425) sparked my initial wonderment on logical positivism as well as torpor-inducing verbosity (in these terms, his only peer is Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day, Rs. 800), and I often wonder why many call for his nomination for a Nobel Prize in literature. The Prize is awarded to good writers, right? Sure, he writes grandiose stuff and explores sensations and times abstract to everyone else with heart-warming clarity, but by god do you have to have a big attention span to digest it! In contrast: Vargas Llosa!).

I realized that if I had to follow what Hume had to say, and then Rawls, and then Sen (The Idea of Justice, Rs. 374) and Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Rs. 169 - the subject of my PG-diploma's thesis) and Kant, and then Schopenhauer, Berkeley and Wittgenstein, I'd either have to study philosophy after school and spend the rest of my days in penurate thought or I'd have to become rich and spend the rest of my days buying books while not focusing on work.

An optimum course of action presented itself. I had to specialize.

But how does one choose the title of that school of thought that one finds agreeable without perusing the doctrines of all the schools on offer? I was back to square one. Then, someone suggested reading The Story of Philosophy (Rs. 230) by Will Durant. When I picked up a copy at a roadside bookstore, I suspected its innards had been pirated, too: the book would have been more suited in the hands of one in need of a quick-reference tool; the book didn't think; the book wasn't the interlocutor I was hoping it would be.

I wanted dialogue, I wanted dialectic in the context of Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus' thesis (Systems of Speculative Ethics as translated by Alfred Edersheim, 1854 - corresponding to System of Speculative Philosophy by G.W.F. Hegel). I wanted the evolution of Plato (The Republic, Rs. 200), Aristotle (Poetics, Rs. 200), Marcus Aurelius (Meditations, Rs. 200). That was when I chanced upon George Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge (Rs.225) and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (Rs. 709). Epistemology began then to take shape; until that moment, however, it was difficult to understand the inherently understood element as anything but active-thought. It's ontology started to become clear - and not like it did in the context of The Architecture of Language by A. Noam Chomsky (Rs. 175), which, to me, still was the crowning glory of naturalist thought.

Where does the knowledge, "the truth", of law arise from? What is the modality within which it finds realization? Could there exist an epistemological variable (empirically speaking) the evaluation of which represents a difference between the cognitive value of a statement of truth and that of a statement of law? Are truths simply objective reasons whose truth-value may or may not be verifiable?

Upon the consumption of each book, a pattern became evident: all philosophers, and their every hypothesis, converged on some closely interrelated quantum mechanical concepts.

Are the mind and body one? Does there exist an absolute frame of reference? Is there a unified theory at all?

Around the same time, I came to the conclusion that advanced physics held the answers to most ontological questions - as I have come to understand it must. Somewhere-somewhen in the continuum, the observable and the unobservable have to converge, coalesce into a single proto-form, their constituents fuse in the environment afforded them to yield their proto-reactants. Otherwise, the first law of thermodynamics would stand violated!

However, keeping up with quantum mechanics would be difficult for one very obvious reason: I was a rookie, and it was a contemporary area of intense research. To solve for this, I started with studying the subject's most pragmatic parts: Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by Powell & Crasemann (Rs. 220), Solid State Physics by Ashcroft & Mermin (Rs. 420), Quantum Electrodynamics by Richard Feynman (Rs. 266), and Electromagnetic Systems and Radiating Waves by Jordan & Balmain (Rs. 207) were handy viaducts. Not like there weren't any terrors in between, such as Lecture Notes on Elementary Topology and Geometry by Singer & Thorpe.

At the same time, exotic discoveries were being made: at particle colliders, optical research facilities, within deep space by ground-based interstellar probes, within the minds of souls more curious than mine. Good for me, the literature corresponding to all these discoveries was to be found in one place: the arXiv pre-print servers (the access to which costs all of nothing). These discoveries included quantum teleportation, room-temperature superconductivity, supercomputers, metamaterials, and advancements in ferromagnetic storage systems.

(I also was responsible for discovering some phenomena exotic purely to me in this period: cellular automata and computation theory - which I experimented with using Golly and Mirek's Cellebration, and fuzzy logic systems and their application in robotics - experimented with using the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio.)

What did these discoveries have to do with Hume's positivism? That I could stuff 1 gigabyte's worth of data within an inch-long row of particles championed empiricism, I suppose, but beyond that, the concepts' marriage seemed to demand the inception of a swath of interdisciplinary thought. I could not go back, however, so I ploughed on.

[caption id="attachment_23735" align="aligncenter" width="600"] I was trapped in the spaces between books, between different moments in history, in time, a totalistic cellular automaton whose different avatars were simply different degrees of doubt.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_23736" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Because of reality's denial of accommodation to manifestations of tautologies and contradictions, so was I trapped within the shortcomings of all men and women.[/caption]

A Brief History of Time (Rs. 245) did not help - Hawking succeeded splendidly in leaving me with more questions than answers - (Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity by Steven Weinberg (Rs. 525) answered some of them), The Language Instinct by Harvard-boy Steven Pinker (Rs. 450) charted the better courses of rationality into sociology and anthropology (whereas my intuition that Arundhati Roy would reward governance with a similar fashion of rational unknotting was proved expensively very right: Algebra of Infinite Justice, at Rs. 302, lays bare all the paradoxes that make India India).

For literature, of course, there were Orhan Pamuk and Umberto Eco, Lord Tennyson and Sylvia Plath, de Beauvoir, le Guin and Abbott (My Name is Red (Rs. ... Whatever, it doesn't matter!), The Name of the Rose, and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana are to be cherished, especially the last for its non-linear narration and the strange parallels waiting to be drawn with hermeneutics, such as one delineated on by E.H. Carr in his What Is History?) to fall in love with (Plath's works, of course, were an excursion into the unexplored... in a manner of speaking, just as le Guin's imagination and Abbott's commentary are labours unto the familiar).

Learn to like ebooks. Or turn poor.

Ultimately, that was all that I learnt. Quite romantic though that being an autodidact may sound, the assumption of its mantle involves the Herculean task of braiding all that one learns into a single spine of knowledge. The more you learn, the farther you are from where you started, the even more you have learnt, the more ambitious you get... I cannot foresee an end.

Currently, I am reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Soviet-era exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn (war-time dystopian fiction became a favourite along the way after reading a history of firearms in Russia, a history of science and technology in Islam, How Things Work gifted to me by my father when I was 11, and Science and Civilisation in China by Needham & Gwei-Djen (Rs. 6,374 - OK, now it matters)) and Current Trends in Science: Platinum Jubilee Edition - Indian Academy of Sciences, lent to me by Dr. G. Baskaran. At each stage, a lesson to be learnt about the universe is learnt, a minuscule piece told in the guise of one author's experiences and deductions to fit into a supermassive framework of information that has to be used by another's intelligence. A daunting task.

No wonder it doesn't come cheap.

Or does it?

Flight of the magus

In the beginning, there was a Universe, lush and abundant, a paradise inhabited by the opportunities of boundaries and ragged pathways and winds that blew this way and that without giving pause, a world where a man could understand wakefulness and fatigue both, satisfaction and deprivation both, because it was a world that put his will to the test again and again. With the assistance of a memory that moved forward whilst its head remained turned to the past all the time, men knew where they did fall and where they did sprint under the light of dispassionate stars, and within the strange bounds of disappointment and elation men understood who they were, as if they had looked into mirrors and seen faces, as if they knew what the world knew of them.

A time came when the world began to fade, when the ground was no longer what those who still walked upon it had known it to be, when lay dust was picked up by the raging winds and whipped into the skies above, when ultimately the moon was red and bleeding. Trees began to be stripped off their leaves and rivers flowed far from their courses, gouging valleys and gorges out of the world's floor, and before long, mountains lay prostrate on the ground, flattened into a dismal stretch of boulders and soil that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the ugliness they had boasted of before. Men were beginning to lose direction, walking in search of what they knew was dying and dying in their presence and yet, both knowing and unknowing what lay beyond the horizons once guarded by an old face of nature: they strayed into unknown territories that contained no borders, no sense of progress but the moon and the sun that traversed the skies for ever and on.

The unwillingness to embrace fatigue against the threat of permanent change, the hopelessness that consumed victory each time they looked behind their shoulders to a world they knew had once been, men kept walking. It was akin to toil, nay, it was toil itself, but the memory of the world's knowledge moved them into newer lands. The Universe was closing in around them, bringing them closer and closer to their brothers; they constantly found themselves in each other's company whether they turned north toward the cold or south toward the warmth. And when hope and will began to walk together, to take measure of the treacherous plains stretching before all their eyes, they were one in murdering an identity that had once existed, that had once known walls. Where did the walls go? Who pulled them down? Why did the world have to fade at all?

The answers lay in the hidden memories of their feet, beneath their leathery, distance-worn soles, in the pedestrian muscularity of their shins and knees, which could still recall the thousands upon thousands of miles that had been tread: the world had changed to change man with it, and significantly yet, had changed because it knew the face of man thoroughly and withdrew its restraints and laws, its pervading sense of order, to a womb within itself, so they may gestate their until the day came when man would be lost again, so that the face he had befriended would fade and recall the Universe to its original duty, to a preternatural body that would nature nature. It was a cycle that lasted for days one time and centuries on another, but the cycle moved through space, time and the mind, where everything else took proper shape.

Almost forgotten between these two entities, perpetually depressed under the burden of their strange purposes, lay a span of time incredibly short and hungry, as if a fold that had been fighting a tenuous battle against whatever held it there, be it hope, be it will, or be it a memory of ice. What lay there, so, was a monster, a beast brought to lay dormant until a moment was upon some chosen ones by an expedient force from history, burgeoning with power and, therefore, open intentions toward dissonance, it resounded like echoes from the future, seeping into the present through impudent doubts. Some called it the Oldness, others the First Form, the aging skein of the first mountain that man had clomb, impugned within its soul the first evening they had spent together, man and nature, loss and possession, light and shadow, a memory upon which was founded a necessary darkness that sought to steal faces.

There was no way it could resurface and survive; its place was within the earth whence it had first come, and it had returned, awaiting the return of a friend, so that, once more, they may know the embrace of the earth.

Azurus

The world was ablaze; slick rafters hung limp from the ramparts, fire-glazed and oozing heat, while charred bodies adorned the turrets and towers lining the inner wall, garlanded along its entire length. Azurus was an orgy of burning gold in the aftermath of the assault, the pungent odor of sulfuric vapors thick in the nighttime air, stilling a dozen gazes that cared to look anywhere.

Attacks were unheard of after sunset, but the Council wouldn't be persuaded: the camp reeked of sorcerous intentions, spells so powerful that they had to be cast over time, locked with moments, fermented for weeks before they could gather the momentum necessary to fell the ancient stronghold. In the sky, a murky green storm swirled around a spinning black vortex, a wound in the empyrean that had bled the darkness that came before the blight, and now throbbed gently with a festering pus of decapitated limbs, falling gently instead of a freshwater monsoon.

A few feet from the metallic pedestal upon which they had been bound, the generals of Azurus looked on from behind the capricious, but altogether serving a simple purpose of their own, jute ropes that hung limply from their wrists and ankles. The undersides of their feet were already covered in blisters scorched onto their pale skin, but the pain of their flesh was nothing against the pain of their losses: the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who had decided to camp with them for the night were all dead; a deathly mist still susurrated over the ground gathering within its phantasmagoric embrace the remnants of a hundred thousands souls. They would be drawn into the ground, the soil made rich with their visions and memories, and the power would accumulate until it could be drawn again by their sorcerer.

Their sorcerer! Where was he, their mighty sorcerer? He had warned of some perils earlier, but none had heeded him, not even himself - unmindful as he had been with the confidence of a thousand warriors standing guard, even the most conspicuous of threats are ignored when knowledge of resurrection, victory and salvation is secure.

The general named Hundar was the first to give voice to their fears, stepping onto a mound of the dead in front of him, and shouted, loud and clear, "Valan!" There was no response, if the stirring of winds could be discounted, and those around him stiffened: Valan was their strongest sorcerer, a man invested with such skill that he rivaled the gods themselves, and if Valan had fallen with the culling, then their hopes stood for nothing.

While Knath and Del raised their arms skyward and prepared to conjure a mana of rejuvenation, Hundar continued to shout into the young and weeping world of aurum, looking for his brother. Quivinen, a shapeshifting huntress, quickly sprinted away on the swift paws of a giant wolf to scout around the perimeter, perhaps to look for anything that might help their cause that dreary night. A moment or two after she had disappeared from sight, a dull and argent glow began to spread around the grounds, a Healing Tide, that would awaken those still alive from their merciful stupors of injury, as Knath would prepare the Ankh of Resurrection. A hundred, perhaps two hundred at best, would be released from lifelessness and into life, a journey that would leave them dazed and disoriented, but they would be released nonetheless.

Just then, a form stood up, erect, on a ridge to Hundar's left that banked the subterranean transportation corridor that spanned the barracks from the armory, aubergine in texture, a grease-soaked loincloth in place. It was Valan, great Valan, screaming in agony, his skin devoid of all moisture and beginning to peel off to leave exposed his bankrupt flesh, his eyeballs having long before abacinated with the incubating heat.

It was an arresting discovery for the three generals simply because Valan, though resurrected, was blind, deaf and, in all likelihood, mostly paralyzed, and his screams were completely the depiction of all his pain, neither chamfered nor muted in any measure with any emotional persuasions. He was like an infant doused in a greedy acid, one moment nestled in a blanket of contentment and the next, tugged back quickly into the depths of his failures and left to face...

No, left not to face all that ordeal and torment on the road to freedom once more but something else much simpler, the torment of conviction. If he could have bawled, he would have until he had fallen to the floor once more. Hundar ran to his side to assist him as he stumbled on the loosened and sifting soil, and the moment Valan felt those hands on him, he sunk into unconsciousness.

Nuclear monsoon

There was no meaning in the amassed legions of grieving clouds along the horizon, gathering lost wisps whose their mindless desperation found guidance in the open arms of a trusting friend, and vindication seemed close at hand. A storm was being brewed that would last for years and years, erasing the purpose of the pulsing tides on the grayest shores of the sea and leaving the cycle of seasons capricious, an abandonment that stung less of betrayal than of sensibilities, and they were drowned.

Under leagues and leagues of water, they lay embalmed in the arresting embrace of water and weed, caked slowly into stone.

As the first droplets splashed at the feet of trees and hills, a subtle eloquence in the silence could be discerned but became quickly susceptible to loss and decay, the uniform and artless patter of precipitation chasing it away. Soon, water was sniping through the air, like shards of glass ripping through skin and flesh with undeterred proficiency, and over everything that lay gazing at the sky that day was a patina of age and a realization of struggle, a call to arms.

It rained.

Propositions

Man is a dreary proposition. He's a lost form searching for function in a world that does not and never will know him. He wanders the streets of cities looking for something or the other but he will never find it—he never has.

On a wet Sunday night, I was driving home after my customary dinner at The Thatched Hut. Stuck in a traffic jam and the rain coming down harder than ever, I had nothing better to do than look out my window at a world that couldn't not be wet on a stormy night. A bus pulled over at its stop and a few people alighted. An old woman firmly gripping a knitting kit, her husband trying to keep up with her while trying to unfurl an umbrella, a prostitute whose make-up was already streaming down her cheeks—she could've been crying, and a middle-aged man carrying a bag of groceries and walking while typing something into his phone.

A bright red light caught my attention; the traffic was clearing and I began to move. Why was the prostitute crying? An affair of love? Interesting as that thought was, I realized it held no potential whatsoever beyond its curious context. Why did the crying prostitute have to be an odd proposition? That she fell in love wasn't so simple anymore—and I strongly suspected those of us who cried "Love is for everyone".

These were the men who were looking for love when it was already everywhere, and that they were looking for it meant they were looking for something specific. The man who'd made her cry could easily have been such a man, hurting from the love of a woman who had bedded other men simply because it was the matter of trades and a hungry stomach. He couldn't stand the severely non-physical love of a woman. It was strange to him, scared him, and he pushed her away.

Would she know love again? I was and am in no position to tell. Why couldn't the old woman care about the rain? I was sure her old husband was still trying to get the lever to unlock so he could open the damned umbrella. I was sure for some reason that he was only trying to look busy; men usually had a penchant for mechanisms capable of confusing most women. The umbrella would've been open much earlier if not for his avoidance of some conversation.

What could've happened? An affair, again? With the prostitute?! Unlikely. There was nothing loveable about him, for one. An inexplicable expenditure? Perhaps. As a man moves on from one era and into another, his first attempt at reorienting his senses is to coax something into obedience—he must possess something tractable. Growing up, it's a bike, a girl, a car, a job, an office, tenure, companionship, recognition, fame, pension, vacation and a death that kills him in his sleep.

The old man must have just found something he liked, something he could grip while his marriage slipped through his fingers. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the umbrella he'd invested in.

That was the lot. I wasn't much better off myself: an out-of-work writer is a nobody. I turned away from the window and just stared at the road the rest of my way home. The rain was whittling down already and the ripples were barely visible outside the umbra of hundreds of headlights.

I recalled then something I did when it rained when I was much younger, perhaps a boy of 20. I used to look at the sky and try to focus on one droplet as it came down, and I used to follow it with a keen gaze all the way to its demise on the road below my balcony. And then, I used to look up again, trying to spot my next target. I can't remember anymore why I enjoyed doing that boring exercise again and again, but I still did try to look up through the windscreen for a raindrop. I couldn't find many, and even when I did, I couldn't track it all the way. It was just the knowledge of tremendous rainclouds above my head and the firm ground on which I drove. Everything in between I took for granted, and that was something I knew I wouldn't like to be told ever.

The road was now empty—not a vehicle in sight. Driving slowly, I turned my eyes to the other side of the road. Outside a butcher's stall, a crowd waited in silence for their portions. On a piece of slate hung from the wall, "Fresh meat" was inscribed in chalk, sheltered from the past downpour by a shallow parapet that leaned over it.

Further ahead, another bus was pulling away from its stop, getting back on the road, and two boys were doggedly chasing it. They had backpacks strapped to their backs—students, getting back from classes, going by the rest of their attire. For a moment, I considered pulling over and offering them a lift, but decided against it when all those rainy nights that I'd spent waiting for the next bus to arrive came to mind. I hadn't enjoyed those nights one bit but they did teach me the value of punctuality... and how nasty colds could get.

I continued driving. A couple was walking on the sidewalk, outside a mall, holding hands while she pulled her scarf tighter around her face. Anonymity was hard to come by in cities such as this: all I had to do was walk up to them and ask for a light, and they'd already have a pretty good impression of me, my habits, my life. It was simple, really. I was and am a man in this city.

When we are drowned.

The rain poured—not in sporadic busts of the clouds but ceaselessly, day and night, and by the time he'd reached the shack, the mud path he'd been tracking for days was dissolved, drowned under four feet of water. Water was everywhere, coursing rivulets down abandoned sheets of asbestos piled against a fence, dripping from rafters and rain-slicked girders with an unmistakeable splash that stood out resiliently, even flowing over gutters and puddles and ponds with a noiseless turbulence that rekindled memories of the sea.

But he knew his place well enough because the seagulls weren't there, because the sand wasn't there, because the wind wasn't there to bring respite from the humid evening. Vapours condensed on his spectacles, and they wouldn't be wiped off despite however hard he rubbed them on his shirt. That the shack hadn't been whipped away by the storm surprised him; he would have enjoyed the sight of planks and splinters of wood coursing through the guts of an airborne whirlpool of dust and grime, his arms and legs flapping around like... well, a duck caught in the guts of an airborne whirlpool of dust and grime.

No. It stood there, as irascible as ever, little waves lashing against the platform, lolling and roiling around aimlessly with a moronic obedience to the laws of nature. Adjusting his knee-high boots, he stepped out of the car and carefully planted his feet on the ground, cautious not to slip or slide against the slush.

For a moment right then, the sun shone out through a patch of flimsy cloud cover, the single shaft of light reflected on millions of raindrops in its path, scattered eventually into nothingness, or perhaps into rodents that scrambled into the shadows. And as quickly as it came, the light vanished from the faces of the raindrops, the residual warmth fading from the skin of his arms, his face... he could remember her pulling away, backing away, walking into the clouds, into another man's scar-kissed arms, into another man's booze-drenched world of free-trades and unabashed bargains. If only she'd asked, he'd have given it to her, but even though she knew that, she'd left him.

It made him feel cold for the first time, his body naked, stripped off all the man he'd adorned through years of a tragic marriage, left to stand with an ageing soul right from under which a cushion of a thousand happy memories had been stolen. A bloody ritual would set it right, he knew, and he held the hand of a colder steel in his pocket, and started to walk. He could feel the water fighting his advance, pushing him back away from the door; the impudence!

Quicker steps that he thought would slide through the water found them retarded by small vortices that curled around his thighs. Could he swim? No, that would be foolish. Only a few tens of metres more, a short distance to whit; he could and would make it.

Where men hide

Here, men walked, under the concrete and metal girders spanning the roof, in their ancient wombs. It'd never been calculated that they would get here, nor was it foreseen as a circumstance substantiated purely by accident. It was the way it was. They waited for the train to arrive in silence, neither each standing alone nor in a few throngs, but they stood speckled on the banks of the tracks. It was the picture of nonchalance. The ocean might as well have been a few meters from their feet, and the water might as well have easily been lashing at their feet with poetic gusto, but they wouldn't care. They just stood there waiting for the train to arrive.

One man looked at his watch; I remember, I was standing right next to him. He pushed the sleeve of his very-old jacket back and looked at the dial of his watch, and when he was satisfied, he pushed the sleeve back down with a jerk of his arm and leaned on his other leg. Not a sigh had been heaved in the hall all this time, not one expression of mild consternation, not even of frustration. Some of them carried grocery bags: the orange bags were unmistakeable under the halogen lamps, the customary thumbnail of a butterfly sewn onto each face that meant they were made of downcycled plastic.

Others were getting back from the football game. The sweat glistened on their skin like the sweat on the foreheads of anxious and drooling devotees come to meet the sage, and He would walk in their midst seeking out the one He could at least trust. They would chant His name and they would pack His purse with coins in return for blessing, and when He taught them, they wouldn't listen. After all, they had purchased a lesson, and he had better give it to them. And I did, and I did. Say what you will, it was a glorious world filled with men, each the nucleus of my fantasies. And that one trustworthy disciple? He would end up in the sewers, curiously.

Finally, in the distance, there was a bright light visible, circular and white, and approaching with intent and steadily toward our platform, the low rumble of the perfunctory horn accompanying its enlarging. The men looked up from their News Todays and the concrete floor, slowly moving forward as if they going to grapple with it like it was a woman they had sighted and now yearned for.

They all yearned for a woman and I knew they no longer cared if she was fat or thin, if she was beautiful or grotesque, or even if she was healthy or carried in her loins a disfiguring fever. By the time the locomotive was a hundred metres away, they were in two barely distinguishable groups, one each for the two doors each compartment would have, and they would hurry to enter it like they did on every night, hurry to enter it, finish first, and discard the weight of loneliness. They would push the woman away and go home to be absolutely lonely. And in the dark confines of that room, their solipsistic hopes would be realized.

The train came closer, and as it did, they huddled closer, their shoulders so close that they almost touched. Nobody wanted to get too far away from the light descending from the office upstairs, its window the only window discernible in this cavern we stood in, the cold and mechanical glow quickly disintegrating within the spaces coveted by corners infested with rodents and disaster-blown fissures.

At the same time, nobody wanted to touch each other because nobody knew what would happen then, because someone might feel something, a strange sensation, and something might happen. They were so scared. So scared! I could laugh with pity.

I jumped in with them, deliberately pushing my shoulders against the brawniest men in the crowd, and they would grimace at the silken touch of my wonderful hands, and they would move away, and I would follow them. Some of the men gave me stern looks, attempting in vain to push me away with their eyes, while some others would look downcast, grunt something under their noses and walk away.

I liked the ones who used their eyes. The men who walked away were men, too, but they were a different kind of men. They were men with fathers who had worked in cities and had owned a small house in the suburbs with a wicket gate, and they were men with mothers who had doted over them when they had been young, and they were men who had never lost a sibling to a stalking paedophile or a psychotic serial killer or a maniac hopped up on acid and convinced he was carving the cross on a piece of bark and not on a baby’s head.

No, these were good men, men who understood decency and so had been cheated on by their former wives and girlfriends, men who believed in the goodness of other men, men who believed in such things as leading by example. I wanted the men who had been emotionally raped by their abusive fathers, who had awakened quickly enough to hit their wives and girlfriends, men who wouldn’t be afraid to be men.

Looking around within the packed compartment, my pity evaporated and into its wake condensed a fatigue that I had hoped would set in much later, a terrible world-weariness that removed from my indulgence, a reminder that I did have other things to do. It was already three years since the Emasculation and these men had no idea they were absolutely lonely in this world in their turmoil.

Should I have told them then? I don’t know. I didn’t know, I wasn’t sure. Anyway, as the train snaked its way through the city, I seemed no longer capable of enjoying the drove of jostling men, as if the night had become more colder – Had it? Someone must have opened the windows – and the airs drier, as if all the moisture had been expunged out of my brain and I seemed to stand in the middle of a large and empty field, the stalks of tall grass dark-blue in the darkness disappearing beneath my feet.

A foreboding beat of realization began to thump in the distance. I could remember my father, the railway engineer, sounding the three-step foghorn to signal danger for inbound trains at the station, I could remember him changing signal lights frantically before anything untoward happened, I could remember no train arriving at all as I looked to the east, and I could remember him collapsing on the bench in tears. I was almost 20 when I realized I was the child of a madman. I wished then that he was standing next to me so I could hold him upright and that we could enjoy this train ride together.

He was a man in his own right, a third kind, an invincible one.

As this and other odd images passed through my head, I stood standing in the train even though more and more seats became empty as we journeyed on, and at one point, I was offered a seat by a man who was getting off – how polite! After another hour, my stop was come, the last on the line, and I alighted, mentally drained from yet another evening of loafing around the city soliciting men who were the same universally but never seemed good enough for me, for my vainglorious body, a ritual that I called an ordeal.

Why did I play it out, then? Because I was hopeful, but don’t ask me what I was hopeful for or hopeful about because I have no idea. As the doors shut behind me with a plastic secularism, I paused for a moment’s wonderment as I always did, looking down at the street in which all the houses were mine, whose windows were all open and through all of which flowed a dull, orange glow of a mob of halogen bulbs, the abundance reeking of decay and death.

I decided I would sleep in the third house on the left tonight, the one I called Jacopo after Jacopo Belbo, poor conflicted Belbo. Then again, it didn’t matter: after the women had died, the men had moved to other parts of the city, slowly but with a steadiness that was both geographic and consistent. When I came across this street, I found all the rooms empty behind all the doors, and decided to stay on here, in these tombs, secretly wishing my increasing fatigue would push me to do something about my plight, an undead man-woman.

Mostly, I wondered what it meant to be anything less than a man in a world without any women. Beyond the walls, womanhood meant conflict simply because it meant a lot of things, and each choice therein was mired in conflicts both social and political. Within the ambit of these walls, on the other hand, it meant some kind of loss to not be a whole, and that oneness of being was lost to me because I was both and neither: I was trapped in the middle of a fight, and the fight was flaking, like a magical fog that was slowly disappearing and my sword was gnashing nothing, my shield blocking nothing, and soon, the enemy had deserted me. I was an unworthy opponent.

All the men were at a loss to understand what was really going on while some of them sincerely believed the aliens were finally here; none of them know that they were completely isolated and destined only to die, not unto any greatness or martyrdom but just death, myself included. They surrendered their will to the city itself, no longer incentivized to initiate anything, their hearts parched of any kind of freedom, and they walked the roads like zombies, as if simply to get from one point to another.

The shops were all shut for business and opened for rationing and all the supplies were tallied and stocked in a warehouse, away from fire and water, guarded by a small group of police officers. At the beginning of each week, queues would form outside the building for the next seven days’ supply of food, beer and chocolate; there were other small establishments that still sold anything, but when money wasn’t going anywhere or coming from anywhere, it ceased to mean anything.

Death, of course, was the greatest nullifier.

Arrival of the unpunctual

Even his outstretched fingers couldn’t reach the first vestiges of the bleak winter sunlight falling from the window. The floor was cold and hard, and the insides of his palms and knees singed with pain. How long he’d lain that way, he’d forgotten. A crushing weight pressed down upon his mind and all he could think of was the infinite and eternal loneliness, the closing in of a vast emptiness that pushed out both friends and enemies. He was not cared for. Pushing himself toward that final effort, at long last his fingers found the beam of light on the floor, a gentle warmth flowing through them as he embraced it. The cold was still not gone, though, but when or whence the cold had come, no one knew. Waiting for a knock on the door had proved terribly futile. The timber-legged chair had crumpled down with him when the clock struck six. He wished that the finality of death had befallen them all, that were they not here upon his doorstep and awaiting his welcome, much rather the truth be forgotten forever than hang between fact and fantasy!

When brothers are born murdered: An experiment with stream of consciousness narration

He takes the gun firmly into his hands and peers down the barrel. Satisfaction. Clicks it back into place-

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

He stands there, smoking out of his head, the gun still pointed at his temple. The evening is just as startled, it kicks up the dust and swirls orphaned leaves around with the wind. The town is fortunately empty this evening, families making the monthly shopping trip to the city and the noblemen housed in their castles hosting tea parties. In the town square, we stand in silence: it is both disbelief and terse finality in the air, the smog-tainted drizzle pattering down on terracotta rooftops bringing relief and detestation and peace at the same time.

He starts to cry, the dry sobs haunt me, a reek of guilt. The gun clatters upon the pavement, it seems it will stay there until I decide to move my feet and close the distance between us, the least I can do for a start. The hollow tinnitus of empty tin cans suspended from my father's crucifix on silken ribbons clatter and clamour with greater vigour when the feeble wind rises from beneath the valley, but tin cans don't have to feel guilty. I do. The mercy of the Lord be with me, this man is my brother, but I have sinned. He moves quickly, sensing my hesitation and he hugs me. I hug him back, the war is over. The sounds of bombs going off in my head is dying out, one baleful ring of thunder at a time, until they're hanging suspended in mid-air beyond the valley of shell-charred tree stumps and dandelions. But the bombs will fall once more, after this evening.

He asks after father, whose life he saved almost a year before. Father is keeping well. And- So is mother. I'm curious. How did you survive the war? They couldn't kill me, but I didn't let them know. So I joined them. That was when he left us. Mother was weeping, a traitor had prayed with her in the town church, a traitor had enjoyed her blanquette de veau on the rare Saturday when she made them. Father was livid. Join after the murderers of your brother. The fury was alive in the air, we felt it in our skins returning from the fields that day. I wish father was alive now. I wish he hadn't died with one son and two daughters. I wish and I hope that beyond the joys of this renewed brotherhood was the joy of a father seeing his son return victorious from battle.

Visions of a beach

*

Look at it! Two eyes, two eyes. I sit pinned down, stunned silent. Some dualism of vision. One eye sees while the other observes. While this observes, that sees. This and that. The palm knows everything, I suppose!

*

*

Fishes inside my head. My lover in the water and I can't swim. She swims away while only the blood flows this way. It is a beautiful cosmology where imitations galore. What one eye sees is what all eyes must see!

*

*

Stories abound in this Universe. Opinions are injected into each page, into every page, all going in, in and in. Limitless volume... or really? There are no ears and no eyes, no flavours and no odours. The fabula must live and the sujet must die. It must, expended, die!

*

*

Why must I listen? There are stories everywhere, characters, plots, words, ideas, people, their avarice... their avarice! Idiots! Demons! The inheritance of loss is scarring, the reward for neonatality! Steps and ladders, snakes and bosoms, where are my fortunes?

*

*

Skin and bones, wherewith there struts a holy cleavage, the thin line between illusion and the eternity of godliness! Am I there? I must be there. It is as what I imagined it to be. Be blessed, my child! You are no longer polluted. You are the polluting all-dirt.

Visions of a beach

*

Look at it! Two eyes, two eyes. I sit pinned down, stunned silent. Some dualism of vision. One eye sees while the other observes. While this observes, that sees. This and that. The palm knows everything, I suppose!

*

*

Fishes inside my head. My lover in the water and I can't swim. She swims away while only the blood flows this way. It is a beautiful cosmology where imitations galore. What one eye sees is what all eyes must see!

*

*

Stories abound in this Universe. Opinions are injected into each page, into every page, all going in, in and in. Limitless volume... or really? There are no ears and no eyes, no flavours and no odours. The fabula must live and the sujet must die. It must, expended, die!

*

*

Why must I listen? There are stories everywhere, characters, plots, words, ideas, people, their avarice... their avarice! Idiots! Demons! The inheritance of loss is scarring, the reward for neonatality! Steps and ladders, snakes and bosoms, where are my fortunes?

*

*

Skin and bones, wherewith there struts a holy cleavage, the thin line between illusion and the eternity of godliness! Am I there? I must be there. It is as what I imagined it to be. Be blessed, my child! You are no longer polluted. You are the polluting all-dirt.