Snapshots of life, imagined and lived
The past, at a certain age, becomes a landscape of loss and of absence and of regret.
It is an obscured territory confused by wishes and dreams.
It’s truth is darkened by the advancing shadows of forgetting.
The past is always of vanished hope, and the past is always out of context.
Someone died today. It was a gruelling, grinding death. The scene played out in many long acts in a quiet part of a hospital in a quiet part of town. There was no comforting her, and the death was tucked away out of sight for the benefit of the living, tucked away to comfort us. So many die like this, out of sight and out of mind, and so many die with no friends or families around at all. We live with blinkers to avoid seeing the death that surrounds us. Reality knocks but we turn a deaf ear, it’s scent is everywhere, but our noses are burrowing in the troughs of worldly delights. The parting of the living and the dead is so frightening simply because it is the one truly democratic episode in everyone’s existence, it is utterly inevitable. We tend to see ourselves when we witness it, secretly hoping we get the ‘died peacefully in his/ her sleep’ obituary. There is no dying peacefully. It is always painful. It has been written that way. It is a sad thing but it is also a heartache we learn to live with and many of us learn to forget, but all too quickly sometimes. If we believe in the hereafter or not we can see in death a fullstop. If you don’t believe in an afterlife then that is the end of the book of life. If you do believe in an afterlife then the chapter has ended and a whole unknown section begins under the book of (after-) life. In either case, be careful what you write. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un – Indeed we belong to Allah and to Him we shall return.
She wore a white blouse. The blouse was plain in parts but had been made mottled with a blurred lace pattern where her bra was pressed against the silky material. It was like a virgin offering herself for sacrifice to the cutting stares and gawking of men. Somehow she promised something that was not meant to be seen yet was on display to all, a kind of threat: look and you will turn into a pillar of salt, don’t look and be safely on your way, knowing all along what you have fleetingly missed. The hypocrisy is too much and too obvious that it cannot be stated without the invocation of ‘rights to’; these ‘rights’ always trump and trample ‘rights from’, but it is unjustified: if you want to wear whatever you want and expect no judgement then I shall look at what I want and expect no judgement, besides I can’t look elsewhere until I have witnessed your selfish disrespect – in other words, cake and eat it!
Instead of leaving my home, instead of navigating through life outside, I shall enclose the world within these walls.
Just as the world has closed its eyes on me I too shall close my eyes on the world, shutting it out whilst also shutting it within my domain.
People start private businesses all the time, private enterprises, private clubs; this is mine and it’s Members Only.
I fight a battle all too frequently. It is one I have never relished but since I was blessed with Islam it has become starker in its naked contradictions and I am obliged to fight whether I like it or not. I have a hatred of living and a dread of death. This flies in the face of my knowledge that this does not accord with the Islamic teachings which I hold to be utterly truthful. So my knowledge may be faulty because it feels right to say that true knowledge leads to its consequent actions of the heart, the mind and the body – true knowledge should not result in contradictions in our actions. When it does, we must suspect cognitive dissonance to be negatively impacting us. There is a fault in me, and whilst I do not know what it is precisely, I am conflicted and I am fighting to redress the balance.
It may be that I am an out and out rebel like Iblis, bismillah, who knows better the truth of Allah and the Right Way than any of us, yet he rejects it and is thus himself rejected and accursed. I wonder if I have a mental disorder? I wonder if it is a disease of the heart? I wonder if I am merely the product of my generation, fractured and fragmented, virtual and yet squashed, alone together in this shrunken expanding planet? Or all of the above? I seem to be unable to resolve this battle, of being constantly diminished by my failure to live in some meaningful way which in turn, I hope, would lead to some sense of death as a stage rather than the tormenting crushing pit I fear so much. Why is there a hatred of life when life is so wondrous? It is life and it is a battle. To live I must fight to the death. But even then, what will death bring but the futility of life?
Even with the best and brightest mirror you cannot see how you really are with your eyes closed.
And it is at times like this when the darkness creeps out and brushes deliberately against my mind like the cat reminding you it is feeding time, when the darkness slowly grasps my heart making it feel and beat as heavy as lead, dull and toxic, that I need more often to rest. More +
What is the space called that falls between spaces? There is a space between our eyelids that is closed when we blink, it is as if it momentarily disappears then reappears to become a space through which we regard and gaze and stare at the world. Where does that space go when we blink, when we sleep? Is it pushed aside? Is it consumed, filled, distorted or destroyed? When we wake it is there again. Between blinks it is present. What removes what – the blink removing the space or the space removing the blink? When we wake it is the same. Eyelids fight space as function. What is the function of space?
Space is a vital non-existence that is crucial to our existence. If we couldn’t make space between our lips our hearts would starve unable to whisper love. When not in heads or in books or on signs, words use space to move about and to be heard (and even then we need spaces to form ‘a’s’ and ‘o’s’ and ‘q’s’ and so on). Rooftops are spaces upon which we should shout into other spaces our undying love. Space can be loud as well as quiet.
Space is sometimes a genius. It lurks, taken for granted yet unresentful, in perfect ways. If there were no spaces set in closely stabbed rows our toilet paper would remain a singular lolling sheet. Spaces are convenient. Cups insist on a space in their middles. They embrace space in order to hold something to drink. Space is something that can be used, even when left alone.
Space is not always mute nor is it necessarily blank. Sometimes space is given over to certain human endeavours like towns and farms and art and motorways. Space is not always roaming free, sometimes space is designated.
Space it seems is a paradox of sorts: it is a void, it is absence, yet it is full and present. Space is like, in a roundabout way, candle wax: transforming and mutating, seeming to disappear; but when the flame is cooled and we return a little while later, it has reformed, re-emerged. It is like the weed that isn’t pulled out by the roots, it makes a comeback. Space like well thrown boomerangs, departs and returns.
Space is integral to the ebb and flow of life. There is a species of space between heartbeats, indeed it is this space that lets us know there is a heartbeat, a blip or a ping and not that mortal concluding monotone of the oscilloscope droning. Bye mum. There is a space in my life where my mother used to be. Space can be painful.
Space between me and a bear is very good space, it can never be enough. But a hairs breadth of space between me and you is too much. I don’t want to see the end of me and the beginning of you, it is intolerable space, it is space that denies our love. Space can be good, can be bad, can be conquered, though only for a little while. Between birth and dying there is the space we call life.
Memory is an inheritance of a loved but illusory past. It is never pure; only that which is recorded is maintained all else vanishes. Even we who remember ourselves do so by seeing ourselves third person, an out-of-body experience to be sure. Yet when we lived that moment it was as ourselves and not as avatar. So our memories make us removed from ourselves just as we are distanced from the reality of what really happened. If we have no infallible records, if we have no purity of past, then we can have pride only in false stories of ourselves. This is not worth dying or killing for, yet this fallacy remains the heart of patriotism and nationalism. Je suis moi!
Love is a trick! We are alone in this world, but sometimes things come along, life savers stopping you from drowning in isolation. Things like love and friendship, family and the anchors of shared objects and experiences. Love is both the Queen of Deception and the King of Fools.
Love makes us feel as if we finally belong, that we are wanted, that we have value and worth. Most of all it makes us feel that we are no longer alone in our reality, a reality in which we are genuinely isolated. We are discrete, one from the other, separate. Like closely jutting islands we share the same seas of love and feel the waves of passion crashing on our shores.
It is this sameness that binds us but then in turn blinds us to our fixed bearings of abstracted insulation. Love is a mask, a blindfold, it is pain relief, a numbing and it is the sugar to help the medicine of isolation go down. Love is a beautiful sweet trick.