Yours Truly

Here, beloved, at this very moment, let me present to you,
MY BEING!

… there. Oh, read it to me—
The inaudible, the interval.
It has a timbre like a column of light,
yet if you call it a colour— it must be pitch black.

Let's punctuate this, holding my being at check;
Let me give it to you piecemeal.

                    ,
                            ,
                    .

Now, you can pause.
Now you can think about how to utter this emptiness.
But how to utter any emptiness?
Even without talking,
even without playing a song in the background,
even if, for a moment, I stop my internal monologue,
There is the low humming of the AC,
the vehicles in a far-away avenue,
There is this unnoticed backdrop of a city that never sleeps.

humm….., [a deep inhale]
humm longer…., [inhale]
humm…… [inhale]

We discovered lullaby all over again—
Every child's umbilical darkness— sung by their mothers.

Or, we can now hold our hands and inhale my Being.

inhaaaale….,
paaaaaaaaaaause……,
exhale…..

No, you are doing it all wrong.
It is not:

Anticipating inhalation….
A grand chest-bursting pause….
A satisfied exhalation….

No, that is Praanaayaam.
Let's not work on it and utter my Being through grunts.
Simply be, and listen to how our bodies work. It is simply:

inhaaaale….,
paaaaaaaaaaause……,
exhale…..

Ah! The staggering simplicity of our life.
The Bhaaratnaatyam with only three Mudraas.

Now that you have inhaled my Being, what did you feel?
What is it to our existence?
A rot? An incurable disease?
A veritable anguish?

Or is it there, an amphitheatre, unburdened, unsleeping, unpunctuated—
A suitable stage for the dance.
A dance that my life is.

About This Poem

Our capacity of thinking affects our language, and for most of us, I think, language affects our thinking even more. They share both strengths and weaknesses.

Poetising, i.e., the act of writing poetry, is an active effort to me instead of a natural outburst. With the aesthetics of this craft internalised and the fluidity of expression it brings along, I intend to push the limit of my language and thinking to find expressions for (or, at least give a notion of) the phenomena I find inexpressible.

This poem deals with one such concept: Being.^[1] Or to be specific, how the being of my Being is going on.

The peculiarity of the structure of this poem is not merely a gimmick. As I stated earlier, through poetising, I want to transcend the limits of language (and by extension, writing system) put on our thought. So, instead of an elaborate construction of complex emotions to give the hint, I am inviting you, my reader, to take part in this experiment to really start from an emptiness to understand something that is not quite an emptiness but which invokes the word 'emptiness' as the first choice as an approximation.

Therefore, I struggled to give the reader a notion of my Being that transcends the usage of our language, although they are parts of the same reality. In parallel, this poem's ergodicy is a struggle too. I intend to bring the struggles forth, intertwined, so that the structural struggle can invoke the emotion of struggle to understand the struggle to expose my Being.

I struggled, essentially, to make my Being readable. Now, our Being, which is an intimate but conceptually equally alien phenomenon to our linguistic life, will require a multi-faceted re-read throughout our life, of our life, and beyond this poem. Yet, I tried to introduce cognitive equivalences to aid our imagination. That is why you will find that every child's umbilical darkness is being sung, in parallel with how we tried to explore the Being with musical jargons.

Another aspect of this poem is its existence in present. Most poems (not all) are descriptive in nature. Description of an epic event, or one's emotional life. Because this is a description of a phenomenon, the phenomenon here is a priori. This poem is not a description, even of a near past. It exists in the present and intends to interact with the reader, not with a historical beauty but with a real-time introspection. We need to allow our Being to speak forth.

The end may seem like ending with a hopeful note, if not some exhilarating outburst of some grand epiphany. However, that is not the case. First of all, it is a guess about the nature of my Being. Secondly, this is also where I deconstructed everything I constructed during our little experiment. Unburdened— from urges (to even breathe as an exercise), unsleeping— immune to lullaby, unpunctuated— like the first time I presented my Being as an empty space. This is not at all about conclusion and mostly about our intellectual integrity. To go back, to strip away inessential qualities we introduced due to the limitation of our craft and reinstate the Being in its purer form, but now better understood through our experiment.

It is no wonder that this is still far from understanding Being. But this can work as a first introduction, a rudimentary map even, to our journey towards our interior. This is a journey that must be completed alone.