bobcat

I saw this bicycle. It looked orange, matched the sky, I ran towards it. I saw it coming down the road, and in between there were two circles. They could have been my eyes. Maybe I saw myself between them. There are always maybes. Things I am not sure about. I saw the bicycle and then it came to me. So I got on.

We went towards this park where there are often skids drinking cans of Black Label. The light was orange and I could see that the clouds were getting wider and thinner. It seemed as though they were being stretched towards some other end. In a sense I was riding that bike to get to some other end. That bike and I went around for a long time. I was always using it to get from some diversion or another. I lived in this city where that park was on and off for a few years.

There were some women involved. They would cause me to get on that bike and ride towards them. Sometimes away from them. The sky was constantly orange when I was on that bike. I put cameras on it to record where I was going in case anyone wanted to see it at some point in the future. I showed it to some people in this other place where I was living. They thought that the hotel was a temple.

I wonder what could have become of that bicycle. But they come and go. The places I am going to seem to come and go. The people who inhabit the spaces where the bicycles compels me to ride come and go. Soon there will be a new place to go.

The password is go. All systems are “go”. I’m looking for a more efficient means to power this blood machine. It’s running on something else, something that I am finding harder and harder to mine, create, falsify. It comes from some reservoir that I know is non-renewable. I am always, it seems, seeking cleaner sources of energy. Perhaps this is what is compelling me to run, and if that is the case then all of this is some circular exercise of consumption and expense. It’s like filling up a container so I can see how fast it will empty. And to repeat this exercise until I find the perfect size of the exit hole that would allow a certain level of fluid to be maintained in the container while still filling what ultimately is an emptying vessel. I’m trying to find this level in this container so I can take a marker and make a line on the outside of the container to establish the event. This explains why I studied economics.

Equilibrium. If there is some point where balance is achieved, that’s where I need to be. I’ll go there. But to get there I have to ride all these fucking bicycles, two at a time, three at a time, one foot on the left pedal of one bike,. An ass cheek on the seat of another, and an unsteady hand trying to steer the third. The more bicycles I can ride at once the more interesting it is. In fact, if I can maintain a certain number of bikes running at the same time, that challenge can run parallel to the line drawing exercise I mentioned earlier. Scissors and markers.

When I was 7 I could read music. My teacher wanted me to compose something. She said I was good at it. I left that place when I was 10. I forget how to read music now. I tried to invent another means by which one could visually represent sound by a series of crooked and straight lines of different lengths and angles when I was 11. I was listening to Mr. Mister. I took those broken wings. I think Starship was next. They built that city on Rock. And roll. I took up the clarinet. Actually I wanted to play the drums. I left that place when I was 12. The next t place I went to didn’t have anyone to teach me how to play the clarinet. But there was an ocean in the backyard. You win some, you lose some.

Narrow lines, fissures, cracks in the wall, wrinkles. I can’t see anything without my glasses. If I look into a bright light I see bacteria. I think they are on my retina. I’ve never actually addressed this. It’s probably not the case. I like the thought of being close to my bacteria. The fact that I could actually see them just like that is highly appealing. Makes me think that I’m not just Human™ but human. Makes vision more interesting. Why trust one perspective and not the other?

Maybe I need to get another bicycle. Maybe if I had a new bicycle I could go somewhere suitably and equally as new. I have this friend who wants to settle down. Some girl dumped him recently. Such events tend to compel others to seek stability. He just might do it though. He’s full of surprises this guy. Maybe he just needs a new bicycle.

Bicycles are good that way because they are easy to steer. You can do so with the slightest movement. And your off in some other direction altogether. It doesn’t take that much effort to avoid a diversion. Just a slight twitch and you can go somewhere else entirely. Just a slight twitch and you can be someone else entirely.

basically, los angeles is lame

I was playing air guitar in a hotel room in Shillong.  The chorus was ‘you know cos you know cos you know‘.  There was something wrong with my body; if I were to take deep breaths my chest felt as though someone else was inside me who was 8 centimetres wider than I.  All my cavities seemed to be filled with toothpaste and shaving cream; my eyes rendered mist an opaque barrier wall, filled with amateur ghosts in bedsheets with asymmetric holes cut out for eyes.  There was no one in my room, no one but harmless cartoon characters; he with a forked tongue and skintight red suit, she with moist vaginas for eyes, and the others with cracked lips and violin bows, stroking my arms like some off kilter hymn to dreams unfulfilled, hopes unraveling, pores bleeding, severed, dismembered, cut off from me, and pasted on to you.  You, the caricature of that which I once thought was myself, now staring at me from the bathroom mirror, framed by the paste-on emulations of the third eye of yet another imaginary ghost, clouded by mist, opaque, simmering, like steaming sterilized gauze covering my eyes.

Below my balcony was a market.  There were two paanwallahs directly in front of me, one down a staircase, the other framed by bags of Kurkure and Lux shampoo satchets.  I preferred the latter.  He could have been Bengali, he could have been Assamese.  Assamese sounds like Bengali with a stuffed up nose and half a bottle of vodka.  I didn’t know why I was there.  Days earlier I was riding a bicycle nine and a half time zones away.  It was October; the leaves were turning.  Leaves turning is often a sign for me that it is indeed time to leave.  And so I left; I scripted a part for myself to play and was acting out the role.  I am a teacher.  I teach people how to throw their eyes at others.  I never speak any language; I move my hands and twitch to offset conversation.  Someone else speaks for me.  When they do my mind wanders, and it is only brought back to me when silence arrives and eyes are looking at me to begin again.  I smile, I stare at my fingers, at the windows that provide fleeting glimpses of romance on the park bench 4 stories below, of birds that don’t know anything about me, at bricks off kilter and cracked.  I smoke cigarettes between the third and fourth floor and try to count the streaks of paan infused saliva that stain the corner of the walls red, one, two, eighty-five, and tending towards infinity where the corner meets the ground.  And then I return to my role as a teacher, full of alleged wisdom that I am expected to impart on others.  I do my best.

But regardless of my not really understanding what I was doing there and what I am doing here, I knew I was there and am here as I see myself in the mirrors of motorcycles, or because others acknowledge my presence; a stare, a look of disapproval, or a man avoiding my sphere of movement.  I know it, though most of those devices I have that tell me the time are not working properly, I know it as when I wash myself at night the water turns to brown.  It could not be so if were not there, if were not here, if I were not real, if I were truly clean.

Before I left where I was earlier I had been with someone.  She stroked my hair and my face like some dispossessed Barbie doll.  She told me how much, how many, when, and if she could.  She told me that she didn’t care about anything else, at least for that night.  When I was in Shillong she told me that she couldn’t bear to see me anymore. I walked out of the where I read her words and into the rain, grey, silt ridden, with that fucking mist all over my body, my cavities.  It made me think of her; opaque, yet moist and healthy, well healthy for some purposes anyway.  If I had chlorophyll instead of shit in my veins I think I would have appreciated it.  But then, it didn’t help me exchange any gas, anything that would sustain someone or something else. It made me keep my head towards the ground, with a slight strain in my face, craning my neck slightly to make sure I didn’t bump into anyone or fall in the gaps in the pavement created by Bangladeshi laborers, or, conversely, an effort to try to avoid my eyes from being pelted by 90 degree raindrops and any more unwelcome stimuli.  She is someone I used to know.  I seem to know a lot of people who I used to know.  I should keep a list of people who I used to know.  I can put their pictures up on street posts here in Ahmedabad with a caption that says ‘Missing’.  And leave a false telephone number.  Dial 1-800-FUGETIT.  Or 1-900-LEAVEME.  Or something equally as clever.  Or maybe I’ll just leave them in the back of mind where they can get a nice suntan.

I have been away from where I was before for almost 3 weeks now.  But really, it seems like much longer than that.  I’m still the same person, I just seem to have shrunk.  Or perhaps that person inside of me has gained weight while I have lost weight.  As I write this I am thinking of a café near Morningside Park in Manhattan.  I had a grilled panini with smoked salmon and melted goat cheese.  I was surrounded by people I had just met, with the exception of one.  I was desperately uninterested.  It was cloudy, misty. I sat on someone’s front step with a pack of Camels in one hand and someone else’s lighter in the other, and looked at the M60 coming and going from LaGuardia. I had gotten nailed the night before on cheap shooters at some bar near Columbia.  I bought a packet of Camel Lights from a Bangladeshi man.  I asked him in Bengali if we has from Bangladesh. Stupid question considering we was reading a Bangladsehi newspaper. He looked at me like I was a complete idiot.  I was pissed, so that was fairly accurate.  Bengali sounds like Assamese with tonsillitis and 7 shots of tequila.  Anyway, it was a good sandwich, but I was somewhere else at the time.  I called a girl I used to know on the telephone. I was thinking of her and how she used to make me feel as opposed to how she made me feel at that time.  She was in SoHo at the time, now she is somewhere in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is a hole.  I have been there once in 1998, and I can only really recall three things.  First, I tried to score from some Mexican near a bank downtown.  I say downtown, but in reality that is a misnomer; Los Angeles doesn’t have one.  Or at least the one it has is empty except for textile shops owned by Mexicans and Punjabis.  I didn’t score, he couldn’t hook it up, he apologized.  The second thing was Hollywood in the morning.  It was much smaller than I thought.  I had breakfast in some diner plastered with allegedly famous people.  I had an omlette as per my habit.  I called my parents, but I can’t recall what I said.  I hadn’t slept in four days and nothing really made much sense; I was living in a classroom in Taiwan at the time and had decided to go to California for a few days.  I ended up in the Nevada desert surrounded by naked people bathing under a tree.  I didn’t really speak to anyone.  The third thing I remember was going to Compton to watch the sunset.  I had been a big fan of NWA when I was younger, and I had to check it out.  It seemed harmless.  I had a conversation with some random woman at a bus stop, a gas station attendant, and some children at a public library.  I went to a Soul Food restaurant for dinner and had ham hocks.  There were Mexican children in school uniforms on my bus.  Everyone’s face was orange with the light of the setting sun. The streets were lined with pawn shops and bail bond brokers.  The sunset burned my eyes clean.  I left for San Francisco that evening.

Los Angeles is lame.

Or does it matter?  I suppose if it didn’t really matter I wouldn’t be recalling any of this.  I can’t tell.  It’s too close to now, at least as far as the calendar says.

fiction man

People like to watch movies.  People like to watch television.  People like to watch and be passive.  To be engaged in the visual means a variety of things to a variety of people.  I accept this.  But I wonder how this passive engagement for the sake of what would commonly be termed “entertainment” really effects our perception of reality.  It is in this context that I wish to offer some ruminations on two notions that are, perhaps often taken for granted: fiction and non-fiction.

I think I first became aware of reality TV when I was in Denmark.  Big Brother was huge there.  It struck me as a rather silly means to passively engage in what appeared to be non-fiction; indeed, I think the appeal of the television show was the assertion that nothing was scripted, and that it allegedly allowed insights into the lives of people that you otherwise would not have access to interact with.  I qualify the preceding statement with the word “allegedly”, and for a reason.  It strikes me that these insights are based on what really amounts to a contrived depiction of reality.  It´s the same as when a child enters the room where his or her parents are having a party; the child may either act rambunctious, may behave in such a way that is somewhat unusual…in the sense that the child will talk loudly, say silly things, run around…for the sake of attention.  On the other hand, the child may become shy, and quiet, and awkward.  Both are reactions to a group of unknown (perhaps intoxicated) people, adults in particular.  This sense of their representation to the  “other” facilitates a form of behaviour that is somewhat unusual of the child.  But the catalyst here is based on a level of consciousness; the fact that the child knows he or she is being observed, watched.  When you place a group of people in front of a camera lens with the sole objective of being observed, their behaviour becomes somewhat stunted, as they are acutely aware that they are being watched.  And this is marketed as non-fiction.  People enjoy this, as it presents a rare opportunity to observe, to passively engage with a stranger who is behaving in a contrived manner due to their perceived and explicit awareness of being watched.  Of being watched to “act normal”.

But this is marketed as non-fiction, as “reality”.  I think that non-fiction and fiction have become interchangeable.  I am not sure of those who are ardent fans of “reality” TV believe that what the y are watching is not “scripted”.  While I would accept that the behaviour of these characters may not be explicitly scripted (though I do not easily accept this and have reservations about doing so) I wonder if “scripted” is perhaps too narrow a definition.  To script something in the context of the moving image means to explicitly represent or characterize certain actions, personality cues, movements, sentiments, so on, ostensibly to generate a perception of a certain character.  This is entertainment, is at allows the viewer an opportunity to gauge how convincing the representation is, and to perhaps draw on his or her set of relations to create a proxy for understanding and becoming more intimate with the character.  This is considered engagement, and if the characterization is done convincingly, the process is deemed successful and worthy of formal recognition via awards, accolades, monetary compensation and as an extension, fame, fortune, and public recognition.  The ability to relate to a “scripted” character is perhaps one of the primary desired outcomes of what is ultimately a false representation of an individual.  But this is acting; this is fiction. This is what we want to see, and someone who is particularly convincing is a “good” actor.

But we are all actors.  We are all liars, cheats, and politicians.  We all act strategically – though some more thatn others – to assert and achieve certain goals.  We navigate “reality” to suit our ambitions and ourselves.  This may seem pessimistic, perhaps even misanthropic.  This is not my intent.  While I do think humans are remarkably stupid in many ways. I am amazed by the capacity that exists among to cleverly take on various personalities to suit particular goals.  More specifically however, I am amazed by how “fictional” representations of characters represent in some peoples minds an accurate representation of reality.  This acceptance in some cases is enough for some to observe these events and consider them to be an accurate proxy of reality, scripted as it may be, and to utilise these “fictional” representations as a means to “learn” from.  In the context of uncertainty and doubt, some of us equate these “scripted” behavioural cues drawn from these “fictional” representations as being acceptable enough to base decisions upon.  And as such, fiction manifests non fiction, which becomes the fodder for reality, which is thus marketed as non fction, which then translates into real behaviour.  But is this behaviour fiction or non-fiction?  At which point do you draw the line and decide one is not the other?  And why do we find these representations so fascinating?  Are we so lazy that we are afraid of engaging in certain events due to the “fictional” outcomes we observe in the media?  Or does the fact that it was scripted (or not) amount to a representation of a catalyst for understanding and relation rooted in reality, in non-fiction, and as such, is true, real, and close to our hearts and minds?

Actors are liars.  Reality TV is fiction.  When I watch TV I can feel my fingernails growing and I feel like I should cut them.  I feel time passing and I feel like I am wasting it.  This is not good.  As far as I know, that´s non-fiction.  But if someone recorded me saying that and broadcasted it to others, it would become fictional.  You don´t know me.  I´m just some dude with fingernails.  And maybe I´m full of shit when I say “I want to cut my fingernails”.  But then again, maybe I´m not.  But you can´t ask me to verify this, as you are watching me at home on your TV, feet raised, curtains drawn, relaxed and at ease.  Chances are you don´t really care if I verify this or not.  It´s entertaining to you to hear me say “my fingernails are growing”.  Because you can relate to that.  You also have fingernails.  It´s mundane.  It´s boring.  It´s pedestrian.  It´s fascinating.

Fiction becomes non-fiction.  Non-fiction is fiction.  It doesn´t matter which term you use to qualify one or the other, because both terms are meaningless.  But we seem to want to relate desperately to other people.  We seem to want to relate our lives to strangers; not those strangers on the street as they pose the potential of danger, of uncertainty and the possibility of harm as this is what is depicted so often.  This culture of fear and apprehension is well documented.  But on TV passive engagement with strangers amounts to entertainment.  If we all had video cameras, think of what we could do with each other…we could all be actors, we could all play roles…and we could tell others this is reality.  And no one would really know.  I want to be an actor.  I am an actor.  I´m lying, I´m not really like this.  No actually, I am.  Can you relate?

pissed on cotton

I have not used this medium for it´s full potential since I was offered the opportunity to do so.  My only excuse is the implications that doctoral research presents on time management and priority setting.  But as I sit here, 1237 am in my flat here in Brighton, England, there is something happening outside my window that I feel compelled to exorcise from my mind, perhaps in an attempt to come to grips with it, or perhaps merely in an attempt to divert my time from the afore mentioned obligations.  Either way, it´s going to come out.

In my current research, I am trying to understand, broadly speaking, what regulation means in the context of uncertainty.  More specifically, I am trying to look at how the state can manifest its authority via the regulation, legally binding or otherwise, to assert control over the people it claims to represent, protect, and serve.  Even more specifically, the context is the innovation, massive research and development, and resultant market availability of consumer products that contain genetically modified organisms.  But the previous statement contains a qualification, namely “legally binding or otherwise”.  From this, I will state a further qualification, perhaps a dichotomy: that of informal vs formal regulation.

I recently presented a paper on my work to date to a variety of academics and legal practitioners.  As I stood to speak, I stopped.  I asked everyone in the room to stand up, raise their right arm at a ninety degree angle to their body, and wave at me.  As they performed this rather asinine request, I wrote on an overhead projector, “why are you doing this”.  I noted to them that though none of them had any idea why they were standing up and waving at me, they all performed the act, in tandem, without question.  I argued they did this due to the informal regulatory framework that exists in formal settings that encourages people to not break the status quo, as to do so would draw possibly unwanted attention to the “outlier”.  I then drew a parallel to their behaviour and the behaviour of scientists who, while incapable of truly stating the long term effects of GMOs on human health due to the relatively short time frame they have been on the market and the artificial environment that laboratory tests are carried out within, would never admit to this ignorance.  To do so would violate the informally regulated system that has created an almost devotional following among policy makers in the word and opinion of formal science.  For a scientist to say to his peers, “actually, I know fuck all about what GMOs will do to us in the long run” will simply not fly, expletives included or otherwise.  They sat down and I proceeded.

This dichotomy of the informal vs. the formal is key in the context of uncertainty.  It appears to me that if the state cannot really say how a new technology released to the market will fare in practice, what will happen is that citizens, acting as agents who have the capacity to make a difference due to a subscription to democratic (in the universal sense) principles or simply economic realities (being in debt to a money lender who has a gun) will take matters into their own hands. Where the state fails in its role as representatives of the state, citizens will take the burden of representation on their own shoulders.  And there is no formal system that regulates that.  The premise is based on urgency, on common struggle and interests, and in some cases, life or death.

By way of a pragmatic example, consider the adoption of genetically modified cotton in India.  In one particular state, farmers have gone as far to kidnap representatives of Monsanto and the State Department of Agriculture due to the failure of Bt Cotton, a GM variety authorized by the government on the basis of scientific evidence.  While the reports did not provide evidence as to whether or not these farmers acted this way out of sheer desperation, or whether they had organized themselves under the aegis of a broader, more common struggle of other farmers, their actions could not be ignored.  It is worth noting that these actions exist and manifest in an environment where farmers have killed both themselves and their families due to unmanageable debt, debt incurred from private money lenders in order to afford and purchase these new technologies.

This is but one isolated example, but I present this here as a representation of the extent people whose livelihoods depends on what science would (not) call a technology burdened with uncertain effects would go.  The consequences of these effects are then politically advantageous, and desperation often translates into political opportunism and a fertile vote bank.  “Vote for me and I´ll kick Monsanto out.”  But the point is that what began as an informally (in the sense of the dichotomy presented earlier) regulated act manifests in a formally regulated act.  In this case, the state in question (for reference, Andhra Pradesh in southern India) has now banned Monsanto from their borders, and is actively seeking various forms of legal culpability to hold the firm responsible.  But who´s fault was this?  The firm or the state?  If the latter, is it really their fault?  They were, as we all do, acting on the basis of economic incentives.  Though they didn´t know the long term consequences of releasing the technology, they did, as there was demand from farmers for the technology.  Indeed, farmers have gone as far to travel 2000 km by train to get these seeds if they were not available in their own state.  They wanted it, the government released it, and no one really knew what would happen.  Meanwhile, the firm sells record amounts of GM Cotton seed in India, and conclude the release and the technology was a success.  Informally regulated acts can manifest in formal acts, and the market will always provide incentives for these acts to occur.  This is the nature or our desires as they are represented in the market, and these are the potential outcomes.  You can´t regulate that.  Ironically, the regulatory arena we currently exist in is rooted in neoclassical economic principles, that of trying to contain the “excesses and contradictions” (that´s Keynes, not Marx) of capitalism via regulation.  And while the current manifestation of these economic principles adheres to this (i.e. the WTO), people will simply assert their agency in ways the WTO simply cannot control.  In a further example or irony, this is due to the same school of economic thought, agency, and representation: demands are characterized by a valuation of a resource, and if the valuation is high enough, the “price” that people are willing to pay may seem high to an outside, disinterested observer, but quite affordable to the person who it primarily effects.  Formal regulation to a farmer who will soon be killed by a loan shark means nothing.

That all said, the catalyst for my writing this is winding down outside my window.  It is this: at around 11pm here in England, society flips 180 degrees.  While typically, in the days, people are reserved, polite and cordial.  A substantial amount of the population starts drinking around 7pm, and by 11pm they are pissed.  By 12, the pubs are mostly closed, and everyone is on the street.  I have rarely seen such a level of bipolar behaviour as this.  People begin to scream FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK at the top of their lungs, they will kick objects that they know very well cannot be dislodged, women will fall down to the ground and continue to sing Doncha by the Pussycat Dolls, they will go the beach, have sex with strangers in full view of everyone and then part ways, and they will spit, piss, flay their arms wildly and wobble down the road until they go home.  This is in front of my window most nights.  I love England.

Sometimes the catalyst for informal regulation can be found in a pint of Stella.  Other times it can be found in a cotton seed that yields only unfulfilled promises.  Either way, people do stupid things.  But it´s easy to say “I didn´t know that would happen”, or “I was pissed”.  Is that an acceptable excuse?   Yeah, it is.  It seems we allow and accept it to be so.

hermeneutics on rye

I’m just waiting for my computer to suck up all the footage from my camera.  It happens in real time, so it takes a while.  It’s a strange to get paid to spend all your waking hours staring at peoples faces, pausing on it if you want a stare to linger…usually people begin to feel awkward if you stare, but all I have to do is press pause and I can stare as long as I want.  It’s as though I have this power to overcome all these boundaries that society places on our physical space and the value we place on that.  Is that fair?  I don’t know.  I guess it depends on if they knew I was staring at them at the time that I was.  I can make people’s faces look as though they are about to cry, or about to go to the bathroom, and I can hold it like that for as long as I want.  It’s a somewhat strange experience, and makes me think about what it is that I have in my hands when I am filming someone.  What makes someone want to speak into a camera, speak to a camera about things that are so hard to fathom at first hearing.  Is it the disconnect between a face and a lens, an artificial eye?  What is it that makes me think that it is so important for us to communicate with one another, and that there is truly very little else that matters?  Is that unreasonable, naïve?  Forgive me, I have just been sitting in front of my laptops for the past 3 weeks editing and stealing people’s expressions.

The camera is whirring as I write this.  If I look at it, I see a man with a coffee can trying to aim it towards a wireless Internet router on an island 2 km away.  We are all on a boat.  It is 27 degrees outside, about 4pm.  A woman wearing a hijab has now taken the coffee can.  It is a homemade antenna.  This seems ordinary to me, and perhaps that is a sign that I should really take a break.  So much can happen so fast.  One day it is February and you can hear your mother practicing scales on a harmonium just down the stairs.  It is bitterly cold outside, there are few people around, it’s often dark.  All you do is work, everyday, trying to make some dreams approach reality, trying to make everything happen.  But everything is uncertain, and at times you feel hollow, alone, and aimless, rudderless, though in reality there are so many things that lie ahead of you it is as if the girth of those prospects tips the balance and throws up a brick wall that blocks out the sun.  Then you are suddenly in a war zone, there are children dying, you are listening to young boys tell you how they were forced to murder, and you are eating beef three times a day. It’s just an airplane ride.  It’s just rocket fuel.

Somehow, placing yourself behind a camera allows you this insight into peoples lives.  Your day to day becomes a process of having the ability to ask someone you have just met very personal questions.  This is, indeed, your job.  You are supposed to convey their feelings, their thoughts, to other people.  And so you become, in essence, a medium.  You become a device that allows the perspectives of one person on the other side of the planet to be heard by someone else very far away.  You put their faces on the internet, and by typing a few letters here and there anyone can see it.  Communication is like some other language entirely, or rather the visual medium seems to amount to the ultimate lingua franca.  We can all sense emotions, we can all realize what it means when someone’s eyes are downcast, or when they smile at you because they have just said something clever, something honest, something that they felt was appropriate to say.  These things don’t need subtitles, or voices to illustrate further what it is they are trying to convey.  Or rather, what you as a medium are trying to convey to an unknown audience.

There is something both very appealing about this process, and at the same time there is something very frightening bout it.  The latter as you, as a sculptor, have this power to convey a person’s personality without them knowing.  I can make you look like an idiot, or I can make you look like a pontiff.  It’s a process where you feel as though you are getting to know someone, but based only on 10 minutes of their speaking, or their gestures, of the movements of their hands and how their eyes shift from left to right when they are trying to emphasize a point.  But in reality, you don’t know them at all.  It’s as though you have this opportunity to go back in time and readdress and process a first impression.  You hear your own voice asking questions to be answered, and you wonder, why did I ask that question?  Your own voice surprises you.  It’s a process by which you can sense why it is you react with that next question when you did, because you can reflect it in your own understanding of how you look at people, the things you want to know and ultimately the things you value about new knowledge, people you meet, the value you place on getting to know something new about someone.  And yet, intrusive as this may arguably seem, it is as though you have free license to do so.

You’re in a bus, you’re on a motorcycle, you are in the passenger seat of a car and it is going to somewhere else away from the previous somewhere else.  And whn you arrive, you say ‘Apoyo’ and then hands exchange.  There are bricks all around you, there are wireless routers all around you, there are tin shacks, palatial mansions, blue eyes, brown eyes, eyes that look at you and then your pants, eyes that have seen you before, haven’t we met before?  Perhaps.

All of this is like some predetermined process of getting more hair on your chest, as it were.  That is to say, you are indeed getting older. Which, however, is not to say that the number of hairs on my chest are like some biometric by which I can count how many days I have left and what it is I need to do, but rather that all these things seem to make me look back at my life and think; that I am one person who has lived this life in a way that was initially predetermined by someone else, well, by two people in particular.  My physical surroundings seem so alien in retrospect, living on a dirt road where no one spoke my language and there was no one my age to really talk to anyway if I wasn’t in a classroom.  But at the time it was all I knew.  It seemed normal to me, to have my mother around and no one else, to dig holes in the snow and think of what I could put in it, to cross country ski across the lawn as the sun was setting and the sky was red and all I had to do was get home and eat something.  It’s as though…it was just…it was just all I knew.  My community was my mother.  I saw my mother do so many things.  As though she also knew nothing else, and that her life was just what was given to her.  Though I am not so sure if it was indeed like that, as she was an adult, and as such was blessed (cursed) with the faculty of memory, of other faces, of a community that was so different from that place in which she found herself then.  To make do with a situation, rather than to simply exist within it with no recollection of how others live, as what you feel and see is a first draft, there is no eraser there.  I have been thinking about that salmon colored house a lot lately.  I have been thinking about the basement, and finding my mother there one afternoon, and there was something terribly wrong.  But I couldn’t understand what it was, and I couldn’t do anything about it but try to be close to her.  The lingua franca is such; certain things are beyond adjectives, adverbs, I’m ’sad’, I’m running away from here, ‘quickly’. But my eyes aren’t glass, and I knew that person I saw with my own lens.

If I were to grow up somewhere else, if I were to have been born in India, if I were to have known only a farming community in West Bengal, if I had to work when I was 8 because my father had passed away, if I were someone else entirely then I would be elsewhere, I would be away from here, I would have different clothes and I would smell different, and maybe I’d be wearing a wristwatch.

I was not allowed to play with guns.  When my parents found out they were very upset.  I didn’t understand why.  It was the first time I had people to play with in my neighborhood, it all seemed so new to me at the time.  I had never played with guns before as I didn’t knowhow.  Some things should ever be learned.  Some things only make sense when you are older.

I can see myself in that boy’s face.  It’s as though I knew him, but I don’t.  I just see myself in him because of the way he is blowing his cheeks out and pursing his lips together.  But he isn’t me, and I am not him.  I don’t know him, but I can see the community that surrounds him and cherishes him.  I can see that he has two sisters, do they play with him or do they only play with other girls?  What did he eat for breakfast?  Did he like it, or did his mother make him eat it?

‘Anyway if you don’t eat it I’ll call the police and then they will
come and get you.’

‘No!’

(dial dial dial) ‘Hello, Police?  Yes, Rana isn’t eating his food…he
is being very naughty –’

‘OKOKOKOK’

But maybe it wasn’t like that.  I don’t know.  Everything gets rendered into a moving picture when you stare at a 640 x 480 frame all day.  Everything gets rendered to how fast his arm is moving, and when you need to cut that frame out.  Everything becomes scripted, and everything seems, in some bizarre way, predetermined.  Though of course, that would render it fiction.  And this is not fiction.  It’s not fiction, I know, as the moon was not like that yesterday, and 2 days ago the clouds looked like Europe without western Europe.  Well Western Europe is boring anyway.  No, its real, it’s happening.  These things are real.  I was like that once.  But that was a whole lot of clouds ago.

Time becomes this ever pliable sustance that can be altered with a remote control.  Music is like some transportation device.  With both in my control together I can see what I was like when I was his age. But I should know that in any case.

I think about what it has been like, now, not in the distant past when I had corduroy overalls, but just in the past.  Just in the recent past, just where I was…just now.  If I think about where I am, I picture a map.  And then I see my parents.  And then I see my sister.  And then I see me.  And I can draw long lines to connect the dots, and I can make the triangle as big or as small as I want, as my brain is not to scale in any case.  But the angles of this triangle are always changing, sometimes acute, sometimes obtuse, but never…round?  No that’s a poor analogy.  I don’t even know if that amounts to an analogy at all.